Hungary Again

We had a long day on the train to get back to Budapest, the final stop of our Balkans leg. It was one of those trains with each carriage compartmentalised into cabins of 6 seats. The train was reasonably empty, so I shared a cabin with Sara, Marsha, and Cameron. We managed to pass the nine hours reasonably easily, playing Uno (we had to play twice because Sara lost the first game… although I lost the second in quite spectacular fashion), watching The Hangover on Sara’s laptop (still funny, even though it was the third time I’d seen it), eating, reading, and listening to our iPods.

Because of the way the tours fall together, I had two full days in Budapest before we left on the overnight train with Tony. I don’t even know what I did with my time. Wandered around the city. Went to the Great Synagogue and took a tour of it and the Jewish Quarter, then went shopping at the Jewish market and spent far too much money on jewellery for myself and a present for Jess for her birthday. I really enjoyed the synagogue, it’s very beautiful, and they had a local volunteer who took us for a guided tour. There’s an area out the back which had a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, and another to the people who helped save Jewish people.

  

I went to the Szecheyi Bath, in the City Park. The buildings in the park are all very beautiful, and the baths were no exception. The baths themselves smelt like chlorine, which to me seemed to not quite be the point of thermal baths, and were basically three open air pools of varying temperature. The building is kinda labyrinthine, I had enough trouble finding my way from the ladies’ changing room to the pools, so I didn’t bother trying to find the private baths, although I heard tell that there were some. I was planning a massage, but entrance just to the pools was quite expensive, so the massage got decided against. That was probably one of the most pricey swims I’ve ever had.

The following day was the day that Sara's group left in the morning, to head to Serbia.  I got up early and said goodbye to Ina and waved them off.  We didn't have to be out of our rooms til about 11am, so I basically just hung around there and talked to my friends on Skype for the rest of the morning.  We were on the overnight train to Brasov that night, so we had until 1045pm before we had to meet Tony. 

I very much took my time over what I did that day.  Not that I did much - I went for a wander along the shopping street, up to Castle Hill, and over to Margaret Island. 

Castle Hill was pretty busy with tourists, of course, but had some pretty cool stuff to see.  The church, which was right in front of me when I came in the gate into the front square, was pretty striking.  The castle's actually a huge area, and a lot of it is private residential buildings, or hotels.  I also found the Archives, which weren't even really marked on my map, which was a stunning building, and I went to see the bell tower, which is all that's left of an old church.

My first view inside the castle.

Parliament through the Castle Wall; a tower from the wall reflected in the hotel windows;

the Budapest Archives Building.

 Margaret Island was quite pretty.  I didn't far, I had very tired feet by this stage and really just wanted somewhere to sit down!  Most of it is closed to traffic, and a lot of people seem to use it for their 5pm run.  They all looked very serious about it, these weren't joggers, they were Runners.

The rest of the evening was spent finding food, then wasting time in the hotel foyer until it was time for the train....  woohoooooo!!  Who doesn't love a good overnight train!

 My favourite of Budapest's bridges.

Liszt Square, across from our hotel.

Slovenia

We stayed two night in Ljubljana. That is one of the hardest words to type that I’ve ever come across. It takes far too much concentration. Anyhoo, the first afternoon we had a couple of hours to organise ourselves and find some lunch, and then we took a walking tour around Ljubljana with a local guide. Ljubljana’s rather small, and the tour was meant to go for two hours, and I think that the guide felt like she needed to fill the entire two hours. She was very knowledgeable, but she had a tendency to spend ages at every stop, telling us every bit of information she had, rather than giving us the basics and then moving on. It got quite entertaining, because she’d stop speaking, and we’d all go mmm lovely how interesting, and go to walk away, and then she’d start again – and the door handles are significant because…

It would’ve been better to keep it brief and finish early, in my humble opinion.

The market; Lover's Bridge with padlocks; a random composer next to a very random tree.

Ljubljana is adorable, and has a small old town that’s built down both sides of a river, with lots of bridges that cross between. The walking tour took us to a few of the most interesting bridges, the town hall, the local cathedral, and the markets. One of the bridges has become the local Lover’s Bridge, and it’s where you go to lock a padlock to the fencing to symbolise how you’re going to be together forever. It’s a shame I’m so cynical really. It was very pretty though. After the walking tour, most of the group went up to the castle (which is really a fort, apparently, it’s just become known as the castle). You can either walk or take a cable car up for a few euro. I took the cable car. To be really honest, the castle was a bit of a letdown. You have to pay to get into most individual parts of it, and it’s not all on one ticket, you have to pay separately for each area. There are only a couple of things you can visit for free – the wall, which has a great view out over the city, and a small chapel which has some decoration on the walls. Some, not a lot.

For dinner that night, Kim directed me to a kebab shop, which did really good kebabs (for those who are going there in a week or so, go to the main square, look for McDonalds, the kebab shop’s right before it…. I noticed there were 8 views from Montenegro on my last two posts within a few hours of me putting them up, that can only be Sara’s new group!). Their vege option is just salad, there’s no falafel, but Kim reckons it was really nice. And not only were they good, they were about 3 euro. Laura and Kim like this.

The next day we had an included excursion to Lake Bled, which Tucan organised for us. We went by local bus, and it was only an hour or so away, so we were there reasonably early. Marsha and Cam, Sue and Vince and I all decided to hire bikes and pedal our way around town. We picked them up from the tourist info at the bus stop, and the girl who was working spoke excellent English and was really nice. She let us take the bikes and pay when we got back, so we didn’t have to worry about how long we were gone for, and she talked us through how to get to where we wanted to go and what was good to see, and gave us a map. We decided to all ride out to Vintger Gorge, which was a few kms away, and then do the lake.

So we headed for the gorge. We went along the back roads, but they were still reasonably busy. She’d also told us it was mostly quite flat and easy riding, but we must not be as fit as she is! We had to get off our bikes and walk them on several occasions. On one of those particular occasions, I was behind everyone else, and as I was walking up to them I went to climb on my bike, only to discover one of the pedals was missing. Like, the whole pedal and piece of metal that attached it to the bike had just fallen off as I was walking the bike. Just as I got within shouting distance, the rest of the group all rode off. So I carried on pushing my bike, and a couple of minutes later they realised I wasn’t with them, and all stopped. When I caught them up, Vince went back on his bike and found my pedal, then whipped a roll of duct tape out of his bag (yes, really), and tried to reattach it. He strapped it up pretty good, but it was very oily and I didn’t get very far before it fell off again, even though I wasn’t putting any weight on that leg. So the rest of the way to the gorge, I pushed my bike along the flat and up the hills, and rode it down the hills. Thank god we were almost there anyway.

The gorge was lovely, but again so many tourists. Even though it was the end of the season, there were still just enough people to make it slightly uncomfortable. Just so that you get stuck behind slow people and can’t quite get past until they decide to notice you. However, it was beautiful and the water was just as absolutely clear as what we saw in Croatia. The walk from one end of the gorge to the other took maybe half an hour or so, and then you walk back. At the end there’s a big waterfall, which is worth seeing but because of the angle of the sun I couldn’t get a good photo of it.

There were buses running from the gorge back into Bled, so I jumped on one of those and the driver (who thought the whole thing was hilarious) shoved my bike into the storage compartment. I took it back to the hire place and swapped it for another one. The girl was a bit shocked, she said they’d only had the bike for a couple of weeks, but she was really nice about it and didn’t try to blame me or inflict a surcharge on me or anything. From there I went and rode around the lake, which was gorgeous. If you’ve ever seen a photo of this lake, you’d remember it. There’s an island in the middle with a church on it, and a castle on a hill on the edge of the lake. There’s also the Bled International Rowing Centre, where they held the third part of the World Rowing Cup four weeks before I got there. There were people I met at the start of the tour who told me about sitting on the grass watching it. I saw a couple of guys head out for a training session. I’m so hanging out for a row.

By the time I rode around the lake, stopped a few times, took some photos, and found Marsha and Cameron, we figured it was time to eat again. It was about 330pm, and we’d taken lunch with us to the gorge, but we were starved again. So we returned our bikes (when we eventually managed to find our way back to the right place), went and ate, then got the bus back to Ljubljana. What an awesome day, and what a beautiful and peaceful place.

The following day, we were on our way back to Budapest, to the final leg of our tour.

Croatia - Zagreb

We arrived into Zagreb reasonably late in the afternoon, to the Movie Hotel. That was quite entertaining. Each room was dedicated to an actor, and had their name on the door and photos of them all over the walls. We had a random roommate switch again, and Ina and I scored the Jack Nicholas room. It was a little bit odd, one of the first photos I saw was a still from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, of him screaming with his face covered in blood. Not particularly conducive to restful sleep, to be fair. There were rooms dedicated to Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, which a few people were rather disappointed they missed out on. Ah well, you can’t win them all.

The hotel is a reasonable way out of Zagreb, so we caught the tram into town to go for our city walk. Zagreb is cool and a little different because it has two old towns. They were on neighbouring hills and apparently used to fight each other at every opportunity, but then when the Ottomans came along they united to fight against them. There’s not a lot of delineation between the two old towns, they seem to have blended into one, and the new city has grown up around the bottom of the hills. The map you can get from the tourist info centre has a few different walking tours marked on it, so for our city walk we followed one of those, up through both old towns. It’s very pretty, as is the new part of the central city.

Old Town One - Kaptol

Old Town two - Gradec - St Mark's Church

We stayed two nights in Zagreb, and the next day I only had a couple of things I wanted to do: 1. Visit the Technical Museum, which I’d read about in my Lonely Planet and wanted to see because it had a big central display of old planes; 2. Find a decent coffee. I was like it’s Zagreb, it’s a reasonably big city, there must be decent coffee.

We’d passed the Technical Museum on our way into town the previous evening, so I figured I could walk from the hotel. Yeah, and it only took like 45 minutes. Never mind, I got there in the end. The museum was under construction, and basically empty of people. It was so weird. You’d walk into a room and there’d be panels missing off the walls. I heard a group of school kids at one stage, but they must’ve been leaving, and I only saw two other visitors in the hour or so that I was there. It was a bit random as museums go. All the exhibits did fall under the heading “technical”, but as a collection they were a little bit odd. There was a room of engines, just random bits of engines from boats and planes and cars through the history of… well, engines. There was also a room full of fire trucks. And one about geology. And one about mining. And one about space travel, with a planetarium that was apparently shut. And a display about a Croatian who made a lot of advances in electricity, which was again apparently not working. They theoretically did shows in there a few times a day.

The engine display...

...the electricity room....

...and selfportrait, me with a girl in a pink t-shirt.

I did love the display of planes. They had heaps of them, generally from Yugoslavia, all absolutely crammed into quite a small space. You could walk around between them and touch them if you wanted to. They were mostly on the ground, but also some on platforms and some suspended from the ceiling. In the same room, there were also a couple of horse-drawn carriages, three cars of various ages and not necessarily chosen for their beauty, a collection of motorbikes and pushbikes which was pretty cool, trams, train engines, and probably coolest of all, a submarine. It took me ages to figure out what it was. They don’t signpost things particularly well, you have to go and hunt out the sign, and then that sign doesn’t necessarily relate to the vehicle that it’s closest to.

So that was a pretty awesome couple of hours. What kind of geek am I. Oh yeah, and I met one of our group going in as I was coming out, he amounted to the third person I’d seen during the time I was there.

Next was coffee. I’d spent quite a lot of time on the internet that morning, trying to hunt out some kind of reasonable coffee shop. I can deal with Costa Coffee, they’re pretty good, and I found very vague mention of one which was kinda out in the burbs of the business district, so I figured that was a good idea. I caught a tram from the museum into the centre of town, and went for a walk for a little bit, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The city is really lovely, there’s a great big park down the middle of the road I walked down, which was just off the square, and all the buildings are from (or at least look like they’re from) the turn of the century (I mean 1900, not 2000) and are well kept and look freshly painted and bright. Once I’d convinced myself there was no reasonable coffee to be had around that area, I took a tram out to the address I’d found for Costa Coffee, which was past the city bus station. I didn’t have a number, just the name of the street, so I started at one end and kept walking. And walking. And walking. I didn’t get lost or anything like that, but I did walk along this street and back again for almost an hour. No Costa Coffee. I was sad. And by then I had really sore feet. However, I saw an area of the city that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen! The central city’s much nicer though…

Croatia - Split and Plitvice Lakes National Park

Again, we were only in Split for an afternoon. I don’t know how Sara has done this for six or seven or eight months without a break. It’s a lot of travel time, which is very tiring.

There’s an old town (of course) by the water, and the new city has spread out around it. The old town in Split is cool because it’s all inside the old Diocletian's palace. I thought it was really gorgeous and was happily wandering around taking photos. Then my camera battery died. Not cool. Our hotel was twenty minutes’ walk away, so I decided to head back and charge my battery for an hour, then come back to town for dinner. Once you get outside of the old town, you feel like you could be anywhere and you wouldn’t know it. There was nothing to define the place, and it wasn’t even very attractive. I also didn’t particularly want to be walking around on my own in the dark. It wasn’t necessarily the people who gave me that impression either, it was that the city was grimy and the buildings in our area were all huge, rundown apartment blocks with beaten-up cars parked outside.

We were on the public bus to Plitvice Lakes, which was a bit of an adventure. We’d been warned that it might be very busy, and that was almost an understatement. We had to change buses after about an hour, and at the same time we picked up more passengers. They actually just keep selling tickets when they know all the seats are already full, and some of the seats had been allocated twice. The intercity coaches also double as local buses, and all the locals who are only going to be on the bus for five or ten minutes will get on first and rtake the seats, so there were a few arguments. I felt sorry for the conductor, he had to settle all the arguments. Then when we stopped for a break, we picked up even more people, and two of them got on the bus and decided to sit in the seats that Marsha and Cameron had been on for the entire trip. Even though they’d left piles of their bags on the seats so everyone could see they were taken, as we’d been advised to. These people weren’t going to move Marsha and Cameron’s bags either, they were just going to sit there with all the luggage. They were very upset when Marsha came back and told them to get lost, the woman went to get the conductor, who took Marsha's side and also told them to get lost. There were free seats in the next two rows back.

However, we eventually all got seats and made it to Plitvice. We were dropped off on the side of the road in what felt like the middle of nowhere. We walked up through the trees and immediately found all the public walking trails, and followed them into the park and to our hotel. There are only three hotels in the national park. I believe the park is a Unesco site, which means they can’t change anything. Apparently that includes the hotels. It was like being transported back to the late 70s, they must’ve been pretty nice hotels at that stage but they clearly haven’t had any kind of upgrade since then. Our hotel still had very classy brown and orange wallpaper, carpet, and furnishings; a lot of exposed wood; lots of square lightshades artfully grouped in threes; and yet it was always just a bit dark inside. I can’t believe I didn’t take any photos.

We had that afternoon and the following morning to visit the lakes, before we caught the bus to Zagreb at 130pm(ish). Within the park, there’s a system of I think thirteen lakes of varying sizes, which are all interconnected by streams and waterfalls. The entrance is in the middle of the lakes, and the walking tracks start from the opposite side of the closest one. There’s a boat that takes you to the start of the track, and another boat leaves from the same point to follow the river down a little way, if you want to use it. There are also buses which connect the entrance with stops at either end of the lakes, so you only have to walk in one direction. Bonus! There are miles and miles of paths, if you walk one way and take your time stopping for photos and the like, it’d take about three hours to walk from one end of the lakes to the other. Or, if you wanted to, you could spend days hiking around the place. However, you’re not allowed to swim or fish or anything, because they don’t want to disrupt the ecosystem.

I decided to walk from the front entrance, up to the biggest lake at the top. It was so nice. It was late enough in the season that there were times that you felt like you had the place to yourself. There were also times when school groups with no manners came past and you had to balance on the very edge of the bridge, which didn’t have a railing, while they went past you in groups of three across. Never mind, school kids will be school kids. It was also late enough in the season that there hadn’t been any rain for quite a while, so the waterfalls were not really in full swing, which was a little bit of a shame, but personally I enjoy looking at a calm lake just as much, so it didn’t really bother me.

 

The park was really beautiful and extremely well managed, there was very little rubbish and the pathways and bridges were well kept. It reminded me a lot of Waimangu Volcanic Valley, the park outside of Rotorua that my family has been involved with for 20 years, and my Dad still manages now. In comparison, I much prefer Waimangu. Less people. More interesting. More varied scenery. And Waimangu is even cleaner and tidier than this area was. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy Plitvice, but I still prefer Waimangu. I basically grew up there though, maybe I’m just biased!

The next morning I opted for doing nothing until we had to leave. Mainly because I was in such a foul mood, but also I felt like I’d seen as much as I needed to of the lakes. We were all a bit concerned that when the bus turned up we were going to have a major scrap on our hands if we wanted seats, so Sara organised three of the men to help with getting bags on and the rest of us were instructed to just get on and get seats, and save spares. There were at least 25 people waiting for that bus, but when it (eventually) arrived, it was surprisingly empty. No scraps then. Disappointing. And so we made our way to Zagreb...

Croatia - Korcula and Hvar Islands

After we said goodbye to the people who were leaving and hello to the five newbies (Peggy and Gwen, friends from Canada, David from Canada, Ina my lovely Aussie roommate, and Fenella from the UK), we headed down to the port and caught the ship out to Korcula Island. Peggy, Gwen, and Fenella were only with us for our week in Croatia (on the Jewels of Croatia tour), but Ina and David joined for four weeks, and are still on tour with Sara now (on the Balkans Encompassed tour). The first thing that happened when we got on the ship was that everyone dumped their bags and walked off to get coffee or have a look around the ship, and I suddenly found myself alone. That was the first time that’d happened to me over the whole three weeks, and it was not a welcome feeling. So I wandered around and had a look and then came back to where our bags were, and sat down with Kim and Sara.

The next thing that happened was that Kim told Sara (our tour leader) that her roommate Fenella was a snorer. I said Ina did as well, meaning that won’t work so you might as well leave the roommates how they are, but Sara took it the other way and said “right, you two are rooming together now”. So there it was, I had a new roommate for the second time in two days.

It was only a few hours to Korcula, so we got there, went to our hotel, and walked back into town in time for a late lunch. There’s not a lot there, it’s just a nice island with a nice but small town, so we didn’t even have our usual orientation tour. I had lunch with Kim and Ina, and then they wandered off in two different directions, and again I was by myself. I went and found an ice cream, then sat at the water’s edge, right by the town, to eat it. Then I went for a walk through the town, which took all of five minutes, and on the way I ran into Sue and Vince, an Aussie couple who were on our tour, who I really like. The first thing Vince said to me was “we’ve just been talking about you”. I said oh yeah, why’s that? And he said “We were thinking you must be really lonely, now that your friends are gone”. Far too close to the mark. I was doing my unsuccessful best not to cry. They told me that anytime I wanted to I could go and hang out with them or go with them for a meal, which was incredibly kind and just what I needed to hear at that stage. When I left them, I went to see if I could find Marsha and Cameron at the beach, but by the time I got there Cameron was in town looking for lunch, and Marsha was leaving to head home.

  

This is my own record of my trip, as much as for everyone else’s information, so I am going to be quite honest here. I was very alone at this stage, and for the first time on this trip I had to deal with myself, if you know what I mean. Normally I’m quite happy in my own company, I lived by myself for over a year and I loved it, but a few months before I left home the guy that I was seeing ended things with me. It wasn’t unexpected, and it was on good terms, but it was very painful. Until Croatia, I’d managed to bury myself with work, getting organised to leave the country, seeing all my friends, and when I came overseas I was rushing around trying to do everything and having a good time with the friends I made on the tour. So when I suddenly started spending a lot of time on my own, trust me, it really wasn’t pretty.
Anyhow.  Enough of that.

That night was the first night on the trip that we’d had a full kitchen at our disposal, so most of us took the opportunity. I had ham, cheese and tomato toasties; others cooked full meals. We were only there for the one night, so everybody was home by 9pm and we were all in bed by 10pm.

We caught the catamaran to Hvar Island the next morning, which was much faster than the ship that had taken us to Korcula. We were there in a couple of hours, if that. I think we had to be on the boat at about 6am, so I don’t know about anybody else but I slept most of the way.

Hvar Island and Hvar town, where we stayed, were very, very touristy but very picturesque. We were there at the tail end of the tourist season, so it was much quieter than it might have been, and very enjoyable. We had two full days there, because we were there at about 8am the first day, so I spent most of my time sitting in the best café in the town with Sara the tour leader and sometimes Cameron and Marsha, and walking around the coastline, and sitting on the rocks or swimming. There aren’t any sand beaches, only big sheets of rock. Everything you hear about Croatia’s islands is true – it’s so beautiful, and the water is incredibly clear. However deep it is, you can still see right to the bottom. It gets deep fast too, it drops right away from the shore.

Vince and Sue really came through for me in Hvar, they took me for a swim and an ice cream when I’d been feeling really down. You can’t be sad around Vince, he’s always noisy and laughing and joking, and is one of the most Australian Australians I’ve ever met, if you know what I mean. Sue’s very softly spoken but loves to chat once she gets going. The three of us talked for hours and hours over the time we were together, on buses and at beaches. After our swim, I went for a run, which helped a lot as well. Then the nice man who was staying at the next accommodation over slipped me the password to the wireless internet, which I wasn’t meant to have. He wrote it on a bit of scrap paper and threw it over the fence to me. So it turned out to be a good afternoon.

Sara wasn’t really into letting us sleep in while we were in Croatia. The next morning we had to be at the port ready to leave at 720am! Luckily there was somewhere open to buy coffee…

Croatia - Dubrovnik

So. Many. Tourists.

I didn’t really enjoy Dubrovnik as much as I could’ve, simply because it was just too busy. It’s the end of summer and the tourist season, so I’m sure it’s much quieter now than it would’ve been even last time Sara was there (4wks earlier), but it was still very busy and full of loud Americans. There were still a couple of cruise boats around. Apparently they continue year round.

The day we arrived there was another big storm. When it rains around here, it pours. We put our raincoats on and went out anyway. We stayed in Lapad, which is about 10min from the old town by bus, and it was so nice out there. There were far, far less people than in the middle of town. There was a big strip of cafes and a nice beach, and it was almost deserted (comparatively) for the whole time we were there. By the time we had a quick walk around there, changed some money, and went into the Old Town, it stopped raining and the sun came out, and boy was it glarey. Kat and I were in raincoats and had left our sunglasses at home, so we were roasting hot and could hardly open our eyes. So we bought new sunglasses. They were cheapies.

The moment came in Dubrovnik that we’d been dreading, when Kat left the tour. The night we arrived, we had our last night as roomies, and then the following day she officially left, along with Kylie and three others. We picked up five new people that day, so we were right back to a group of 18 again. Kat and Kylie had both booked an extra night in our hotel, so they shared a room for the second night we were there, right next door to my room, and we spent all our time in Dubrovnik together. Our tour ended up leaving before either of them did.

We only had one full day there, so we got up early and headed into the old town for 8am, when the town wall opened. Kylie wanted to go and buy a bus ticket, so she left earlier, and Kat and I met her at the wall. That was the one thing in Dubrovnik that I did really enjoy. It took far longer than I expected, I’d thought we’d be up there for an hour absolute max, but it was 930am before we came down. We walked the whole way around, and there were very few other people there. There’s a café on the top of the seaside wall, so we stopped there for a coffee and were treated to some very grumpy service. I think we were the first customers of the day somehow.

Going by the map at the Pile Gate entrance to the Old Town, the town was badly damaged during the war in the 1990s. The reconstruction job they’ve done is amazing. Standing on the wall, unless you’re specifically looking, you don’t even notice which of the roofs are old and which are new, and there are very few damaged buildings left. The wall itself is in almost perfect nick.

Perfect moment of the trip: Standing on top of the town wall with Kylie and Kat when there was nobody else around, looking over the Old Town of Dubrovnik in the sunshine, listening to the church bells.
 

 

 

We found some breakfast or lunch in the old town, depending on our personal preferences, and spent that afternoon at the beach in Lapad. Kylie was around the hotel and met Ina, who was joining our tour that day and would be rooming with me, so she brought her down to the beach too. I got on well with Ina as soon as I met her. She’s another Aussie (of course, there are so many Aussies on this tour) and she is easy to talk to and smiles and laughs a lot, and is generally just very likeable. And she’s excellent as a roomie, very considerate if you’re sleeping and she’s not, and she only makes a mess of the room when you’re out.

The next morning, the dreaded moment arrived. We were leaving at something ridiculous like 7am, but even so Kat and Kylie got up to see us off, which was very nice of them. So everybody did the goodbye keep in touch hug hug thing, and I waited for Kat to say goodbye to everyone else first, and for everybody to head out to the van and start getting organised with seats and bags and shit. Then we looked at each other, and Kat got all teary, and we gave each other a great big hug, and then I started crying too. We didn’t say any of the usual stuff about email me or visit me in Canada, we just hugged each other tight and said goodbye. It was devastating. Even though we only knew each other for a short time, we formed a real friendship. So much time together, so many shared memories, such similarities in our senses of humour, and so many parallels between our lives… Then I got in the van and we drove away.