055 - sat 24 jun - balaton/london

we said farewell to our dodgy lakeside hungarian tourist village, and successfully attempted to catch the right combination of train and bus to get to balaton airport. when the bus dropped us off at the airport, we saw nothing except for a wire fence with a big road running through it, and a sign saying 'Welcome to Balaton Airport! Terminal 1000m'. so we got walking.

the walk to the airport terminal was interesting, and probably unlike most walks you expect to have between airport shuttle service and airport terminal. usually it involves a couple of escalators, a lot of signs, and a lot of concrete and glass. instead it was a 1km walk through unkept woodlands, dodging out of the way of the occasional crappy hungarian car, nodding once to the security guys having a cigarette out the front of a depressing old building that must have been some kind of security office, wandering whether you are actually heading for the airport or if you have made some strange mistake. suz saw a little scorpion. we knew we were getting closer to the terminal proper, when we started to see what looked like bombed out old bomb shelters and rundown hangars. we figured that the new balaton airport - which is only a few years old - has been built on the site of an old abandoned airfield from 50 or so years ago. we turned the corner, and there it was, a shiny apparition of globalisation in the middle of an open field of nothing - balaton airport terminal, looking very much like an ikea building. we got ourselves sorted and boarded a plane back to stansted airport in london.

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054 - fri 23 jun - lake balaton

when we booked our flight to get back to london, we booked it with one of the cheap airlines who didn't actually have flights running out of budapest, but instead ran their flights out of a small airport in a part of hungary known as lake balaton, which is a popular resort area around the shores of hungary's largest lake. its a place i think where a lot of hungarians go for their weekends or for the summer. so when we booked the flights we thought this would be a good excuse to get out of budapest and head for a part of hungary that we might not have chosen ourselves.

we had a bit of trouble initially finding the right combination of trains that would get us to lake balaton, and we weren't aided by the fact that we didn't know exactly where we were going. we were yet to actually get a clear understanding of where this airport was, so we just headed for the main town along the shores of lake balaton, kezthely. eventually we got there, after stopping at a couple of other balaton towns, and checked in to a hotel.

the towns along the shore of lake balaton, at least from what we saw, definitely have more than a little bit of a seaside tourist town vibe, caravan parks and rickety seaside carnivals, garish restaurants and knick-knack shops, that actually reminded me of the kind of little towns that you might see on the sunshine coast. kezthely was a nice enough town, and after our great half-day of biking around budapest we decided to be adventurous and find somewhere to hire bikes from. when we found the hire store, eventually, we struggled through some banter with the hungarian owner of the store - she and us somehow managed to find common ground through a combination of english and german - and hired bikes for some exorbatant price. with the bikes we rode around town, and up to the majestic mansion that sits to its north. after a bit of a stroll around its gardens, we decided we'd had enough of the bikes and that now we needed to soak in some sun and sand on that famous lake balaton shoreline.

we headed for the only beach in town, which you have to pay to get into, and it was very busy. grass patches filled with families, edged by concrete footpaths that are lined with kiosks and hot food stalls selling typically vile fast food. the sandy beaches along lake balaton are, of course, artificial but i don't think we were expecting what we found on the bottom of the lake when we did eventually abandon our towels and go for a dip. because what was sand on the shore was not sand in the lake, but more of a sand/mud mixture that very quickly became simply just mud as you waded into it. add to that some decent amounts of seaweed and just general floaty bits, and you begin to wonder how much effort they really put in to creating this artificial lakeside beach, supposedly the best in lake balaton. but its easy for us to forget i guess how we might take for granted the beaches we have at home. this is hungary! they don't even have a coastline! so i guess they are doing alright. but we didn't last very long in the lake.

after a bit of a sunbake, we grabbed a bottle of wine that we had picked up somewhere on our travels and not yet consumed, and took it out to the park, and leisurely consumed it. as the sun went down we found a nearby restaurant, out the front of a hotel, that looked the least dodgy (!) and enjoyed a light meal and more wine. we had a very cute albeit stressed out hungarian waiter who was obviously trying very hard to impress us. well actually, before long i began to notice that his boss was spending almost the entire evening looking over his shoulder, making sure he was getting everything right, so i don't think it was us that this young guy was desperately trying to impress. ordering wine was a bit of a struggle - in one of those completely absurd moments of language difficulty, and not knowing how to pronounce the hungarian word for win, we said the word wine in about 10 different ways to blank looks from our poor waiter. it was only when suz whacked the 'v' on the front, in a german style like 'vine', he understood straight away. its just one of those things. but i don't think i'll forget the look on his face when he, having excitedly fetched us the bottle of wine that we had asked for, went to open the bottle and tore the cork in half in the process. he was shattered, the look on his face was enough for suz to immediately say 'oh we do that all the time.' but what he really needed was for his boss to get off his back. we fished the bits of cork out of our wine, and chuckled about the fact that the only english word the waiter really knew was 'please' and that he said it every time he did anything.

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053 - thu 22 jun - budapest

we awoke and headed for a museum. of all the museums we had been too, this one definitely had the least museum-y name of them all - 'the house of terror'! muhuhuhu HA! i probably shouldn't really be making light of what is always a pretty serious issue - the museum was concerned with the communist era, particularly the communist era in hungary, from the influence of nazi germany, through to homegrown hungarian communists, and then the prolonged russian occupation. but the museum itself was so heavy-handed and dramatic in its presentation of history that its hard in hindsight not to be a little bemused by it all.

i dunno. suz and i had pretty different opinions about this place, and i think its definitely the kind of 'museum' that is going to polarise people. you can't not be provoked into an opinion by it. even from the outside the house of terror is an incredibly imposing building, a traditional old european building that has had every window blacked out, and looks kind of like its had a giant sheet of metal sliced through its upper most level, with the words 'house of terror' menacingly stencilled out. once inside you learn that this building was the focus of administration for nearly all of hungary's most despicable communist secret services. in the entry hall you see the first signs of the dim moody lighting that characterises the entire museum, and you also get your first tatse of the 'imperial march'-esque cinematic music - again menacing - that follows you around most of your tour. its a dazzling modern multimedia experience that cost millions of dollars, and caused a lot of controversy during its building, when the opposing sides of post-communist hungarian politics bitterly fought over its appropriateness. the whole political element of the museum, and how its building reveals a lot about contemporary hungarian politics, was probably what interested me most. google it! the strangest thing is at the end of the tour. the second-to-last room is the least gloomy of them all, with video screens displaying footage of the end of communism in hungary, scenes of joy, freedom won back after decades of hardship. but after that, the last room jerks you back into the gloom, because its walls are covered with the faces of people who were involved directly and indirectly with the communist government, with the word 'victimisers' hovering menacingly (again, menacing) above the hundreds of photos. and the thing is, a lot the people shown in this 'hall of victimisers' (like some perverse hall of fame) are not only still alive and well, many of them living in budapest, but many of them are politically active or involved with the contemporary media. so... its hard not to then completely re-assess your reading of the entire museum, that its not just an epic tale of tragedy and gloom, but its also a public space with a very contemporary political purpose to sway the opinions of everyday hungarians, perhaps towards a way of thinking about the past that lines them up neatly with one present political party over another. is it just one big negative political advertisement? or am i a communist?

anyway... after that dose of heady seriousness, we headed for the famous baths, the name of which i don't have at hand, and besides its almost as hard to spell as it is to say. budapest has many thermal baths, but we went to the most famous and probably the most tourist-friendly. we indulged ourselves in pools of varying temperatures. it was a great way to spend the afternoon, after such consistent hot weather in our days in budapest.

we then made for raday street, a buzzing street of restaurants and bars where we found ourselves some dinner. the street had a very laidback but trendy vibe that definitely made us homesick for our favourite places in melbourne. budapest has a very liveable feeling about it. and its made up of some wonderful grand and old buildings, it has a rich history, and it is open and welcoming to foreigners without yet being completely overrun by tourism and louts. it wears its history on its sleeve, and you never know what you are going to find around every corner.

after dinner we did a big sweeping walk around town, taking a lot of photos of very beautiful buildings lit up at night. we ended up in a bar to watch the second half of the australia v croatia world cup game, which was no mean feat considering that 99% of bars had decided that it was a more financially sound decision to show the drab japan v brazil game over the nailbiting and very crucial australia game. but we eventually found a bar, we had some beers, and we bit some nails as australia scraped through. at the end of the game we got a text message from rodrigo and ferdinand, who were at this stage now actually in croatia, and we were happy to find out that they had not yet been lynched by angry croatian football fans looking to take out their frustrations on the nearest antipodean targets.

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052 - wed 21 jun - budapest

our tour officially over, we moved hotels the following morning, although only just down the road, and into a room that our tour guide had organised for us at a discount rate. we then booked a tour that would take us to budapest's statue park. we weren't actually sure if the tour would run because george w bush happened to be in budapest at the time, and all kinds of roads had been blocked off. we'd been warned the previous day by several people that we should probably expect all kinds of public transport cancellations, and that the tour probably wouldn't actually be running. but it did.

with rodrigo and ferdinand we went up to the statue park, which is basically a big flat paddock of sand where they now house some of the great statues of budapest's communist era. apparently its one of the bigger collections of intact communist statues, because many cities had a nasty habit of completely disfiguring or destroying all signs of the communist era as soon as the russians packed up shop and went home. someone in budapest had the foresight to store a few away, and recently they were repackaged into this open air museum. our bus tour included a guide, which was great because we wouldn't have had much of an idea what any of the statues symbolised if it wasn't for her. it was really interesting.

tacked on to the end of the statue park visit, in order to pad out the tour, our bus took us back to the main office of the tour company, where downstairs they had recreated an authentic communist apartment. at first glance this seemed kind of lame, because we were led downstairs to a white concrete room that basically resembled the basement (because it was the basement) filled with rundown retro furniture and bric-a-brac that you would expect to see at a flea market, or at tolleys. but once the tour guide started opening books, explaining things, we realised that despite the lame-ness it was probably more of an accurate and definitely a more interesting insight into the everyday mundanities of people's lives in the communist era, than anything else we had seen or were to see. our guide in particular gave us some great perspective, because she had been through primary school while the education system was still run by the communist government. she described some of the things they had been taught, history in particular, and how she and many of her schoolmates struggled in high school when all of a sudden there was a revolution, and the history being taught in the classrooms changed overnight, everything they had been taught was no longer true. she had old school books of kids, exercise books with kids names and colored-in front covers, and inside drawings of communist leaders and communist slogans in crayon and colored pencil. it definitely helped to make it real.

our tour ended with a complimentary shot of hungarian brandy, which actually took the form of our guide bringing out several bottles of the stuff in different flavours, putting them on the table with some plastic cups and saying 'help yourself.' i like tours where you get free booze.

whether or not it was the liquor, we were a little bit snoozy at this point, and also a bit peckish. after grabbing something to eat back at that outdoor cafe place, we wandered around in a bit of a daze. it was still quite hot. we ended up meeting back up with rodrigo and ferdinand, having a few drinks and then heading to a restaurant for some yummy dinner. back at the hotel, we said farewell to our perth buddies with the obligatory pointing-the-camera-at-the-mirror type group photo.

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051 - tue 20 jun - budapest

another early morning, and another hot seedy train ride, and we arrived in budapest. after grabbing lunch at a really cool, laid-back outdoor restaurant, we met up for a group bike ride through the city. again, we had an extremely literate and interesting guide, and we saw a lot of great things and learnt some stuff too. at one point rodrigo and i got ourselves lost, which was fun. we rode up to the castle, on the older buda part of town, although i should say that it was near impossible to actually ride up the hill. only the more athletic members of our group, and the guide of course, were able to manage it. needless to say, suz and i did not. the castle provided spectacular views of the city and the river.

after our sweaty bike tour we all went back and freshened up for our farewell dinner at a swanky hungarian restaurant. dinner was great, everyone reminisced about the last two weeks and resolved to keep in touch. after dinner, some of us went with our tour guide to her favourite local bar, which had that kind of disused warehouse vibe going on, folding chairs and exposed wiring and things like that, also with a big open inside courtyard and projection screens etc etc. but it was obviously a pretty well-known and popular hot spot because it was completely packed out. in awe of the coolness of the place, and of this city, we grabbed some drinks and chatted some more.

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050 - mon 19 jun - bratislava

the train trip out of the mountains and down to slovakia's capital, bratislava, was exceptionally hot, sweaty and stuffy. we ended up sharing a carriage with some slovakians who made it pretty clear that opening the window in our poorly ventilated, stuffy compartment, was not an option. luckily they got off the train half way through the journey, but the damage was done. by the time we arrived in bratislava past noon, we were almost all of us completely buggered.

and it was for that reason that we didn't make too much of our one evening in bratislava. a few people went in search of a very impressive sounding swimming complex, and instead found some depressing wading pools and a shopping mall. suz could tell you more about that. i had a nap. that night, we found our way to a japanese restaurant of all things, because we were craving some asian food. it was not bad, although there was heavy use of garlic in everything we ordered. but it hit the spot. after dinner we just wandered around town, and as it got dark we realised how pretty it was. heaps of alfresco diners, cafes and bars, and a lot of good-looking young slovakians, mostly uni students we guessed, out on a monday night. bratislava definitely seems like 'a place to be'.

that night we slept on a boat hotel - a 'botel' - yes they actually call it a botel. and it was not nearly as fun as it sounds.

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049 - sun 18 jun - the tatras

today we did a big hike into the mountains. i'm going to skip any of the descriptions, and you can just look at the photos.

after the hike, we made it to the only pub in town in time to watch the brazil v australia game (world cup 2006), although apparently it took a bit of persistance on the part of our tour guide to convince the owner that it was worth putting on. as we chowed down on slovakian pub food and of course, more beer, we watched the football game and were happy to not be beaten by too much. afterwards we ended up in the drawing room back at the hotel, where we drank more and chatted the night away. this night included suzanne's infamous mad dash across town at midnight - in thongs - in a desperate attempt to find an open store to sell us more wine/beer/anything. alas she had no luck, though we had by that stage definitely had enough.

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048 - sat 17 jun - krakow/the tatras

today was mostly a travel day. we narrowly avoided missing a train, and then spent a lot of time on a train, and then a bus. at one point we crossed the border, but only of course after stopping at the makeshift pub set up on the side of the road at the border crossing. we had beers. eventually we made it into slovakia, and into the high tatras, the mountains. as a group we split up to survey the different dinner options in the small town that we were based in - eventually we all ended up at the same place, a little italian place where we had pizzas and pastas.

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047 - fri 16 jun - krakow

we spent the morning as a group with a tour guide taking us around krakow's jewish quarter. this involved a visit to a synagogue, where the walls are made out of the headstones of graves, and i got to wear a skullcap. our tour guide was, yet again, insightful, intelligent and charming. in between the huge doses of polish history, she also pointed out streets and stores where parts of schindler's list had been filmed.

in the afternoon the group split up, and suz and i made our own way around krakow. i don't remember exactly what we did but at one point there was a pope john paul photo exhibition. then we met back up with the group to take a bus out to see some salt mines. we went underground and checked out.. the salt mines. i don't remember the name, or really i don't remember too much about it. but salt mines are cool. yeah.

once back in krakow a few of us found a cosy little place to eat dinner, which included a massive bowl of cheese fondue. then we attempted to hit the bars but didn't last too long - we found a couple more red-lit jazz bars but they were hot, stinky and overpriced. after some cocktails and the requisite vodkas, we called it a night.

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046 - thu 15 jun - auschwitz

we were picked up in teplice by two marvellously friendly polish men driving minibuses. our driver, peter, had the most striking bright blue eyes that i have maybe ever seen. if you have ever seen the movie dune, and you know about the sand people who eat that crazy stuff and then have crazy eyes, well he had those crazy eyes. if you walk without rhythm, then you won't attract the worm. come on, people! he was also extremely keen to teach us polish, none of which i now remember, and was also very keen to expand his own english vocabulary. for much of the trip he was driving with a polish-english dictionary unfolded in his lap. somewhere between 50% and 83% of the passengers in our minibus fell in love with this polish man.

auschwitz is not really something i can go into great detail about here, except to say that i'm sure everyone has their own reaction to it. i had the eerie feeling that i'd been there before, thanks to tv and movies no doubt, so i think i was desensitized to it before even getting there. add that to the fact that is kind of impossible to even get your head around the scope of the tragedy, and also that i have no personal involvement with it, that i came out feeling like i had been walking a movie set. it was solemn, but for me not harrowing.

in krakow we had time for a short tour around town before grabbing dinner. after dinner our tour guide took us to a favourite jazz club of hers and we all drank polish vodka, which is of course the best. krakow at night seems like the ratio of bar to person is 1:1.
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045 - wed 14 jun - teplice

we got up really early to check out prague's famous charles bridge. during the day it is completely packed with tourists (do you see a pattern emerging in prague?) who themselves are perhaps outnumbered by people hawking gimmicky tourist items. it was basically dawn and it was cool to be out and about at that time. a bunch of drunkards on the bridge, returning home no doubt after a big prague-style boozefest, must have overheard our accents because they started yelling random things like 'glenn mcgrath' at us. actually they were just yelling 'glenn mcgrath'. it was random.

we caught the train to our next destination, teplice. actually there are two teplices, and the one we went to was the 'other' teplice, home to rock formations and hills and small villages. we checked in to our lodgings, and had a big group lunch at a bistro in the small town. the owners of the bistro had seen it wise to seat our group kind of around the corner of the large l-shaped room that made up their establishment, and then used large boards to partition us off in our own makeshift space. we weren't sure if this was to make us feel special, or to hide the pesky foreigners from the locals.

we then embarked on a hike, wherein we saw snow, climbed rocks to see views, and there were also rock formations. fun was had. afterwards we returned to our hotel where we had a big group barbeque out in the back yard. it was the night that rodrigo was crowned the tongmaster.

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044 - tue 13 jun - prague

today we decided to tackle prague castle first thing in the morning, to try and beat the crowds. prague, apparently, recently supplanted paris as the number one tourist destination in europe. and no one comes to prague and doesn't visit the 'hrad', prague castle, so we figured getting in first might be the sensible thing.

it didn't really seem to make much difference. we had about half an hour of relative peace before it was just jammed with tourists from all corners. so we rushed through a fair bit of our visit, also because we were starting to become a little castled-out (surely a fairly common phenomena for europe travellers), and also because prague castle was frustratingly poorly signed. there just really wasn't that much in the way of illustration or context, slabs of text to illuminate the meaning of things, pamphlets that tell you about stuff. but the cathedral was still amazing. we even climbed the tower to get views out over the city, although i got really dizzy and nearly passed out going up the claustrophobic spiral staircase of around 300 steps. it took us something like 20 minutes just to get up the tower because things were moving at such a slow pace. and it was the one narrow spiral staircase that people were using to go up and to come down, and no crowd control limiting the numbers entering it.

we saw the changing of the guard, we actually were standing next to a group of elderly english ladies who had this tall, dashing 60-something youngster with a beer gut as their tour guide, he had a wonderful way of speaking that reminded me of stephen fry. actually maybe it WAS stephen fry... he must've really let himself go.

after enduring the 'golden lane' - theoretically an intact restoration of a ye olden days shopping strip, but in practice just a shopping strip - we had to leave. i think we both left feeling sorry for the hrad, because it now spends its days bloated and heavy from the weight of so many stomping feet. while other historical monuments limit the traffic that goes through their doors, in a struggle to preserve what is left of the buildings, prague castle seemed to have an all-in policy. surely in 50 years there will be no castle left, it will have been swept away by millions and millions of impatient footprints. but someone is making some money out of it in the meantime i suppose, and it would surely be less profitable to limit the numbers of tourists coming in and out. but does the hrad suffer? and can this hastily thrown together hypothesis be applied to the city of prague in general? mmmmm.

best leave that kind of talk to people who actually know what they are talking about. after the hrad we descended down the hill to find the st nicholas church in the middle of what is called the 'lesser town' which was really spectactular. 'the book' then told us to have lunch at a jazz club, which we soon regretted.

we then took in the wallenstein gardens, home to a unique cement wall (i think it was cement) that from a distance looks like howling skulls or the backdrop in al pacino's office in that final scene of the devils advocate, you know the one. yeah you do, just think about it. no? ok fine. walking back across to the old town, we found the tyn church which is not hard to find, being right on the main square of prague. afterwards, we found the mucha museum, wherein we learnt much that we did not previously know about a man named mucha, though some called him albert, and even others called him bobo for reasons known only to me.. he painted art nouveau stuff! then - iced coffees in the grand municipal hall, one of europe's best surviving example of art nouveau architecture! woo hoo!

we grabbed picnic bits from tesco and headed for a park, where we met rodrigo and ferdinand and drank wine and ate as the sun went down. there was an improbable public performance across the road that amused us momentarily.

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043 - mon 12 jun - prague

we made the controversial decision to skip the scheduled itinerary for the day, which was to head out to nearby kutna hora, famed for its bone church. we decided to stay in prague and try and figure out the bewildering, tourist-heavy, seemingly hollow (but is there something else going on) town. first we did our washing though. at the laundrette i saw a guy playing travel scrabble on his own. a deep need in me awakened to play scrabble. but for some reason all of the toy and games stores in prague seemed to only have the czech version of scrabble! who knew!

clothes washed, we of course had a beer by the river. then we retraced our steps from the previous day down into prague's jewish quarter to take a bit more of a look around the buildings and shops down there. we wandered off the beaten path and took in some other parts of the old town, like paris street which is the only evidence of a misguided plan that prague's powers that be once had to completely overhaul the town's districts to resemble paris. we found lunch at a cheap curry place under a hostel. yum.

after lunch we had a date with the museum of communism. this was an awesome place, slightly kitschy, heavy on information, and just generally really interesting. we learnt so much on our trip, about the rise and fall of communist governments, about hitler and nazis and stalin and the iron curtain, specifically about the czechs, about the slovaks, about the hungarians. we struggled to get it all into our brains and now its hard to get it back out, so i'm not going to get into it here. but its interesting stuff. europe has a recent history that is fascinating, and the events of the last fifty years are still kind of unfolding as you walk around. it makes australia seem like a very stable, safe and boring place.

we then had iced coffees had prague's grand municipal hall which is decked out in an art nouveau style. then we wandered up to wenceslas square, a packed-out long shopping strip which has in the past hosted most of prague's most important political demonstrations, including the one that brought the communist era to an end in prague. they call it 'the velvet revolution' because it happened so smoothly, with minimal violence and casualties, just people protesting for a week or so in 1989 until the russians just shrugged and left.

dinner was at a mexican restaurant called the cantina which served delicious enchiladas and some kick ass spanish wine. back home we played cards with our new buddies until 1 am. we hadn't noticed until this point that our apartment had a window looking out directly over the prague castle. at night it was lit up, and super pretty.

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042 - sun 11 jun - prague

good thing we had another early start, otherwise we wouldn't have fully been able to enjoy our hangovers. we took an early train to prague, and its a crime that we so struggled to nap whilst in transit.

after checking in to our apartment-style accommodation, the group splintered again and suz and i found ourselves a french bakery where we had croissants and a salad for lunch. and coffee. we then hooked up with our group and our tour leader took us on an orientation around prague, ending at the astronomical clock where there was a little mechanical display that goes off on the hour every hour. it was cooler than the daggy glockenspiel in munich. though it was also daggy.

then we had another lively walking tour lined up, this time with a man named george. he too could spin a yarn, knew his town backwards, and he incidentally seemed to hate austrians. we learnt that hapsburgs have a lot to answer for, that the czech people have been invaded or occupied by basically everyone else in europe, and that the czechs are responsible for basically anything awesome thats ever happened. george was a little biased. it turns out there is more to be angry about when it comes to austria, than the fact that they are australia without al.

(incidentally, when we were in salzburg, and we wandered through the stalls in the market square with the roma band playing, we found a souvenir stall selling all the typical stuff like baseball caps that say salzburg, mozart badges, mozart chocolate, etc. one t-shirt had a kangaroo on it and a picture of a road sign that said 'there are no kangaroos in austria'. sense of humour.)

incidentally, as we wandered the streets of prague, we saw a souvenir store selling dodgy things like baseball caps that say prague, postcards a-plenty, and amongst their t-shirts was one that said: "praha. czech me out!" (praha is the czech, non-english and therefore incorrect spelling of prague) it was a cute t-shirt. what didn't make sense was the t-shirt at the next souvenir shop that looked exactly the same, except it said "praha. prague me out!" something got lost in translation, between some dude's copy of photoshop and the t-shirt printers.

we broke from the gang to seek out dinner. we took to the hill towards the hrad, prague castle, and halfway up we found a place claiming to serve asian food. it was tough going. did you know that in australia we have good asian food? it turns out that in central europe, asian food is not so hot. it actually makes sense. we consoled ourselves with ice cream.

we were so tired we were asleep by 9.

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041 - sat 10 jun - cesky krumlov

today's adventure was rafting down the aforementioned river that runs through cesky krumlov. our group was split into two rafts. before we had even left town, the other group had managed to snag their raft on some wire and were lucky to shuffle it up on to the bank before total deflation. total deflation is, incidentally, my favourite steven seagal movie.

so we floated down the river for a couple of hours. there was conversation. there was also a small bottle of rum. it was a lovely thing to do in the morning, drink rum and row down the river. before we reached our designated pickup point, there was, of course, a pub on the side of the river. essentially a collection of plastic tables and chairs and a few portable rooms, it was a wonderful thing. everyone treated themselves to grog, which in the czech republic turns out to be hot rum and water. mixed in with some sugar its like having a warm sugary alcoholic tea. we debated the ancestry of the term grog before heading off.

back in town we headed up into the castle for a tour of its insides. hooked on to the back of a group of perhaps a hundred, it was a pretty impersonal experience compared to our excellent private guide of the town the night before. and our tour guide seemed like she should have been working the beaches at byron bay and not guiding us through some historically significant castle and its many hangings and chairs and paintings and whatever. but hey she said things and we listened. learning occured.

we couldn't resist returning to our vegetarian hangout for lunch. we all ordered things that we'd seen each other eat the day before. and at the end of our meal, our cute sheepish waiter brought us a free dessert to thank us for our intense patronage. what a guy. what a restaurant. be there.

i headed for the internet cafe while suz wandered the shops of cesky krumlov for a couple of hours. she bumped into last night's tour guide whose day job is working in the town's coolest bookstore, which seemed to make a lot of sense. then we headed back up into the castle and found tucked away at the back some really pretty gardens. and a really weird revolving ampitheatre. kind of like when you see john farnham, and the stage revolves, except you sit on the stage, and you spin in a circle while john farnham runs around the edges. but not just john farnham, imagine also olivia newton-john. and anthony warlow! someone get me gudinski, i have a great idea! we'll call it 'the man vent!' they must wear clown suits. and i will have a jet pack.

we couldn't get enough of this castle. when we'd had enough of the castle, we wandered down and had coffee by the river, this time not at the vegetarian place. we didn't want that guy to put out some kind of restraining order on us. but it didn't pay to branch out because we ended up at a place where the coffee tasted like pancakes. coffee in other countries is very confusing.

our tour leader had organised a special treat for dinner tonight, at an underground restaurant in a converted medieval cellar. the taller members of our group had to crouch to get through the little halls of the place, but with the candles and the wood benches and the authentic history of the place, it was really great. and then the food was awesome. a couple of the guys got giant hunks of pork that seemed like something out of polanski's macbeth.

then we headed to the cocktail bar. since we'd gotten to the czech republic, the word absinthe had been bandied about like, a lot, like something that gets bandied about a lot. like, a bandy. its not hard to find a bar that sells absinthe in the czech republic, or anywhere in europe really, so we made our order. i didn't mind it although it was pretty foul. green absinthe made me think of sambuca. maybe that helped me get it down. then there were absinthe cocktails. we danced with a man named martine. suz requested britney spears' "toxic" on my behalf, and then the dance floor was alight with tim. tim, and the famed stripey-shirt man, who was a very large, you might say rotund, czech man who had a low centre of gravity and an impeccable sense of rhythm. he wobbled with sex appeal, like i've never seen before. and he knew every single song. suz was lucky enough to get a dance with him at once point. i was jealous. i wanted to dance with stripey-shirt man. lets be honest - i wanted to BE stripey-shirt man. i will get there. pass the pork knuckle.

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040 - fri 09 jun - cesky krumlov

we met in the hotel lobby at 5:45am. this was the first but not the last of the ungodly early starts that were to plague our tour. it was a new experience for me, not altogether bad, but a little unexpected. there was no way we would have seen everything we saw without some of these early starts, so we owe a lot to them. god bless my mobile phone and its calmly persistent alarm tone. that morning we squinted into the shining, sunny early-morning reality of the professional traveller, and said 'ok we're in'.

breakfast was pastries from the train station before departing to cross the border into the czech republic. on the train uniformed dudes came in and totally stamped our passports. this didn't happen every time we crossed a border, so was majorly exciting. we arrived in cesky budejovice, the original home of the original budweiser beer, but we only saw as much as the train station before boarding a bus to cesky krumlov.

cesky krumlov is a great little village. much has been said about it, google will tell you how great it is, so i won't put my two cents in apart from to say that it is a must-see kind of place.

after checking in, our tour leader took us to a little place for lunch where we had some delicious czech food and the first of many marvellously cheap and exceedingly drinkable czech beers. our tour leader was quite the gastronomic guide, consistently leading us to great meals in different cities. suz and i figured that would probably be one of our priorities too, if we were tour guides seeing the same parts of the same towns week in and week out. you'd want to find the right place to eat.

our activity for the afternoon was a bike ride, where a bus dropped us off 10 kilometres or so out of town and we rode, mostly downhill, back into town through some pine forests and hilly vistas. i got a bit of a dodgy bike where the chain came loose. we were led down the hill by a handsome young local guy, who turned out to be in high school. we would stop occasionally and he would tell us how much longer we had to go, and point at maps along the way. he had a really cute quirk in his english where instead of saying something like 'and thats all you need to know about the bikes' he would just finish his trains of thought by saying 'and its all about the bikes.' like 'here is where we are on this map blah blah blah... yes and its all about the map.' we giggled. you probably had to be there. i apologise.

there was, of course, a pub at the bottom of the hill. we had more czech beers. our bike guy informed us that the local cesky krumlov beer was crap. we asked him whether he was old enough to be drinking. he said 'it doesn't matter, this is a beer town.' works for me. i'm sure he'd had more beers than i'd had hot dinners, and he was only 8. (slight exaggeration)

after the bikes, our group splintered and some of us ended up in a cocktail bar. we had cocktails while the soccer played on the big screen. and then we ate dinner at a vegetarian restaurant, literally on the banks of the river that runs through town. we more or less could have stepped from our table into the river which was flowing level with the bank, and flowing rapidly too. on the other side of the river, the magnificent castle. it was photogenic. so we took photos. the food was so great at this place that we resolved to return later for dessert. it also helped that our waiter was giggly and almost sheepishly cute. we think there may have been something special in his lentils, because there was something funny about him. i don't know whether to be suspicious or envious of suspiciously happy and giggly vegetarian czech people (or was he french?)

after dinner we met up with everyone and did a walking tour of the town with our local guide, whose name sounded like aldruska, and thats the best i can do there with spelling. she was vibrant and smart and spun a good yarn. and by that i mean stories. and she had crazy hair. she told us a lot of great stuff, like about haunted music schools, and about the old 'to restore old buildings or not to restore old buildings' debate, you know the one. it was an excellent little tour around town.

afterwards there was of course dessert at the vegetarian place. less than 24 hours in this town and we had found a hangout. towards the end of our desserts, we were approached by two drunk scots with matching t-shirts who sang us 'lady in red' and then practised their standup routine on us. they were shit funny (that means 'really funny'), and they were shit faced (that means 'really drunk'). then they sang lady in red again, pulled suz up for a dance, threatened to dunk her in the river, then moved on to the next table. we figured we were probably the most receptive audience they'd had that night, because we suffered (endured?) their attention much longer than anyone else that night.

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039 - thu 08 jun - vienna

this means nothing to me... this means nothing to me... ohhhh... vienna...

we had breakfast. and then our tour leader took us on a walking tour around the city pointing out a lot of interesting things that i assume i would remember if i looked at the photos. here's hoping. it was good though.

we then had the rest of the day to ourselves.

we took a tram around to a coffee house to have a slice of the local dessert delicacy (or tourist trap) sacher torte. which was delicious. and of course we had coffee. this was the only coffee house we made it to in vienna and perhaps it wasn't indicative of whatever it is about coffee houses that makes them special in vienna, because it was essentially a cafe. note to self: when you go back to vienna, seek out a real coffee house, whatever that is.

then we got back on a circle tram and took in more sights. we got off at the state opera house and decided that it might be cool to go to the opera tonight. then we went for a short walk and found the coolest market around, the nachtmarkt (sp?). wow. stalls after stalls of great food, continental specialties, fruit and veg, breads, nuts, and then - open air restaurants, and bars. and seated at the tables and on the stools - actual young people! after spending a lot of time haunting the touristy parts of these cities, and therefore spending a lot of time with a different demographic, it was cool to almost accidentally come across this market that was a gathering place for young cool vienna people. i instantly wanted to rent out an apartment, in this street, right next to the market. suz talked me out of it.

we made our way to vienna's museum quarter, where we struggled to pick one museum to spend the afternoon in. we ended up in the leopold museum, devoted to collections of austrian artists. we saw a lot of egon schiele, whose name is disturbingly similar to mine, and also some gustav klimt. and some other dudes. a lot of paintings. but it was cool, and i liked schiele, not just because of the name thing. suz liked klimt.

we went home and got changed. we made it back to the state opera house in time to join a short queue for standing-room tickets for tonight's show. the vienna state opera house is a hot ticket, and its apparently neither easy or cheap to get tickets in the real seats. but if you don't mind queuing up on the night, and you don't mind standing, you can pay the equivalent of five bucks to see what the posh, faux-posh and pseudo-posh people see. and between the acts, you get to wander out into the grand foyers of the theatre and rub shoulders (or other parts if you are some kind of pervert) with the aforementioned psuedo-quasi-posh people. it so happened that tonight's opera was actually ballet but that was ok. it was sleeping beauty, although i didn't realise that for some time. when suz turned to me and said 'do you know what we are watching yet?' i had to say no and she filled me in.

three hours is a long time however to stand in a poorly ventilated space crammed in with other cheap bastards. we had almost passed out by the time we emerged. to celebrate our night we stopped at the cafe attached to the opera house and ordered ice coffees. they were without doubt the most foul iced beverage to have graced this earth. disappointed with this poor example of vienna's attention to coffee detail, but happy with our night of opera (which was actually ballet) we returned to hotel mozart.

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038 - wed 07 jun - halstatt/vienna

we caught the early ferry and the early train out of halstatt. we could have stayed there for weeks longer, just sucking in the views and the atmosphere of the place.

we arrived in vienna much later, at 1 pm. today, we were to meet our tour group who we had signed up to tour through central europe with. we found our assigned accommodation, the 'hotel mozart' (you may sense a pattern emerging in austria..) and we checked in.

as we were to be meeting up with our group at 6, we decided to spend the afternoon out at the schonbrunn palace. it is a grand palace and gardens a short train trip out of vienna. we wandered around the gardens and climbed a big big hill to get to a great view of vienna atop the gloriette. it was a sunny day with clear blue sky, at least until we descended the great hill. black clouds swept in with gusto. there were some foreboding views with the black clouds hanging in the sky right next to the bright blue sky. some would say that it looked 'cool'.

the rain passed quickly. we went back to the hotel. we met with our tour leader and our 10 fellow travellers, got through all the formalities and required form filling, and then all went out for dinner at a place specialising in schnitzel (not uncommon in vienna). unsurprisingly everyone ordered schnitzel, except me, i ordered beef in red wine sauce. after dinner, wherein much getting to know of people took place, we adjourned to a discotheque for a few beverages. drunk russian lads, and i'm not sure why we assumed they were russian, were clearly enjoying themselves vocally. suz and i stuck it out to the end with our new buddies, but we were all in bed by midnight. a good start to the tour.

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037 - tue 06 jun - halstatt

we awoke early with no idea that what awaited us today was a town of such 'crazy pretty' that it blew away all previous notions of 'crazy pretty'.

but before leaving salzburg we took in the royal gardens in the middle of town, which were pretty. there were more weddings and brides and bridal gowns and photographers. wedding photographs are suspiciously conspicuous in royal gardens and palace gardens, although they aren't really suspicious, i just liked the way 'suspicious' and 'conspicious' went together just there in that sentence.

at the train station we had some trouble boarding a train to halstatt thanks to an unhelpful ticket dude. he caused us to miss our train, so what else were we to do at 10am in the morning, with an hour to kill before the next train to halstatt? we crossed the road from the train station to the pub and had 10am beers.

we arrived in the world heritage listed town of halstatt at 3. halstatt is perched on the side of a lake that is surrounded by big tall mountains. it is beautiful. the train station is on the opposite side of the lake to the town, so to get into town you have to cross the lake by ferry. its the best and most dramatic entrance to the town.

at the local tourist office they helped us find accommodation. we ended up in a guesthouse with a generous double room that opened out onto a balcony with beautiful views of the lake and the town. there are photos to prove it. say no more.

after finding some lunch we took a long walk around the town. it started to drizzle. we found the town's old church, with its gardens and cemetary, and its accompanying bonehaus or bone house. its a modest little room, more like a cave, that is filled with painted human skulls. each human skull is marked with a name, a year of death and patterns or decorations appropriate to the dead person's family or status or occupation. similar to kutna hora near prague, the story goes that as the cemetery ran out of space in halstatt they needed to come up with more creative ways of storing dead bodies. the last person to have their bones stored in the bonehaus died in 1989.

we had dinner at a nice restaurant where we had big pasta and lovely wine. by the time we got back to our room it had become deathly cold outside but it was still beautiful.

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036 - mon 05 jun - salzburg

we had a delicious organic breakfast at hotel amadeus. obviously we hated it, and longed for the hostel experience of a slice of cheese and an egg and powdered coffee with coffee-milk.

we checked out of hotel nice-breakfast and found a hostel that would take our sorry asses. the hostel was part of an old church called the institute of st sebastian. we wandered around the church grounds, the cemetery, and then wandered around the town of salzburg. a roma band (you aren't meant to call them gypsies any more) were playing in the market square.

we found our way up a hill to the abbey where they shot those abbey scenes from the sound of music. pretty and quiet. further up the hill, we bypassed the great fortress of salzburg to find ourselves in the grounds of a ruins of an old tower, looking out over a breathtaking mountain range. we paused. we accidentally ran into an american dude we met in cologne.

back down in town we decided to split up. suz had by this stage decided that she could no longer resist the urge to go on a 'sound of music' tour. i, however, found it possible to still resist this urge. i found myself an internet cafe and wasted, or should i say spent, the better part of the day writing up the blog (not this bit, but a bit from several weeks ago..). suz went on a tour. at this point, i'd like to hand the mic to my beloved wifey:

"

insert suz here

"

reunited, we stumbled around salzburg in search of dinner. as it started to rain, we found ourselves in a popular tourist haunt serving authentic austrian food. when we entered, our waitress informed us quite sullenly that there was unfortunately only seating remaining in the 'no smoking' section. this was ok with us. food was good, and next door there was a seriously kitschy 'sound of music' theatre restaurant thing going on, so we go to hear all of that and avoid the price of admission, and also the awkward thing where you can't talk to each other or enjoy your dinner because you feel obligated to watch the lame cabaret thats happening in front of you. so, all good. we went back to the hostel where thankfully, there were bunk beds. yes!

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035 - sun 04 jun - fussen/salzburg

after breakfast we boarded a train for fussen. on the agenda today - neuschwanstein castle, the world-famous castle nestled in the black forest, the fairytale castle that walt disney based 'that' disneyland castle on. yes that fairytale castle. that was the agenda. the castle. agenda = fairytale castle.

on the train from fussen we met an american family who invited us to visit them in tennessee. we took a raincheck. they were really friendly, and their names were mike & tina, and their two college-age sons brandon & alex. one of the boys had spent 6 months studying in germany and his whole family had come to visit him. what a cool wonderful thing. and what was on their agenda? apart from family fun and general good times? fairytale castle. their agenda was our agenda. agendas = fairytale castle.

we parted ways when we arrived at the train station in fussen. fussen is a modern town nestled in the hills. from there we caught a bus to the town of schwangau, which honestly seemed less like a town and more of a glorified entrance lobby for the fairytale castle, which turned out to actually be two separate castles, and also turned out to be the hot tourism ticket in all of the black forest. the place was packed. we may as well have been at disneyland, such were the lines. actually, it was interesting because only one month earlier, we HAD been in disneyland. schwangau, for those in the know, is very much like downtown disney.

we queued for our tickets to see neuschwanstein castle, which i may have mentioned is the 'fairytale castle', and as i also may have mentioned, was on our a-g-e-n-d-a. armed with tickets we assaulted the hill, which we need to climb in order to get to our agenda-listed castle, the castle of mad ludwig ii, the fairytale monarch of fairytale germany. it is said that he went mad because he was obsessed with agendas, and fairytales, and castles. and he often liked to combine his obsessions in the form of an equation, for example: agenda = fairytale castle.

our tour of castle neuschwanstein (fairytale castle) was great for two reasons. the castle, which was actually never completely finished, is really quite a strange and impressive thing. ludwig was a huge fan of the composer wagner and wanted to recreate the fairytales in wagner's pieces in the form of a a castle. ludwig was like a mad walt disney ahead of his time, except that he wasn't interested in animation, and he was also obsessed with agendas. the castle's interiors were really fascinating, almost grotesquely grandiose but also strangely personal.

the second reason why our tour was awesome was because of our guide, who was a manchild. we couldn't work out if he was 15 or 35, and he had a delightfully zombie-like way of moving and talking. his eyes were kind of vacant as he recited for the thousandth time (or more) the lifeless descriptions of an otherwise breathtaking castle (fairytale castle), but it wasn't like he wasn't enjoying it. it was like he was part of the castle, like he had traded in his soul, traded in his life force, and also traded in any chance he ever had of growing facial hair, in order to become one with the fairytale castle, or perhaps more specifically, the fairytale castle tour. we did not ask him if he liked agendas, but suz did enquire about something at the end of the tour...

something we have learnt in our travels is that glass can last many centuries, but over time it melts, so that glass that is centuries old has a warped look to it, where some of the glass from the top of the pane has actually 'fallen' (albeit at an extraordinarily slow pace) to the bottom of the pane. the windows in the fairytale castle did not have this look to them, so suz assumed that they were new. she said to our manchild guide with no soul, 'when the castle was built, what was in the windows? not this glass obviously' to which soul-less manchild guide chimed 'the windows are all original' prompting suz to exclaim 'wow! thats amazing.' what followed was the single most quotable line of the whole trip. imagine this being said by a fair-haired german manchild who has given up his life force to the evil fairytale castle of the king of agendas:

'yes. it IS amazing.'

i'm shuddering right now just typing this.

after our manchild experience, our agenda thusly fulfilled, we descended the hill to eat lunch in schwangau. we shared a table with a pair of young new yorkers who conversed with us in a semi-bemused fashion that i have now come to associate with all native new yorkers. they were friendly, but a bit stand-offish, and they smiled a lot but it was those kind of slanty smiles where you really hope they are smiling about what you think they are smiling about, and not about something else.

that afternoon we left germany. from fussen we passed back through munich and ended up in salzburg. by the time we arrived it was well and truly approaching night-time. we slugged our packs from the station down in to the main town, spotting a shell service station for the first time in how many weeks. all the hostels were booked - so in the end we were forced to stay in a nice hotel called 'hotel amadeus'. we drank wine and ate chocolate from the minibar, we relished not being in bunk beds, and suz found a channel on the tv that played 'the sound of music' 24 hours a day. from that point, there was to be no flicking. our stay in austria had begun.

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034 - sat 03/06/2006 - munich

we found ourselves on a walking tour of munich this morning, with our guide mike the american dude, and 4 others. there were churches, and the usual good stories that you come to expect from these kind of things. our tour guide seemed to be an unlikely person to have ended up in munich, but things made sense when he mentioned he had a german girlfriend.

the tour ended back at the glockenspiel at noon, where we were treated to the admittedly uninspiring show for a second time. afterwards we sought out coffee and hot chocolate - something we do at least once everyday, surely - and actually i had the best ice coffee of the trip at a place that i now don't recall the name of. but if we're ever in munich together, i can probably remember how to get there, and we'll go. it'll be rad.

we walked down a street called 'tal' to a place called 'isartorplatz' and then took in ludwig's bridge. there may or may not be photos to accompany these random names of random landmarks. the river that runs through munich is a weird bright green, like an algae kind of color, which we didn't expect. a lot of the rivers in bavaria and western austria had this kind of alpine algae-green color.

we found a pretty fashionable area on our travels which may or may not have been called gartnerplatz. lots of interesting clothes, design stores that sell unlikely or confusing calendars, coffee places with names like 'san franciscan blend'. that kind of area. then our travels continued into the viktualmarkt (sp?) where we bought lunch bits that we took to the englischer garten in nearby maxvonplatz. are you getting all of this down? there will be an exam.

we ate bean salad on the grass. there were horses about.

then we took a long walk through the university district and down into schwabing. i bought long overdue new jeans from a very grumpy and confusing old man - " 'just looking'? 'just looking'! no no, no 'just looking'! " - and we found a second-hand english book store where we bought up on some new reads. lolita, memoirs of a geisha, and a german book called 'the tin drum.'

we eventually found ourselves back at the hostel with pasta and sauce ready to cook. we dodged the potentially crippling fact that the hostel had no kitchen, by taking over the bar temporarily to use their microwave. after dinner and wine we headed back into central munich, suzanne determined to find apple strudle on our last night in bavaria. i think we had almost succeeded in finding it when we accidentally came upon a haagen-daas store and had to have ice cream instead.

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033 - fri 02/06/2006 - freiburg/munich

after a short morning walk back around the munster (church - pictured right) we headed for munchen. on the train i started reading 'life of pi'. it was mid-afternoon when we arrived.

our munich hostel was close to the train station, and between the two was some of the best and cheapest pizza in munich (apparently) so we grabbed a bite for lunch. we then wandered towards the centre of town, and made it to the marienplatz in time to see the glockenspiel at 5pm. this is a three- or four-hundred year old mechanical clockwork display on the side of the old town hall building that operates twice a day, always to huge crowds made even huger today because of the impending world cup. tourist numbers were definitely up in munich.

after the glockenspiel we wandered for a while, taking things in. we ended up at the hofbrauhaus, the most famous of the munich bavarian beer halls. hofbrauhaus was beer + sausages + beer + oompah band + rowdy contiki american dudes.

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032 - thu 01/06/2006 - freiburg

suz woke up at 8am but kindly let me sleep in a few hours longer. although it later turned out that she wasn't so much doing me a favour, she just figured that the weather was so shitty that it wasn't worth getting me up.

we sought out the munster, the impressive gothic cathedral of freiburg. surrounding the munster there is a daily market in the munsterplatz, with plenty of fresh fruit and veg and the usual market stalls, breads, meats, crafts. you know the drill and we sure has hell know the drill now, somehow we manage to seek out the markets in every city we go to. certain things are constants on this trip - markets, H&M, camper shoes (somehow we always find them, accidentally). the continuing feeling of inferiority that comes from knowing only one language.

at the market we bought some picnic supplies. today's plan: to head to schauinsland and catch the cable car up the mountain for a picnic and some scenic views. after a false start, we figured out the buses and got to schauinsland and found our way onto the cable car. clutching our bag of strawberries we ascended up the mountain.

the views were great but the sky was still grey, in fact the clouds were hovering low around the mountain. our cable car became completely engulfed in fog so that we could no longer see out. then the fog slowly began to thin out, and hang on, is that snow on the mountain? clutching our bag of strawberries, our rolls and ham and cheese, we began to feel kind of dumb. when the cable car clunked into its final position, we realised that we may not be having the picnic we imagined.

escaping the snowy cold we found the mountaintop cafe, which was predictably empty. even the waiters were sitting at a table immersed in a game of uno. they kindly let us unfold our picnic onto the adjoining table after we said something along the lines of "we're australian, we brought a picnic, we don't have snow where we come from". we ordered coffees, they continued their uno game.

frieburg has a few conventional city shopping streets, lined with the usual department stores, the same ones that we see in every city. we wandered around town, came across many interesting historical buildings, some cute freiburg idiosyncracies. like the mosaic stonework logos that litter the footpaths, symbolising sister cities and other things.

we ordered cheap soups (and more riesling) from the restaurant adjoining our guesthouse. we had lots of heavy talk at the dinner table that night, religion, politics, one of those big chats. it was good fun.

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