In Search Of The Light

Iceland is not a country to mess with. I first appreciated this on the flight from Glasgow to Reykjavik at the start of our three-night trip to the country on a 'Northern Lights' package with Icelandair (flights, three nights accommodation and a Northern Lights excursion all for around £350 each - very good value). Reading the Icelandair in-flight magazine three different articles caught my attention. Both of them were written in a light tone, but all three of them were communicating a serious message.

The first spoke about how severe the weather in Iceland can get and happily reminded the reader that weather is only dangerous if you don't have the right clothes. It stopped short of advising readers to ensure they always had a survival suit to hand for those endless winter nights, but not far short.

The second article spoke about how dangerous the roads can be in Iceland, particularly for those used to driving on tarmac and not, say, on volcanic glass. It provided some useful but slightly alarming statistics about the number of people who have died or been seriously injured on the roads in Iceland.

The third article provided an overview of the seasonal changes in Iceland, including the fact that in winter residents might not see daylight for weeks if not months, and in the summer you might not be able to get to sleep because of the sunlight streaming in the window at midnight.

So after flipping through the magazine I was left pondering the impression of Iceland as a place where the weather could kill you, where the roads are deadly and where extremes of sunlight and darkness can drive you mad. But then the stewardess came by and gave us a free sandwich because they'd had to change aircraft in Glasgow and we didn't have an entertainment system, and I quickly forgot all about these worries.

We touched down at Reykjavik - a small, quiet airport with low ceilings and wide corridors, the sort of construction that reminded me of the sets you might see in 1970s episodes of Dr Who, with soldiers on some distant space base, that sort of thing - and then got quickly through immigration and customs. Reykjavik airport is a good hour's drive from the city centre, but there are a number of bus companies offering their services to get you into the city as soon as you reach the arrivals area of the airport. We avoided the most popular service that would take us by coach into the city centre to connect with another bus to our hotel, and went for a Gray Lines minibus option that would take us straight to our hotel door. It turned out to be the right choice, by the time we were loaded up with passengers and pulling away, the other coach was still waiting for all the passengers and bags to be loaded up.

The road to Reykjavik takes you across a long, flat volcanic plain, with mountains off in the distance and dark brown grasslands on either side of the road. Gradually houses appeared on either side of the road, and then before we knew it we were into Reykjavik itself. Our bus dropped us off outside our hotel, which was about a mile from the city centre (and on a street that felt to me like the Gyle in Edinburgh - all modern office blocks). We checked in, decided that the Cabin Hotel was appropriately named since our room was exactly like a cabin on a ship - two single beds and a small en suite - and then headed out for dinner.

We'd pre-booked our first night dinner at a place called Perlan (http://perlan.is/index.php?lang=en) - a revolving restaurant in a dome on top of thermally heated water towers. The building is situated on a hill to the south of the city centre and gives a great view over Reykjavik. We had plenty of time until our dinner booking so we decided to walk to the restaurant through the freezing cold. Despite the temperature it was a pleasant walk, down suburban streets that afforded an occasional view of the city centre. At one point we stopped off at a large building which we later found out was a seamanship school, where there was a slight rise that afforded a view over the city. Reykjavik is surrounded by mountains covered in snow, and sits on a peninsula so has water on three sides, and in the evening light the view was superb.

We arrived at Perlan just as it was getting dark, and were quickly seated at a table by the edge of the dome, with a perfect view over the dark city. Dinner was great, good quality fine-dining food without a painful price tag. The reindeer pate appetiser was a bit much for me but otherwise everything was well cooked and beautifully presented. The portions were large too, so much so that half way through my second course I was pretty full. Still, I managed to force down the third course, give or take.

Once we were finished eating we worked off dinner by walking back to the hotel through the dark and cold and rain. It made us feel not quite so bad about how much food we had eaten.

The next morning we feasted on our hotel's Scandinavian buffet breakfast of cold meats, bread and fruit before setting off to walk into the city. It was still cold, with a grey unforgiving cloud overhead, but it didn't spoil our fun as we walked around the compact city centre. Many of the buildings were of corrugated sheet construction, but often painted in bright colours so that you didn't notice the corrugated-ness of the building until you get right up close.

We walked along the main street and then turned south to see the Hallgrimskikja (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallgr%C3%ADmskirkja), a Lutheran church that dominates the centre of the city and which is quite unique in appearance. From a distance it is quite striking but that impression is spoiled a little as you get up close and see that the building is covered in a slightly scabby pebble-dash. Inside the building is quite unusual for a church (in my experience) - it is very bright and sparse, with very little decoration on the white walls and large clear windows instead of stained glass. Presumably that is because of the many months of darkness in the city. The church is designed to be as bright and welcoming as possible at all times of the year.

We continued to explore the city, including an excursion to an industrial estate on the far side of the port in an ultimately fruitless attempt to track down the scuba company we'd booked with for the following day, and then stopped for lunch at Icelandic Fish and Chips, for some freshly caught fish in organic spelt barley batter. Very nice it was too.

By the time we emerged from lunch the sky was clearing and the sun was coming out. Timing couldn't have been better as we'd book onto a cycling tour of the city for the afternoon, and we both much preferred the thought of cycling in the dry sunshine than in the freezing drizzle. As arranged we met our guide - Stefan of Reykjavik Bike Tours (http://icelandbike.com/) - at the harbour and joined up with the three other members of the tour (three tourists from Singapore - can't get away from these South East Asians!) Over the next couple of hours Stefan led us on a really entertaining and enjoyable tour of the main sights of Reykjavik. It was particularly useful for us given that we were only in the city for two full days, and it allowed us to see and explore parts of the city we would otherwise not have had time to see. Stefan himself was a great source of information. We found out later (from our scuba guide the following day) that Stefan has four degrees in various subjects and is highly educated. He certainly was able to answer all the questions we had and seemed to appreciate our interest (unlike the Singaporeans who were slightly grumpy and uncommunicative). It was obvious Stefan was proud of his country. On a number of occasions he would remark on key differences between Iceland and other countries, such as the fact that around Reykjavik all the statues are of poets or artists ('Unlike in England or Germany where all the statues are of soldiers and war heroes'), or the fact that the Icelandic parliament has the greatest percentage of female representatives of any country, and Government Minister posts are equally split along gender lines. He also observed that Iceland is the first country in the world to have an openly gay prime minister, and a female one at that. That is a sign of civilisation if ever there was one.

Stefan - much like the other Icelanders we spoke to during the trip - also displayed a wonderful sense of humour. When talking about a new concert hall that had been built in the harbour in Reykjavik -the Harpa, a grand, modern building, all glass and sharp corners (http://en.harpa.is/about-harpa/) - he told us that the architect was half Danish and half Icelandic. The country was waiting to see if the building was a success or not - if it was a success the architect would be Icelandic, if not he would be Danish. When he was talking about the founding of Iceland he informed us that the country had be first founded by a Norwegian Viking, but one that had been expelled from his home land. "Bad enough to be founded by Norwegian, but this was a Norwegian loser!"

The only point on the tour where I felt any lack of fidelity with Stefan was when he became slightly defensive about eating whale meat. He spent a disproportionate amount of time explaining that the only whales that are hunted by Iceland are those that are not at risk, but he still didn't win me over to the argument that it's good to eat whale meat. (Perhaps I had been influenced by the poster I'd seen in the whale watching company's office that morning, that said only 5% of Icelandic people eat whale meat but many restaurants promote it as traditional food in order to get business - 'Don't Eat Whales!' the poster said... "Watch Them!").

The most interesting thing that came out of this conversation was the fact the there had been a big dent in the whaling industry in Iceland during the previous year as a result of the tsunami and Fukishima disaster in Japan. The Japanese are by far the biggest market for Iceland's whale meat and when their country went into slight meltdown nobody was buying the product, so the whaling ships didn't go out for much of the year. Interesting that a country on the other side of the world could have such an impact on the economy of Iceland. But I suppose that's what happens when it's only the Icelandic, the Japanese and some Eskimos who are eating whale meat.

Other highlights of the bike tour included the Reykjavik hot dog stand, home of what Icelandic people believe to be the best hot dogs in the world, made only from proper meat (and the place where Bill Clinton famously ate a hot dog a few days before his first heart attack - those things are probably not connected); Bjork's Reykjavik house on the southern shore of the peninsula - a surprisingly ordinary detached house, apart from the fact it was painted all black; and the Pond, a big lake in the centre of Reykjavik which gave a great view over the city.

All in all the trip was well worth it and we left Stefan with promises that when we return to Reykjavik we would hire him for one of his longer tours along the coast out of the city.

Following the bike tour we walked back to the hotel, stopping off on the way at that Icelandic hot dog stand - I have to say, I didn't particularly like the hot dogs, I've had better in the States, and it just goes to show all the nasty bits of animal are where the taste is. Walking back through some of the city streets we stumbled across a number of pieces of graffiti street-art - whole sides of buildings decorated with pictures of sci-fi robots fighting, or kids in monster costumes. One side of a building had been completely painted to show a mountainside with trees. It really brightens the place up and clearly the authorities in the city allow these community artworks. Just goes to show what graffiti artists can do if they are allowed.

We diverted out of the streets and walked the last half of the journey along the path that led along the shore - a cycle and pedestrian path. The view over the water to the mountains in the distance was superb, particularly in the late afternoon sunlight. About halfway along the path was passed the Sun Voyager sculpture - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Voyager - a beautiful, stylised sculpture of a Viking boat. We took our time to take some photos of the boat against the dusky sky and then continued on our way.

Closer to our hotel we passed a detached, elegant white building overlooking the sea. It was a building Stefan had told us to look out for. In October 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had met in the building for the Reykjavik summit. It is the place where the end of the Cold War began. The building itself, a former French consulate, is lovely but unless you know the history you would probably never look at it twice if you passed it. Just another nice building in a nice part of town. But the whole world had changed there - or started to change. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk_Summit)

Back at the hotel we indulged in a luxury buffet dinner of cold pasta and salad (I still salivate thinking about it), that was a choice of convenience given we were booked onto the evening Northern Lights bus tour. The way this works is the tour company sends buses to every hotel in town, loads them up with guests and drives them out of the city in search of the Northern Lights. The tours run every night unless cancelled because of weather conditions that make it impossible to see the lights (cloud cover). If a tour is cancelled those booked upon it can transfer their booking to any subsequent night. Of course this means that if you have two or three nights of cancellations in a row, the next night you have a massive group of people queueing up to get on the buses. This is in fact exactly what happened to us. The bus picked up as many as it could from the hotel but by the time we drove off there was still a big bunch of people waiting to be picked up by a second bus (and by bus I mean a full size coach). When we got to the tour company's offices the sheer number of buses on show - each of them full of guests - was remarkable. Literally hundreds of people were being carried out into the wilderness to see the Northern Lights, a daily exodus from Reykjavik. The funny thing is, we found out the following day that if the Northern Lights are on show, you can see them from anywhere in the city. You don't need to be out in the wilderness. It's a big income generating ploy directed at tourists.

But we knew none of this as we were bused out into the dark countryside. About an hour later the bus pulled up in some remote, wind-swept spot and we all climbed out to stand around on the rocky, uneven ground, looking up at the clear sky for any signs of the Northern Lights. Apparently if the sky is clear you should be able to see them. But we didn't see a thing. We froze our bits off for the best part of two hours and saw nothing. After two hours I retreated to the relative warmth of the bus so that I could feel my fingers and toes again, and kept a watch through the bus window. An hour later the tour leader gave up and we all climbed back aboard to head back into the city.

"There's not much you can do at a time like this," the tour guide said, as we headed back. "But if you like I can teach you all some swear words in Icelandic." A sense of humour always helps, I find.

The next morning we had the advantage of a bit of a lie in - which was welcome after our late night out in the cold. At 10 o'clock we were picked up by Finni from Scub Iceland (http://www.scuba.is/) , the company we'd booked with for a snorkeling trip. We were headed to a place called Silfra, a site an hour outside Reykjavik which is apparently the meeting point of the geological plates of America and Eurasia. You can, with a bit of poetic licence, snorkel between the continents.

The drive was superb. Overnight a blanket of snow had fallen and as we drove up into the mountains it was like driving across an Arctic wilderness, nothing but white to see from the road to the mountains in the distance. Other than the traffic - and there wasn't much of that - the only thing moving was the occasional group of tourists on snowmobile trips. The mini bus skidded and stuttered a few times, but Finni reassured us that he had snow tires on, and that he had only ever lost a handful of people in car crashes. Even more so than Stefan the previous day Finni had a solid sense of humour. We even talked about that, and he reflected on all the different nationalities of tourists that he guides and how the Icelandic sense of humour works very well with the British, the Irish and Australians and Swedish. Apparently Norwegians have no sense of humour and it is difficult even to get any sense from them about whether or not they have enjoyed a trip.

Silfra itself is located in Thingvellir park, a World Heritage site. It is a geological valley and historically it was the location of the Viking parliament, the world's first democratic Parliament (i would have thought that would have been Greece, but I haven't investigated that claim in any detail). Because it is a geological rift, and because it has amazingly clear water, Silfra is frequently voted one of the top three dive sights in the world. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silfra). You can also see pictures of Silfra on the Iceland Scuba site - it is the backdrop on this page: http://www.scuba.is/en/tours.html

We arrived at a visitor centre and Finni handed us our thermals to squeeze into - the type of thing that leaves you looking like a big grey Teletubby - and then we sat to wait for the other four members of the tour group. As it turned out they were a bunch of four guys from Dundee who were on a similar trip to May and I. They had hired a car - obviously not having read the same article in the in-flight magazine as I had - and were spending their few days in Reykjavik driving around. They had already been to the Blue Lagoon and recommended it heartily to us. (It only occurred to me after the fact that we chose to go snorkeling in freezing cold water rather than go to sit in the luxurious and thermally heated surroundings of the Blue Lagoon.)

Once we were all a big group of Teletubbies we drove for a further ten minutes down to the dive site. Finni took us down to the narrow finger of water, looking like not much more than a big puddle from above, and explained to us what we would be doing, and the different areas we would be snorkeling through. This included the Silver Cathedral, a grand space where the Iceland Scuba team have their Christmas party every year - they suit up and take a tree and underwater speakers down and have a proper party. Then it was back to the van to spend the next half an hour squeezing ourselves into our dry suits and gloves and masks, and then we waddled back to the water and pulled on our flippers.

I was second into the water and it was a bit strange at first. I've snorkeled before when I was younger, but never in a buoyant dry suit. It took a few minutes to get used to the buoyancy of the suit, and then to breathe normally through the snorkel, but pretty soon any of that stuff was forgotten. The view in Silfra was superb. There was no sea life - it was purely just geological - but it was very impressive, massive big chunks of rock covering the bottom of the trench, clear water ahead where the finger of water opened out into the Cathedral.

Over about half an hour we slowly made our way around the rift, into where it opened up to the wide, silvery cavern, and then onwards to where the floor of the trench rose up to meet us. All too soon we were climbing out onto the rocks, with numb lips and gloves full of water, to walk back to the spot where we'd entered to rift. Emerging out of the water was a strange experience, for thirty minutes I'd been staring downards in a world that glowed blue and aquamarine, and where everything had seemed bright. Rising up out of the water I re-entered a grey/white landscape beneath dreary grey clouds. The world above the water felt monochrome compared to that beneath.

Back at the point where we had entered the water the last element of the tour was to strip off our masks and snorkles and flipper and jump into the water from a height. All six of us did it - I was second in. I have to say I fell for a lot longer than I expected to and it does wake you up when you hit that water and get jets of it up your nostrils (we were told not to hold our nose as the force of entering the water can slam your hand into your nose and break it). Finni told us that he'd recently taken two Australian brothers on the same tour and when it came to the drop into the water they'd both done it naked, and then had swam a few laps in the freezing water. "Even I have not done that," he said. "Crazy Australians."

Back at the bus we stripped out of our constricting dry suits and then Finni served up flasks of hot chocolate and biscuits which helped warm us up. We said goodbye to our Scottish chums - who were off for a driving tour of the Golden Circle, a popular tourist route around some of the main tourist sites in the Reykjavik area - and then we climbed back into Finni's van for the trip back to Reykjavik.

Finni dropped us off at the harbour where we headed to a popular seafood restaurant for some lobster soup and barbecued scallops. It was just what was needed after an adventure in the freezing water. The restaurant was full of charater as well, a ramshackle place in corrugated sheeting, and which was owned by an old fisherman who didn't speak a word of English but who had spent much of his time in English ports. Apparently his view was that after a few drinks he had no problems communicating with anybody. He also liked the ladies, and inside the restaurant there was a framed picture of him surrounded by young women in bikinis. He is known locally as Hugh Hefner.

After that we had a bit of a walk and then returned to the fish and chip shop from the previous day for a serving of langoustines and potatoes in herb and garlic, and then we had a pleasant, long walk back to the hotel, stopping off in a few shops here and there to pick up some souveniers, pausing in the street to photograph some of the fun car number plates we saw (During the trip we saw the following number plates: U2 BONO; REV UP; XXWW; BB: and 4ZZZZ. I don't know how it works in Iceland - but maybe you can just pick your numberplate.)

That evening we had planned to rejoin the Northern Lights tour, but because of the weather it had been cancelled. Both of us were shattered so we spent the night in the hotel room, packing our bags, eating convenience food from the petrol station across the street, and watching BBc1 on our tiny wall-mounted TV.

The next morning our flight back to Scotland was at 7am, so we had to get up a ridiculous hour to catch the bus that carried us back to the airport. The flight itself was uneventful and we didn't even get a free sandwich this time because we had entertainment systems. Still, that meant I wasn't tempted to read the inflight magazine and terrify myself all over again at how dangerous Iceland was.

All in all Iceland was a great trip and a place I think it will be worth going back to, particular in the summer when the weather is better and there is an opportunity to explore some more of the country.

We never did get to see the Northern Lights - but that just means we'll absolutely have to go back, and that is no bad thing.

Norway for a week

Norway is an expensive place. Let me state that right at the start.

To be fair, I had some idea of this fact before embarking upon our recent trip to Norway - it's one of those commonly accepted things like 'France has good food' and 'Italians are all crazy'. People know that Norway is expensive. But there's a difference between sort of knowing something is true and being faced with forking out £15 for a hamburger. That sort of thing brings the truth of just how expensive Norway is into sharp focus. For the first time in my life I realised what it must be like to be one of those tourists from Asia or Africa who comes to the west and who weeps every time they buy a sandwich because when converted to their own currency it's equivalent to buying a small car. I'm just glad that I don't drink - I dread to think how expensive alcohol would be in Norway.

Anyway, financial issues aside, Norway is a lovely place to visit. It's clean, civilised, and friendly. The infrastructure is good (particularly the trains) and there is fantastic food available - particularly seafood - if you can afford it. There are very nice towns and cities to visit and the country is famous for its sites of natural beauty, particularly the fjords. You just have to accept that every time you pay for something it's going to be like passing a kidney stone, and get on with it. Which is what we did.

May and I were in Norway for a week in early June. We got a cheap Ryanair flight from Edinburgh to Oslo (or, more specifically, to Torp Sandefjord, 1.5 hours by train from Oslo - curse you, you Ryanair bastards!) on a Friday evening and we flew back nine days later on the Sunday evening. The flight out was smooth and relaxed, with a half empty cabin and a flying time of just over an hour. We landed in Sandefjord, jumped on the shuttle bus to the train station, and then climbed straight onto the train. We had a relaxed train ride in an empty carriage all the way to Oslo, passing through scenic countryside of rolling hills, rivers and lakes, wooden farm houses and small villages.

In Oslo itself we'd booked a cheap hostel for the night, a few minutes walk from the train station. We checked in to our sparsely furnished but clean room, dumped our stuff, and then headed out to get some food. By this time it was after midnight on a Friday night in Oslo and the only people on the street were those that had been out drinking for the last few hours, all of them dressed up in fashionable clothes and a fair number of them rolling about drunk. It was much like being back in Edinburgh on a Friday night.

At that time of night we didn't have much of a choice when it came to food - the options basically being one sort of fast food or another. In the end we opted for a local fast food place called Jaffs which appeared to specialise in kebabs. I've never had a kebab but I thought it was a good a time as any to try. I opted for a kebab 'meny' (or 'menu' - basically a meal deal) which comprised a kebab, chips and a drink. May got a kebab on its own. For these relatively modest refreshments I forked over the best part of £20. And so the truth of the cost of things in Norway hit home. I needed the kebab to recover after the shock of the price. The food was smashing though, and eating kebabs was to become a recurring theme of our trip to Norway.

With the food consumed we returned to our hotel and slept. The next morning we enjoyed the fiscal luxury of our free buffet breakfast (and very nice it was too, breads and cold meats and fruit juice) before returning to the train station for our train to Bergen.

The train from Oslo to Bergen was a pleasure - other than the first four hours where nobody realised we could open the windows and the whole carriage slowly baked in the heat. It was an eight hour journey through fantastic countryside, climbing steadily up into the mountains where thick snow lined the tracks despite it being the middle of June, and where we passed the world famous Flam railway which travels along the edge of a wonderfully scenic Fjord (we would very much liked to have done the rail journey but it was too expensive, so we settled for the fleeting glance we got from our own train), before descending slowly to sea level again and arriving in Bergen.

Bergen is a wonderfully pretty town. Apparently it rains there 280 days of the year, so we were lucky that when we arrived (and indeed, for our whole stay) it was glorious sunshine. We walked to our hotel, enjoying the pretty wooden buildings and open squares. We checked into our hotel - one of the very first guests in the newly opened Sorbonne (worth a stay if you're ever in Bergen: http://www.sorbonne.no/Sorbonne.html), and then went for a walk around the compact town centre. We wandered down to the small harbour and the fish market, and then to Bryggen, the oldest part of the town with its rickety old wooden buildings on the far side of the harbour (see picture below, which shows Bryggen from the harbour). We ate a 7-11 dinner of calzone pizza because it was cheap (which is a relative term in Norway), before returning to our accommodation for the night.


The next three days we spent enjoying Bergen with as much energy as the baking sun would allow. We went for a cruise to the fjords, which was very pleasant but not very spectacular. When I hear 'fjord' I expect sheer walls of rock rising up from the water, but 'fjord' in Norway is essentially any sea loch. From Bergen the cruise took us to a fjord surrounded by gentle rolling hills that were dotted with farm houses and summer cottages, very pleasant but not impressive. We took the Floibanen funicular railway up Mount Floyen in Bergen and got fantastic views over the town, then walked down through the crooked, narrow streets of old wooden houses that twisted and turned their way down the hillside - the picture below shows a similar sort of street in another part of Bergen.


We visited the Lepramuset - the Leprosy museum - where we found out that Norway had a lot to do with discovering, treating and curing leprosy in the 18th and 19th centuries. We also found out that the Lepramuset has a lovely peaceful garden at the back, but I wasn't too keen to find out why it was the ground there was so fertile. We returned to the top of Floibanen at twilight to see the sun setting - this was at 11:30 at night and the sun never really set, but we did get a lovely view of the city in the twilight as you can see.


We ate one meal in a very expensive but very nice traditional Norwegian restaurant. We wandered around the narrow wooden alleyways of Bryggen and climbed rickety wooden steps to the upper floors of the old buildings (I felt like I was on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean). And on the evening of the last day in Bergen we ended our trip by eating a very fine kebab on the steps of Johanneskirken, a grand church looking down the main street to the town centre while in the distance a school brass band played the hits of Lionel Ritchie in the main square. A bizarre but enjoyable way to conclude our time in Bergen.

On the Wednesday morning we checked out early, about 6:30 in the morning, and then headed down to the harbour to board our water-ferry to Stavanger, a four hour cruise to the south. What I saw of the journey was lovely, but I slept for most of it so the rest might have been rubbish. I'm sure it wasn't though.

We arrived in Stavanger at about lunch-time and immediately set about finding our accommodation. We'd booked a guest house just south of the city centre, a fifteen minute walk away. We found it easily enough. We were greeted on arrival by the very friendly owner, and shown to our enjoyably large room. After a refreshing cup of tea we headed back out to explore the town.

The old part of Stavanger is absolutely lovely - on one side of the harbour the town centre is made of up of old wooden buildings converted into shops and restaurants. After a buffet lunch in a quiet pub we had an enjoyable walk around the quiet streets looking at the shops and restaurants - including a skateboard shop called Shit! - before heading back to the harbour front. On the other side of the harbour the same sort of old buildings make up the oldest, residential part of the town. Crooked, cobbled streets with a a mish-mash of white-washed wooden houses. It was very quiet too, very few other pedestrians about, and the whole place was very peaceful. The only thing that spoiled the serenity was the blaring fog-horn of the massive cruise liner that had been berthed in the harbour and which was noisily making its departure.

As lovely as the old town was it was not a big area. After a few hours in the baking sun having explored the key sites we were tired, so we headed back to the guest house for a rest for a few hours, before coming out again for some food in the evening. We bought a kebab and ate it on a bench at the harbour, watching the night life and listening to the sounds of A-ha from the pub across the bay. Lionel Ritchie and A-ha. Norway must surely be stuck in the eighties, and this is no bad thing.

The next day we took a cruise to Lysefjord. This was a nine hour excursion, four hours sailing up the Fjord, an hour break at Lysebotn, the town at the end of the Fjord, and then four hours back. It was a great trip. This was a proper fjord, with sheer walls of rock rising up from the water. We also passed some great countryside, before getting into the narrowest part of the fjord itself, passed beneath a couple of fantastic suspension bridges over the fjord, and enjoyed a walk around Lysebotn at the end of the trip. The ship wasn't busy either, so there was no difficulty getting a good view or taking pictures, and we had some very nice weather with big fluffy clouds rolling across the sky. Made for great pictures - as you can see.


Speaking of pictures, Lysefjord is also the location of two of Norway's greatest natural wonders - Preikastolen (or Pulpit Rock in English - a massive flat rock high above the Fjord that you can hike to - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preikestolen) and the Kjerag (a mountain where a boulder is wedged in a crack in the rocks high above the Fjord that again you can hike to and, if you are brave, stand upon - see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjerag). Unfortunately, from the deck of the ship, neither really looked that spectacular and both cases I think you have to actually be at them to appreciate how amazing they are. Our photos of both of these wonders do not really convey the natural beauty of either site.

On the Friday we had our first day of rain. It rained all day, grey clouds pouring down a near-constant drizzle. In the end this wasn't too bad because May was ill that day and so we decided to stay in, to keep out of the rain, and watch the first matches of the world cup. It was very relaxing for me, less so for May given she wasn't well, but a hell of a lot better for her than being out in the rain. So aside from a quick trip out to the nearest 7-11 by me to pick up some provisions we enjoyed the comfort of our room all day. Our guesthouse host was very kind and helpful as well and made sure we had everything we needed. And we watched some very dull World Cup matches, but that's another story.

On the Saturday we had our train trip back to Bergen. We arrived at the station and climbed on board, made ourselves comfy in our seats and settled in for the eight hour journey. An hour later the train stopped and we were all herded off onto coaches. Eventually we managed to work out that a train had failed on the line up ahead and the train company had laid on coaches for the remainder of the seven hour journey to Bergen because it was not sure how long it would take to clear the obstruction. For me the thought of seven hours in a coach was depressing. For May, who was still feeling a bit under the weather and who suffers from travel sickness, particularly on twisty-turny roads such as we were driving along, seven hours feeling nauseous was a disaster. Fortunately we were spared the worst of it. After about two hours we learned that the train company had managed to get a train to a nearby station further along the line from where we had been stopped. Our coach was redirected to the station and we found a very comfortable train waiting for us. We found two seats in the 'Comfort' class - equivalent to first class - and then enjoyed a very relaxing five hours back to Bergen, arriving an hour later than intended and half an hour before the first England match of the World Cup. We scampered into our hotel, which was adjacent to the train station, and made ourselves comfortable for the football after a very long day.

Sunday was our last day in Norway. Our flight was at nine in the evening so we had the whole day to explore Oslo. We dumped our bags in luggage lockers at the train station and then went walking. We took at tram to Vigeland sculpture park - a park set up by a sculptor called Vigeland and which is full of his sculptures. The park was lovely but most of the sculptures - all of which seemed to be naked humans in one form or another - were not to my taste. Have a look at the column of writhing bodies below and you can see what a mean. Very well done, but a bit unsettling. And I don't want to come over all Daily Mail but there were also some very odd statues of naked children.


We had a walk about for an hour or so and then headed back to the town centre. We took the tram to the harbour area of Oslo where there was a recent development of shops and restaurants along the front, and some sort of festival going on. We enjoyed a walk about, taking in the atmosphere. We got some Norwegian fish and chips (decent) and then walked back through Oslo city centre to the train station. It's a pretty and compact city, with some nice buildings. The Parliament building in particular, in nice yellow stone, is a very lovely building.-as you can see below.


We finished our stay in Oslo with a kebab, revisiting the restaurant that we had visited on our first night, and then we were on the train back to the airport. We had an easy passage through the airport and a short wait for the flight, and then we were once again in the air and relaxing (as much as anyone can relax on a Ryanair flight) for the hour or so it took us to get back to Scotland.

A good week. Norway is a very pleasant place and I would recommend it to anyone.

Did I mention it was expensive?

Two Weeks In Japan

Afternoon.

It’s about two weeks since May and I got back from our fortnight trip to Japan and I’ve finally managed to get a bit of time to update this blog with some sort of record of what we did and saw (and ate). Most times, when updating this blog, I would attempt a vaguely chronological record of a trip, but given that we were away for two weeks and that we packed a great deal into that time, if I were to attempt a similar sort of blog entry I might well be here for hours. So instead I will just report on the highlights of the trip, the disappointments, as well as saying a few words about the impressions of Japan that we have come away with.

Before we get to that, however, for the official record our holiday comprised the following:

May and I flew to Tokyo (via Seoul) from Heathrow on the evening of Thursday 15 October. We arrived in Tokyo on the evening of Friday 16 October and then spent a week in Tokyo, including a day trip each to Hakone and Kamakura. After that we travelled south to Kyoto from where we also did a day trip to Hiroshima and Himeji (that’s one day trip for both those places). We then came back to Tokyo for a couple of nights before our return flight to London (again via Seoul) which left early on Saturday 31 October.

So, onto to the highlights from our fortnight:

Tokyo by night: Tokyo is a great city, but its even better at night. Our hotel for the first week in Tokyo was in Shinjuku, one of the real nightlife parts of the city. Every evening when we returned from our sightseeing we would emerge from the subway or surrounding streets into the neon valleys of Shinjuku, bustling with crowds of people making their wayto and from shops, clubs or restaurants. The whole area is reminiscent of Times Square in New York, except that its bigger, doesn't have the slightly grubby atmosphere of Times Square and has significantly fewer American fast food restaurants. It was a great place to base ourselves because you really could appreciate the extent to which Tokyo really never sleeps (at least, not in Shinjuku). Even more impressive than Shinjuku was seeing Tokyo at night from above. We paid a visit to the (free) Observation Deck at the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building one evening and we got a fantastic view of Tokyo at dusk, with the sun setting in the west and all the lights of the city coming on. You really get a great sense of the sheer scale of the city when you’re up high and you can see nothing but city lights to the horizon in all directions. May took many photos of all these things and I hope to get around to putting some of them on Flickr, or even in this blog, sooner or later.

Tsukiji and Odaiba: Probably my favourite full day in Tokyo was the day we got up at 5 in the morning to pay a visit to Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market. Normally getting up early, particularly on holidays, is not something I would ever say I enjoy, but to fully appreciate Tsukiji you need to get there early because all the auctions are over by 7am. We emerged from the subway station one block away from the fish market and then walked to the main entrance with a throng of other tourists. As we entered, the fish market unfolded before us beneath a lovely pink early morning sky. We dodged refrigerated trucks and the mini motorised utility trucks the workers whizzed around on and made our way into the outer market, rows and rows of covered stalls and fish preparation areas that sit outside the fish auction hall. We picked our way through the narrow lanes between the stalls, watching as men and women cut up and gutted and prepared all manner of fresh fish. We saw an old guy casually picking thrashing fish from a bucket of water, slaughtering them with one expert application of a cleaver and then gutting them in seconds. We saw buckets of eels, balled up pink octopuses, and massive frozen tuna being cut up with power saws. We crowded into the middle of the auction hall, a narrow path roped off for tourists, and watched the frantic shouting and yelling at the end of the blue fin tuna auction, the massive frozen tuna lying in rows like missiles waiting to be loaded. It was a great experience, but I was always very conscious that I was intruding on people’s work, found myself conscious dodging out of the way of trucks going back and forth or people carrying crates of fish, and couldn’t help but feel I was getting in the way. Some of the other tourists didn’t seem to care so much, rudely pointing massive digital SLR cameras at people working, or at their produce. They weren’t really appreciative of the fact that they were being a nuisance. I also couldn’t believe the number of tourists who visited the place in completely inappropriate clothing – from open toe sandals to high heels – and even more so couldn’t believe the hip young couple who took their toddler with them, perched on the dad's shoulders and waiting to fall off into the path of an oncoming truck. Idiots. After Tsukiji we had a wander around the shops that filled the blocks just beyond the market, selling all manner of fresh fish, fresh food and related items. We had breakfast a small stall on the street that was run by a grumpy old Japanese couple who clearly didn’t like or weren’t comfortable with foreigners, and then we headed south for the second part of our day – a trip to Odaiba.

Odaiba is an area of reclaimed land in Tokyo bay, a man made island. Everything about it is fun. First of all you reach Odaiba by way of a monorail from the main land that crosses the Rainbow Bridge - and as I've said a number of years ago on this blog, monorails are just fun. Once on Odaiba there are all manner of interesting things to see and do. We visited the Panasonic centre that had an exhibition of current and future Panasonic technology, including the worlds biggest plasma screen. We visited Venus Fort, a massive mall that is designed to look like an Italian town, including a lovely blue sky for the roof. We visited the Toyota centre where we got to drive an electric car around a track that ran between and through the surrounding buildings. We visited, but did not ride upon, the massive Ferris wheel on the island that takes 16 minutes to do a full rotation. We saw the futuristic Fuji TV building, and we had an enjoyable walk across the island along a path that took us between all kinds of futuristic buildings. May and I both agreed that the island was great fun, a good mix of things to do, futuristic buildings and fantastic architecture, and enjoyable views across the Tokyo. Unfortunately, we later found out that much of Odaiba is to be flattened in 2010 because the island was only leased for ten years. Seems a bit strange as there are a lot of buildings there and it would appear to be completely unnecessary - but maybe the future is changing and they need to keep up.

Day Trips from Tokyo: We had two fantastically enjoyable day trips from Tokyo – firstly to Hakone, a popular tourist area in the countryside where you can enjoy a number of different forms of transport, including a pirate ship and cable cars, and where we got amazing views of Mount Fuji at sunset. Secondly, on the following day, we took a day trip to Kamakura, which is about an hour south of Tokyo. It is a fantastically historic place, once having been the capital of Japan, with many temples, a giant Buddha, and a very enjoyable walk through the hills where we got to see many spiders and lots of Japanese school children walking in polite lines. Actually, we did observe something very interesting on that walk, an amusing culutral difference. All of the Japanese children we saw were smartly dressed, walked in school parties or small groups, and happily made their way along the path saying hello to us, saying good morning to the other Japanese people they passed, and all in all just getting on with and bothering nobody. The only western children we saw were two German children that came along with their parents, carrying sticks, and beating chunks out of bushes and leaves and each other and making the noise of guns and violence. Wonder if that says something about the differences between Western and Japanese children? (Or maybe just between German and Japanese children?)

Kuishinbo in Kyoto: One of the real highlights for both of us was stumbling across Kuishinbo in Kyoto. On our first night in the city we went our for a walk and then went in search of food. Purely by chance we ended up in Kuishinbo, a small restaurant on the Pontocho area of the city. It is a simple place, with a long counter down one side and three or four Japanese style low tables on the other side where you can sit if you prefer not to sit at the counter. The place was run by a local called Kenzo who, unusually, spoke very good English. So, not only were we served fantastic freshly prepared food, but we also got a chance to talk to Kenzo (and, via his translation, to the old lady who was also working there, who we thought was his mother) about Japan, our trip, where we were from, and so on. It was really enjoyable. He gave us some tips on what to see and told us about the food he prepared. It was so enjoyable that we returned on our last night in Kyoto and were made as welcome as old friends. This time there were other locals in the place and we got a chance to speak to them as well about what we had done and where we were. It was the type of experience you hope for when you travel, really getting a chance to spend time with locals, to see how they live their life. And the food was fantastic too.

A walk along the philosopher’s path. Kyoto has a lot of temples. We spent a few days visiting a good number of them but for me there were only a couple that really stood out. Fortunately, we visited them both on the same day that we also did something else I really enjoyed. In the north east of the city there is a path about 2km long that runs along the side of a small canal and which connects a number of different temples. The path is called the Philosopher’s Path because a local famous philosopher used to walk it daily. It is a lovely little walk, along the tree lined canal and through residential (but very pretty) parts of Kyoto. My enjoyment of it was also enhanced by the fact that a small teahouse about half way along the walk served tea and toast, which, at that point in the holiday, was just what I needed. At the northern end of the path lies Ginkakuji, the temple of the silver pavilion. This temple was lovely mostly because it was set in beautiful gardens, and because it had its own little zen garden. We had a good hour or so there enjoying the grounds. From there we took a bus across town to the north west area of the city where we visited what was for me the most impressive of Kyoto’s temples – Kinkakuji – the temple of the Golden Pavilion. Unlike its sister temple on the other side of town Kinkakuji was actually covered in the precious metal it is named after. So, even though the place was heaving with tourists, the view of the gold leaf covered temple sitting in the middle of its still lake and surrounded by trees that were showing their first autumn colours, was a really fantastic sight.

Hiroshima and Himeji Probably my favourite day from the period we were based in Kyoto was the day we took a day trip to Hiroshima and Himeji. Hiroshima needs no introduction, it is the place of course where the first atomic bomb was dropped in World War 2. The city itself is unspectacular, being mostly modern and built following the war. However, there is an area of the city in the centre that is dedicated as a memorial to the bomb. The first sight we saw was the A-bomb dome – the only building (out of the few that survived the bomb) that has been left standing, as a memorial to the bomb attack. We then spent some time in the Memorial Park, which is littered with many monuments and memorials to people who died in the bomb attack. It has a lovely reflecting pool and cenotaph, both of which line up with the A-bomb dome, and, most interestingly, it has a memorial museum, which seeks to tell the whole story about the bomb and the attack and the aftermath. We didn’t have a great deal of time but managed to have a quick walk around the museum for about an hour. It was clearly a place that would justify a much longer visit, and, in my view, the type of place everyone should go. They had some amazing and terrible exhibits, from personal possessions that had survived the bomb blast, watches that had stopped at the time of the attack, glasses, cigarette cases, and the like. Many of these were put in a personal context – belongings of a father found by the daughter who had come looking for him after the attack; belongings of a child found by siblings. It all helped to personalise the tragedy. There were also no-holds-barred photographs and reports of those who had survived the blast, including those with severe burns, women with burns in the patterns of the dark parts on their kimonos (because the dark material absorbed the energy and burnt the pattern onto the wearer's skin), the story of Sadako, a girl who died from childhood leukaemia years after the bomb blast and who folded over a 1,000 paper cranes during her time in hospital because she believed that once she had folded a 1,000 she would get a wish granted. Her wish, of course, was to get well, but it was not granted and she died at a very young age. (The paper crane did become the symbol of peace and to this day paper cranes are brought to Hiroshima from around the world). Perhaps the most striking item in the museum was the part of a building – a bank I think it was – that had been standing at the time of the attack but which had been excavated and placed in one of the exhibit halls. It showed part of the steps outside the bank and there was a dark spot on the steps where somebody had been sitting when the bomb had gone off. I at first assumed that the dark spot was where the person had been vaporised or burnt into the stone but it was in fact dark because the rest of the stone had been blasted clean by the power of the blast, and the spot where the person had been sitting, the shadow on the wall and steps, had been covered by the person and so not blasted clean. The whole place was fascinating. I came out thinking that a lot of people know that nuclear bombs are bad, that every one accepts it, but until you go to a place like the Hiroshima Memorial museum, you never really understand how bad it is. Perhaps the most interesting and depressing thing I learnt at the museum was that the majority of the scientists who had been involved in the Manhattan project had sent a begging letter to the US Government begging them that if they were determined to use the bomb that they provide a warning to the target town. The US Government refused and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima without warning even though they knew the vast majority of people in the city were civilians. I couldn’t see why they felt they had to drop it without warning. They would have had the same devastating impact on infrastructure and Japanese morale if they had given a warning. The demonstration of nuclear power would have been sufficient without any associated deaths. It seemed utterly unnecessary to me, and it wasn’t something I had previously known about.

After our stimulating trip to Hiroshima, we headed back to Kyoto, but stopped off for a few hours at Himeji, where there is located one of the best preserved Edo period Japanese castles – Himeji castle. It has been used in a number of movies, including the Last Samurai and You Only Live Twice, and it is a really lovely castle. We whizzed around it in the few hours we had before it closed, and both were really glad that we took the opportunity to visit it.

Fushimi Inari: During our last day in Kyoto we took a trip a few minutes south of the city centre by train to the Fushimi Inari temple. This place is worth a visit because it has around 4km of paths in the hills that are lined with red torii gates. It is an amazing achievement of effort and a brilliantly atmospheric place to walk around for a few hours, paths of tightly packed bright red gates leading through the trees from shrine to shrine - so tightly packed in some places that they do not even let the light through. Great for photos and, when we were there, not as busy with tourists as I thought it might have been. The atmosphere was a little spoiled by the workman I saw taking a leak just off the path halfway up the hillside, but I suppose when you're up the path painting torii gates all day you are going to need go sooner or later.

Ryokan in Tokyo: After Kyoto we returned to Tokyo for another night before heading out to an airport hotel for our last night. We had wanted to have at least one night in a traditional Japanese inn – a Ryokan – on this trip, and so had booked ourselves into the Ryokan Kamogawa in the Asakusa part of Tokyo. These are the traditional inns that have mattresses to sleep on, low furniture, tatami mats on the floor. I have to say the Ryokan was fantastically comfortable. It was the most roomy place we stayed in the whole trip, with a separate living and sleeping space, and the mattress on the floor was the most comfortable place I slept for the whole trip. It wasn’t even spoiled by the massive spider lounging on the paper screen over one of the windows that I spotted not long after we arrived. He seemed quite an easy going chap and didn’t mind in the slightest when I coerced him into a metal box for the night.

Puppetry in Nippori: On our last full day in Tokyo we had arranged through Couch Surfing to meet up with a local, Mizue, who lived in the Nippori part of Tokyo. The whole day was fantastic. Mizue was really friendly and took us home to her place, where she made us lunch and introduced us to her husband. Her flat was on the 18^th floor of a recent development that afforded magnificent views south over Tokyo (apparently in the winter they had views of Mount Fuji from their balcony). She then took us for a walk through the Nippori district, including a walk through Yanaka cemetery (lovely and atmospheric, with gnarled old trees and autumn leaves scattered about), to a local shop selling hand made papers, and then, to our complete surprise, she took us down a backstreet to the shop of a local puppet maker and puppeteer. We paid a very small amount of money and got treated to a fantastic and amusing puppet show for half an hour. It was a real treat and the puppet maker's handy work was fantastic. He is so good in fact that locals commission him to do puppets of themselves – he has had to stop taking orders because so many people have already placed orders. It was a great thing to have done and was a place that was not in any of the guidebooks we had so we would not have known about it without having met up with Mizue. It really pays to get to know the locals – especially when they make you rice balls for your train ride to the airport!

Food: We didn’t have a bad meal in Japan. At worst we had a couple of unspectacular meals (in Himeji train station for one), but nothing bad. Of course it helps that we love Japanese food, but even those who have never really tried would have struggled I am sure to dislike the dishes of Tempura, of noodles, of rice and katsu (breaded cutlets). And it wasn’t just the taste and smells, it was the look as well. Japanese really are believers in food looking good, and it always does. I also loved the few times we visited sushi restaurants because you could watch the expert sushi chefs rattling out plate after plate of sushi with amazing speed. It was tremendously impressive.

So those are my highlights from the trip, in roughly chronological order. What about disappointments?

Well, there was only one, really. Autumn colours: We had hoped to be in Kyoto when the trees were in full autumn plumage. It didn’t happen. We did see the early signs of autumn, some deep reds, some splashes of gold here and there, but we probably arrived a couple of weeks too early for the full display.

I’m sure you’ll agree that if that is the biggest disappointment we had to endure over the course of two weeks, we had a pretty good holiday. We didn’t even have any real bad weather. We had one morning where it rained quite heavily for a few hours, and a few cloudy days, but otherwise it was warm and sunny pretty much all the time.

So two weeks with many highlights and no real disappointments. But what were the main impressions of Japan that we came away with?

• Japan is a satisfyingly clean place. Between us May and I have travelled quite extensively and have visited a good number of the world’s major cities. Tokyo is by far the cleanest of these, and Japan as a whole is astonishingly clean. Even crowded, over populated and massively busy places like the Tokyo subway are nowhere near as dirty feeling as similar places in London or New York or Paris. The place is so clean that one of the main marketing strategies in Japan is to have people standing on street corners handing out tissues with adverts on them. They have liquid soap dispensers all over the place and public toilets in numbers I have never seen anywhere else - and even though most of the of public toilets are of the traditional Japanese ‘squat’ variety – which to a Westerner don’t appear the cleanest in the world - the logic is if you go to a public toilet you don’t to touch it, so squatting is more hygienic, see? Still hurts your thighs though...

• Even though it’s a very clean place, they do have their priorities a little mixed up. Even though they have lots of public toilets most of them will only have a cold water tap, no soap and nothing to dry your hands with. So they’re so worried about hygiene they prefer to use squat toilets but not so worried that they want you to properly wash and dry your hands. But more ridiculous than that is the fact that in many of their public toilets they actually have gone so far as to install an electronic device that produces the sound of a toilet flushing that you can activate if you want to cover up the sounds you produce naturally. Apparently that is a source of much embarrassment for the Japanese so they install these gadgets… but don’t bother with a hot water tap or paper towels. Priorities… mixed up.

• Kyoto has a lot of temples. Too many, in my view. We visited a lot of them and they were all interesting in their own way, but apart from two or three very impressive temples (the Golden Pavilion, the Silver Pavilion with its fantastic gardens, and Kiomizu-Dera, which is suspended over a valley) they all start to feel a bit samey after a while, for me at least.

• The rail system in Japan is fantastically efficient and just as complex. You’ve probably heard about the bullet trains, and they are fantastic, but the whole rail system is wonderfully efficient. Trains spend no longer than a few minutes at platforms and passengers are brilliant at getting off and on with no nonsense before the train pulls out again. I saw four trains stop at the same platform over a 12 minute period. In Edinburgh trains sit at platforms for half an hour at a time. Of course all this efficiency is based on tip-top infrastructure, and that costs money, so you have to pay a lot for train travel in Japan. And the other thing is that it is all incredibly complicated. There are publicly owned rail lines and there are privately owned rail lines, and they all intersect with each other and use each others lines. There are also a number of different types of train – it’s not like over here where there are just trains and they’re all pretty much of a muchness, in Japan, on the publicly owned rail lines alone you have different types of train such as Nozomi, Hikari, Kodama (that are all Shinkansen ‘bullet trains’, but just different types/speeds), different types of accommodations on these different types of trains from Green Cars, to Ordinary Cars, to Ordinary Private compartments. You get reserved cars and unreserved cars. You get limited express trains and ordinary express trains – both of which will be bullet trains but which may or may not be the same type of train. Navigating the system and knowing what train to get, where to sit and what type of ticket to buy can be incredibly difficult. And that’s before you even get on to the private lines that are run by private companies (usually companies that own department stores for some reason) and have their own type of trains with such exotic names as ‘Romance-car’. You need a degree just to get anywhere.

• Mount Fuji is cool. Really, it is. We saw it three and a half times during our stay – once from the cable car in Hakone at sunset; once from the observation deck in Tokyo at sunset; once glimpsed through the clouds on the train ride from Kyoto to Tokyo (the 'half' time); and once on the flight to Seoul on the way home when we flew right over it. Mount Fuji is massive – it’s difficult to appreciate just how massive until you see it from the train sitting behind the towns you can see out the window – and absolutely perfectly conical. It's really just everything a mountain should be.
  

• Japanese chocolate is nice. Meiji brand chocolate. It’s nice. The wrapping looks a bit like Hershey’s, which put me off at first, but it’s actually very nice. And their strawberry chocolate is lovely. Try it if you go.

• And speaking of sweet things, Haagan Dazs in Japan has a flavour we don’t get over here – Maple Cookie. It’s lovely and I ate far too much of it. It's a shame we can't get it over here, but probably not a bad thing otherwise I'd be eating it all the time.

So that was Japan. We both had a great time and both agreed we would be happy to go back again, but possibly with a view to seeing more of the countryside.

We have no holiday travel booked up as yet for the new year so I am not sure what trip if any this blog will next cover... I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

Road Trip to Germany

Having just arrived back from the continent, where I drove from Rotterdam to Bonn and back again over a long weekend, I feel it is my civic duty to pass on to readers this important piece of advice: if you are driving on the continent, you should prepare yourself for the fact that any major road that you may choose to take will be completely closed with little notice, and you will be forced to endure a tortuous diversion across country through minor towns and narrow back-roads. All of that is bad enough, particularly if you are in a hurry to get to your destination to ensure you do not miss your ferry back to civilisation, but imagine also having to cope with the fact that you are driving a hired transit van with limited visibility and the steering wheel on the opposite side of the vehicle from every other car on the road.

I should say at this point that I did not undertake this journey for the sake of adventure. An old friend of mine who has been living in Germany for the last five years decided that she wanted to return to Scotland (obviously she had been missing Irn Bru and fish suppers). As she does not drive herself she asked me if I would be willing to drive a van from Edinburgh to help transport her things back to Scotland. Always up for a road-trip I agreed and May kindly offered to accompany me. So on the morning of Friday 25 September May and I picked up a short-wheelbase transit van from a hire company in Edinburgh and set off down the A1 for our evening ferry from Hull. The journey was uneventful and we got to Hull a few hours before we were required to, got straight onto the ship and made ourselves comfy in our cabin.

Travelling by ferry is a very civilised experience. Unlike the pain-in-the-arse that is modern air travel, taking a ferry is stress-free and pleasurable. You roll up in your car, you don't need to wait around for hours to check in or get through security, and you're not cramped into a seat for eight hours. May and I had a cabin to ourselves with its own toilet and shower. Our dinner and breakfast were included and for both we made use of the self-service buffet of freshly prepared and very nice food. The ship has a few shops and entertainment options, including two cinemas and a stage where they have dodgy cabaret acts and bingo. There's also a deck where you can go to see Hull slipping away and two massage chairs which are great after spending five hours driving down the motorway. You get to sleep in a very comfy bed in your own cabin with a view of the sea and when you wake up in the morning the sun is rising over the Netherlands. You can take your time at breakfast and then head down to your car to roll off the ship and into the port of Rotterdam. You are then on your way with no more hassle than a quick passport check. All in all it was an incredibly stress free way to get to Europe. It's more expensive and more time consuming than flying, but why should everything be cheap and quick? Let's start a revolt. Let's make travelling as much about the journey as about the destination.

After departing Rotterdam we had a route marked out that took us south and vaguely east through the Netherlands to the German border just beyond Venlo. From there we headed more directly east to Cologne and then Bonn, where my friend was saying. With directions, a European road-map and a GPS system all on board, we were fairly confident we'd be able to get to Bonn in good enough time to load up the van before leaving again the following day to make it back in time for our evening return-ferry crossing to Hull.

All went well until for the first hour or so. I managed to master driving on the opposite side of the road and in a transit van. As it was a Saturday the roads were relatively quiet and the three lane freeways meant the journey was quick and easy. And then, a little north of Eindhoven, we discovered the that motorway was completely shut a little way ahead. All the freeway traffic was siphoned off onto a smaller side road. We didn't fancy the massive tailback that had resulted and so our map-reading and GPS-listening skills sprung into action. Unfortunately what we didn't know was that the GPS had been accidentally set to always find the shortest route to any destination. Almost without fail motorways and main roads are never the shortest route. They are often the quickest route, but rarely the shortest route. So when we turned to the GPS to get us to our destination, instead of taking us on a brief detour to an adjacent freeway, we ended up on a very scenic but not very enjoyable diversion through a handful of minor back roads and small Dutch towns. Had I been driving my own car, and had I a detailed knowledge of the bizarre Dutch right-of-way rules, that might have been fine. But I was driving a transit van and had no idea who had right of way at any junction I came to.

These difficulties came to a head in the town of Oisterwijk - a lovely historic town with narrow cobbled streets and a picturesque town square. Somehow I ended up in a one-way system that directed me into the centre of this town square. That might have been fine had I been able to follow the one-way system to its natural conclusion and emerge on the other side of the town near a motorway. Unfortunately for me the town square was shortly to be the setting for some sort of festival and was crowded with big lorries and stalls and fairground rides, so much so that the exit from the square was blocked. I therefore ended up in the enjoyable position of having to reverse down a narrow, cobbled, one way street in a transit van with no rear-view mirror and limited visibility to the rear (fortunately May was there to jump out and guide me). I was not alone in being out-foxed by the festival arrangements however, for a large crowd of local traffic had gathered behind me and obligingly waited patiently as I reversed precariously close to them. Still, was not that enjoyable to be reversing painfully slowly because you are scared of driving into some ancient building while a stream of traffic sitting idling their engines behind you.

Once I was pointing in the right direction again I tried to escape the one-way system, but ended up going round in circles. I decided instead to follow a local who, seemingly as frustrated as I was, drove the wrong way down a couple of one way streets. We emerged onto a vaguely main-road and found ourselves, a few minutes later, faced with the delightful and incredibly satisfying sight of a big blue motorway sign.

Having escaped that we were back onto the motorway system around Eindhoven only to find ourselves, less than half an hour later, once again being directed off the road due to the motorway being entirely closed ahead. We were left with the impression that travel south of Eindhoven was entirely impossible.

Having to make snap decisions on which road to take based on temporary roadsigns in foreign languages, and with a lack of knowledge of the road network, we ended up on the motorway we wanted but travelling in the wrong direction. Fortunately for us the next exit was not too far away (and we made sure we took it, because the next exit after that was in France...) and we soon ended up pointing in the right direction.

Much to my relief the rest of the journey to Bonn was much less stressful. We arrived at our friend's place a little after 2pm. The GPS finally came into its one upon leaving the freeway at Bonn, directing us straight to her address in the Bad-Godesberg suburb where she lived and thereby redeeming itself after the earlier trouble it had caused.

We had a busy afternoon, helping my friend transport things that she couldn't take to friend's in Bonn and Cologne, getting rid of rubbish, and generally listening to Sigrid (my friend) complain about Germans and Germany. (Bit unfortunate really, given she has a PhD in German and a German name. She's not German though - she's Irish.) I drove into Cologne with Timo, one of Sigrid's friends, to take a sofa-couch that Sigrid couldn't take back to Scotland to Timo's place. It was an eventful journey, since Timo, who never drove in Cologne, seemed to only know the route to his place by pedestrian and tram ways. Still we got there eventually and managed to head back to Bonn before it got dark and I had to make use of my headlight converters (which frankly, i didn't understand in the slightest).

Then, late in the evening then May and I and Sigrid and Timo went out for dinner at a local German restaurant where we ate schnitzel and German pancake things and a salad which for some reason had watermelon in it.

The next morning May and I got up early and spent a good few hours loading the transit van with all of Sigrid's boxes and belongings, while she packed up the last of the stuff and tidied up the flat. May did all the packing and arranging in the van - an impressive real-life version of tetris at which she excelled in every respect - and I did most of the lugging stuff from the flat to the van. Then Sigrid just after 12 handed over the keys to the grumpy German landlord who spoke in a whisper because of his throat cancer and by 1pm we were on the way back to Rotterdam.

Having reset the default setting of the GPS to always take us the quickest route, its directions were this time much more sensible and after leaving Bad Godesberg we didn't once leave the motorway until we got to Rotterdam. Well, other than for that brief period when another of the roads we were on was completely closed. Not either of the same roads from the previous day, I should say, a completely different, major motorway that was completely closed. The GPS and May's map-reading skills combined redirected us quickly onto one of the many nearby motorways to continue our journey. They have a lot of motorways in Germany - go and have a look at a map of the area around Cologne and you'll see what I mean - but then if they are always closing them perhaps there's a need.

The last stretch of the journey through the Netherlands to the Rotterdam port seemed to stretch on awfully, and it was spectacularly dull. Actually, that is true of the entire journey through both the Netherlands and Germany. Neither country is interesting to drive through. Lots of flat, boring farmland, the occasional tree, a horse here and there. The first half-an-hour stretch of motorway from Hull to Edinburgh was more interesting than any part of the drive through Europe.

Once again we made it to the ferry in plenty of time. We had another relaxed evening that was spoiled for me by eating something by body didn't agree with, so much so that I spent most of the night awake with indigestion.

At about 1am I went out to get some tea to try to settle my stomach and as a result had an interesting long chat with the Filipino server at the on-board Costa coffee. He filled me on the fact that all the Filipino staff on the ship live on the ship for six months at a time, going back and forth from Hull to Rotterdam. They don't get a single day off and so are never off the ship, and they get paid less than the few European who work on the ship. Clearly P&O are feeling the pinch and having to cut corners, but I was quite shocked at this sort of treatment occuring in Europe. Interestingly, it is only on the P&O ship registered in the Netherlands. The sister ship (because there are two ships doing the Hull-Rotterdam route) is registered in the UK, and has no Filipino staff on board. The guy explained why this was but I couldn't really understand through his thick accent. I was even more shocked by the fact that one of the Filipino crew's family were lost in the recent typhoon and P&O wouldn't pay for a flight back home for him - he had to pay himself if he wanted to go back, or wait until the end of his six-month stint. Not having the money to pay for a flight he was forced to wait. I was quite outraged.

Then the guy I was speaking to started talking about not being able to see his young family for six months, but having no choice but to work for P&O to get money because there was little prospect of work at home. It really makes you realise how lucky you are to live in the west. I felt a bit ashamed when he mentioned how rude many of the ship's passengers were to him, treating him like crap just because he work at a coffee shop. Then he insisted it was the Dutch and the English only, and that the Scottish were always very nice, which was probably rubbish but very nice of him to say so. I should say that having sailed on both the P&O ships, the Dutch ship with the Filipino staff was by far the friendly ship with by far the better service. Isn't that sad when the Filipino staff get treated like shit?

The next morning, after probably nothing more than two hours sleep, I got up, got behind the wheel and did the five hour drive from Hull to Edinburgh. I have to say that apart from my stomach I wasn't actually feeling that bad, and the lack of sleep did not seem to affect me until after we dropped Sigrid and the van off at her parent's house in Edinburgh. Her parents had laid on a nice lunch of soup, bread and tea for us, which we enjoyed, and then we caught the bus to Waverley for the train back to Inverkeithing. Almost as soon as we got on the bus I was dozing, and then likewise on train. We had an early night but I must be getting old because even two days later I was still feeling the effects of sleep deprivation.

Still, all in all, it was an experience and a not unenjoyable trip. I could have done without the stress of the road hassles, but it's the type of thing that puts hair on your chest as a driver. And I can now say that I have driven on four continents (Europe, North America, Asia and Australia/New Zealand). I wouldn't choose to do that same drive again however, because it was so dull. It really put the prospect of driving across Europe to Mongolia into some perspective. That would have been a massive undertaking.

Next up, May and I are off to Japan in two weeks time. I am very much looking forward to it. If I don't get to do an update before we go I will certainly be doing one when we get back.

Spiderman

We saw a superhero in Times Sq, New York

And clearly it's not that hard to post videos to Blogger.

A Tale of Two Cities

It occurred to me earlier today that this time two years ago I was swanning about Australia without a care in the world. That seems like it was just yesterday, but its been two full years. It's funny how fast time is starting to pass.

Anyway, the point of this blog was not to get all nostalgic and maudlin, but to update you on recent travel related activity. When last we met I wasn't sure whether or not we were going to make it to Mongolia this summer and I was looking forward to a couple of trips in March to London and New York.

On the first point, I can now confirm that unfortunately we are not going to be undertaking the Mongol Rally this year. From being uncertain at the start of the year we switched back sometime in February to being determined and committed and we spent the best part of a month looking for a suitable vehicle. We searched Autotrader and classified ads and even took a trip to a car auction in Perth but came up with nothing. The deadline for pulling out of the rally and still keeping most of your entrance fee was end of March - after this point you don't get any of your £625 back. So, in the last week of March may and I admitted defeat, deciding that we didn't want to risk not being able to get a car at all and having to forfeit our fee entirely. So in summary the Mongol Rally is a no go for this year; we'll get two thirds of our entrance fee back; and we'll try to enter again for next year and start looking for a car a much earlier than we did this year.

The upside from this decision, other than the money being zapped back into our accounts, is that I now have all that annual leave I had put aside for the Mongol Rally to use. Five whole weeks to do with as I please. Not sure what I want to use it for yet. May's parents are coming over in September so I'll use some of it for when they're over, but I'll probably still have two weeks at least and no plans yet... need to start looking at those cheap flights.


But that's for the future, getting back to what we've been up to recently, we had a trip down to London for a long weekend at the end of February courtesy of a cheap rail deal offered by the Sun newspaper (not that we read that of course, but we buy it if it means cheap holidays). We had an easy journey down on the Thursday afternoon and spent two nights at a small hotel a few steps from King's Cross Station. Had a very good time as well, doing those things in London neither of us had ever done but which we had always wanted to do. We did the London Eye (good fun, but get there early); the Natural History Museum (lots of fossils and an amazing building); the British Museum (well... just the great court really... all those priceless artifacts and we go to look at the glass roof installed a few years ago); the Millennium Bridge and the Tate Modern; and a walk from the Tate along the Thames past Southwark Cathedral to the Borough Market (frenetic, fantastic, food-lovers heaven). We also twice ate at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from our hotel - because that's just part of any holiday we ever take now, eating in Japanese restaurants. If we ever make it to Japan we'll probably eat in western restaurants all the time.

On the Saturday we went to stay with May's friend Chris out in Beaconsfield. We had a good meal(my first ever meat loaf experience) and then enjoyed the atmosphere at a small gathering of friends for Shelly's birthday. Our presence was entirely coincidental to the part, but it didn't mean we couldn't enjoy the snacks and drinks. I also got into a strange conversation with one of the other guys at the party about the lack of Chinese restaurants in Arbroath, but there you go.

All in all, a very enjoyable and relaxing weekend. The last time I went to London as a tourist I was still a teenager, or not past it, and since then I've only ever been to London for work. So it was good to visit as a tourist and experience all it has to offer. It is a city with a great atmosphere but it does feel a bit rough around the edges. Not dirty exactly... but shabby. Nothing a good clean wouldn't solve.

A few weeks later we headed off to New York for my third visit and May's first. The journey was uneventful, although I don't understand why Schipol airport has nowhere open to eat before 9am when dozens of flights arrive earlier than that in the morning. When we arrived at Newark airport we had a bit of a moment when May was told by immigration that the US visa she had in her passport from her working trip a few years ago was the wrong type of visa. Turns out it was a VIP visa (because she had been invited as a travel journalist on her previous trip, to write about sunny California) and that just made them suspicious. I had visions of us sitting in Newark airport for a few hours before being shipped back to civilisation. Fortunately we were lucky enough to have ended being seen by an immigration officer who was surprisingly pragmatic. He asked a few questions, checked that May was travelling with someone with a British passport (because really that's the best character endorsement you can get, really, isn't it?) and then said he would let her through this time, but couldn't guarantee the visa would work next time. And that didn't bother us since May's visa runs out at the end of April. Surprisingly sensible really. Not something you expect from US immigration.

After that it was a pleasant train journey into Penn Station on Manhattan, affording us fantastic views of the Manhattan skyline as we approached the Hudson River. Then we were in the busy corridors of Penn Station, working our way out to the surface and May's first view of Manhattan. She certainly seemed impressed since we stopped at the first corner to take pictures of yellow cabs, tall buildings and Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile I found myself contemplating the New York smell - a smell unique to the city that, when you smell it, immediately places you in the centre of Manhattan.

From there we walked to our hotel, a great little place a few blocks from the Empire State Building that cost us no more than £30 each a night (http://www.hotel31.com/). It was dated, with heavy dark wood everywhere, and the view from the window was a brick wall, but it was spotlessly clean and quiet and had a shabby, Manhattan charm about it that I liked.

Our first evening in Manhattan we went for food in a local Jewish deli that is apparently a Manhattan institution (the walls were covered with pictures of the famous people that have dined there) and which serves sandwiches the like of which you've never seen - more meat than you would get on a pig farm. May and I worked out way through one between the two of us and then spent the next four hours walking around mid-town Manhattan just to burn it off. It was a great few hours, seeing the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, Times Square, the Empire State Building all lit up, and enjoying May discovering them for the first time. It's an awesome city and enjoying it with someone else for the first time is a great way to remind you just how awesome.

The rest of the week was just as much fun. We visited amazing museums; drank coffee in a diner with decades worth of coke bottles in the window; ate visited the Statue of Liberty on a bright and sunny St Patrick's day; ate at a fantastic self-service sushi restaurant and got into an argument with the waitress when we gave her only a 10% tip despite the fact we served ourselves throughout; walked through Central Park and listened to a man playing an autoharp by the Bethesda Fountain; ate traditional American food in diners; bought two bars of chocolate with maple cured bacon in them (it was horrible); visited the biggest Cathedral in North America that is still not finished despite over 100 years of building work; ate genuine New York hot dogs from a vendor outside the Metropolitan Museum; wandered around Greenwich village in the rain, seeing where Waverly Place crosses Waverly Place and stopping for tea and cookies and great little place called 'Milk and Cookies'; ate griddle cakes and bacon for breakfast in a diner around the corner from our hotel; went to the top of the Rockefeller Centre at dusk to see an amazing sunset and the lights of Manhattan come on; woke up to find snow falling on the last day of our stay; and walked so much over the seven days that when I came back to the UK my thighs ached for almost three days.

All in all it was a great trip, very relaxed but very fulfilling. Just about the only downside was the day it rained that prevented us from walking over the Brooklyn Bridge as we'd planned. But instead we went to the Bodies exhibition (interesting, but I did chuckle to myself when they admitted all the preserved bodies on display came from North China in totally non-suspicious circumstances) and the Museum of Sex (entirely May's idea I promise, but the exhibition about sex in the natural world, including homosexuality in nature, was interesting, and I can honestly say I never thought I'd see a museum exhibit about Panda Porn or about a gay raping necrophiliac duck). I came away looking forward to going back again and May came away happily admitting that she too would like to go back - indeed that she would quite happily see more of the north-east on the United States. Perhaps an Amtrak tour is on the cards at some point in the future - as long as May can get another visa.

I did have a digital camcorder with me on the trip (and for the London trip as well) and I took plenty of footage, some of it quite amusing (to us at least), but I haven't yet even tried to work out how to get it onto a blog so I probably won't bother posting anything. But maybe I will, since it's Easter weekend and I am work for a couple of weekends.

Nothing much else to report for now. Once I know what I am doing with my leave for this year - if anything - I'll probably be back to update this.