Athens

Hello from the Speedrunner III en route to Tinos Island in the Aegean Sea. We have just left our base off Piraeus, Athens where we have been staying for the last three(ish) days.

Since we arrived in Athens on Tuesday we seem to feel more relaxed. Not sure if this is because we are finally wound down from our day jobs or just as a result of a more laid back approach to life in Greece. It is certainly less hectic than Rome.

We travelled via a very efficient X96 bus directly from Athens Airport to Piraeus (the Port town just West of the Capital) , deciding that it was easier to stay in the port and get the metro into Athens centre for sightseeing rather than lug our rucksacks around town.  Dinner of traditional Greek Souvlaki  (pork kebabs ), spicy cheese and prawns was wonderful until interrupted by HSBC informing that some scumbag in Rome had stolen my card details and was helping himself to a new wardrobe as a result.

On Wednesday we headed into Athens via Metro. Athens (like Rome) has  a reputation for pickpockets with the Piraeus to Athens stretch particularly bad. We didn’t feel like being the victim of crime again so we kept our hands in our pockets like they were affixed with superglue and braved the trip  looking like tourist idiots. As an aside the Metro system in Athens is excellent. Like Rome it costs just 1 Euro to get anywhere, however unlike Rome the trains and stations are spotless. Many of the stations also double up as museums as they incorporate ancient structures and archaeological finds from when the metro was built around 10 years ago.

First stop Acropolis. The Greeks know how to strike. While those dastardly French cause chaos for all, the Greek approach to striking is to picket the ticket office at the Acropolis making it free for all the tourists to get in. Thanks chaps.

If only the French were this helpful

The site itself is magnificent. Set upon a serene wooded hill in the centre of otherwise traffic clogged Athens it is a little like an oasis. You could easily spend an afternoon sitting there in the shade amongst the ancient ruins (and dozing cats & dogs) day dreaming about the Greek Gods Poseidon or Athens.

The Parthenon is the centre piece – the building that (I think) most people associate with the Acropolis. It is amazing to think it has stood since 438BC and even survived us Brits pinching key bits of it (the Ancient Greeks always intended that they should end up in British Museum).

Entering the Acropolis

After the Acropolis it was time for a bit of lunch. I always thought that pies and savoury pastries were solely a British tradition. However, it seems that the Greeks are pretty fond of them too – we tried the chicken and the spinach varieties and while  I am sure it did not help our fitness objective they tasted great. Desert of baklava was equally rewarding on the senses.

We wandered through Athens after lunch, stopping by the Temple of Zeus (again much of which now stands in the British Museum), the national gardens and parliament where for some reason the Greek army stations two of its finest in tights, silly hats and pom-pom shoes. They also perform (for no obvious reason) movements not dissimilar to those of John Cleese in the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch. It may have worked against the Spartans 2 millennia ago, but not surprised the Germans got in here quite easily.

Fearsome Greek warriors

Our walk continued up to the National Archaeological Museum –noted as one of the world’s best museums by the Lonely Planet. My god, you have never seen so many vases, round ones, tall ones, thin ones and most of them were bloody broken. If you can get over the cookware the sculpture is pretty impressive even to laymen, cynics like us. There are marble and bronze statues from 0 – 800BC with bodies where every wrinkle, muscle, bone and sinew appears so lifelike it could be one of those idiots painted silver who stand in squares for money. The face of one particular boy riding horse (see picture below) is so full of character it still tells its powerful story today, some 2000 years after it was completed.

Boy jockey and horse circa 220BC

On our second day we stayed in Piraeus and lazed around. We hit Starbucks (the first proper Americano since we left the UK), shopped at yet another Carrefour and found out our Ferry for the next day had been cancelled! Luckily, there was a faster (more expensive) ship going a little later so we booked tickets for that instead. A haircut and a new pair of sunglasses for Monali (5 Euro specials) and we ready to retire to the hotel for an early morning wakeup call in order to catch the Tinos ferry.

Btw we are now onto Season 5 (via illicit internet streaming) of Entourage. However, this will not last forever and therefore, we would welcome suggestions for our evening viewing!

Roma

Three nights in Rome in order to tick off the big things that we missed last year.

Arrival on Saturday afternoon was a little delayed due to waiting for baggage and then playing musical platforms at the airport train station as the FM1 to Trastevere moved from platform 1 to platform 3 and then platform 1 again. Sounds painless enough, but with a 20kg backpack its a bit of a ballsache. I guess the people of Rome can't complain too much - it costs 1 EUR to get anywhere in the city (other than the airport)  - can't see Boris matching that anytime soon.

Another good (and cheap) hotel, just outside the city, but right next to a train station and nowhere near any gypsy communities (Monali's sister can recommend a 'thrilling experience' tour of Rome including such attractions if anybody is interested). A great pizza, an ice cream treat (the first of many trip) and then sleep in preparation for a big day of sightseeing.

Italian ice cream - bigger smile than the wedding?

We had two days for sightseeing and we chose to spend day one away from the Vatican, because the Pope was creating the first Australian saint-sadly it wasn't the Crocodile Hunter.

Day One: Rome Sightseeing

So we stumbled into town courtesy of train and bus both of which seemed to our panicky eyes to be full of likely pickpockets, but more likely full of people looking at two idiots overprotecting bags and pockets. First destination was Tiber Island - which is a tiny little island in the middle of the Tiber (hence the name I guess). It has two bridges which don't look very impressive, but have been standing since the first century AD. Amazing considering modern day Italian engineering seems to rust after about ten minutes.

Bridge lamppost - padlocks left by young couples expressing their love! Handcuffs more appropriate?

From Tiber Island we walked through the ancient streets and ruins to reach the Disk of Truth. The name might sound like a crap quiz show, but apparently telling a lie whilst you hold your hand inside the disk's mouth will result in the mouth shutting and chopping off your arm. Luckily either everybody was telling the truth or the disk wasn't too hungry during our visit.

Disk of Truth - seems pretty 'armless to me

We moved onto Circo Massimo which was a huge 200,000 capacity chariot racing stadium in Roman Times. Sadly it is now more of a huge field and it takes imagination to visualise the excited crowds chanting on the competitors and their steeds. Luckily for us there was some kind of Roman reenactment going on - the context wasn't historically accurate, but I guess it did make it feel a little more special.

A rather diminished Roman army

Onto a more traditional Rome sight - The Trevi Fountain. It is customary to throw a coin into the fountain which will ensure that you will return to Rome. It seems we might not be coming back! It was so packed with other tourists that you just couldn't get near the thing.

We thought these were the Spanish Steps, they are not. We are stupid.

Our final sight of the day (if you exclude a hurried rush past the real Spanish Steps and the huge, funky McDonalds McCafe in Spagna) was the crypt of the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini (thank you wikipedia).

I think the colour really brings this room alive

For some reason the Capuchin Friars had a different approach to interior design. Stained glass windows and wooden pews were 'so last year' to them. Instead they decided to use the remains of around 4000 of their order to create lampshades, pillars, wall hangings and ceiling decorations. Just in case looking at six rooms of death doesn't creep you out enough, the monks decide to remind you once more of your own mortality in the final room with a sign reading "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be..."


Day two: Catholic Disneyland.

We were both excited to visit the Vatican on day two as this was the biggest part of the Rome 'sights' that we had missed last year. All in all its a good show - thousands upon thousands of sculptures, paintings and other priceless antiquities that countless Pope's have appropriated from across the Catholic empire. However, you cannot help questioning how this place is so fundamentally linked to Christianity. Granted, St Peter's tomb is within the Basilica so there is link there, but most of the other big sights of the Vatican are from Renaissance or at a push Medieval times. I guess its just difficult to understand the reverence with which the Vatican is held compared to Jerusalem or elsewhere in Palestine.

The map room

As I said the contents and buildings themselves are magnificent - its amazing to think that with a population of round a 1000 or so the Vatican still has ruled one of the world's biggest empires for centuries. The spoils are here to prove it!

Next stop Athens - yet more history!!

Leaving France

On reflection it was an excellent time to leave France. The airports are running out of petrol, the public sector is running out of workers (Sarkozy heading towards his very own 1984 moment i.e. Thatcher not Orwell) and we are running out money by eating foie gras and quaffing red wine each day.

One thing we forgot to put in the last blog was that we did manage to do some exercise while in France, in fact we even managed a 20km walk to nearby Genis one day just to eat at Jerome's restaurant. The food must be good as Jerome is renowned locally for needing a gastric band as a result of his food being so irresistible.

Action Barbie

Our last day in France was spent in Toulouse which turned out to be a great city. We dropped off the car at the airport and then headed into town via the FlyBus to our hotel destination, the IBIS (ok, not really a backpacking hostel but we are too old for that crap).

The city is bigger than I expected, but still quite walkable in an afternoon and we soon determined that it contains a shopping capacity that Monali deems worthy of a return visit...soon.

We enjoyed free entrance to les abattoirs which has been turned into a modern art gallery, though we lack the artistic knowledge (or perhaps are just too cynical) to enjoy many of the exhibits. Ironically the centre piece was a bunch of packing boxes / crates  - leading us to believe that we missed a trick when we had not charged visitors for viewing exactly the same bunch of boxes artistically placed throughout our flat for the last month.

Dinner was taken at a little fast food mexican place called Mex. They only served tacos, sopas and tamales but it all tasted great and the food  is probably the best mexican we have eaten outside of the US. Not sure if it is a chain, but we will be looking out for them in the future.

Excellent mexican

As I am sure you are all well aware Toulouse is the home of Airbus and Monali was very 'excited' about the the four large 'transporter' planes we spotted sitting at the other side of the airport. I think these used for moving A380 (that huge big plane) wings made in the UK to France - what a great production decision that was (aren't subsidies great?).

Plane spotting

So goodbye France and hello Italy....another country where strikes are not uncommon. Its ok, I am sure that their president isn't an arrogant little short arse who creates chaos..........oh shit.

Animal Farm

So we lasted nine days 'on the farm'. Spiders and Silverfish were bearable (just), but then things got furry.

This is a Dormouse........
Note: This is a library picture of a dormouse as we were too scared to handle it ourselves, even for the sake of the blog!

Friendly looking critter huh? Well cute he may be frolicking in the fields and hedgerows, not so cute when he and the family Dormouse decided to make our living room their French retreat. So we left post haste and now we are on the road.

Its been a week or so since our last blog and to be honest we've been a little lazy. The thing is that when you don't have to do anything, you don't feel like doing anything. We have made vague attempts at exercise in an attempt to work off the after affects of the amazing French food we have been glutonnising every day but have now given up as we are now simply to heavy to even move.

We did take a trip to Perigueux (I must have typed that into a hotel search engine 10+ times and I still I spell it incorrectly). Quite a nice city (much nicer than Brive) which apparently used to be one of the biggest spots in Roman France. Anyway, much more importantly it now contains an obligatory Irish pub avec free wifi - they could build straight roads, but they couldn't bring you facebook!

Dan in front of the Temple de Vesone in Perigeuex. A monument to the City's Goddess.

As we said earlier we had not really done too much up until the last few days. Preferring to spend a lot of time unknowingly chilling with our vermin friends in the cottage. Our three top lazy french activities being:

1. Waving to frankly unimpressed cows:

2. Chestnut roasting on an open fire:

3. Avoiding the local French delicacy (aka Flopsy) in the supermarket

In the last few days we have moved around a little. Night one in a motel room outside Perigueux which reminded me of the final scenes of No Country for Old Men - not a positive memory for those who have seen the movie.

We then moved on and remain in a nice hotel just outside Sarlat. Sarlat itself is lovely - a sprawling medieval town, only problem being that we bring down the average tourist age to 72.

So rather than eat cakes and drink tea like the septuagenarian coach trip massive, we drove over to an endangered wildlife zoo thing which was very pleasant. A lot of the enclosures were built such that you walked through them...meaning that we could see and hear the anger in the lemur's growl as we disturbed them en coitus.

 

This looks like a Lemur who got what he want....

In fact it appears that the people that run this place take their role in species preservation seriously. Perhaps this Lemur behaviour was spurred on by little blue tablets in the food? Certainly the ant-eater (who sadly had no mate in sight) was ready to do his bit for the cause...:

note the fifth leg

So on Friday we will drive to Toulouse and drop off the car in anticipation of our flight to Rome on Saturday. Of course no holiday in France would be complete without some form of obligatory French strike, and kindly enough the whole country has decided to take an open-ended holiday to protest about removing retiree's benefit of free garlic or something. I'm sure Sarkozy will be more than happy to pay for any hotel rooms resulting from any delay!!

Speak to you all soon

Dan & Monali

Le Clos Roussillon

Cote de Roussillon

Vitrac

France

Blog 001 Photos

You'll always find Monali by the warm fire

Walking in the rain

The bovine motorway passes right by our house

Writing the first blog

Nous sommes arrivees

And so the journey begins, although the blog is a little late. Three hectic days of last minute chores, cleaning (both home and abroad) and travel has meant that our creative juices were exhausted and our first blog entry has been postponed until today. The two most notable events during the three days was the receipt of Monali’s new Briitish passport and the surrender of Monali’s Indian passport-no longer the illegal immigrant!

So turning back the clock, we woke exceptionally early (4:30) in Kingston on day one after sleeping surprisingly well on an old air mattress we had. A dose of last minute cleaning (and hopefully waking our noisy student neighbours with the mini-vac) and we were gone - It was a little sad to see the old place empty. One phase of our lives is now officially over-we now look forward with trepidation and anticipation to what the future now holds for us.

Getting to Stansted was fairly uneventful, however we did realise not trying on your fully laden backpack prior to packing all your other stuff into storage could have been a fundamental flaw. Good job we are travelling more like ‘flash’packers than back packers!!

Experiencing a Ryanair flight is always a interesting way to spend an hour or two of one’s time. Firstly, Mr O’Leary now appears to have turned each flight into a flying supermarket, with tannoy announcements every five minutes trying to convince me that I am thirsty, hungry or in need of a Ryanair Lotto card. Secondly, I get the feeling that Ryanair now recruit from the Italian Acrobatic team. Every pilot has the same charming Italian accent and confidence that you know has put many a lady into a tail spin, but when it comes to flying (and in particular landing) it feels, well a little approximate.

Limoges airport was great in that it afforded Monali her first opportunity to use the British Passport. For those of you used to travelling it is like suddenly getting a Marriott Platinum card...rather than the immigration officer carefully thumbing each page of the travel document, he simply waved her through!

A quick drive through the French countryside and we arrive in Sanas, or home for the next week or so. Here it seemed that our cottage doubled up as a Spider Park, with at least 20 different varieties on display. Those of you fond of spiders will be sad to know that these were evicted post haste with the help of a powerful vacuum cleaner. Any less and I think one of us might have been sleeping in the car for the next week.

So we made the cottage cosy, lit the fire and got tipsy on cheap Medoc! Hello France!

Sleeping was not great night one, partly because any new bed is strange, but also we were very excited (as I am sure every other Brit on the planet) to go the French Supermarket on day two. However many times you go and regardless of your age, it is fascinating to look at 435 varieties of cheese, 180 bottles of wine all under 3 euros and also pay thanks to God for not being French and having to eat rabbit, snails or other exhibits from the under five petting zoo.

Dinner on day two was great, pork spiced up with French garlic, shallots and chilli flakes, and then once again in front of the fire to drink local plonk and stubby beers. Another law for Brits in France is that we have to drink stubby (25cl) bottles – the type we all used to bring back 15 years ago from a Calais hypermarket. I must research the genius that came up with these things!

Day two also saw us watch the first of many movies. This isn’t just a travel blog, but a film review service!! Perrier’s Bounty is an Irish gangster film and brought back nostalgic memories of Dublin (not that I was ever a gangster or visited the rough places in the film). Anyway, the film was ok, nothing you’d go out of the way to watch, but definitely something to while away a dark cold night in the French Countryside (you are unlikely to see any slash / horror movies reviewed over the next week or so – its creepy enough without that in the back of my mind).

Day Three starting with an early hour thunderstorm which was a indication of the weather to come that day. Luckily we managed to avoid a lot of the weather by staying in bed until 10:30 – 11:00, mainly just because we knew all you lot would be at work!!

We took a drive down to Montignac this afternoon to check the prehistoric area of France. We were planning to visit the pre-historic cave paintings in Lascaux, however only French language tours were available so we will go back another day. Found a farm selling fresh truffles and foie gras-we decided against buying the fresh foie gras and settled for pate in a tin as neither one of us were quite sure of how one actually cooks foie gras. If anyone has any idea-please do be sure to let us know-we have another 10 days to figure it out.

Anyway, now we are back in the cottage reading Kindles, drinking wine and writing this blog. Off to Brive tomorrow to find an internet connection and re-establish communication with the outside world.