Nice

I didn't really think I'd like Nice based on its reputation but in fact despite the huge numbers of tourists focused on the beach, it was still a lovely place, particularly the old town. That's the triangle of red roofs in the picture, which was taken from the hill overlooking Nice, which is like a King's Park in terms of relaxed public space.

Beyond the triangle is 'modern' Nice ie loads of the older terrace-style flats you see in every European city plus a recently remodelled strip where they've been installing a tram line for at least 3 years.

Here's the famous Riviera beach, pebbly and crowded. Plus when I went swimming (I couldn't go all that way and not take a swim), I got stung by a red jellyfish, which reminded me why I prefer pools.

Nice has a long history of attracting tourists, and at one time many Russians came to the area, which explains this early-20th century Russian cathedral. Though it looks big from the outside, the public space is just a tiny room inside, with an icon of St Nicolas which worshippers kiss and bow to - some more enthusiatically than others. I watched an old lady lay her forehead on the glass for minutes at the time and bow right down to touch the ground before it, then watched a younger man give it a peck and a little nod - well, whose prayers are going to get answered between those two? The glass was covered with smudges from people kissing it, it was really quite unhygienic.

The hills and mountains rise up only a short distance back from the coast, and there's lots of little French towns to go see, like St Paul's de Vence, just Vence, La Turbie (overlooking Monaco), Tourrette's, and Gordon, all of which have their little old towns still preserved and are pleasant places to wander around in. Pictured is Eze on the hill (as opposed to Eze by the sea at its feet). I was impressed that in between the over-developed sprawl, green open space has survived.

Along the coast, I skipped Monte Carlo and Cannes and visited Antibes, Villefranche and Menton. Menton in particular I enjoyed as the old town is still entirely residential, the shops being confined to the bottom of the hill. This means it's a quiet and shady place to take a stroll in. The Menton cemetary, where the English and Russian TB patients were buried (Nice and surrounds once being a supposed cure for consumption), is also worth visiting...and for those who are following the new Dr Who...

DON'T BLINK.

Iceland

It's been around six months since I took the route to the guesthouse: firstly, I now know why the roads are in such bad condition here; part of the road was shut off so they could re-surface it and yet they had foolishly left a slight gap which cars were squeezing - me included since I didn't feel like turning around - how on earth they're ever going to clear cars off long enough to get the tarmac down I do not know. Secondly, the hospital on the corner that used to be my landmark for my turn off the university road has been so altered with new buildings and walls that I almost missed the turn. Whole swathes of other areas nearby have been knocked down and are awaiting re-development. I do not think people who haven't lived here can comprehend how amazing these changes appear to my eyes.

Anyway, Iceland. You all thought it looked like this, admit it. In winter, it might but in summer, snow only survives in the high areas. Most days, the weather was like a Perth winter day, cool but clear.

Some of the landscapes are like another world.








And some were just plain pretty (though this photo is mainly to prove that it wasn't all snow and black rocks).




I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with some of the errors we came across in the Lonely Planet. We went to one isolated restaurant based on its description of their menu, walked inside and asked for a table for two, only to hear, 'We're happy for you to have lunch with us but we are not a restaurant any longer': yep, we'd walked into a private home and demanded that they feed us. For a book published in May to still list a restaurant that closed two years ago is pretty poor (you're wondering how we made such a mistake: all the farms are signposted and the restuarant had the same name as the farm; many of the restuarants are converted private homes and this one looked just like those, including several tables and chair sets outside; no, we didn't eat with them).

The other error was more serious: in the section on the Interior it listed the tour to the Askja caldera as only running from mid-July; it was only when we got around to the north that we found out that that was a misprint and it actually runs from mid-June. By sheerest luck, we were going to be in the area on the day the tour was running, and were able to get places on it. And if I had missed seeing this part of the isolated interiour because of the Lonely Planet's carelessness, you can bet that would have been the last of their guide books for me.
Fantastic guide on that tour, by the way, sang us Icelandic folk songs and told us Icelandic fairy tales all the way home.


I could post photos all day: waterfalls and mountain valleys, geysers, the Blue Lagoon where the water is 38 degrees and an unhealthier luminent shade of blue, lava fields and black deserts made from glacial floods. There's so much to see, so much to do (golf, diving, horse-riding, hiking, camping, bird-watching, climbing, caving etc etc etc), and so many new animals to eat - the Ambassador added horse and reindeer to his list, but missed out on adding whale (for obvious reasons) and puffin (out of season, the only restaurant serving the cute little fellas also served whale).

Let me leave it with these last two photos: one, the dog sledding team who pulled us across a glacier for an hour, with their musher (official title). These dogs were the stars of Tomb Raider. One of them, as a puppy, peed on Angelina Jolie. They're Greenland dogs, not huskies.

And the other photo: the lake at the toe of a glacier, full of icebergs.






Let's see. Reading The Hours, watching Fever Pitch, still knitting the Dr Who scarf. No idea when I'll post next, depends on internet access.

Provence

Paris, first weekend: Moulin Rouge, Louvre (pictured: the Three Graces, another example of which is in the Tripoli museum), Eiffel Tower at night. Paris, second weekend: a run of fantastic meals including a tasting menu that beat Perth's Jackson's if only because every single course was better than the one before even when you thought it couldn't possibly get better than this.

In between: hiking in Provence. I started off by making a rod, or more literally a 10kg brick, for my own back by buying the Ambassador a giant book of maps in Paris and then carting it with me to Provence...this made the 6km walk from the L'Isle sur la Sorgue train station to my guesthouse near Valleron a lot harder than it needed to be. The meal I had at the guesthouse that night, by the way, was so good I had to call the Ambassador at the end of it just to tell someone about it.

The next day I discovered this aqueduct on my hike (not the famous one near Avignon) and then stumbled into the exceedingly touristy town of Fontaine de Vaucluse which had an old ruined chateau perched on the rockface overlooking the peons below...I particularly like this photo because the rock looks like a fossilised castle itself.


The morning of my second day's hiking started well as Provence unrolled itself and demonstrated why every man and his dog wants to move here and spend their retirement doing up an old stone cottage with no modern amenities...

The afternoon did not go so well as I got my planned lunch stop so late the sole restaurant in town was closed for the mid-afternoon lull and I then had to hike four hours across country back to my guesthouse with no food or water, navigating by the sun as my map failed me halfway home. I was pretty impressed with myself when I popped out on the very road my guesthouse was located on, which meant I had managed to walk in a more or less straight line for some 5km with no other guidance but the setting sun. Less impressed when it turned out the guesthouse restaurant was shut that night too...

Knitting a Doctor Who scarf, and that'll be about it for the next few months, given how stupidly long the Doctor Who scarf is and how slowly I knit...Reading, aptly, Paris: the secret history. Watching Scrubs Season 5, not as good as it used to be.

Rome

If you've got only one day in Rome, visit the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Sistine Chapel (which is in the Vatican Museum; don't let the queue put you off, it looks long but it clears quickly...unless it stretches all the way back around to St Peter's, in which case bring a book and a deckchair). I'm not going to post pictures of those, you've seen better versions than I can produce already. But in the Sistine Chapel, when you're done looking at the famous Creation of Adam with God sitting in a giant brain, turn around and look at the Last Judgement.

If you've got longer, then take the time to visit the Forum, Trajan's Markets, and particularly the Palatine. There's nice views and parkland space up there, and for me it was special because I've already seen ruins similar to the Forum/public spaces here in Libya (and it's good to see more arches to Libya's own Emperor Septimius Severus), but the Palatine is residential space, where palaces and normal homes once were, not something I've seen before. This photo was taken outside, from down in a chariot racing arena, now used to walk your dog. The rounded and earthen shapes of the Palatine ruins remind me distinctly of the Berber graneries I've seen here.

You could also go and see the famous sites: the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, other piazzas and fountains. Trastavere across the river with its Porta Portese Sunday flea market. The parkland around the Medici Villa (especially nice if you've caught a bad cold and would really rather spend the day curled up in bed...).

The rest of the Vatican Museum: though that would supposedly take years, so you're best to choose sub-collections of the whole thing; I liked the gallery of maps (where the 400-year old map of Venice is still accurate) and the tapestries you see on the way to the Sistine Chapel. This photo is of a head in the museum courtyard; a shame you can't tell it's actually taller than me...

Any other museums that take your fancy: I looked at the Castel Sant'Angelo (connected to the Vatican with a fortified corridor that allows escape by the Pope, very handy last time Rome was attacked by angry soldiers) and the Genius of Da Vinci exhibition.

The glaring omission to my list of things to visit was the actual St Peter's Basilica, but that's only because that's what I'm going to talk about now. Here's a picture of the space outside the first day I visited.

And a picture of the next day, when the Pope gave his general audience. He's the tiny little guy in white under the red canopy in the distance. Oh, and he assures me the blessing I (along with everyone else) received extends to my family and friends back home, so consider yourself blessed by proxy. It was a rather surreal event; each language-group (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian) got their turn to be acknowleged and addressed (they all had tickets to get into the seated area, they'd registered in advance). As the origin and name of various pilgrims groups was read out, the group would cheer and wave their hats and the Pope would make a vague waving gesture. Sometimes they got to sing or play a song for him too. Italians groups were most numerous, followed by American; there were no Australian groups.

The Ambassador wishes me to inform you that he particularly liked: the freely available water fountains everywhere. It's perfectly safe to refill your water bottles from these flowing taps as it's fresh from the hills through pipes and aqueducts. And he can't remember the other thing, I'll let you know what it was eventually...

Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. Knitting that stupid headband again since I didn't like the first try and frogged it. Watching Heroes (Is it really evil of me to hope that Peter dies just because I cannot stand that thing his lip does? Probably).

No kangaroos in Austria

The prophet’s birthday this weekend…lots of firecrackers and fireworks on Thursday night, not to mention at least one child being hit and killed, and a second (unrelated) child being hit and put in a coma…nice one, you irresponsible hoons, learn to freaking drive.

Anyway, on a less disturbing note, we had pleasant holiday in Austria/Germany. Four nights in Vienna based at a lovely little pension just out of town centre. This time included a day trip out to Europe’s largest underground lake (a flooded salt mine; for some reason the tour included a stop-off at the hunting lodge where a crown prince killed himself and his girlfriend 100 years ago. Said stop-off included a guided tour and time to buy souvenirs). We also visited the local palace and local monastery. It turns out monks make really good wine. And they knew it too, to judge by the celebratory table situated in the cellars.

We visited the butterfly house (for warmth as well as insect observation); the State Hall, now a rather lovely old-book library with baroque decor eg 3D ceiling frescos; and the globe museum - not nearly as cool as a watch&clock museum, though the Ambassador disagrees. And also indulgenced our kitschy tourist selves with a Mozart concert (held daily! Includes costumes!) and a ‘no kangaroos in Austria’ fridge magnet.

A week or so in the Salzkammergut, based in Fuschl-am-see (25 minutes out of Salzburg), where we discovered a lovely little café serving a beautiful chicken with gorgonzola sauce, a fantastic Caesar salad, and a parfait which was like icecream cake for adults. Oh, and the area was nice too: we went skiing for a couple of days, visited the ruins of a castle, relaxed.

Up to southern Germany, where we based ourselves near the Romantic Road and more-or-less drove up and down it for a few days visiting little walled towns with medieval history and towers to climb. One was situated in a meteorite crater, which is all very well and good but the crater’s so large and old you can’t really tell. This portion of the trip ended up with a visit to Lake Constance dividing Germany from Switzerland, where we visited my favourite castle yet: Die Meersburg, said to be the oldest intact castle in Europe (or possibly just Germany).

And then to Hitler’s playground, Berchtesgaden. That Fuhrer, he knew where the picturesque spots were. Okay, there is a little bit of Nazi-tourism there, what with the Eagle’s Nest and all, but it’s not all there is. Unfortunately for us, snow had been poor (so no trying snowboarding for us, as no baby slopes were open) but that didn’t mean any no-snow activities had re-opened early. However, aside from an awful awful tour of a salt mine (the salt mine itself was interesting, it’s the touristy side of it that sucked), we had a lovely old time hiking down the mountain (yes, down; we caught the cable car up first), shopping, relaxing on the balcony of our hotel with a bottle of sekt and 86% dark chocolate (too much, I’ll stick with 70%). We also took a boat tour on Lake Konigssee and took a walk to see the ‘ice dome’ which was not readily apparent, however very many avalanches coming off the rock-face were, and that was amazing. Oh, and our little hotel had a restaurant in the basement, which featured an almond-encrusted venison schnitzel with cranberries that put any Australian variant of this national dish to shame.

Emergency: almost out of Vegemite. What disgustingly salty spread am I going to have for breakfast now?
Reading: Watching the English by Kate Fox, an engaging and clever anthropological analysis of English behaviour. Recommended.
Watching: Battlestar Galactica, halfway through S3. I’ve heard the finale is great. Well, good. Well, alright.
Knitting: a tea cosy.
Up next: pottery town.

Zurich

After I got back from Australia, I was only in Tripoli a couple of days before it was time to fly to Zurich with Dog for his annual rabies shot – it can be done here, but I, and many expats, are concerned about the validity of the Libyan rabies certificate – specifically, about whether such a record is acceptable to the European authorities. If it isn’t, I can’t prove Dog is rabies-vaccinated, so I can’t get him into Europe anymore, so I can’t get him home (Australian quarantine rule being strict and specifying that any animal coming from Libya must spend six months in a more ‘acceptable’ country first). The original plan was to share the cost of flying a European vet here with his European stamp of approval but that didn’t work out, so off to Switzerland it was.

I was concerned that leash-pulling, dog-and-child-adverse Dog would be shown up by all those well-socialised, well-trained European dogs but as it turns out, not only were they worse-behaved than I expected, but Dog was a near-angel for the whole time (aside from the aggressive barking all the way through the Tripoli airport both going and coming – and for people who are supposedly scared of dogs, an awful of Libyans thought it would be a good idea to tap on his cage and stick their faces close to the bars). He was so well-behaved it was like he was angling for a European holiday every year…

So I had a far better and easier time than I expected. I did make the mistake of thinking two-to-four-hour walks in the morning would tire him out, but a kelpie, even an eight-year-old one, isn’t impressed by that – all I did was train him up into peak physical condition and condemn myself to marathon efforts back here in Tripoli.

Zurich itself is nice enough, though I wouldn’t call it a ‘destination city’ like Paris or Venice; it was overcast the entire time and a lot of the various attractions are closed or not running for winter, but I managed to entertain myself and Dog for our week there with things like:

a visit to the museum (located in this palace of a building, which was only built 100 years ago, and had always been a museum),








a city tour by bus (featuring among other things, a view of the largest clockface in Europe – you can’t really tell, but it’s more than 8m across).




















a ferry trip on Lake Zurich

a train trip up the hill to Uetliberg with a lovely view over Zurich and a hike back down with Dog (dogs being allowed on public transport, and Dog proving himself surprisingly amenable to train and tram travel; I didn’t risk the buses with him); no photo of this, got sick of waiting for Blogspot and my dodgy internet connection to come to some sort of agreement.















and a day trip out to Plaffikon for a walk along the pilgrimage route Camino de Santiago to Rapperswil along the longest bridge in Switzerland (Dog did not come on this trip as I was not sure how long the train trip would be and I sensed his goodwill towards train travel beginning to expire and I still needed to get us back to the airport). This trip to Rapperswil was the closest I got to snow.



Also, given how unexpectedly impressed I was by the clock and watch section of the British Museum, I naturally had to go to the Zurich clock and watch museum (where this creepy little fellow was among the amazingly intricate collection).

Any advice, by the way, on whether a Libyan rabies certificate is acceptable to European authorities would be greatly appreciated – Dog was good, but not so good I want to have to take him off to Europe every year…





We’re off to Austria at the end of this week, not back till March.

Rule Britannia

I loved London the first time we were there, and I loved it again this time, even if it is a dirty, crowded, polluted city with shoddy weather; I love the underground and the gloriously imperialistic we-stole-half-this-shit-from-our-colonies British Museum (I spent half a day there last time, and half a day there this time, and still haven’t seen any of Africa and only one room of Asia – the clock room, however, is brilliant), and how you can walk up behind a crowd of tourists to see what’s so interesting and find it’s some obscure royalty-related ritual that been going on for six hundred years and no-one even really knows why anymore, and most of all I love how familiar all the street and district names are because they’ve been mentioned in literature for years and change about as often as the royal rituals do.

But anyway, for all that, I didn’t take any photos of London this time; we did the tourist rounds last time – though I did take a couple in a rather impressive food market that Jamie Oliver supposedly shops at, and where I had a very nice slice of banana cake – look away now if you’re doing Ramadan and don’t want to see photos of food, especially pig-based food. In fact, I do keep mentioning food in this entry, so you might want to avoid it altogether...







So this is a stack of cooking chocolate. You know how cooking chocolate for years was this horrible low-quality inedible stuff which was supposedly improved by being melted down and stirred into other things…I don’t think this is quite the same.

And this is a roasted suckling pig the likes of which we hadn’t seen since our visit to Spain. £85 a kilo, my friends, or thereabouts; they sell it by the 100g, which we wanted to get just to try, but the wait for carving was half an hour. And isn’t it interesting their weights system is metric but distances and currency aren’t.



We stayed in New Forest, which was mostly heathland despite the name, with lots of ponies by the side of the road (there’s a sign I never thought to see, ‘Risk of Ponies’), and Dartmoor, a suitably gothic moor with suitably gothic weather (Heathcliff wasn’t set there, but it might as well have been), and then spent quite a bit of time in Cornwall. We ignored castles and cathedrals, having done them last time, and continued the theme from Malta by looking at ancient standing stones and prehistoric village remains. Cornwall ice-cream, by the way, is the best ice-cream of those western counties.



I lie, we did do two castles: one was St Micheal’s Mount, near Penzance, if only because we did the French island-castle Mont St Michel; unlike the French version, it’s boats only to the castle until low tide when the causeway appears.

The other was Tintagel, attached to a very pretty town of the same name, and supposedly the birthplace of Arthur, though they were surprisingly upfront at squashing that legend in their very good information centre. Tintagel castle was made from the slate which predominates the area, makes for unusual ruins.


The town of the trip was lovely little Lynmouth, at the bottom of a large hill in Exmoor to the north of Devon/Somerset. The other half of the town, Lynton at the top of the hill (joined by a water-powered Victorian cable train) is not nearly so pretty because it doesn’t have the river and gorge. We also had the meal of the trip in Lynmouth, at the Eat Moor café – closely rivalled by a meal at the A Little Moorish Spanish restaurant in Ashburton near Dartmoor, they do like moor puns.

We spent an afternoon in Bath, but did not do the baths, because we have seen an entire Roman city plus baths for literally a tenth of the cost…we also drove right by Glastonbury and its highly visible tor, and Salisbury, but did do Stonehenge and Avebury.


The Avebury stone circle is very cool if only because the village is built in the middle of it, meaning the inn and other village institutions get to claim to be only one of their type built in a pagan circle (the churches seem to get a kick out of that). The inn also claims to be one of the top ten haunted sites in the world, I’m not sure how they worked out their ranking out…

We had the insult of the trip in Avebury – looking for accommodation for the night, we were showed a lovely B&B room, and then told the price was £150 a night – for context, the next most expensive place, also with a ‘view of the stones’ which is apparently a selling point, was £80 a night, and the place we ended up in was £50; for more context, it would have cost us nearly AU$1000 for two nights. Nice room, okay, but still just a place to sleep.

We told the guy showing us the room, politely, that it was little more than we had expected to pay and we would look elsewhere. His polite response? ‘The nearest Salvation Army [homeless shelter] is in Salisbury…just kidding.’ Well, we know where our nearest wanker is…just kidding. The Lodge in Avebury, look him up sometime.

Malta II - Before the Knights

Again, a photo-heavy entry. That’s what happens when you try and pick from over 300 photos.

I think the Malta prehistoric/pre-knight culture is under-rated. We saw three temples, one of which was built entirely underground, the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum; we were lucky to get into that one as they limit numbers carefully for environment control, but they don’t allow photos. Here’s a site that does:
http://www.jimdiamondmd.com/MaltaTemples.htm


This is part of the temple on Gozo, the Gigantija, so-named because it was once thought to have been built by a race of giants (because the stones are bigger than they look from these photos. This is thought to be the oldest free-standing structure anywhere, some 5000 years old.


This is the Tarxien temple, near the underground temple – they are finding the underground complexes were often built near an above ground temple, so it seems to have been a part of the religion. It’s not as well-preserved as the one on Gozo, but is bigger. There are other temples we didn’t get to, and all are different; this site has some lovely photos.

I looked in on the Museum of Archaeology in Valletta – they have collected some of the prehistoric statues and temple figurines they’ve found – the photos aren’t wonderful, sorry.



My favourite, the Sleeping Lady, perhaps a depiction of death, and perhaps not a woman at all, was found in the Hypogeum. Then there is the ‘Venus of Malta’, and a fine collection of sitting ladies. The heads, by the way, have not been broken off, they appear to have been designed to be removable/interchangeable.










We did the catacombs in Rabat next to Mdina. (Rabat meaning ‘suburb’, Mdina meaning ‘city’ – as with the Medina here in Tripoli).


These are photos of St Paul’s Catacombs, which are large and have an audio tour; you can see some of the various types of tombs here, and a table used for feasting to celebrate/mourn the dead, and a tomb ‘plug’ thought to be for a doctor, given the tools depicted on it. They were thought to have started from a cave in Phoenician times; and are surprisingly multicultural, holding the dead of Christian, Jewish, and Arabic peoples of the time.



We also went to St Agatha’s Catacombs; no photos allowed here, but it did have some fine paintings on the wall, all defaced by Arabs arriving after the Romans, but still recognisably fine work – here is a scan of St Agatha from a newspaper. We were lucky enough to have a torch with us, so we able to go off the lit paths in St Agatha’s and into the maze of catacombs they don’t think tourists want to see.







To finish, here are some nice photos around Mdina. The main entry and a view of the walls, the view from the wall on the other side of town (note the Mosta dome, mentioned in the last entry – see, it is big, isn’t it?), their cathedral (behind which is a fantastic cathedral museum, with artworks and coins and other interesting things, and OK, I know I sound old now), some winding streets ...









... and lastly the backside of the heraldic lion at the gate, which I feel is quite well-made.