Greetings from 45° South!

We are just pulling out of the friendly “Scottish” city of Dunedin, on our final mission in New Zealand: to track down those elusive penguins that are supposed to be hiding out all along the coast of everywhere we have travelled and lived, but have so far eluded us completely! Less than a week now till we fly from Wellington to Sydney for our month in OZ, and we decided we had better get ourselves sorted before we hit the big red desert! Following Nicole’s advice closely, we have booked a 5 day Learn to Scuba Dive course on the Great Barrier Reef (no better place for it!) that includes three days living on a boat out on the Reef, so we’re pretty stoked about that. And we decided to curb the ultra-adventure urge that would have had us hitchhiking blindly into the hot Outback, and instead booked another campervan for the journey. Not quite as flash or cheap as this one we’ve got now, but it will reliably take us into and out of the desert, so we can manage our general route that will take us from Sydney through to Melbourne through to Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and up to Cairns for diving. Then we’ll fly back to Sydney to fly to Taiwan, where a whole new adventure awaits us! It has been great to have planned such a diverse three month journey: New Zealand’s quiet, chilled, blue mountainous coastal nature excursion, then to Australia’s big red hot Outback leaping with kangaroos (hopefully), then to Taiwan’s crowded cosmopolitan cities and brand-new-to-us Asian culture and merchandise and culinary delights!

Since our salty bath with the dolphins on the Banks Peninsula, we drove through some of NZ’s most spectacular mountain passes (everywhere seems to be a filming location for the Lord of the Rings films, or that’s what the tourist brochures tell us), and to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. A few days hiking through the native bush and parking our van beside the wild west coast beaches, and searching for our own rough chunks of jade on the beach (every rock looks like it when it is wet, much duller the next day) and then we weaved our way through the steep mountains to Fjordland!

From New Zealand

It was like entering a different world taking this 1.2 km tunnel through the cloud-rimmed mountain to emerge at Milford Sound (which receives 6 meters of rain annually!) where thousands of waterfalls are cascading off the glistening steep rock walls into the sea every direction you look. A cruise took us out to the open Tasman Sea as Captain Cook would have first viewed it as his British ships were exploring NZ’s coast in the 1700’s, and right under waterfalls that the wind whipped so strongly that the water never reached the sea below, so we could look straight up into them! Coming around and up the east coast is lots more isolated beaches and a vast coastline with only birds to keep us company (and two giant sea lions who surprised us by rearing up out of the grass beside a lighthouse where we were going to park the van for the night; we let them keep their camping spot) has brought us to this university town of Dunedin, and a chocolate factory that we got to tour! We’ve been basked in hospitality since we arrived here by friends of my Grandma Betty’s, Gai and Geoff and kids, and Katie, a friend of Scotty’s from Glasgow has shown us all the hip cafes, and the pubs with warm fireplaces to curl up around. Mike’s put a couple more photos online of our last moments in Kiwiland… our next entry will probably be from Down Under!

EZY Cruizn

For the photos to go along with this entry open this link in a new window...

For the record, we did eventually feel a single earthquake of the weekly minor quakes that Wellington (built on a continental plate fault line) is supposed to suffer from. I was on the 16^th floor of Jon’s office building when it began to wobble, just enough excitement to have me and the other Canadian girl chattering about noting it on our blogs, too small to do any damage. At home, Mike momentarily thought the lady downstairs had slammed a door, until he checked his online seismograph. (it was a 4.4)

As I am typing this, we are cozy and warm in our campervan overlooking the village streetlamp reflections shimmering in the volcanic crater harbour of the Banks Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. We feel like we are living a very luxurious lifestyle this month travelling around the south island: no shivering in a cold, wet tent or waiting on the side of the road on the kindness of strangers to transport us to our next destination! Nope, we’re in our EZY Cruiza campervan, complete with microwave, laptop, fridge, stove, sink, DVD player, queen size bed, and a safe! All for less per day than we would pay to stay at a hostel! When did we morph into “flashpackers”? Perhaps it was the inspiration from the tales of Gren and Beryl in England towing their caravan all across the continent, or perhaps it was the rude awakening Mike had at that music festival when he discovered that our tent is no longer waterproof…

Work in Wellington has been all wrapped up now for almost two weeks, Mike gorged on his final café indulgences hoping to build up his fat stores for the next four months of unemployment (ie glorious freedom travelling). I had a last few giggles with Tess, and a good send off with Jon and Sarah and baby Amber: accompanying them on their holidays around the North Island. And I thought I was going to get away without having to drive at all on the narrow, cliff-hugging, winding tracks that New Zealand calls their main roads. Instead in the last month I manoeuvred the van full of us over 2200 kms, cresting over some lush mountain views, every horizon jagged with palm trees and giant ferns. Apart from Jon diving over a small cliff in his power wheelchair, and getting that damn heavy thing stuck in the rising tide on a golden sand beach, it was quite an idyllic excursion, even with a 4 month baby in the backseat! And travelling with Kiwis gave me a whole new perspective on the country: those 2 meter tall tufted grasses are called toi tois and have you ever felt one before…and those long pods falling off that tree are perfect for whipping your mates…and these marshmallow cookies have to be smacked onto your forehead at birthday parties… Everytime Sarah mentioned that anything was a “little slice of Kiwiana”, I was totally sold on it. And I finally got to go for a dip at the famous “Hot Water Beach”, where hot springs pass below the sand on their way to the sea, so if you bring a spade and find the right spot, you can dig yourself your own little hot tub, but you have to defend it shrewdly from all the other holidaymakers who want a piece of your own little bit of paradise!

But now we are onto our own journey, all of May chugging our Ezy Cruiza up the mountains and down the scenic coasts of the South Island. We were warned that the landscape doesn’t get much more wild or beautiful than down here, and we have not been disappointed. Some days have been gloriously sunny, and some nights have been frosty…it is the end of autumn, the leaves are all changing colours, and we are passing from coast to mountain summit everyday. We began our travels in Christchurch where we met up with Steve’s Kiwi girlfriend, Hayley, who made sure we got to sample the full scope of the nightlife on offer down here! Then we sped across the island to the northwest tip to Farewell Spit to meet up with Ben and Caroline, our French friends whom we tracked down kitesurfing on a deserted beach…we were only able to spot them from the highest peak of an ever-shifting sand dune. We joined them hiking some of the Able Tasman National Park coastal track, a route which constantly rises over mountain ridges for panoramic views of the sea, then drops down to tramp across impossibly beautiful empty beaches. So we decided to get the full perspective of the majesty of the park by renting a kayak to explore the coves from sea level the following day. We saw one stingray, and three pups from a seal colony tagged along with our kayak to the beach we picnicked on to play, and then entertained us by darting under and around our kayak all afternoon, nearly leaping right up over our paddles, but the sharp-fanged mom (or dad?) did charge at us once to maintain her territory when we first floated up. Two days ago we hiked some of the Queen Charlotte track in the stunning fjords of the Marlborough Sound, and were absolutely mesmerized by what we found on the dark beach where we pulled off the road to spend the night. At first we thought the moonlight was just illuminating the waves lapping gently against the pebbles, but then we realized that the water was glowing where it touched the stones! We tossed some rocks in, and the ripples lit up like a fountain… then our hands were speckled with bright glowing spots…so were the bottom of our shoes… and we looked back across the wet, low-tide beach: our footprints were glowing behind us where we had disturbed the brilliant photo plankton! Every step we took was illuminated, and then the breeze picked up and the glowing spread and faded up the beach where the wind touched the wet rocks, just like the aurora borealis dances in the sky. All this under how many shooting stars, and no one else around except the curious possums, their eyes glowing in our flashlight beams down from the trees.

Not to glorify this little island nation hanging off the edge of the globe, but what can top that? So we drove back into the interior the next day for lunch at a sunny winery, and today, well we just went swimming with the world’s rarest dolphins. Sigh, it’s a wonderful world. Although I did swallow far too much sea water for comfort, and since I cut my hair really short, I don’t think I have fully warmed up once, but the wetsuits at least kept us buoyant in the crashing waves. Mike was just floating there innocently, knocking two stones together underwater (a sound these Hector’s dolphins adore, apparently) and they just came right up, surfaced, and sprayed him in the face from their blowholes. Rude.

If I ever finish this blog entry and get to bed, then the plan is that tomorrow we are driving over a mountain pass again to the west coast of the island to see the glaciers, then down to Fjordland, a destination I am very titillated by, as my favourite author, Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) described as “the one place on earth that looked like it was dropped from outer space”. It is supposed to be stunning, even in torrential weather conditions. Thank God for the Ezy Cruiza!

We’re not getting very much internet access, but we’ve got two more weeks down here, then off to Australia May 30, so if you don’t here from us in the next while, you can imagine us sunning ourselves beside a kangaroo-adorned billabong! I can’t wait to get one of those cork dangling sun hats those crazy Aussies wear to chase away the flies!

Top to Bottom, almost done...

So, we're getting near the end of our time in New Zealand. It has treated us very well! Just over three weeks of work left before we leave our jobs and flat and head for the South Island, hopefully before it snows down there! Today was Carli-Ann's last day working with Tess, the little girl she nannied for this year. Tomorrow, Carli-Ann goes away for two weeks with her boss Jon and his family on their holiday. She will be doing all the driving and most of the personal assisting all the way up to the Coromandel peninsula. Now, we'll tell you what we've been up to the last couple months on the North Island.

My university plans have come together nicely, being accepted into the engineering transfer program at Malaspina university in Nanaimo. We'll move out to the "Bathtub Racing Capital of the World" at the end of August to live in the basement suite of Carli-Ann's sister Lisa and husband Tom. Just last week we found out that my Plastics Engineering degree from 7 years ago will transfer 30 credits to my university degree. That's almost a whole year's worth!
Last month we were lucky enough to get tickets to WOMAD (World Of Music And Dance), a fabulous music festival up in New Plymouth near Mount Taranaki. It is held in a beautiful, sprawling city park, filled with giant NZ ferns, lakes and hills. At night, hidden coloured lights illuminate the giant old trees like a fairy tale. Bands from 26 countries played on 5 stages, and some of them even gave cooking lessons on a special chef stage! On the second night it began to rain, gently at first, but increasing through the night. As we slept in our tent, the winds grew strong enough to nearly flatten our tent. As the tent bowed in the wind, it pressed it's unwelcomed, cold, wet nylon in my face. In the morning we woke up in an inch of water. Well, Carli-Ann's side was dry. I woke up in an inch of water. All my stuff was soaked, including our camera (the good old thing works again now after drying out!). In the end, the sun came out that day and we were rescued by our flatmate with her car and moved in to her hostel for the last night.

After the festival, we took an early bus further up the country to the Waitomo Caves. These famous caves house heaps of glow-worms and almost as many tourists! After donning wetsuits along with 5 other adventurers (all Taiwanese girls), we tramped through a sheep field until we came to a large hole. Under these fields are dozens of rivers carving out magnificent caves filled with the usual formations, and the ceilings starred with glow-worms. We sat on inner tubes and floated about a kilometre through the cave, going down a couple waterfalls as well.

Immediately after the blackwater rafting experience, we had to get moving to make it to Rotorua that night. Thanks to New Zealands reliable hospitality, hitchhiking there was no problem, and we were even given a view of the city by being driven up the mountain before being dropped off at our hostel doorstep! The next morning we were shuttled out to the coast, where we took a boat 50km to White Island/Whakaari, New Zealand's most active volcano.
About 25km out from land, we came upon about 20 playful dolphins. We found it interesting how similar they are to dogs. As the boat slowed, they seemed to chase it, swimming beside it, jumping around. Much like a dog chases a car (minus the barking). Anyway...this strange, sulphur encrusted island is the peak of an active volcano, poking out of the sea. We were given gas masks and hard hats and told to beware of possible "car-sized rocks hurtling at the speed of a bullet" that it has been known to hurl out when erupting (the hard hats were apparently meant to ward these off). We were given a fascinating guided tour up to the rim of the smoky belching crater complete with eerie stories of disappearing geologists. After a long day, a night bus carted us back to Wellington for work the next morning.

Earlier this week, we took another boat, this time to the nearby Kapiti Island.

We spent 6 hours hiking around this nature reserve, home to some of New Zealand's rarest birds. Along with forest dwelling parrots, parakeets, and other unusual birds we were lucky enough to see one takahe, a big dinosaurish bird (photo above) of which there are only 280 left in the world. Nineteen of them are on Kapiti Island.

I've been eating a bit less brownies at work this week after getting one of my molars pulled out. This is the same tooth that had broken in Ireland, and I got fixed in Kosovo. Unfortunately, a filling wasn't enough to save it and a root canal was out of our budget. The bright side: now I have it as a kosovar souvenir! Stay tuned for a time-lapse video of the healing process...not for the faint of heart!

So, we've been busy but we're almost done with our North Island experience. On May 2 we'll get the ferry from down the street to the South Island where we're going to rent a camper van for 25 days. We'd usually just camp, but it's starting get bloody cold here! And the South Island should be even colder. So we're really excited to travel in style for a change, and to be the ones stopping for the hitchhikers!

We have bought our plane tickets to be on our way and make a long, roundabout trip home. At the end of May (30th), we get a flight to Sydney. It will be our first time in Australia and hopefully we'll get to see a lot of it in the month we have there. On June 30th, we fly to Taipei, Taiwan for a visit to Asia! We'll see my cousin Dave who has been living in Taipei for a while now teaching English. Hopefully he'll have some tips for us to keep out of trouble there! And then finally, we fly in to Calgary, to be in Canada just in time for the August long weekend.

So, we hope to see everyone soon!! (if applicable)
Happy Spring/Autumn in *insert hemisphere here*White Island from our New Zealand album

You can't beat Wellington on a good day!

we have a new photo site here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mikeeg555/NewZealand

You can't beat Wellington on a good day! And finally we have had a few of them, even in a row! We are now in the height of summer (unless the southerly winds are blowing up from Antarctica, which forces me to shiver in bed wearing my hoodie and slippers like last night), but then this afternoon the sun dried my washing in only half an hour. We have been taking full advantage of the good weather to cycle around the peninsula to reach the best beach-side cafés, thrash about in the harbour a bit in kayaks, do some hiking to seek out glowworms, and I finally went swimming in the sea for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere! I even found a dead baby shark on the beach, its teeth stuck into my finger like Velcro, so I saved them as proof of my battle.
My jobs are still fine, and at Fidel's Café Mike has been promoted to Kitchen Hand, so he is reinventing himself as Master Pizza Chef. And, much to my delight, he is applying his new skills at home, though not very often as he still consumes a good 80% of his meals at the café, and he gets paid for his time too! What a charmed existence.
Wellington has been an exciting place to be in the summer, despite only having a population of 200 000. But it is the national capital. They seem to have at least two festivals going on at any one time, at the moment is the Asia Pacific Festival and the Fringe Festival, and this weekend is their carnival. A few weekends ago was the Rugby Sevens matches, the most bizarre Welly event to date, at least 30% of the people in the streets were walking in groups of 5 or 6, dressed up in matching costumes. Like way way way more costumes than at Halloween. Nothing thematically related to rugby as far as we could decipher, they were just off to watch the match dressed as Marilyn Munroes, or Smurfs, or aliens, or Fembots, or as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
Since Christmas we have actually managed to get out of town quite a few times, every time we can both manage to wrangle two or more consecutive days off we use our thumbs to jet up the North Island (too expensive to ferry down to the south island for just a weekend trip, we're saving that mammoth journey for May). Big thanks to all the sheep truck drivers, old Maori ladies with grandkids in the back, horse-trainers, pumpkin delivery men, farmers, marines, German tourists, tattooed bros, and students who cart us all over this little volcanic country!
In January we attended a music festival at the historically potent village of Parihaka, where the non-violent reactions of the Maori people when their land was being confiscated by the British in the 1800's were said to have inspired the movements of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. We got a new perspective of the event from our first helicopter ride: the barefoot pilot flew us over the village nestled at the foot of the snow-capped conical Mount Taranaki, where it is rumoured that you can snowboard in the morning, and surf in the afternoon. While the clouds clung to the mountain top most of the weekend, once they parted, they provided a stunning background for our photos of the festival volunteers on horseback, crowned with the white feather symbolic of their passive resistance. And the music was inspiring too, but on the Saturday afternoon, after the 5th tedious hour of bands playing Bob Marley covers, we were forced to seek out other sources of entertainment.
After our dusty festival weekend, we hitched into the nearby city of New Plymouth to meet up with Vivien, who I was a Personal Assistant for in Scotland. She and her new Aussie Personal Assistant, Sarah (who's couch we plan to surf in Melbourne in June) were on a 6 week tour of Australia and New Zealand; its always exhilarating to catch up with someone on the other side of the planet!
Our last days of 2006 were spent in the smelliest city in New Zealand, Rotorua, where the city park is dotted with natural hot springs boiling and steaming away, geysers erupting every half hour, and large puddles of mud bubbling and leaping playfully. Rotorua is famous for the traditional Maori concerts and feasts they put on for the tourists: the hotspring steam pit-cooked food is divine, but the show is terrifying, and Mike was glad that he wasn't chosen to represent our table by accepting the "peace token" from the threatening, hollering, puffing warrior chief. Our favourite memory was the beach near to our campground (our tent site was, incidentally, thermally heated!) where the hot water flowed out through the sand and into the moonlit lake shared only with the silhouettes of floating black swans. If you pick the right place to dig, right at the water's edge where the hot spring water mixes with the cool lake water, you can be sitting on warm sand with your feet in warm water, but if you move an inch back, you might scald your feet!
A few weeks ago we took a few days off to hitch up the East Cape, a remote part of the country with dazzling beaches and lots of little Maori communities. We stayed with cousins of Karlee's, a friend we met in the UK, and they showed us a proper East Coast good time. They took us mussel collecting off the longest wharf in the southern hemisphere, showed us their marae (Maori meeting house adorned with carvings of their ancestors and family history), and invited us to a hangi. All the hangi food (cooked in a pit dug in their garden and buried with hot rocks) was collected by them from the sea or from their garden: crayfish, sea urchin, mussels, abalone, potatoes, wild boar, lamb, pumpkin, sweet potatoes. The night before we had shyed out of going on a wild boar hunt, an event that was so extraordinarily far out of our realm of experience: imagine us going into the forest with a knife and a hunting dog! And one of our host's cousins was from the tiny village of Whangara, where the Whalerider movie was filmed, so he graciously brought us to his beach and marae, and let Mike have a go at surfing on the movie prop whales that are left crumbling on the beach. He said when other tourists turn up uninvited, they send them packing back up the road, so we were glad we didn't show up on our own.
We are working on securing our plane tickets home, and have decided to do a little detour to Australia in June, and Mongolia (via Beijing) in July, so as soon as Air China releases the tickets, we will know when we are coming home. We're still aiming for August for Mike to begin university in Nanaimo in September. He just got notice of his university acceptance letter today! We'll save the celebrations for later this week when his cousin, Nicole, who is on a world tour for 6 or 9 months, is blowing through Wellington. That will be the first family that we have seen since my Grandma Betty last April in Italy! That seems like a lifetime ago now...but I guess it was on the other side of the world, still can't quite wrap my head around New Zealand's isolation. But we know that we are not forgotten, a few weeks ago we received our Christmas presents from the Germains finally!

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas!
Happy Christmas! We hope everyone's holidays will be gorgeous, in whichever climate and time zone they find themselves in! Mike just pointed out that New Zealand shares the same time zone as the South Pole! We set out today to find a New Zealand Christmas tree, a Pohutukawa Tree, which flowers these brilliant crimson blooms at Christmas time. Pretty festive, even without the snow, eh?
Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, we are planning to go for a coastal hike to see a seal colony near to Wellington, and in the evening we are joining up with a friend from Berlin who is also on her own for the holidays, to go for a BBQ on the beach. Apparently the beach, and pavlova topped with whipped cream and kiwifruit, are the NZ Christmas essentials. The beach is on a peninsula which is home to "little blue penguins". Didn't I always dream of sharing my Christmas picnic beach blanket with a little penguin? Another "Thing to Do Before I Die" to cross off my list.
Christmas Day I am working, but Mike will be joining me at Jon and Sarah's family dinner (and doing the driving), so there will probably be minimal work and maximum feasting and sunning, so we can't complain. Plus we get to experience another little slice of Kiwiana culture up there in Otaki.
While we are both enjoying our jobs here in Windy Wellington (click here for photo of Mike slaving away), we have only once had two consecutive days off together, so we hitched up to Tongariro National Park lickety-split, and spent the time hiking around their active volcanoes. While a blizzard forced us down from the tramping our intended route, it was slightly refreshing to see snow for a short time. But it was even more refreshing to climb down from the ridge of the aquamarine volcanic cone lakes, to a lower altitude, and a return to the sun glowing off the lava fields, leaving the icy clouds to hang off the peak of Mt Ngauruhoe. This was the mountain that featured as Mordor's Mt Doom in Lord of the Rings. I really ought to watch those three films again, just the other day we were walking through the forest near our house where the hobbits left the shire for their big adventure!
French friends of ours whom we met in Dublin a couple years back now, Caro and Ben, also moved to New Zealand the same time as we did, so we brought a little of Europe with us! They are really into kite surfing, and took me out to the beach with them last weekend where they spend all their free time. When the wind isn't quite strong enough for kite surfing, they practice synchronized trick kite flying (photos). They met when Ben very delicately tapped Caro on the shoulder with the kite he was manoeuvring. How many other pretty girls' shoulders he had tapped that afternoon remains undeclared. Mike and I are thinking about getting our scuba diving certification while we are here. The bombed Greenpeace "Rainbow Warrior" ship has been sunk to be a dive wreck and fish sanctuary off the NZ coast, so that would be cool to explore, and certification would open up lots of diving possibilities when we travel through Australia too.
Working right through the New Year's holidays too, but after that we are going up to Mt Taranaki (which served as Mt Fuji in Tom Cruise's "The Last Samurai" film) for the Parihaka International Peace Festival, as the area has an intense history of Maori non-violent resistance to European colonization, so that should be educational And my boss from Scotland, Vivien, will be visiting there at the same time!
We were inspired by Mike's cousin, Nicole's blog site with a great mapping feature, so here is our map of our route around Europe over the past couple years, it sort of just looks like a big jumble though! But the route made sense at the time!
Hope everyone has someone to kiss when the clock strikes the New Year

Tuis, Wetas & Milkshakes

Less than a month till Christmas and enjoying the (sometimes sunny, usually windy) weather! We've been checking up on the temperature in all the places we've lived and so far Wellington is by far the nicest! I guess it being the start of summer here has something to do with it. At a glance as I write this, the weather in Wellington: +18°C; Glasgow +7°C; Cork +3°C; Edmonton...-28°C but as always with prairie weather, you have to factor in the wind chill which makes is -40°C (yikes!). While the temperature is steadily improving, the New Zealand wind gusts are still ominously impressive. Often, before you feel the wind, you can hear the massive gust coming through the trees and the buildings, roaring down to you. When it arrives, it is like looking into the eye of God. There is almost enough warning to hide, but not quite, just enough to grab a lamp pole, or leap down from your bike if you are lucky. And there is a very obvious difference between the wind from the north: warm winds from the Pacific, and the chilling winds from the south, blowing over from Antarctica. For the first time in living memory, there are Antarctic icebergs floating down (or up) New Zealand's coast!
And the hole in the ozone layer effect is bizarre. On the really, really sunny days, instead of feeling a warm glow on your skin from the sun, it feels more like being rubber with cayenne pepper! Always a good reminder to reapply the sunscreen. I guess we always had an awareness of the ozone layer issue before, but never really thought about where this seemingly abstract "hole" actually was, and what that meant for the life below it. Typical NZ political critique paints a picture of the ozone hole above New Zealand, shaped like North America.
Mike's job at Fidel's cafe is going very well. He has joined the ranks as defined by our Lonely Planet travel guide: "Fidel's is an institution for caffeine-craving, left-wing subversives, watched over by images of Castro. Terrific eggs are miraculously pumped from the itsy-bitsy kitchen. Pierced, tatooed staff are studiously vague, but friendly." It might be the busiest café in the city so he's run off his feet, but the time flies by and the perks are very good. The huge selection of food is excellent, and no one cares how much free chow he scoffs between (sometimes during) pot scrubbing! Some rough calculations, adding up the multiple daily lattés, milkshakes, samosas, lunch feasts, cheesecake and fudge brownies show Mike's weekly café grub intake to be around $150NZ! He is valiantly attempting to avert the standard grandma cheek-pinching and exclamation "Why are you so skinny?!" on our return to Canada in August.
To avoid any inequality, we both made sure that Mike had only been at work two shifts by the time Carli-Ann started her new jobs. I'm working as a Support Worker/Personal Assistant again part-time with a software engineer, Jon. His wife, Sarah, is 5 days overdue with their first baby, so once they get over this waiting period, my shifts with their family should have an entirely new dynamic! I spend early mornings at their house, and quite a bit of the rest of the day at Jon's office. Mostly I am just an extra set of hands as Jon has Cerebral Palsy. http://www.supportpeople.blogspot.com We attended their "fancy dress" baby shower, here's a photo of them dressed up as babies, "the unexpected twins". We dressed up for the party as a jelly fish: bits of bubble wrap dangling from an open umbrella.
That was the third costume party we attended in a week. We attribute it to one of three possible causes:
New Zealanders are crazy for costumes
Wellington, having hosted the filming of "The Lord of the Rings", "Narnia" and "King Kong", is crawling with bored costume designers
We arrived Halloween-time
Speaking of big budget fantasies, we have yet to do Mike's planned cycle around all the "Lord of the Rings" locations near our house. Our Lonely Planet warned us that every New Zealander we meet will claim to have worked on the film. As predicted, we have met at least six people who have, including our Auckland friend, Monique who worked in the hat and glove department, counting Gandalf's floppy wizard hat on her costuming résumé.
My afternoons are all centered on a delightful little girl named Tess, a bright 3.5 year old who loves swimming, crafts, and going to the playground. Tess has some special needs, so we get to spend our time together smearing, sprinkling and general messing about with food, leaping around outside, and seeing the city's sites. (sigh of contentment) While I have joined a terrific couple of yoga classes a 45 second walk from my house, I have decided not to join a gym here because I hike more than 10 kms almost every day up and down Wellington's famous hills between my shifts, so I have decided that this should be sufficient exercise. An example to understand the extent of Wellington's hilliness: during the initial leg of my morning hike, I climb up 105 meters, past three cliff-perching houses that have their own, private cable cars to transport them to their front doors!
On a recent trip to the Wellington museum "Te Papa", we learned that the city experiences about one earthquake per week! Almost all of them are too small to be felt, and we would probably mistake it for a truck rumbling by. Click here to see a real-time seismograph drum for the past 24 hours in Wellington. We're hoping to feel a small earthquake while we're here. Just enough to wake us up, nothing frightening please. We figure that if our little house is about 80 years old, then it has withstood over 4000 earthquakes in its time! So, we're pretty sure it will hold together until our departure in June.
On our recent visit to the world's first urban predator-free Bird Sanctuary near our house, we learned all about the fauna with which we share New Zealand's lush forests. One of the many interesting endemic birds is the Tui. It has a double-voice-box, so its call includes all sorts of sounds including clicks, cackles and wheezes, and is said to be able to imitate human speech. As in many countries, being a common and admired animal, Mike was delighted to discover that the Tui has a beer named after it, much like Canada's "Moose Head", or Britain's "Speckled Hen". Tui is one of New Zealand's most popular ales (south of Auckland anyway), and his favorite over here.
The Weta, one of the world's heaviest insects, is one of New Zealand's more infamous animals. "Demon grasshopper" in Latin, the giant weta can weigh more than three mice at 70 grams (2.5oz)! It looks like a cross between a cockroach and a cricket, but with longer legs. We just saw our fist "cave wetas" last weekend in a disused goldmine at the wildlife sanctuary. It was pitch dark in there and we walked through it slowly with one dim flashlight. Once we stopped and pointed the flashlight here and there we realized there were dozens of Cave Wetas, antennas listening, clinging to the walls all around and above us. Luckily we learned after we came out of the cave that they can jump 3 meters (especially when provoked with a flashlight beam)!
That's probably a long enough entry for now; we often wonder who actually reads all the way through our entries. Once we save up some money we'll try to squeeze some weekend trips in. Until then, our days won't be terribly exciting, just working, going out in the evenings to listen to the surprisingly huge range of live music in this little city, and absentmindedly soaking in the news from the perspective of this end of the globe, which features lots of South Pacific events. Who knew there was so much political unrest on those little islands! So we'll blog again when there's something momentous to mention. We're now getting closer to settling on the idea of a few weeks in Australia and maybe a month in China on our way back to Canada June/August, but we're keeping our options open until we can afford the flights. So if anyone has any suggestions, we're all ears!

Anarchy to Lemon Trees

I am sitting in the laundry room of the youth hostel in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city and the place we have decided to settle for the next nine months, while Mike is taking a shower. The place we're actually staying at here is a really cool anarchist community centre squat, but they don't have hot water or showers, so rather than have a bucket bath, we decided to "borrow" the hostel's lovely showers, and we fit in pretty well so hopefully the hostel won't notice the two grateful temporary guests.
When we decided to act on the advice of most people and settle in Wellington, the next thing we heard was "Oh, Wellington, it is sooo rainy and windy and so many hills! It's going to be murder to cycle around there!" And so far it has lived up to its reputation, miserable, cold, wet, galeing spring weather, but we are hoping it can only get better? And it can't be worse than the November weather in Alberta, Ireland or Glasgow, right? The wind shook the community centre house, and I felt my bunk bed move from it this morning, and its not even against an outside wall! But there are a lot of (hopefully minor) earthquakes here, half of Wellington is supposed to be built on reclaimed land that emerged from a quake, so it could have been that. The activists here are all great, and the collective is really well organized. We're pitching in to help around the centre when we are not out apartment-searching, everyone cooks vegan food together, and they have their own library, bike repair shop, community garden and non-profit internet cafe, and there are a lot of events happening in the city, so Wellington should be a fun place to live. And there are plenty of people around to pester with our brand-new-to-the-country questions like "How much is bus fare?", "What part of town do we NOT want to live in?", "Where can we find wireless internet and a job posting board?"
New Zealand appears to be a perfect place to live: the people are so friendly (Kiwis must be so disappointed when they go abroad), the indigenous culture is interesting, there are palm trees everywhere, people recommend cities to live in solely on the beauty of the nearest beach (none of which have tempted us to swim yet due to the chilly spring weather), it was super easy to find a place to live, and there appears to be tons of work! And we get to eat kiwi fruits everyday! We couldn't ask for more, except perhaps to tempt our families to move here so that we don't have to go back home for anymore Canadian winters! New Zealand really reminds us of Vancouver Island, except for the palm trees, and the sun disorienting us by being in the north, and the Cheshire cat smile crescent moon, of course. Really laid back, all kinds of people go around in bare feet even in the shops, rainy, almost tropical forests. But so many New Zealanders do the "overseas experience" for a few years, so us travelling and working for three years in different countries has ceased to be a novelty, we'll have to come up with some other sort of gimmick to convince people to be our friends. The only downsides is that the place where the ozone layer is the thinnest in the world is over New Zealand (actually a hole!), so we are being very conscientious to put on sunscreen everyday.
Since our tour up north, we met up with Carli-Ann's university Yukon friend Suzanne and her Kiwi boyfriend, Pete for a weekend at his cabin on volcanic Lake Taupo. They took us back to his large deer, sheep and cattle farm in Hawke's Bay to work for the week, and got us helping the shepherds herd and weigh bulls: for the first few minutes Carli-Ann insisted on standing with her bike between her and the galloping herd! And we thought we had missed the opportunity to taunt bulls by bypassing Pamplona! One of the days while we were all out inspecting the fields we helped Pete herd a sheep who had a dizzy little lamb head hanging out of its backside. Its one leg had got caught during the birth, so Pete had to give it some assistance. The experience lacked the miraculous quality that I anticipated. We pitched in on house maintenance and gardening as well: palm trees are tough little trees to prune! Every morning we got out of bed in time for "smoko" which is a NZ farmer's mid-morning break, although the rest of them had been up working for hours by then! All the farmers have long since traded in cigarettes for tea and doughnuts made by Pete's dad, who imparted to us the wisdom that farming is all about "Sex, Death and Taxes". And we joined everyone in the city for the long weekend at the farm fair! The highlight for us, apart from watching Suzanne trying to get all the names straight of all the great aunts at Pete's family's legendary annual picnic, was the speed sheep shearing: a whole sheep shorn in 30.4 seconds. Incredible.
25 October, 2006
We are feeling quite proud of ourselves at setting a personal best "settling in" record: 63 hours after arriving in a brand new city, we have found and moved into a flat, had our first big grocery shopping trip, and Mike has already landed himself a job starting the next morning! We are living with a really sweet 52 year old physiotherapist woman, Fran, in a very central two bedroom house with a splatter-painted front porch covered in flowering bushes outside our sage-green, lemon-sherbet-yellow and teal window. We traded in the horrid Barney-Dinosaur-magenta colour of our flat in Glasgow for a gorgeous, well-spotlighted plum purple living room and kitchen. We also have a back deck glittering with fairy lights and a big back shared garden with five large, exotic-looking trees, and our neighbour has a lemon tree for which Mike is designing a lemon-pinching apparatus to reach over the fence. Fran has lent us an air mattress, and we got a great deal on a tacky glow-in-the-dark dolphin and galaxy duvet set (which nearly blinded Carli-Ann last night), but the most important thing: so far we can connect to someone's wireless internet from our bedroom! Yay!
Mike's first day of work went smoothly in the kitchen of a café called "Fidel's" on... Cuba Street! (here's their website) But the anarchists said not to let the décor fool us, the owners are just in it for the money and don't mind exploiting their workers as much as the next café owner. But it's the perfect place to meet lots of new friends, and get lots of good free food, and its only 450 meters from our front porch! Carli-Ann is feeling quite lazy that she hasn't put in a single job application yet, while Mike's already slaving away! We'll post the good news when there's something to report! Here's a couple of photos of our new place, and a couple other Kiwi tidbits!

New Zealand: Aotearoa: Land of the Long White Cloud

Our first week Down Under's been glorious, great hitch hiking, relaxed friendly people, no dangerous animals, what more could we ask for? We have spent most of our week here taking advantage of Monique and Manolo's hospitality, and that of their extended family in various parts of the far north. Lots of lifts with fellow tourists, European New Zealanders and Maoris, lots of things to learn about this new hemisphere! The only bus we've taken so far drove on the sand down the Ninety Mile beach (at low tide of course) and took us sand dune tobogganing, which was remarkably similar to snow tobogganing, except for the sand lodged in our eye sockets for about 24 hours. The most northerly point of this beach, and of New Zealand, is where the spirits of deceased Maori people are said to travel to the pohutukawa tree which sits on the tip of the peninsula. The spirits slide down a root of the tree to the sea below to rejoin with the ancestors in the next world.
We had time to do some hikes in the bamboo and palm tree forests where we saw 1500 year old kauri trees 5 meters in diameter, and have learned a few new seafood recipes from our lifts. Last night at our campground we slunk out to the inky black forest at night time to scout out the endangered nocturnal flightless kiwi birds and glow worms, flicking on our flashlight in time to see a possum creeping over to check us out. All the New Zealanders that we related this story to have demanded to know if we promptly killed it! Possoms are a vermin here brought from Australia (where they are now endangered) and they are eating through New Zealand's forests at an alarming rate.
Tomorrow we are off to meet Carli-Ann's university Yukon friend, Suzanne, at Lake Taupo (eerily close to Mt. Doom). She has invited us to stay at her boyfriend's farm for a couple weeks to work a bit, so we are off to get a taste of some kiwi rural life! If we like it, we might settle around there. If not, we will probably head to Wellington. Aah, we love those moments when everything is a possibility! We forgot to ask what kind of farm it is though...oh, and the one sink we could determine the direction of water drainage went clock-wise, but Mike's pretty sure that it's determined by the sink rather than the hemisphere. Any of you northern hemispherers going to test it and get back to us with the results?

New Photos...oh, and greetings from Auckland!

Kiora! from New Zealand! We can't quite decide if what we can feel is the effect of standing upside down on the other side of the world, or if it is just jet lag! But something definetely feels strange over here in tomorrow-land! Our flight from London to Auckland spanning three days (but only 27 hours of actual flying time) via LA was remarkably smooth, and every passenger was zoned out on the 80 different movies and TV programs they could watch on the back of the seat in front of them. We are staying in Auckland (<=click to see a photo we just took an hour ago from our host's house across the bay) with a friend of a friend of Carli-Ann's from university, and we are already enthralled with the legendary friendliness of the Kiwis, the intense and dynamic cloud cover over this lush island, the bungee jumpers off the tower on the horizon and the colorful birds perched on the next building. We already have our bank accounts set up and new mobile phone numbers, so we feel like we are doing well for our first day! We can't quite get our heads around the fact that we just traded autumn for spring, days growing shorter for those lengthening, and that at noon the sun is in the north, but Mike can't wait for the sun to set to examine the new constellations! We are still arguing whether the toilet is flushing clockwise or counter-clockwise, so we can't debunk or prove the myth yet!

Here are a few photos

Heiko in Germany

France

Spain (the first 9 photos on the page are the new ones)

Filling in a few gaps before we lose ourselves on the other side of the planet!

OK, back to where we left off a few days ago of our blogging.....let me think...yes, hitchhiking...the morning after our minor French misadventure with a highway curve and the resulting ride with a tow truck driver and $170 taxi ride to Limoges with our now sadly car-less driver left us happily feasting in the breakfast room of the hotel that his insurance paid for for us. It was a good thing that our driver Fabien was also well accostomed to hitchhiking himself as he now had to rely on that form of transportation to complete his journey to see his grandmother in the hospital. We continued hitchhiking ourselves through the countryside of Limousin and its tiny villages where the children peered out of the shuttered second story windows to peek at the foreigners standing with their thumbs out on the side of the road for an hour at a time until a postal truck driver, a taxi driver and a few other varieties of French drivers tested Mike's french skills and brought us over the volcanic mountains (which had not appeared on our AMA map: this tedious winding route appeared as simple to navigate as any other) to Lyon finally. Three french girls: Fredrique and Melanie, who we had met in Dublin two years ago, and Pauline who we had worked with at the pub in Cork, toured us through the secret corridors and grand murals and culinary delights of their city. Melanie took us kayaking Sunday afternoon, only telling us as we were on the lake paddling against the approaching storm that she had been a previous national kayak champion.

Only a few days and one city left in France on our loose itinerary (we had just looked at what lays between Lyon and Barcelona, but as usual we underestimated just how far out of our way it actually was) brought us to the pink city of Toulouse. Our first host, the meterologist Alice predicted the rain that held us contained in the city for a day longer than we had expected. Luckily our second host Delphine welcomed us back into her house for a second night to dry off as our hitchhiking attempts were foiled by the downpour. But we couldn't complain as her tour of the city's parks and sheesha bars and her homemade crepe meals made up for the thorough soaking. And we heard that Barcelona had had a good flooding anyways so we were happy to have kept a little distance from the coast that night.

After a brief stop in the Spanish (Catalan) border town of Figueres to see the Salvador Dali museum and eat paella, we made our way along the east coast to Primera de Mar where our Brazilian/Russian hosts Sergio and Natasha were awaiting us with gorgeous meals and some interesting opinions of being foreigners in Calalunya. We could nearly walk the rest of the way to Barcelona along the beach where our next HC host Victor was not, but he had left us keys to his delicate flat in the gothic heart of the old town! Yeah, without even meeting us! We can only hope that he received as much hospitality on his current travels around the Baltic Sea as we did in his city cause we were soaking it up! We met up with three other HCers, Cris, Kerem and Marc for rampages around Barcelona's bars and skateboarding plazas and Gaudi architecture. We were sworn to secrecy on the location of Manu Chao's new tiny bar which was as eclectic and chaotic as his music, but in truth we could never find it again even if we wanted to in the maze of dark hosed down graffitied streets and frantic stag parties parading past live statues in imaginative costumes, steep wrought-iron balcony buildings and busker's alleys, plazas with green parakeets dashing between palm trees and flamenco-fusion performances (think Another Brick in the Wall flamenco version...that sounds cheesy but it wasn't) and the Spanish nights out that really do last till dawn. Sigh.

Our next hitch brought us to Zaragoza where Elisa and Manuel the postman/biker pampered us another couple of days that really stretched Carli-Ann's spanish comprehension while we toured the Roman foundings of their quiet city. The promise was that when we came to Spain they would take us out for 'cold' beer as they were not impressed with the British room temperature ale they received at the Glasgow pub when Mike hosted them on their motorcycle tour of Scotland a few months ago. They accomplished their task with the perfect Spanish flair on a night out racing between tapas bars where there isn't time to sit down between beer and little sandwiches of chorizo or dripping sardines or calamari bits. Really, most of the bars didn't even have chairs.

Before we took the most logical route next to Madrid, we had a few days to kill before an Amparanoia gig we wanted to catch back on the Catalan coast so we hitched a couple days winding our way through the desert and mountains back south east, lost most of the time as many of the tiny mountain roads that sported more tractors than cars did not appear on our map. But the hurricane brewing on the west of the country kept us on the move a little uneasily, taking our only night in a hostal on the castle-topped mountain village of Morella. The next day was a whirl of hitching through sunny almond groves punctuated by torrential downpours where we were grateful for the thick branches of olive trees for a tiny bit of cover, a jousting match with the Spanish police who proclaimed that hitchhiking was PROHIBIDO in every single inch of Spain, tramping through the mountains to the nearest village where the old men in the solitary sidewalk cafe watched every move we made as we tried to find a bus that would take us out of this particular cop's region, and haltingly making our way hitching north along the coast, but I think we walked at least a third of it. Man, am I glad that all those ferocious dogs protecting their territory around the houses along the beaches and olive groves are well tied up...

We camped somewhere along the coast in Catalunya again only a meter from the sea, and woke up to the rain of the burnt out hurricane letting loose on our tent, and way too many ants taking refuge in the tent and all over our unsuccessfully drying clothes. The Spanish, much to our dismay, are like the French in that they are rather hesitant to welcome hitchhikers into their cars in bad weather. But eventually a Moroccan brought us almost all the way to Reus, pouring piles of recently picked figs and pomegranates into our hands. A final brief train ride threw us into the arms of our Catalan and French Canadian hosts, Gemma and Pierre who washed and dried all of our soggy clothes, sleeping bags and tent, fed us, and toured us around the old streets charged with the energy of the Reus equinox festival. Fire breathing dragons were chased through the streets by devilishly dressed children wielding deafening, spark-shooting fireworks on sticks, but the Catalan tradition of the human towers were rained out. The final part of the madness, we went to the free gig of Amparanoia, fronted by a fabulously energetic Andalucian woman, who stirred up enough racket to keep it going for two and a half hours! A bit of sleep later and we were on the train to Madrid (this train journey being one of our big indulgences - well deserved we thought!).

Our Hospitalityclub planning for Madrid was a bit delayed, so we were very pleased to receive a text message on our phone while we were on the train which invited us to the home of our final European host, Eryke. Madrid was the perfect place to spend our final week of our two year exploration of Europe, and Eryke and her thousand Madrileño friends were a true gift to us. Wine and plazas and parks and coffees and so many people to meet...If anyone ever comes across the Nowan music video called 'Imagina', the woman painted red is our Eryke.

Madrid and then our flight to the mild rains of England. Gren and Beryl welcomed us back for a fourth time to recooperate, get cleaned up and rested (well, in theory, but their new phone plan with free calls to Canada kept us up late every night catching up with family at home) and tomorrow back to London, the throngs of which we hope will not be pulsating too much as we have a north to south cycle to do with all our gear on our backs. Sunday at 4pm we leave for the other side of the world, Tuesday at 6am we arrive (don't ask me what that is in flying time) and who knows what happens next! We'll let you know when it does though! Did we mention that while everyone we know is preparing for winter, New Zealanders will be doing their spring cleaning? We thought it was quite clever of us to be escaping from winter for a whole year...

Comment ça va?

Heya, we are in Madrid, Spain, in a couple days we fly back to England and then on Oct 1 to New Zealand. We haven´t had much blog updating time so we´ll just publish this bit of our journeys in France that we began preparing a few weeks ago, hope to fill in the gaps soon though!:

Our final day in France! Mike has spent the last two weeks trying to run away from French cheese but rather unsuccessfully as the pungent odor permeates even the double glazed fromagerie windows . But aside from this minor detail our time in France has been un experience tres charmant. Mike has had ample opportunity to practice his French, since our hitchhiking lifts rarely speak more than a few words of English, but occasionally the chatting switches to Spanish. Mike is looking forward to hitch hiking in Spain when he can relax in the back seat and sleep while Carli-Ann maintains the conversation in Spanish. When the drivers ask why we are taking such a non direct route in France Mike always gets a laugh with "Nous essayons dessiner une étoile dans notre carte" (We are trying to draw a star on our map).

We spent four fabulous days in Paris with Julien, our Hospitality Club host. After doing the cliché Parisian activities (climbing the tower, eating a ten dollar crepe, and peeking through the throngs to glimpse the Mona Lisa) he took us out for some more local pastimes (like playing pool in a Cajun bar). His flat was in one of the saucier neighbourhoods so the muted clamour in the street kept us entertained, as did the pigeons that flapped in through his open window and pecked at the stinky cheese on the counter.

Hitchhiking has proved to be a delicious way to pass the time in France, and contrary to the opinions we heard so many times in England, we found the French to be incredibly hospitable! I know, I know, even the French people we revealed this to were surprised! Seven times in a period of two days our hitch hiking lifts offered us a bed to sleep in if we didn´t make it to our destination that day, and twice we took up the offer! And our hospitality club experience has been top notch as well. In Dieppe we were introduced to the concept of the lengthy multi-course French meal by our host Ludo, after checked out the museum about the Canadian contribution to WW2, and the enormous chalk cliffs, of course. In the quirky, crooked medieval streets of Rouen we were given a fantastic walking tour by Virginie and Hugues that enchanted us with the night time projection of Monet paintings on their cathedral, and were gracious enough to offer us plates with our breakfast to avoid confusing the poor North Americans.

Our second Rouen evening was passed with sipping wine at an outdoor cafe with Maeva and Kevin and their friends from his punk band, Youssof Today, and a fellow passionate HCer, Morgane. Next we went on a mission: winding our way through the Normandy countryside to locate the Canadian war cemetary near Caen where Carli-Ann´s grandma Betty´s brother is buried, and then proceeded to pass the following three days hitch hiking to Lyon, which we anticipated would take a single day. Come on, its only 433 kilometers, but we took the exceptionally long route, as everyone is quite keen to point out. But this path did take us hitch hiking on the Formula One race track at Le Mans, a night with a French family who owned a wine store, and on a close encounter with the ditch at night which left us and the driver all fine but without a vehicle to continue our journey as the frame was bent beyond repair. But the insurance paid for a taxi for us and our driver to the next town and for a night in a hotel and breakfast, so we considered ourselves lucky in a strange way.

Yesterday in Reykjavik, Today in Frankfurt, Tomorrow in Paris!

We are contentedly back on the continent again, having survived Iceland's freezing winds and naked landscapes, enjoying the good German hospitality that. we have come to love. We are staying near Frankfurt with Heiko, our flatmate in Ireland. Our other flatmate, Torsten, drove across from Nürnberg to tour us around the local castles and bring us to their own little irish pub!

Iceland proved to be yet another country simple to hitchhike around, despite everyone' s dubiousness, and our lifts were representative of Iceland itself: the population is comprised of 299 404 Icelanders, and 369 431 tourists visited in 2005. We got 5 lifts from Icelanders and 6 from tourists, and several of our lifts took us 600kms at a time! Thrudur, and Tomek and Ola, our HC hosts in the east of Iceland, sent us marching up and down dozens of waterfalls that appear to be emptying all of the planet's seas in a rush into the centre of the Earth, up and down volcanoes, over cracks where the earth has opened up in a quake (Thrudur's house was split open in a recent earthquake), past glaciers calving into icebergs floating in a lagoon with the sea lions, to hot rivers to bathe in, and to the Geysir from where all the rest get their name, which was a terrifying experience to stand next to alone in the dark as it materialized 15 meters of gushing water every 10 suspenseful minutes or so. Though we were repeatedly told otherwise, we did manage to hitchhike through Iceland's interior, which is crossed only by two gravel roads only recommended for 4x4 vehicles with those enormous wheels and satellite phones. Thrudur warned us about these strange rock formations that were trolls who had been caught out in the sunlight while viewing their land (apparently Tolkein based his trilogy on Icelandic mythology) so we didn't camp the night out there! We still think it is a lovely but bizarre little country: the tiny villages smelt of their main industry: fishing, and after showering our silver wedding rings turned black temporarily from the minerals in the naturally hot water that is piped into houses. Thankfully we managed to avoid Iceland's speciality dishes: burnt sheep's head, rotten shark, foal, puffin, soured ram's testicles (as if ram's testicles wasn't strange enough). I guess in this barren land you had to eat everything you can get your hands on! Here's three new photos of our time in Iceland (last three on the page).

We have a lift to Paris arranged for tomorrow with the great German ride-sharing agency (an institution which the rest of the world is sorely lacking), and HC hosts for the next few weeks so Bon Soir and Tchussiii!

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Chips!

We are being blown across the volcanic landscape of Iceland, I know we should have expected it but its quite chilly here! We had an easy flight yesterday from London Stansted to Reykjavik, despite all the intensified security measures (everyone´s shoes being x-rayed, no liquids on the plane, no lighters at all) and are settled cozily with our hospitality club host, Thrudur, just outside the capital. The landscape on the bus ride to her apartment (the buildings and roads look all very Canadian) could almost be seen heaving and waving as the lava formed this island long ago, still devoid of trees and greenery, and great streams of steam shoot up into the sky in several spots on the horizon. And this was all just in our first hour on this bizarre island adorned only by stacks of stones several meters high to mark the ancient roads.

Our last couple of weeks in Britain were memorable, finally attending the Highland Games with Vivien and Dik in Aviemore near Inverness and watching the world´s strongest hurl a variety of enormously heavy objects ridiculous distances, all in various lengths of kilts. Meeting Kathryn and her English boyfriend, Adam, in Pembrokeshire National Park in Wales and exploring the beaches and cliffs. We thought it was hilarious to be one in the long parading line of beach-goers, each person equipped with at least four objects of entertainment: kites, tents, footballs, surfboards, snorkels, cricket sets. Mike finally learned how to play cricket! Although it is doubtful how much of the rules he actually understood. We hitchhiked from where Adam´s failing brakes left us in Bath towards Cornwall, unexpectedly finding ourselves in a campground in Glastonbury, and proceeded to feast happily on vegetarian food in this eccentric little town and visited the Glastonbury Abbey and climbed the Tor in the morning. Carli-Ann played Knots and Crosses (X´s and O´s) with the ten year old girl in the van on our lift to Cornwall where we stayed with our hosts, Sera and banger-racer Ian in Launceston. Sera was just going to drop us off on the highway near the cliff -scaling Tintagel Castle where King Arthur was supposed to be born, but ended up joining us and proceeding to graciously tour us through Boscastle that was destroyed in the flooding a couple years back, onto the Bodmin Moors and for lunch in a moor pub where she used to work (there really are supposed to be released jaguars and a lion roaming the moors since the 1970´s law that made it illegal to own an exotic pet without a permit), through the lovely Cornish towns and along the roads sunken into the fields to protect from the elements which made it feel as if we were on a secret mole-tunnel mission, and all the way to Land´s End! What a day, and it was only a few weeks before on Orkney that we looked south to John O´Groats on the mainland. A farmer dropped us off at his veternarian´s house who was also our next host in Devon, and with Mark´s lovely family we attended a very english community dog show and BBQ, went hiking on Dartmoor, and saw the National Firework Championships in Plymouth! Quite a day!

A few more lifts brought us next to Bristol where we met Carli-Ann´s Grandpa Ken´s family, Steve and Pip, and the bright matriarch of the family, Mrs. Sheila Whitfield who lives in a 400 year old thatched cottage in Wiltshire! They were as enthusiastic to meet more of the family from Canada as we were to meet them, and had a large family dinner and went through old family photos and the family tree (which was quite useful as I wasn´t quite sure how I fit in) and took us up in the hills at the back of their place to see the Uffington White Horse chalk figure. And they have extended their invitation to all the family back in Canada who wants to come and visit!

And as the day finally came that our British visas expired, Iceland´s discount aircarrier took us out of London to this little island where we will explore the geysers and waterfalls and volcanic activity and icebergs until the end of the month before heading back to the continent. Our photos of Iceland should be stunning, so we´ll post them as soon as we´ve got them organized!

Mae'n bwrw glaw

A couple weeks ago we went on a trip to the very north of Scotland and crossed over to the Orkeney Islands. This place is absolutely loaded with ancient ruins, many of them 5000 years old! We climbed inside one mound-tomb which had been vandalized. Not by local antisocials, but by vikings 1000 years ago. One of them carved something like "These runes were carved by Thor, the most skilled rune-carver in the west!".

After a brief but busy six months we have finished up our time in Glasgow. Again it was alot of work to get ourselves and all our gear out of the country. With a bit of ruthless binning we managed to pack up everything into a backpack and bulging bike pannier each, along with our bicycles of course. The journey from Glasgow Central took five trains and seven hours to get down to Cuddington Station in Cheshire where we were greeted by Gren and Beryl once again. After a nice evening with their family they drove us into the heart of Snodonia National Park in Northern Wales where we found a nice camp site at the foot of Wales highest mountain - which amazingly has a special train that ratchets up to the peak. We are very impressed by the amount of Welsh that is actually spoken here. Even young people working in shops are speaking Welsh togther when you walk in. When we first heard it in a cafe, I was sure the waitresses were immigrants speaking Polish, but no, we were the only foreigners in there! We stayed with our first Hospitalityclub host of the trip last night in Carmarthen where he works as a Welsh language promoter. He said it had been a while since he last spoke so much English (his second language). We are now travelling slowly towards the south of Wales where we'll meet some friends for a weekend camping. Traslate the Welsh title of this entry for a clue about how its going :)

After Wales, we'll head for Cornwall, and then to Swindon to visit some of Carli-Ann's relations. After that we fly from London to Iceland for what is gauranteed to be a unique experience!

We got the lowdown on Grandma Betty Germain from her big sister!

Hey to everyone, briefly we are fine, moved out of our old place now and into the new one that ended up being just a few blocks away. It took another full weekend of elbow grease to get the new place into shape, and another week until we figured out how to get hot water, and we still can’t get the fridge to do anything but freeze our food solid except in the very top corner, but we are only there until July 24 when we ship out of European rental life entirely, so we are making do fine.

Carli-Ann’s boss, Vivien and Dik took us last week for a drive in their van (we were a snug 17 wheeler! 2 bikes=4 wheels, 2 wheelchairs=8 wheels, and a van=4 with a spare wheel) along Hadrian’s wall, the 73 mile Roman wall built to control the northernmost border of the Empire roughly between Scotland and England. Then they took us back to the beginning to cycle it from a different perspective, to absorb some of the “breathless” views along the tail end of Britain’s backbone: the Pennine Mountain range. We camped out near the village of Twice Brewed (which appeared to us to be only a pub) which is next door to the village of Once Brewed (which was only a visitor centre now, as far as we could tell). The next day we arrived (part pushbike, thank God for that mighty tailwind even though it nearly flattened our tent, and part train) in New Herrington, Houghton Le Spring, Tyne and Wear, 10 miles north of Durham at Mike’s great Auntie Agnes’ door step above their butcher shop.

This is possibly our favourite bit of being in Europe is turning up at distant relative’s houses and seeing the family history from the Old World perspective! Auntie Agnes and her super-cyclist/rower son-in-law Joe showed us the neighbourhood where Mike’s grandma and her sisters grew up, the old light pole they used to play around, the ancient barn now converted into a pub, Shanky Banks, the hill so steep you have to walk your bike up, and we got to hear about Grandma Betty Germain in the eyes of her big sister! Priceless! Grandma, 86 year old Auntie Agnes is still standing on her kitchen table to hang her sheets up to dry!

Joe took us on a tour of Durham, the famous hill top Norman cathedral and its 325 step tower which he nearly leapt up in a single bound, and twirled us through the old winding streets with hidden nooks leading down to the river bank, and leaning old buildings with ancient rippling glass windows. And to get the classic view of the city, we went for a paddle down the River Wear in a wooden row boat with his friend Caroline, (they gave the rowing over to us just as the big paddleboat came around the bend and threatened to capsize us if we didn’t learn how to steer fast!). And then he took us up the bank to meet his friend who was in the process of carving out these wooden boats for us tourists and for the racing rowers like Joe. I think this is a lovely time to be touring Britain as the cherry trees were practically throwing their fruit into our hands, our hikes led us through mountain top wild blueberry patches, and the mock orange blossoms hung down to the water alongside the trailing weeping willows, just like in the children’s book illustrations we had always seen of Merry old England.

Another excursion we have slipped in alongside work in our final weeks in Scotland is to cycle up the “bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond”. It was mostly the midges that propelled us to continue cycling, doubling the planned distance: they can only be avoided by keeping a faster pace than their terrific swarms! (mosquitoes the minute size of fruit flies that fly into your eyes and nose and deny you the satisfaction of swatting one dead because they are too tiny and too numerous to be affected by flailing arms) But the midge tour of the Highland fault line did send us careening down Loch Gare and Loch Long, and around a bend to be hurled into the monstrous shadow of a docked British military battle ship, past a noisy military shooting range, and later through a colourful protesting peace camp. We are due next week for a visit up to the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland, and a jaunt in Wales soon too!

We are very pleased to have remembered that Carli-Ann’s friend from university, Suzanne, has settled herself happily in New Zealand, so it will be great to have someone to pester for advice before our flight (Oct 1) and a couch to surf after too! Today we are doing a test pack of our gear, as being permitted to fly over with only two pieces of checked luggage each, our bikes being one, that leaves everything else in our lives from the last two years and for the upcoming year to be squeezed into a single backpack, so this will be our tightest pack yet! Yikes!

We hope that by the time we leave the animated Glaswegian life behind us next month, a little of the colourful vocabulary and friendliness will have rubbed off on us. Everything’s “nae bodder” (no bother) and Mike’s already “jus takin da mickey out o’ ya” (teasing) and “skiving” whenever the opportunity arises (skipping out on duties/lazing about at work) and whipping out “fer a wee dram” (drink). Oh, these years about Europe will never be forgotten!

Cheers!

Börk Börk Börk!

This is the sign warning motorists about children. Notice Pipi Longstocking, and the kid riding the cat!

Hej! (one of the few words we picked up on our recent Scandinavian trip north) We just returned from our fabulous week in Sweden, finally a place where Mike looks like one of the locals (until he opens his mouth). Since the Swedes all speak such immaculate English we only absorbed a couple words of the Stockholm dialect.

Since our last update in May we have been busy with work, and attempting to squeeze as much Scottish culture out of our few days off together as possible! We have made it cycling around the isle of Arran that runs parallel across the water from the Kintyre Peninsula so that Carli-Ann can dutifully report back to her mom that she saw Paul McCartney's beloved "Mull of Kintyre". Yes, Arran and Kintyre are those strangely anatomically correct bit on the map west of Glasgow. It's known for being a miniature version of Scotland, so can we claim that we have cycled over the highland mountains? We were especially impressed that while crossing through a mountain pass at the centre of the island, just after a magical moment when the sea sparkled on the horizon both in front and behind us, we clocked in a descent on her bike spedometer at 70kms per hour! What is that over here in imperial land...43 miles per hour? Impressive and terrifying! We also hiked the final two days of the West Highland Way, and camped out the night in the ruins of a stone cottage from several hundred years ago. The sheep bleating curiously at our tent was our wake up call that morning. I think Mike will soon get a few more photos in our Scotland folder.

Our Lonely Planet travel guide 'Australia and New Zealand on a Shoestring' just arrived this morning, so we are already scouring it for material to stoke our dreams of our next adventures. All our train and plane tickets are bought: a short visit to the Orkney Islands, Wales, up up up to Iceland when we leave the UK on August 18, France and Spain, and then to New Zealand on October 1! Everyone we meet who has visited there says it is paradise...Wikipedia.org just informed us that "barring three species of bat (one now extinct), there were no non-marine mammals" until humans arrived! But tons of birds and the heaviest insect in the world, which can be as big as a mouse!

It is a good thing that we travel light and that we are mobile, because reminiscent of our final weeks in Ireland, our flat here in Glasgow was just sold and we have to move again within the week! But the letting agents say they have a place for us in the city centre, and the quality of accomodation can only improve, so there we go again. So don't send anything in the mail, we won't get it! Sigh.

And an even deeper sigh: one of our friends, hospitality club hosts and profound inspirations, Kinga Freespirit, has passed away from cerebral malaria during her solo hitch hiking journey on the final continent of her explorations, Africa. Everyone was shocked that after overcoming so many obstacles (she hitch hiked around the world for five years!) that she would be taken like this...there is not much that I can say that can express our emotions at her passing.

So, on to more upbeat topics: our trip to Sweden to celebrate our sixth anniversary! It's not the North Country Fair, but what can you do when you're in Europe.

We spent the first three nights with Carolina, our HospitalityClub host near the centre of Stockholm. She surprised us on the metro ride home when we asked what she did for a living. "This" she said. She drives the subway! She said our reactions fit the norm. The man's eyes twinkle and fill with technical questions, while the woman wants to know how cool it is to drive through tunnels. She said she feels like a "monkey in a cage" and is in a constant struggle to not close the subway doors on some unthinking metro-zombie passenger. People are always trying to squeeze through the closing doors which, closing under 30kg of force, can do some harm. We had a great few days with Carolina and her boyfriend Richard.

Our first sunny, roasting afternoon was spent on a long, squat boat motoring through locks and between the many islands that make up Stockholm. Sitting between a large lake, and the Baltic sea, central Stockholm is made up of several islands all linked by bridges. The rocky cliffs and shores were overflowing with sunbathers and swimmers resembling the unfortunate annual fate of Sweden's lemmings.

Carli-Ann was thrilled to frolick around the Junibacken: a creatively crafted museum built for children all about the characters and stories of Astrid Lindgren (author of Pippi Longstocking). Houses, shops, and a farm – all scaled down to the size of a 6 year old - were available to explore. The experience was made complete by all the Swedish children running around shouting "Hej Hej!" to catch their parents' attention. The nearby Vasa museum houses the 69m (226 ft) long Vasa warship which, on her maiden voyage in 1628, tipped over in a gust of wind and sank to the bottom of Stockholm's harbour. In 1961 the boat was pulled back out of the water almost completely intact. It is a beautiful ship covered in hundreds of sculptures. The museum was very well made too, one of those that close and kick you out before you're ready to leave!

Carolina and Richard had been planning a trip to Stockholm's Skansen zoo & open-air museum. We were pleased to join them to see the Swedish reindeer and the historical buildings at the park. Being severely arachnophobic they wanted to hold a tarantula to help overcome their fears. Amazingly, all four of us ended up holding the big hairy spider! It was very docile and we all came out unscathed.

Since Carli-Ann doesn't like beer, she was happy to see the wide variety of Swedish ciders in the Systembolaget (liquor store). Aside from the internationally famous Kopperberg Pear cider, she sampled strawberry and star fruit ciders. All alcohol sales stop at 3pm on Saturdays in Sweden, so we were forced to lug our spoils around during the day's sight-seeing. It's a rough life.

Our second (that we should be so lucky to have two hosts!) HospitalityClub hosts were Swedish/American Nicole and Lithuanian Romauld, who lived just outside of Stockholm in a rural forested cottage village. We camped out under their trees and enjoyed the rustic lifestyle along with three Lithuanian girls and an Italian also staying there. The hot weather allowed for a morning swim in the lake, just a 10 minute walk down the road.

Our last night in Stockholm was spent at an impromptu midnight-sun forest party. Our HospitalityClub host's brother is in a band and they organized the small party on the banks of the huge lake Mälaren. A portable generator supplied power for the spotlights and guitar amps, and the tolerant neighbours supplied their lenience in not phoning the police. We arrived just after the sun set at 22:10 and stayed until it rose again at 3:30.

As our travels are beginning to pick up momentum again (it feels like we just arrived in Scotland...especially confusing as the weather is the same as it was when we did arrive in January) we hope to continue our updates. And we are praying for a wireless internet connection in our new flat!

By the way, we saw plenty of Swedish chefs, but none with the same animated flair as we were hoping for!

Ciao!

Ciao!

We are just back from a very short burst of Italian culture that took us to Rome, Sorrento, and vicinity to meet Carli-Ann’s Grandma Betty and great Auntie Darlene on their tour of the Boot. It was a mostly golden week of scampering madly between the major sites that can’t be missed, such as the Vatican, the Catacombs, the Coliseum, the Mount Vesuvius’ lava covered Roman city of Pompeii, the Greek temples of Paestum… but mostly mad scampering between the crazy Italian drivers and their scooters. And this was sandwiched in between two ridiculously cheap flights that were paid for in general well-being as we spent our first and last nights sleeping in cramped seated positions in the London Stansted airport lobby.

The days in Sorrento were passed sampling as much Italian cuisine as we could possibly stuff into our selves in such a limited time, hiking to the next village between the lemon and olive terraces, escorted from asparagus plant to asparagus plant by little darting lizards, gazing at the gorgeous view over the Bay of Napoli at Mount Vesuvius (Wikipedia says it could erupt again at any time!?!) and the Isle of Capri. All this to the tune of the church bells clanging every 15 minutes day and night, and to Grandma’s 15 travel companions hooting away on their hotel balcony that looked down over the beach and the campground where our tent trembled. I don’t know what they are doing now that we have left, as Mike was their official wine bottle opener, and he uncorked at least ten our first happy hour on their balcony! Actually, a good chunk of our time in Sorrento was spent following a bouncing orange around town from its birth on a tree to its tragic and untimely death before us. Mike has created a memoir to Orange, the results of which can be viewed here. Our new photos from Italy can be viewed here (the first 7 on the page are the latest ones).

Italy is the only European country where we have never gotten away from being just tourists, which is sad, but I hope we will have other opportunities to get to know the country from a different perspective in the future. One of our fondest memories is of the four little Italian kids on the train who kept poking Mike in the belly, asking how to say different words in English, and cracking us up by slapping each other up the back of the head in waves from biggest kid to littlest kid and back up the hierarchy, just like every Italian stereotype cartoon we have ever seen. It was a lovely week with some great grandma-time. Very little relaxation however, so we are happy to have returned to this Scottish isle with seats on the toilets, and streets where the pedestrian right-to-life is enshrined in the British Highway Code. But we are back again to British prices…one of our hospitality club guests found the prices here so high that he was forced to determine his grocery store purchases by calculating the kilojoules of energy in each item and make the most economic pence per kJ choice.

Mike’s Grandma Betty just informed us in a letter that her grandma was from the tiny village of Kirkintiloch, just outside of Glasgow, so that is a cool surprise that we have some Glaswegian roots ourselves. Mike keeps proudly reporting to everyone here that his family’s from Kilt-in-a-Loch. His first day as the Head Porter at the horse track was this week, so he’ll probably have some stories after the first race of the season this weekend!

We’ll blog again when something else interesting happens!

Glasgow Loves its Traffic Cones!

We have decided that the symbol of Glasgow must be a pylon, or fluorescent orange “traffic cone”. They are all over the roads here, and as is to be expected when surplus bright objects are readily available in the streets, come Sunday morning they are also hanging in trees, on poles, and to our great delight, on the heads of various important looking statues about the city. When I was searching for the Gallery of Modern Art, no one knew what it was, but when I said “You know, the statue of the guy on the horse that always has the traffic cone on his head”, everyone could point me in his direction.

Shocking, but we still have no flatmates! We still have the whole 3 bedroom, two bathroom place to ourselves! Though we have shared it with more than a dozen hospitality club guests already, we are still savouring the sweetness of this precious and fleeting position as sole occupiers of this mouldy, old tenement flat. But it must be something special as I can hear commentary floating up through my window as the hourly double-decker bus tour of the city passes below us. Our huge, drafty windows are also a prime parade-viewing spot and we appear to be on the usual route. Mike has been awoken to the noises of the annual 5000 strong “Motorcycle Action Group Easter Egg Run”, and I was roused from sleep by the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which had more police guarding it than participants. One block up from us is a lawn bowling green that we have yet to try out, and a great skate park. It has been exhilarating to watch the spring flowers blooming in the nearby park, beginning with snow drops, then purple and white crocuses, fields of nodding daffodils, the occasional tulip and bluebell, and cherry trees all a-white with delicate blossoms. But only recently have we been discouraged to note that Alberta’s sunny temperatures are creeping up, at 20 Celsius some days, while Glasgow is still clinging to the same 9 degree cloud as when we arrived in January.

Mike’s still happily well-employed with a temp agency that gave him a blissful two month long stint at IKEA. He brought home Swedish sweets and ciders nearly everyday, and soaked up the pampered Scandinavian working conditions that included an IKEA staff radio station open to requests, and all the lingon berry juice you can drink in an 8 hour shift. A few odd placements have crept in as well, such as city council canteens, and an elderly day care cafeteria, but we are both excitedly curious to see what British experiences will be chalked out for us as he begins working at the horse races next week. I predict he will return to Canada sporting a monocle.
Carli-Ann began her week on, week off job as a Personal Care Assistant for a couple in Dumfries. It was a great first week packed with memorable “cultural” experiences. Vivien regaled me with tales of her adventures on the Paralympic swim team in Atlanta '96 and doing the London Marathon. Dick is a biker who could empathize with the mind twist of driving and thinking in opposites, who whipped us up with my bike and his scooter to Dumfries’ elaborate mountain bike trails my second day out. Her little cottage has a name as the first line of the address, they have a (wild) hedgehog living in the back garden who leapt at the chance to plow into the food bowls of their two Miniature Schnauzers resulting in me having to deflea them before bed. And I survived the 3.5 hour drive to and around (and around and around) Britain’s 5th largest city of Leeds, mostly thanks to the GPS TomTom system programmed in John Cleese’s voice. The only times I screwed up was when he kept telling me to “Bear right, beaver left” round the roundabouts, which are available for your driving convenience in mini, regular, double, and the famed quintuple “Magic Roundabout” of Swindon. Thankfully, my driving instructor had focused especially on these exciting little whirlwinds of British culture, as well as killing my habit of turning on a red light. Our zip down to Yorkshire was for Vivien’s orienteering competition, the first day of which left me totally mystified as to the method in the madness of 4000 Brits in sweat bands, cleated shoes and crumpled maps grunting and dashing madly about a 12th century Knights Templar estate crowned by a Tudor-Jacobean mansion, gaping at clusters of orange and white dangling cloth boxes being peed on by the dozens of dogs loping after their masters. After Vivien illuminated the mechanics of the sport, my appreciation increased considerably the following day.
I am happy to report that the Joys have also kept me as part of their family for a few more months as their nanny on my off weeks. Paul (5) and Neil (2) are teaching me all about Scotland, their neighbourhood of Ascot Avenue, and the peculiarities of Glaswegian and British vocabulary: when colouring a picture of them I asked what colour were his pants and to my surprise was promptly shown…pants being underwear on this side of the Atlantic. I have recently provided no less than 36 “ARTS AND CRAFTS TIME!” ideas…I’m glad Paul is creative because the sources of my inspirations have just about been depleted! Neil (2) takes me trainspotting weekly, and to my delight, I was invited to share their “elevensies” which I thought was just a Tolkien creation for “The Hobbit”…and that very same evening I walked past Pippin himself near our house! The hobbit actor, Billy Boyd is a Glaswegian, but it was very peculiar to partake in elevensies and to walk past a hobbit on the same day.Between the job in Dumfries, being a nanny, working occasionally in the dementia unit, and with seniors in supported accommodation in a few different facilities, the prints on the pads of my fingers have nearly cracked open from all the anti-bacterial hand washing procedures. But we have added 744 kilometres to my bike odometer since mid-February, and several pounds of muscle to our thighs from carrying our precious bicycles up and down from our fourth floor flat twice daily.
Carli-Ann turned 27 Nessie-hunting and we’ve added conclusive photos to our Scotland folder! My birthday trip to Loch Ness was wet and grey, as it truly should be. The dark, whipping waters of the deep loch nearly convinced you that out of the corner of your eye something might be surfacing. We were taken on a short boat tour of the loch by a researcher who has been investigating the potential for giant creatures to survive on the bottom of Loch Ness since the 1970’s. The current trend is to chock it up to sturgeon, which can live for a couple hundred years and have been caught at 8m long. Mike’s birthday was a pretty low-key affair involving sloppy “courgette cake”, and samplings of the best ales in the land, particularly the Wyre Piddle Brewery’s “Piddle in the Hole Traditional Cask Ale”. From the label:“Piddle in the Hole” is traditionally brewed cask ale which has, until now, only been available in pubs in the surrounding villages, the names of which are featured in this rhyme…Upton Snodsbury,Peopleton and Crowle,Wyre Piddle,North Piddle,And Piddle in the Hole.”Another weekend when all the Historic Scotland sites were free, we bustled about the ancient capital of Stirling for the day, saving a total of $71CAD in entrance fees. The castle is a magnificent fortress, and I was intrigued to view the years-long process of weaving a copy of the 1500’s tapestry “The Hunt of the Unicorn”. At the Bannockburn Visitor’s Centre, Mike was trying on the chain mail of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace’s time, and then was found floundering at the back of the museum after everyone else had cleared out at closing time, struggling to escape from his 30 pound metal costume. A couple weekends ago we also journeyed along the banks of the lovely silver Loch Lomond and the snow-capped Highlands to the Isle of Mull and the Isle of Iona, where a 6th century monastery is still a functioning spiritual community. We had to race the three bus loads of old folks to the graveyard where Macbeth and 48 other Scottish kings are buried. They beat us back to the ferry though, filled it up completely, and forced us to wait for the next one. Vicious. The Highland cattle grazing lazily on the wind-swept heather bogs consumed many megabytes of memory on our camera, and we have decided that they must be the inspiration for the hip hair styles of the indie Glaswegian lads. Which reminds me that Corb Lund played in Glasgow in March and we caught the show at “King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut”. We never imagined there were so many Canadians in Glasgow, but they nearly filled the bar!
Our Glasgow lads introduced us to another Glasgow institution, The SUB-Crawl. www.subcrawl.co.uk Glasgow’s 110 year old subway is a dingy orange 15 station circular route of stale air (which still beats Edmonton’s half line), known as the Clockwork Orange. With ease, one can surface from any subway station and stumble directly into a pub, so we joined 25 of Glasgow’s finest young folk for James’ birthday and made a day of it. ‘Twas a long day indeed. Mike put the photos online - click here. We can even justify in including it in our broad category of “cultural experiences” due to the education we received as we entered the blue Rangers pubs and the green Celtic pubs. Depending on which neighbourhood we surfaced in, there was no mistaking where the loyalties of many pubs and patrons resolutely stood. Here’s a website worth a laugh about Glaswegian characters: http://www.glasgowsurvival.co.uk/, check out the people section.
All this workin and playin has nearly worn us out so we figured we were just about due for a vacation. Luckily our wanderlust coincides with Carli-Ann’s Grandma Betty’s scheduled tour of Italy, so we are off to Rome on Tuesday to meet up with her! We also threw in a few days in Sorrento for good measure. And since Carli-Ann can’t seem to be able to take a day off work without a plane ticket booking to keep her to it, we just got tickets to spend a week in Stockholm, Sweden for our summer solstice anniversary in June. We thought we would head even further north. Carli-Ann is still scheming about how we could pop over to Iceland before we leave Europe, but that might be pushing it a little.
And we are also very excited because we recently had our applications for working holiday-maker visas for New Zealand approved for next year, a process which was done simply over the internet. The only extra bit was that we had to go to a private hospital to get pricey chest x-rays to prove that we don’t have tuberculosis due to our choice of travel destinations, but Mike is thrilled to have gotten to keep the x-rays, which I am sure will be framed once we settle back in to Canada. Now we just have to figure out how precisely to arrive at this little paradise that is inconveniently located on the exact opposite side of the globe from Scotland. We have quite a few possibilities, including elaborate European and Asian and South Pacific and Round-the-World ticket options which Carli-Ann keeps dreaming up to try to squeeze every last corner of the earth into our realm of experience, but it will come down to how much more of Europe we want to see before we leave, and how much of our savings we will throw at the EU before sailing off! Our dear French friend and original hospitality club host in Dublin, Caroline and her boyfriend Ben will be arriving in New Zealand around the same time, so we will have some company down there!
And we have been looking even further into the future as well with some excitement. Mike has finally decided what he wants to take at university, so he’ll be applying to the engineering department at UBC for September 2007, which will put the brakes onto our global gallivant significantly. He’s thinking of going into something with energy conservation, so hopefully our future will unfold in this new direction with as much vigour as the last few years have doled out to us. So, Vancouver it will be, keeping our fingers crossed!
But first to Rome.