Backpacking

Farewelled by half a dozen community dogs from Bucharest train station, we set off for Veliko Tarnovo in central Bulgaria. Alone in our little train cabin, we devoted the first hour or so of the painfully slow ride through Romania to attempting to learn some of the Cyrillic alphabet so we could at least know when to get off the train. Our train was ultimately bound for Thesalonikki in Greece, fairly inconvenient should we miss our stop. We ‘checked out’ of Romania at Giurgiu, a process which involved the snatching and subsequent disappearance of our passports by the border official and the inspection of the roof compartments of the carriages for contraband vodka by the customs official. This done, we proceeded through the grey area to Ruse where, after a lot of muttering about ‘Australians’ into walkie talkies, we checked into Bulgaria. While at Ruse, we were turfed off the train and left standing on the freezing platform while they undertook a not-very-well rehearsed shunting manoeuvre which resulted in the train having the exact same number of carriages and direction as it did pre-manoeuvre.

Very few Bulgarian train stations are clearly named and those that are named are named in Cyrillic only so we’ve taken to sitting at the front of the train so at least we can see it pull into the station. We also entertain the locals with a lot of poor pronunciation and finger pointing. Just before arriving at Veliko Tarnovo, a very agitated man entered our little cabin and began yelling Излезте с колата at us fairly wildly. Completely unnerved, we used our best Bulgarian to say ‘No Bulgarian, English only’, to which he spat ‘English schminglish’ with complete disdain before producing his train conductors card. Turns out we were in the cabin he wanted to use as the conductors cabin. We moved out and five conductors moved in and promptly began taking off their clothes and settling in for the night.

We arrived at Veliko Tarnovo at about 8pm and walked from the train station along a winding, dark, scrub-lined road (the type our mothers told us never to walk along in the daylight, let alone at night in the middle of Bulgaria) into town to our hostel. The next morning we woke to the most dramatic view across the valley. The houses seem to cling precariously to the cliffside and are in various stages of disrepair.

Houses cling to the cliffsides

A typical Bulgarian house

Veliko Tarnovo has a very impressive set of ruins and we spent a morning exploring them. The same set of ruins is also the setting for the Sound and Light Show which takes place once 300 euros have been collected. Basically, uninformed tourists pay and the rest of the town gets a free show from the bottom of the hill, albeit without the sound. It’s impossible to know whether the show will go ahead so we hung around hopefully at the bottom of the hill with a considerable group of locals and were eventually rewarded with a bells-only light display circa 1985.

Veliko Tarnovo by day

Blurry sound and light show

We spent a good few days wandering through the beautiful old town. We hiked through the Bulgarian hillside to Albanasi, another old monastic town, and Glenn went riding with some local bike enthusiasts through the Bulgarian countryside.

Bulgarian food is superb. Bec was in her feta cheese/olives/salad/yoghurt element and Glenn was loving all the different manifestations of pork. We both enjoyed the variety and quantity of Bulgarian beer. We ate in the same restaurant several times because the food was so good and the menu so long it would have been possible to eat there every day for six months without ordering the same dish twice. The shropska salad proved the favourite. We went to the local market for fruit and veg and the nameless (for us) local street food which resembled a toasted pocket of ham and cheese filled with ketchup and mayonnaise.

We left Veliko Tarnovo and spent a night in Plovdiv before taking the scenic (but very uncomfortable on account of the hardness of the seats and the choice of music blaring from the mobile phones of the local teenagers) narrow gauge railway from Septemvri to Bansko. Very slow but beautiful rail journey. From Bansko we caught a bus to Blagoevgrad to cross into Macedonia.

A Bulgarian churchyard with death notices posted on the gate

Bulgaria is excellent and we’re lucky to have seen it before it succumbs to tourism and the euro. Even the owner of our hostel referred to his people as harsh people but we saw nothing but helpfulness and compassion. The Bulgarians always seem to have their wallets open for something: people begging outside restaurants never walk away empty handed, women selling holy pictures on trains always make a sale and we watched two young women buy two slices of pizza and a bottle of water and place them in front of a homeless woman in the street in Plovdiv.

So onwards to Macedonia………..

After taking the 4am shuttle bus to Madrid Barajas Airport, it seemed we should have just spent the night at the airport sleeping on the baggage belts beside the check-in counters like everyone else did. Though swearing never to fly Easyjet (elbowjet) again because of their no seat allocation/get-your-elbows-out policy, we eventually found ourselves being shoved to the outside of a throng of five foot tall, matronly Romanian women at the boarding gate. Last on the plane, we managed to find seats across the aisle from each other. Before the plane had even reached the arrivals gate in Bucharest, the aisle was full of Romanian woman yelling at Glenn in Romanian to hand them their oversized cabin bags from the overhead compartment.

We took a new-age bus from the airport to the train station in Bucharest to meet Soph and Jimi and Troy who were arriving from London on a later flight and then jumped the next train to Brasov. According to a certain travel bible, Bucharest's greatest annoyance is it's enormous number of 'community dogs' (read: stray, often mangey, sometimes rabid dogs) that roam throughout the city. There were nine dogs on the platform as our train took off for Brasov. Our train took more than three hours to cover the 120km to Brasov, hence Romania was re-named SlowTrainia.

The plan was to go to Brasov for a week of skiing at a resort called Poiana Brasov, 12km north of the town of Brasov in Transylvanian Romania (home of Dracula and all that). Again, we were foiled by the weather. Brasov has had an unseasonably mild winter with no recent decent snow. We took a day trip to the stunning Bran castle (often referred to as Dracula's castle, when in fact he's most likely never set foot in it) and spent most of our days planning our next meals. We're embarrassed to say that most nights we didn't make it past our local restaurant whose sausages and cabbage dishes were highly rated, even amongst the Irish in our group. The beer flowed freely; Romania produces a remarkably good black beer called Ursus Brun.

Bran Castle

Soph and Jimi departed early, which left Troy and Glenn and Bec to head to the ski resort to check out the action anyway (and for Troy to feel justified in hauling his snowboard bag and gear all the way from London). Troy's snowboard made for a good but uncomfortable sled.

In the middle of Brasov's old town square is an ice skating rink which we were keen to try out. Troy was good at it, Bec (decked out in a pair of ski crash pants she'd borrowed from Troy to protect her previously broken backside) was average at it and Glenn was rubbish at it. Even the lessons we got from a seven year old Romanian boy didn't help us.

Ice skating

It snowed on the Thursday night and we decided to head back to the mountain to see what the ski conditions were like for one final time. There proved to be enough snow for Bec and Glenn to have a ski lesson and for Troy to do a few runs on his board. Troy was good at it, Glenn was average at it and Bec was rubbish at it. At least Glenn had the decency not to gloat about it, unlike Bec who gloated famously about the ice skating. As predicted, Bec was the first to ditch the ski slope for the ski lodge while Glenn perfected his snow plows and turns.

Poiana's sludgy ski hill

Set into the hill above Brasov, alongside the cablecar station, is a giant Hollywood-style sign (that reads Brasov, of course). The day before we left town we took the cablecar to the top of Mt Tampa (Glenn and Troy were feeling almost at home) and climbed all over the Brasov sign.

Bec climbing Brasov

We then took the train back to Bucharest. Troy took an early morning flight back to London and we were left to our own devices for a couple of days in Bucharest. We're not adverse to big cities, but just prefer places that are easy to get around on foot. Bucharest has its charms, but we were keen to move on to Bulgarian pastures. Farewelled by a mob of community dogs, we took the train to Bulgaria.

Our last week in Whistler positively flew by and it wouldn't be us if we weren't trying to do all the stuff we should have done in the three months prior at the absolute last minute!! Bec sold her bike at 6:10pm with just enough time to make the 6:30pm Greyhound bus out of town to Vancouver. Glenn wasn't quite so fortunate and we had to lug his bike and helmet to Vancouver with the plan of selling it there. We were quite sad to leave Whistler. We'd invested so much time into thinking about it and yet it comprised such a small part of our time away.

We spent a week in Vancouver, the main purpose being to acquire our visas for the USA. This was a surprisingly smooth process given the amount of organisation and paperwork that went into it. And so we found ourselves with an extra week on our hands. The weather was typically rubbish which put the kybosh on our plans to go to Vancouver Island but we spent our days at Stanley Park, Kitsilano Beach, a baseball game and the PNE (Vancouver's Ekka) when we weren't trying to offload Glenn's bike (hereinafter referred to as the BB (bloody bike)). To be fair, there was no shortage of shady individuals around our area of town willing to take the BB off our hands. They just weren't prepared to exchange money for it. We had a lovely dinner with Lori and Wayne, friends Bec's parents made while traveling in Egypt. It was really nice just to have dinner and talk about people that we know!!

Vancouver's Ekka. No show bags, but an inflatable Thomas!!

Baseball in Vancouver. Complete with view of pole.

We flew to Las Vegas from Vancouver for a three day stopover en route to Iowa. Welcome to the USA, where people really do drive cars with wooden side-panels (think Chevy Chase, National Lampoon Vacation) and where the price you see is never the price you pay. We booked a car over the internet for $12 a day and ended up paying a total of $136 for the day when taxes and insurances were added!! Nevertheless, we drove our over-priced convertible through the lights of Las Vegas Boulevarde to our hotel where we planned our assault on the lights and buffets of Vegas.

Vegas by night

Glenn's plan to indulge in as many Vegas buffets as possible began the following morning with breakfast at a casino on the way to the Grand Canyon. $6.95 (plus taxes and tips, of course) all we could eat. And eat we did. We continued on, Thelma and Louise style, in our convertible to Hoover Dam (basically a huge dam with enormous appeal for engineering and farming types), had a look around, re-affirmed Bec's fear of small underwater spaces then took off through the desert (temp in Vegas was a consistent 38 celcius) for the Grand Canyon. We seriously (SERIOUSLY) underestimated the amount of time it would take to get there and really only had about an hour to admire the canyon when we eventually got there before heading back to Vegas to return the hire car. Despite spending three months in Canada, the closest thing we got to seeing a moose was the backsides of two elk (elks?) sticking out of some bushes just outside Grand Canyon National Park.

Dams are ugly. This picture of the lead-up to Hoover Dam is much prettier

Nurse Nasty and her friends at the Grand Canyon. Nurse Nasty has nearly been to as many places as Bec.

Our self-guided walking tour of Vegas the following day began with a hearty breakfast buffet and our rough notes on all the free stuff to see and do in Vegas. If it was free, we saw it and did it. We gambled at the MGM Grand at nine in the morning (definately not free) and drank beer at the Fremont Street light show at eleven at night. The themed casinos are amazingly like the real thing. Our personal favourite was Paris, though Bec was partial to St Mark's Square at the Venetian. We saw countless wedding chapels, however the total bride count for the day was a mere two. Our attempts to reduce our mortgage by gambling were fruitless.

The Luxor in Vegas

Venice in Vegas

We stayed at the Stratosphere Casino which has a huge tower and observation platform at the top of its 880ft spire. We took the lift up there the morning we left to check out the view and to watch a few crazies escape death on the rides up there before getting ourselves to the airport for our flight to Iowa to begin our lives as children of the corn.

After much planning and procrastination we both arrived in Vancouver safely, albeit 24 hours apart. We pushed through the jetlag to do a bit of sightseeing around Vancouver (including ten consecutive hours at no less than twelve bike shops where Bec earned some serious good-wife points and after which Glenn was still bikeless) and stuck with the original plan of getting to Whistler ASAP for a summer of mountain biking.

We took the bus up the Sea to Sky Highway to Whistler and took ourselves into the Village to find jobs.

Whistler Village

Glenn's dream job is to work in a bike store and Bec's dream job is to work anywhere there's food and where no one dies. And so Bec headed to the local Supermarket to relive her Franklins days:
Bec: Do you have any jobs?
Them: Do you have any fastfood experience?
Bec: I worked at Maccas for three years
Them: You're hired. Can you start tomorrow?
And that is how Bec arrived at spending 40 hours a week serving icecream cones and making mini pizzas at Whistler Supermarket. As for Glenn, bikeshop jobs are proving elusive so he too has joined the ranks of the Supermarket and can be found stacking rice bran oil and the like into shelves. Which is handy given that the cost of living here will most likely bankrupt us. Someone needs to be keeping an eye on the weekly specials!!

So with jobs sorted, we set about scoping out the Village. It's quite pretty and there's still some snow on the mountains where the snowboarders are getting the last out of the season. Weekdays are pretty quiet, but the weekends are full of bikeboys and bikebitches.

Whistler Bikeboy

Glenn eventually bought a bike and is keen to get onto the mountain. Bec is none too confident that she won't be removing stitches from Glenn before the end of the summer. Bec has invested a lot of time into finding a good vantage point close to decaf coffee in the mornings and beer in the afternoons

We're currently living in a lodge about 4km from the Village. Yesterday there was a bear rummaging around in the neighbours backyard. Cute little fella, though ready to rip my brains out through my nose at the blink of an eye I'm sure. Bear-proof bins are the done thing here and also proved to be Bec-and-Glenn-proof initially.

After saying farewell to Glenn at Phuket boat harbour, I got a ride into Phuket itself and found a hotel for the night then got up early the next morning for the short flight back to Bangkok. My flight to Hanoi the next morning was very early and I left the hotel room I was sharing with a girl I met on the airport transfer bus at about 3am. I snuck out of the room and waited on the street for yet another airport shuttle bus. The lady-boys were out in full force and appeared to have no shortage of clientele.

The plane arrived fairly early and I transferred into Hanoi. The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of people riding pushbikes. And, yes, they do wear cone-shaped hats!! The streets were full of people selling everything imaginable. In the afternoon I took a trip to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum but was disappointed to find that 'Uncle Ho' was away on his annual pilgrimmage to Russia for a spot of taxidermi-ing. After a disappointingly 'western' dinner, I met up with my tour group and we went off to see a water puppett show (picture Punch and Judy in a swimming pool!!). Most entertaining.

Street markets in Hanoi

The next evening we took an overnight train south to Hue where we spent two days exploring the palaces and narrow streets. We had dinner one night at a restaurant run by a man whose children are all deaf. All the children work in the restaurant and it made for an interesting night. One or two of his children are quite accomplished artists and we bought quite a few of their paintings at ridiculously low prices.

We then left for Hoi An, another overnight train trip. The trains were less comfortable than the trains in Thailand, but the beverage carriages seemed always to be in fine form!!

Arriving in Hoi An, we wasted no time in legging it to the best reputed tailor in town and putting in our order for clothes. The whole process of having clothes made is incredibly quick. I had two suits,a jacket, a dress and a skirt made in less than a day. You simply point at a picture in any of the magazines in the store, they measure you up ( I steadfastly refused to make the same soul-destroying mistake I made in Thailand and declined to hazard a guess at my size), then tell you to come back in two hours at which point they have a pinned-together version of your soon-to-be clothes. They then re-measure you and tell you to go away and come back in three hours, and when you return all your clothes are ready and waiting in a suit bag. The only problem being that you have to carry around the suit bag for the next month!!

With my tailors in Hoi An

From Hoi An we went to Ngah Tranh and then across to Whale Island for three days of uninterrupted swimming, reading, volleyballing, scuba diving bliss. My volleyball skills were never anything to write home about and my arms paid the price for about three days afterwards. The scuba diving was brilliant and ironically the guy who took me was a friend of a friend from Brisbane so I think I scored a longer mates-rates dive. Brilliant coral and fish.

From Ngah Tranh again we took another overnight train further south to Ho Chi Minh City and then further on south for three days on the Mekong Delta. The Delta communities are amazing in how they conduct all their business from their boats. Each boat sells one type of item (eg pineapples) and attached to the front of the boat is a really tall pole with a pineapple attached to the top of it so that people can see from a way away that the boat sells pineapples.

Markets on the Mekong

The people live in huts and lodges on the banks of the Mekong and we spent two nights in homestays with the local people. The second homestay had an enormously fat snake in a tank that they treated like a pet. I freaked out when they put it around my neck and I thought I might have to perform CPR on myself. Am not a snake person. Or a spider person. Or a praying mantis person.

Bec and a very big snake

On returning to Ho Chi Minh City, I had a week to myself before having to head back to Australia. I spent a day out at the Cu Chi tunnels (the tunnels used to hide during the vietnam War). The tunnels are incredibly narrow and are pitch black. Someone I had met previously had told me to take my headtorch and admittedly I felt like a bit of a git (and was paid out accordingly by the people in my tunnel group) but 10 metres into the dark, winding tunnels I was soon everybody's new best friend.

In the Cu Chi tunnels

For $1US it's possible to buy a bullet and then choose which gun you want to shoot it with. Initially I wanted to use the semi-automatic but the gun guard wasn't convinced that I would remain standing afterwards so I lost my gun-firing virginity to an AK47 and a pair of shoddy ear muffs, most likely lifted from an airplane in the late eighties. I was unilaterally deaf for almost a week afterwards.

I spent a day trawling through the massive Ben Tanh market in central Ho Chi Minh City and bought so many wooden women, placemats, chopsticks, Ralph/Polo/Rolex/Cartier/CK rip-offs that I needed to but another bag (Polo rip-off carry-on size suitcase on wheels for 150000 dong/ 7 quid/ $17Aus) to get it all home in. Pho 2000 (famous for having been visited by Bill Clinton) was good for yummy noodles.

Hat weaver at Ben Tanh markets.

I spent another day museum and zoo hopping and found the War Remnants Museum to be quite disturbing. I had my hair cut and my nails done and had the best and longest scalp and head massage I've ever had.

The people of Vietnam are smiley, happy people. A hundred year old lady (or thereabouts) walked out and stopped an entire street of traffic so that I could cross a busy road. Boiled snake has the same texture as the insides of grapes but tastes repulsive. Dog tastes like stringy beef (sorry dog lovers, I didn't do it on purpose. It was cleverly disguised in a stirfry). There is an enormous market for bootleg books (photocopies of actual books) and I bought about thirty bootleg CDs, all of which work. Locally made beer is incredibly cheap and is served in plastic jugs and drunk while sitting on child size plastic chairs at child size plastic tables on the side of the street. The cyclo riders know the town like the back of their hands and will wait an entire day just to take you back to your hotel. Life in Vietnam appears simple, yet complicated at the same time.