8 itchy feet

6 months done

Published on July 22, 2016July 22, 2016 by 8itchyfeet2 Comments

Yesterday (7 July) it was six months since we left home. Six months on trains, planes, automobiles and living in hotels, homestays, tents and Airbnb’s.

I remember wondering before we left if we would get sick of travel. If living out of a suitcase would wear thin. If we would get homesick after a time. If we would tire of moving from one place to another. I worried about having enough money to complete the journey and about one or all of us getting sick. I dreaded the thought that something might happen to Amy or Oliver. I even wondered, on occasion, if the world might disappoint. That after going to all the trouble of taking time from work, packing up the house and taking Amy and Oliver out of school we would discover there is nowhere better than home.

When I read that list again, it’s a wonder we went anywhere! So how do my worries stand-up against reality? Well, as of yesterday I can honestly say that my wanderlust has increased not diminished. I would dearly love to spend more time almost everywhere we have been and I feel no compulsion to return home. Yet. Homesickness then? Nope. None. I think the same can be said for Emma, and if you have just read that then it survived her editing and must be true!

The picture is a little greyer for Amy and Oliver. Amy misses her friends and all of our extended family, jumping at every chance to put in a Facetime or Skype call. She also recoils a little at any fanciful suggestion that one year of travel be stretched to two. Which is not to say she’s not enjoying the trip. In Amy’s perfect world I think you would all be along with us for the ride! Oliver has changed over the last six months from being a bit unsure about it all to one of travels stronger advocates. ‘Go home! Are you kidding!’. I’m sure I’ve heard him say this from time to time.

Amy working on a Skype call in Kathmandu airport

As to other concerns, there is no rational reason that anyone is any more likely to become ill out here than at home nor any reason why peril is more likely to present itself here than there. The last of my worries however, that the world might disappoint, was surely the most ridiculous. Talk about going out of your way to find something to worry about!

Everywhere we go presents new fascinations; historic, natural, culinary or simply in the subtle differences in the layout of a supermarket. Australia is a wonderful place. It’s a fine part of an even finer tapestry which is, as they say, altogether more than the sum of its component parts. Oh yes, and so far we are a bit under budget, which means I am now starting to relax.

Having said all of that, we are changing as we go. The edge has come off our eagerness. There is no need to rush out the door. Every time it opens the view is different and dealing with that sometimes means lingering a little longer in the hotel room each day doing ‘normal’ stuff. Time is needed to process experiences and for more mundane activities like making bookings, reading books, preparing and doing school work, writing blogs and postcards and, you know, banking.

Schoolwork and blogging with friends in Thailand

We are changing in other ways too. You think you know your partner and your children, but I’m not sure you really do until you live with them 24 hours a day 7 days a week for months on end. At home little irritations can be glossed over because they happen five minutes before everyone heads out the door and goes their own way for 8 hours. By the time you regroup, the matter is long forgotten, but not necessarily dealt with. On the road, little irritations can become a major rub, if they are not soothed beforehand.

We each have our anxieties and personality quirks. Of our foibles, I have a propensity to worry and overanalyse, self-evident perhaps from my admission re concern that travelling the world might disappoint. I can also get overexcited about things on occasion which has a tendency to drive everyone else nuts.

Emma can be anxious and controlling when it comes to matters of our collective health and safety and has a reasonably short fuse when it comes to hijinks and silly noises. Amy is very wary of the unknown and can find the days which involving moving from one accommodation to the next somewhat stressful. Oliver has a tendency to make oddly irritating noises from time to time, a perfect match for Emma, along with a highly developed sense of justice.

There were times earlier in this trip when the mix of these lead to… tensions. Back in South East Asia I recall at times wishing that we could all be more co-operative and cohesive. Little feuds would sometimes become tiresome and unvoiced irritations gnawed around the edges. Thrashing out home-schooling arrangements was a fairly constant battle which didn’t really help. It was like nobody expected we would actually go through with it and if it was ignored hard enough it would just go away.

We’ve moved on for the most part. After six months on the road I think it would be fair to say each of us has developed a much healthier respect for the others ‘buttons’ and is inclined to push upon them less often. Oliver is a case in point with a notable transition from agitator to happiness enforcer. ‘No, no, no grumpies’ he would often say with a waggle of his finger whenever a sniff of tension was aired.

School work too, is no longer the battle it was earlier on. The constant debates about journal writing which dogged our early months on the road have largely gone. It’s still not Amy or Oliver’s favourite activity, but they have come to accept it has to be done. Of equal, if not greater value, than bookwork however are the many discussions we embark upon into the history and happenings of the regions through which we travel.

It is a marvellous thing to be there to help fill in some of the blanks when Amy and Oliver embark upon a line of genuine, curious questioning about what we’ve seen or what’s going on or why things are the way they are where we are… or were… These discussions are not branded ‘school work’, so the conversations can go on for quite some time with focus and thought. We have covered various aspects of global economics, politics, history, geology, geography, ecology, languages and relative merits of various forms of societal organisation including democracy, monarchy, communism, capitalism, socialism and recently fascism as well.

There is no doubt in my mind that Amy and Oliver are developing an appreciation for people, places, cultures, religions and history that would be impossible to replicate from home. So, for that matter are Emma and I. I sometimes feel like we’re on a field trip for world history, with each place we visit filling in detail or blanks from fragmented pieces of information gleaned over the years from who knows where.

We filled in some gaps in our Roman history

To the extent this is the case for Amy and Oliver, in their own way, book work becomes the stuff of how to translate thoughts and understandings to paper, and crunch the numbers for your pocket money given different exchange rates and work out if that gelato represents anything approaching ‘value for money’. Learning about the world happens by osmosis, in sights and sounds, through books shared and conversations that seem to go on for hours when it really is time to go to bed.

It is interesting too, standing apart from the business and preoccupations of the people who dwell in the places we visit. I recognise myself in the faces of tired looking commuters on metro trains across Europe. Bored, but resigned to their daily fate. I wonder if they know how much of their experience they share with others the world over, or whether they are lost in their own internal wrangling. I wonder, if they wonder why they do it? I wonder what are they working for and what’s going on in their lives?

In most places we have freedom by virtue of the countries we live in, but how many people actually exercise that freedom and how many unconsciously follow the paths and norms handed out by tradition and social imperatives? How many ride the metro each day because an alternative is hidden from view? Then I wonder how much of what I do and have done is also shaped by tradition and social imperatives and how much a matter of conscious choice? I rather suspect more belongs in the category of the former rather than the latter.

When we first started travelling for long periods in 2011, I felt guilty. I felt like taking time out was shirking my responsibilities and, to a degree, that travel was the domain of the retired. Responsibility to whom was not clear nor consciously questioned. We had saved enough money to support ourselves without being a burden on anyone else, at least for a time, so what responsibility was not attended to? And who is to say that you have to be retired to see the world? Where did the notion that work is the absolute imperative come from and how is it perpetuated? These things I ponder.

And ponder we will for a little longer yet. We’ve seen so much and done so much already and we’ve only visited fourteen countries. Aren’t there more than 200? I wonder what is coming next?

Friends in Denmark

Published on July 12, 2016July 12, 2016 by 8itchyfeet4 Comments

Denmark. It wasn’t on our list of places to visit, but that was before we met Britt, Morten, Seigne, Sebastian and Sigurd on a river boat on the Mekong. Some people you meet you never see again. Others linger for a while and a few become friends. We have been so lucky to meet three families on this trip that fall into the last category. We knew as soon as we said goodbye to Britt and Morten back in Luang Prabang that if we got the chance we would pay a visit to Danish shores.

The budget airline gods must have thought this a good idea because it’s cheap as rotten haggis to fly from Edinburgh to Copenhagen. We also figured a trip to Denmark would set us up nicely for a southern migration through Germany into Switzerland and the French Alps later on.

We arrived into Copenhagen late at night because of delays and milled about nervously at the airport hoping we were in the right spot for our Uber driver to pick us up. We were, or he was, or both, so we jumped in the car with a very friendly Danish fellow and were on our way. Our Airbnb was very Scandinavian with a funky loft that had Emma and I dreaming up grand renovations for our place. These may or may not come to fruition – who knows. Life is a splendid but unknowable thing.

The first thing you notice about Copenhagen, even as the hour approaches midnight, are the bikes. They’re everywhere. Everywhere. The Danish ride everywhere and the whole place is set up so they can do so. Bike lanes sit between the road and footpath almost everywhere you go. Need to travel further afield? No worries, the trains all have carriages dedicated to bikes.

Biking is serious business, so much so it is said that the only way to upset a Dane is to get in the way of his or her bike. Our Airbnb host wouldn’t let his son ride to school until he was twelve despite all this bike friendliness. In some parts of town there is some really serious commuting going on.

Not that we found this to be a problem. So many people ride bikes that the traffic never really builds up, a matter affirmed by our Uber driver, and what’s more the road rage battle which seems to exist between drivers and bikers in Australia is totally absent. Yep, we liked Denmark from the start.

I liked it even better when we visited the Royal Palace, by bike, a couple of days later. The big fluffy hat wearing guards here bear a striking resemblance to those at Buckingham palace, except here they’ll actually talk to you. I liked that. It’s altogether less pretentious and a whole lot friendlier. I asked if the Queen was home while Amy and I posed next to the guard for a photo.

‘No she’s gone sailing’ replied the guard.

‘Just for the day’, I asked?

‘All summer’, the guard replied.

I guess she likes sailing and isn’t too worried about any Scottish style plots to remove her from the throne. Those Scots sure did like murdering their monarch for several hundreds of years there. I forgot to write about that last time, but all you really need to know is that if you sat on the throne of Scotland there was a good chance you’d be dead within a year, two at the most. Britt did tell me that the Danish Queen’s husband is a bit upset the she won’t make him king. He’s a Frenchman and apparently the populace doesn’t approve of the idea. Maybe she had better not stay out on the water too long.

Guarding, chatting and posing – tough job!

If it’s good enough for the Queen, it’s good enough for us. So we went sailing too. We caught one of those sleek looking European canal boats for a tour of Copenhagen. It was a very touristy thing to do but really worthwhile, walking that far is hard work. Along the way we came across a most remarkable, unremarkable thing. The Little Mermaid. She is one of the most visited spots in all Copenhagen. Seen by millions of people every year.

It’s a statue of a mermaid on a rock, about a metre high, from the story by Denmark’s favourite son, Hans Christian Anderson. The people come in multiple bus and boatloads at a time and for the life of me I can’t see why. I mean, it’s nice’n’all, but… am I missing something? Still, ‘when in Rome…’ so the saying goes so we visited too.

Having seen Copenhagen, mermaid and all, we jumped on a train to Odense where Britt met us at the railway station. It was a little surreal to find a friend we’d met half a world away waiting for us another half a world away. By that evening we were feeling well and truly at home. I felt like part of the furniture so deeply was I nestled on the couch with Morten, drinking beer, eating peanuts and watching the European Championship. I don’t normally go in for football but, ‘when in Rome…’. Gooooo Iceland! Nobody expected Iceland to make the quarter finals, but they deposed the English in a European Championship upset. This being at one with the couch went on for three nights straight.

It wasn’t all beer and peanuts though. Britt and Morten’s hedge needed trimming, so I helped trim it although they may have been better off leaving me out of it. I sliced the extension cord for the third time in my illustrious hedge trimming career. ‘Ah, Morten. We’ve got a problem…’.

My error was rewarded only with Danish delicacies including ultra-fresh strawberries, cream and sugar and chocolate wafers on a bread roll. You have no idea how good that is. I think I put on 2 kilos in a week, despite the bike riding, hedge trimming and the occasional run. Britt did also make Emma and I try the salted Danish liquorice – piratos. The equivalent of an Australian offering vegemite to someone of any other nationality. Entertaining to watch, hard to swallow!

Britt and Morten watching us eat the liquorice

Between the football, the eating and the gardening we also learnt a bit about the Vikings at a nearby Viking museum, played a round of mini-golf out at Kertiminde (say Kerdiminnay…I think), cycled around Odense, visited Hans Christian Anderson’s house and took a drive to the west coast and back where the horizon was a blaze of colour with kite-surfers.

When your friends are tired after a big day out

Never seen this many kite surfers before!

We also took a day on our own to visit Legoland, Lego being a Danish invention after all. To say Legoland was a hit with the younger members of the family would be a gross understatement. Oliver looked over at Emma and I on one ride and stated in a very matter of fact way, ‘well this is actually quite fun’, before grinning and turning his attention back to the action.

Amy discovered she loved roller coasters, the train was a bit sedate

Just shy of ten fun filled hours passed before we turned tail and headed for home. Ten hours during which we were picked up and thrown around by more devices than my usually robust constitution could take. I felt a little off colour for a fair portion of the afternoon and thanked the Lego creators for the slow boat through Mini-land to recover my equilibrium. Slower than walking pace, it was still plenty quick by days’ end.

More enjoyable though than all of that was whiling away the hours in Danish suburbia with Danish friends. The kids played games in the backyard and did crafts, happily passing up opportunities to visit more castles. It was the most normal we have all felt for 6 months and seven days felt like it was over before it had begun.

It was with some sadness that we packed up and bid Britt, Morten, Seigne, Sebastian and Sigurd goodbye. We hope we planted enough seeds to entice them down under someday soon.

Twelve degrees and raining

Published on July 7, 2016July 8, 2016 by 8itchyfeetLeave a comment

‘There are two seasons in Scotland. June and Winter.’ – Billy Connelly.

Hang on. We were there in June. Did we miss something? Or is twelve degrees and raining just how it goes? We overheard another camper one evening make a similar observation. ‘Scotland, nine months of winter and three months of bad weather’ he said.

It’s no wonder the Scots love a good pub. They’re warm, with cheery lights, a stiff drink to occupy (and probably dull) the senses and company to boot. It makes sense. Not that we saw the inside of one. They’re not really budget friendly, especially in a country where the exchange rate doubles the cost of… everything.

So after a day and a half in Edinburgh gearing up with camping equipment, to take the edge off the exchange rate mark-up, we occupied most of our time in the great outdoors. Where it was twelve degrees and raining most of the time. The weather was so bleak on the day we drove out of Edinburgh I begun to have doubts about why I had dragged us all the way up here.

I have had a fascination with Scotland for many years, for reasons that are not entirely apparent, even to me. Maybe it’s because it’s dark, brooding, moody and beautiful all at the same time. I like that, but dark and brooding and beautiful is one thing when you are dreaming of far off lands from the comfort of your living room and something else altogether when confronted with the practicalities of camping in the wet and cold and long hours in the pub is not an option.

My mood however may just have been effected by the preceding four and a half hours spent in the windowless Europcar office at the Edinburgh train station where we were locked in heated debate over rental insurance. Europcar refused to acknowledge the third party insurance we had purchased in conjunction with our booking, requiring us to purchase their own insurance as well, at four times the price!

Slightly stubborn – we almost set up camp there!

Were we going to take that lying down? We were not! Just as surely as no self-respecting, whiskey drinking, beard toting, kilt wearing, caber tossing Scotsman would yield to British rule! And a bit like the thousand years it took for the Scottish and English to come to terms, we too are still seeking justice with Europcar!

When I return to work in the distant future it will be with a new found respect and sympathy for the plight of the common man in dealing with large institutional bureaucracies. At one point on our Scottish adventure I found myself in a phone booth (who knew they still existed) on the side of a noisy road discussing the fine print of our insurance policy with a woman in the United States while Emma quizzed Amy and Oliver on their times tables in the back of the car.

Methinks the whole experience was a deliberate plot on behalf of the universe to enhance my capacity to separate ‘administrivia’ from the rest of life. At this I am still a student, progressing steadily under Emma’s careful tutelage.

It was with ‘rental car madness’ fighting ‘delight at being in Scotland’ for space in my frontal lobe that we set off for the Isle of Skye. We started out a day later than planned given the Europcar fiasco. I quite like an all-day drive and Europcar aside the Scottish countryside was everything I wanted it to be which soon ensured that delight won the contest in my mind, even though it was twelve degrees and raining.

The drive didn’t quite last all day, but by the time we had procured lunch and groceries, stopped on the road side a couple of times to take photos and found somewhere to buy a SIM card which provided coverage nowhere except where we brought it… there wasn’t a lot of day left by the time we reached the Eileen Doonan Castle, just before the bridge to Skye.

I love a good castle, and Eileen Doonan is a good castle. Children of the eighties will recall the film, Highlander. ‘There can be only one!’. It was filmed at the Eileen Doonan castle. I am starting to think there must be one or two lucky souls whose job it is to scout the world for places to bring Hollywood to life. I think that would be a fine job.

Along the way we pulled up in a carpark near the start of the Rannoch Moor. Isn’t that a great name. I could just say it over and over again. Rannoch Moor. Rannoch Moor. The ‘och’ really catches in the back of the throat if you work at it. So Scottish. Anyway, we stopped and found a man in full traditional Scottish regalia standing there bellowing away on the bagpipes. Really, we thought? A bus load of tourists appeared a minute later and the riddle was solved. Bagpipes in the highlands must have been part of the sales pitch.

By the time we made Skye bright sun was shining down on green hills dotted with white walled cottages and a gorgeous blue wind streaked sea. By 10pm we had the tent set up and Amy and Oliver were playing soccer, sorry ‘fitbaw’, with a couple of English kids like it was 3 o’clock in the afternoon. This far north the sun sets around midnight, before waking again around 4.30am. Circadian rhythms go out the window as does melatonin to the brain. Lack of sleep follows, but you don’t feel tired because your brain is tricked into thinking the day never ends.

Our first night on Skye – way less than 12 degrees and windy but sunny

Three days of touring, walking, camping and cursing midges in a bad Scottish accent followed as we explored the many wonders of Skye. We walked the ‘Quirang’ on a splendiferous day of glorious sunshine. Sunshine, oh how we love thee. You never know what you’ve got til its gone. Isn’t that what they say? Scotland wouldn’t be Scotland unless there was ‘winter and three months of bad weather’, but Scotland under lights is a sight to behold. We were happy campers as we strolled along soaking in a view which extended all the way to the Outer Hebrides.

A short distance from the Quirang is the Old Man of Storr. We knew we should have kept our boots on and walked the extra kilometres that same glorious day, but we didn’t. Instead we frittered the sunlight away (which was also very pleasant) and went back the next day when it was back to twelve degrees and raining.

The Old Man of Storr is a 48-metre-tall rocky monolith that we hiked up to and touched, but couldn’t see! Aye lads and lasses, ‘twas Scottish weather tu be sure. It was a straight forward walk, but would only have taken three turns with a blindfold on to become totally disoriented and walk off in the wrong direction, maybe off a cliff!

Old Man Storr (that 48m high rock is just there!)

It was still twelve degrees and raining the following day, after being ten degrees and raining all night, so we opted for a visit to the Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the Clan MacCleod for more than 800 years. I wanna be in a clan. How fine it must be to be a man with a clan. It was a nice castle, though more of a stately home, occupying a very fine piece of real estate on the shores of Loch Dunvegan.

The best part of the visit though was marvelling at the beards of the chiefs throughout the ages. Life sized paintings adorned the walls with clan chiefs sporting some mighty fine muttonchops. Oliver’s journal entry for that day confirmed that beard admiration was not his favourite experience. ‘… the castle had a lot of shiny things and we watched a video that wasn’t very interesting so we went to the garden that was not very cool so do you get why I called it the ‘all boring Dunvegan Castle?’’.

At the Southern end of Skye is the mighty Cuillin range, mountains that rise over a thousand metres from a standing start. At the base of the range are the Fairy Pools, a series of cascading ponds of, ‘unusual clarity and beauty’. We visited on a day when it was 6 degrees and raining… and really windy. The Fairy Pools were a raging torrent as mountains of water slid off the mountain. Dark, brooding, moody and beautiful. It was Scotland all over.

By early afternoon it had warmed up, twelve degrees with passing rain squalls interspersed by sunshine. We left Skye and went in search of Loch Ness, where we found more than we bargained for. Yep we found the monster. Don’t believe me? Look at the photo. Emma got her head caught in its mouth!

The pretty little town behind Emma and the monster is Fort Augustus. It had a series of locks which form part of a series of waterways which mean you can actually sail clear through the heart of the Highlands from sea to sea. Heavy set grey stone buildings look as if they were built in deliberate defiance of the weather, fortresses against the wind and rain. They sit as though they are a part of the heavy, green, water logged foliage. Dark, brooding and beautiful. The rain even adds a certain something. Nah who am I kidding.

Just up the road from Fort Augustus is Urquhart Castle. It lies in ruins, after being kicked back and forwards between the English and the Scottish for some hundreds of years, but it is still a very fine spot, perched on a small peninsula jutting into Loch Ness with wildflowers strewn through grassy hills slowly reclaiming the abandoned fort. It had a gift shop with helmets and swords, so Oliver and I had a fight. I won. Just saying.

Note the full rain gear we are wearing… JIC

So excited by the sunshine we made lunch in the carpark!

In an effort to redeem ourselves in the eyes of our children after the visit to the Dunvegan Castle (the boring one), I picked up a brochure for a ‘Highwire adventure’ from the Cumberlands campground office. Once Amy and Oliver clapped eyes on it momentum for a visit slowly but surely built up steam. Fortunately, it was strategically located on our route back to Glencoe, but was closed when we got there. Amy and Oliver’s disappointment was matched only by their excitement when we went back the next day and it was open. They had the whole thing to themselves and I’ll gamble it will be their favourite memory of Scotland.

24 hours later in Glencoe you’ll never guess who showed up? None other than those globe-trotting, fun loving Canadians that we have now caught up with in 5 different countries – the Douglas Grants. It was so good to see them again I forgot it was just 12 degrees and raining. We huddled under the cooking shelter at the campground and caught up on travelling tales. It had been all of two weeks since we saw them last and there was much to discuss!

When one meets the Douglas Grants one goes walking. It’s just what you do, so we picked a trail from the endless supply on offer and headed up towards the Lost Valley. It’s a perched valley where the MacDonald clan used to hide their rustled cattle. Like everywhere else in Scotland, it was gorgeously beautiful with tumbling waterfalls tall mountains and more of the thick green water logged vegetation.

When we made the Lost Valley, the high ridges beyond called Peter and I on and so we more or less raced up to the top in a little under an hour. As we started the descent, Peter started to trot and my heart skipped a beat in excitement before we raced back down in around 15 minutes of adrenalin filled fun, running over the steep scree slopes and rocky ground. It was twelve degrees and sunny. At least for a while.

We bid the Douglas Grants farewell the following morning and parting was sweet sorrow even though it’s only a short while until we meet again in Iceland. The forecast looked… poor. Three days of 12 degrees and heavy rain. We left them to their Scottish Highlands fate (I think it later involved retreating to the dry interior of a B&B) while we headed to the Edinburgh airport. Copenhagen, Denmark was next.

Didn’t make the story but this is Neist Point Lighthouse – Skye