Athens to Santorini, Greece

So there I was, standing on the street outside the hotel with my baggage, waiting for my airport transfer.  I'd booked it through the hotel, and it was meant to arrive at 1250pm, which left me just slightly tight for time as it was.  There were roadworks further down the road, and there'd been traffic jams every night at rush hour but it'd generally been fine during the day.  Of course, as soon as I was worried about getting to the airport, there was a traffic jam at lunchtime.  So 1250pm came and went, and around 1pm I saw a van that'd passed me and was sitting in traffic further down the road, which had the name of the transfer company on it.  I walked down and leant in his window and asked him, and he rang someone up and then told me that he'd take me.  There are of course two airports in Istanbul, and even though I'd told him which one I was going to, I was still horribly concerned that he was going to the other one first or something like that and I was going to miss my flight.

However, he didn't.  We picked up about another 12 or 13 people on the way, but we were there right on two hours before my flight.  He also happened to stop at the door right by the counter I needed to check in at, and there happened to be quite literally no queue, I just walked up to the desk.  It was so easy from then.

Our plane sat on the runway for almost an hour, waiting in the queue to take off, so we were pretty late getting to Athens.  When I got there, I was waiting at the baggage claim, and who should I see but Charley!!  British Airways had delivered her safely to Athens...  minus her bag.  She says this happens to her often.  She'd already spoken to the baggage people who'd confidently assured her that it wasn't in Athens, so we got the bus into town.

When we got off the bus at the last stop, as I was putting my backpack on, Charley realised she'd left her fleece and her Greece guidebook (which was a library book) on the bus.  Not a good day for Charley's stuff.  So we crossed the road and waited for the bus to come back around, and she jumped back on to check the seat.  Of course we'd sat right at the back and they have a system where you pre-purchase your ticket, so the driver assumed she wanted to go to the airport, and drove off.  So I'm standing on the side of the road with all my baggage, in the dark, no map, I didn't even have the name of the hotel because we'd planned to meet at the airport and Charley had made the booking, and in fact not even any idea which direction the hotel was in.  And there was a group of not-very-friendly looking locals hanging about.  The bus stops were rather far apart, so even if I followed the bus there was no guarantee I was going to be able to find the next stop, but I didn't want to just be standing there looking like a lost tourist, so I started to follow the bus.  Fortunately she managed to get off at the next set of traffic lights, which was only a block or so away.  Unfortunately it either wasn't the same bus, or they'd taken it through the depot and cleaned it out, because she hadn't managed to recover her stuff.

So we eventually got to the hotel (with the rest of our gear), and went out for a walk to get some dinner, ferry tickets, and to try to get to the bus depot lost and found, which was, fortunately, at our end of town.  My birthday dinner ended up being the best kebabs ever (the type with bread and meat and veges).  The veges were so fresh and juicy and tasty, so much better than what we get in NZ.  We stood on the edge of the harbour and ate them (it had been raining and everything was too wet to sit on).  Then we got a taxi to the bus terminal to see about Charley's stuff, but it was about 9pm by then and the terminal was shut.

The airline very helpfully called our hotel room at about 230am to inform us at great length that Charley's bag had arrived on the most recent flight from London and would be delivered to our hotel.  Fortunately it was there by the time we wanted to leave to get to the ferry - which was about 615am.  The girl at the ferry ticket orifice the previous evening had said that because of the weather there was a chance that the ferry wouldn't sail, so we'd be much wiser to arrive early in the morning and buy tickets then.  So we did that, then I went to find a coffee and Charley jumped in (another) taxi to try again at the bus terminal for her gear.  She made it back with literally 2min to spare to get on the boat, but unfortunately the terminal was shut again so she still hadn't got her gear back.

The ferry was HUGE!!  And it was very definitely the end of the season, but there were still so many people on board.  We were trying to imagine what it would be like in the middle of summer.  They're pretty awesome ferries, they have bars and restaurants and decks outside and big comfy seats inside and a shop (a pretty useless one, but still).  It was about an 8hr trip, blahhhhhh...  Fortunately we both slept quite a lot of the way.

Sorry about the lack of photos on this post, I was sleeping too much to take any!

Turkey

The Moscow crowd - the six of us who travelled together for the entire 8 weeks, 

with Tony the Tour Leader.

From left:  Peter and Janette; Jane and Colin; Tony leaning forwards; Denyse and Jason; and me. I'd just like to draw attention to my bright orange watch and bright pink socks.

The overnight train to Istanbul was way hard core.  We were on it for almost 24hrs.  We got on at midday in Bucharest and got off at 1115am in Istanbul - we were early!!  AND Kim got off the tour in Bucharest so I had a cabin all to myself!  It was amazing.  I basically went in there and shut the door and didn't come out for six hours.

It ended up being quite good fun.  We were the only people in our carriage, aside from one other random person.  And he was weird.  He was travelling alone, and he told us all that he ran sold-out seminars for men on how to pick up women, all over Europe.  There was no way any of us believed him.  He was Canadian but he reckoned he'd been living in Bucharest for years.  He obviously thought he was the man.  None of the girls on the tour would've touched him with a ten-foot pole, and I didn't actually believe he'd been to half the places he said he had.  For instance, he was talking about how he'd spent heaps of time in Sofia, and it was just like Bucharest.

Not.  Even.  Close.

You may remember one of the stops on our tour was Sofia.  Sofia has wide cobblestoned streets and is beautiful and extremely well kept, there's no graffiti anywhere, there's no dirt anywhere, there are no buildings in any kind of disrepair.  And we've just discussed Bucharest.  Noisy.  Dirty.  I forgot to mention it, but they leave the ends of electrical wires dragging on the ground.  The buildings are half torn down and then abandoned.

Interesting.

Anyway, aside from that guy, everyone basically ended up standing in the corridor drinking together.  A lot of people had brought their own booze onto the train, and the conductor had something like four bottles of wine and six beers, and we ended up clearing him out as well.  Scandalous.

So we all eventually went to bed around 10pm (all the booze was long gone by 930pm).  We got woken up  crossing from Romania into Bulgaria, then again going out of Bulgaria, and then again going into Turkey.  A good time was had by all.  When we were going into Turkey, they made us all get off the train to get our passports stamped.  Everybody else on the tour had to buy their Turkish visas, which, depending which country they were from, cost from 15 euro up to 45 euro.  I didn't have to pay because I'm a New Zealander.  LOVE IT.  Some of the others were quite personally insulted that they had to pay and I didn't!  It was funny.  It was four o'clock in the morning and freezing cold, and they all had to go and line up (outside) to get their visa and then line up somewhere else to get stamped through.

We were staying right in the old part of Istanbul, close to the Grand Bazaar and the mosques.  We had a city walk that afternoon, then we really all just wanted to relax I think.  We had our final night dinner, but by then we'd already lost Peter and Janette, who were staying at a different hotel and joining a new tour (that's game).

On our city walk, we went to the spice markets and Grand Bazaar, which were awesome to take photos of.  The colours were amazing!  And so were the crowds!

The next day was my birthday!!  For my birthday, I'd decided that I should fly from one country to another, so I didn't have a lot of time.  But I spent the morning at Ayasofya, which is an old mosque that doesn't operate anymore and is preserved as a museum.  It was so busy.  I'm sure last time I was there (when I went to the Middle East with Tucan Travel two years ago) I had the place almost to myself.  However, I'm hoping I still got some good photos...

I was panicking about how I was so sure something was going to go wrong and I wasn't going to get to Athens, so I basically ran from Ayasofya back to the hotel, even though I was well early, to catch my transfer...  Which didn't show up!  More next time.....

Bucharest, Romania

Another day, another train.

Personally, I wasn't taken with Bucharest.  We've been to plenty of big, noisy, busy, dirty cities on this tour, but this was the first one I didn't really enjoy.  I loved all the others.  There were a few interesting sights, but generally I felt like there wasn't much personality to the place, and the people there were about as unfriendly as it got in the entire 8 weeks.

We were only there for an afternoon, again, so we went for a city walk with Tony and saw all the main attractions.

The first was the President's palace.  Sorry, it's been a few weeks now and a lots happened, including me sending my Eastern Europe book home, so my memory of what everything is and who everybody was is getting a bit hazy.  The palace was built by the last dictator, who basically surrounded himself with his family and friends in all the positions of power, then ran the country into the ground.  He spent an absolute fortune on building this place, and it is really, unbelievably, huge.

It looks big enough from here, but actually it's a square building.  I think there were over a thousand rooms in the place.

At some stage, someone decided they had to be the biggest and best at everything, so this is the Bucharest Champs Elysees.  It even has a street sign that looks identical to the one in Paris.  I believe the Bucharest one is 6m longer.  Sweeeet.

How is it that so many of my photos feature Colin front and centre?  He's the one with the hat.

We also went to the Student Square, where (as I remember things) there was a big uprising against the dictator while he was giving a speech one day.  He jumped in a helicopter and was taken away to safety, but some of the protesters died.  After that, the dictator and his wife were had up in court for the way they'd run the country into the ground, run up a massive national debt, and caused the people to have to live in poverty, and they both ended up in front of the firing squad.  The square now has lots of statues and monuments and so forth.

We're not sure what the birds nest up the pole is about.

Some of the architecture was pretty cool.  There were a couple of buildings where they'd kept the façade but built a new, much bigger, building behind it.

Oh yeah, this was awesome.  Check out how they were advertising the tv series True Blood (it's about vampires, for those who don't know):

It was a little sick, because the pigeons were drinking the water.

We were staying well out of the city centre, so that was about the extent of our veiwing of Bucharest.  The next day we left about 11am to get our next overnight train (woohooooo!!)...

Bran Castle and Brasov, Romania

More overnight trains!!  Woohoooo!!  Everybody loves a good overnight train...  Or something...

We had an overnight train from Budapest to Brasov, which meant we didn't have to meet until 1045pm the day we left Budapest.  There were a few people on the tour who had quite set routine 9pm bedtimes, so I'll leave you to imagine the whinging that one generated.  Go on.  It was good fun.  We were all there waiting by about 915pm, so we had plenty of time to enjoy it.

That train turned out to be much better than previous overnighters.  Kim and I had a room to ourselves!  We even had room for our bags!  It was quite amazing.  And it was cleaner and nicer than the others, and we didn't get thrown around all night.  We did have to wake up at some ungodly hour to get our passports stamped at the border, but the border guards were really nice and spoke surprisingly good English.  As usual, they were pretty fascinated with my passport.  Most people are - I have a brand new one, it's much prettier than the old ones.  And around somewhere like Romania, they don't tend to see too many NZ passports.

We got into Brasov around lunchtime, and the main reason you go to Brasov is as a jumping off point for Bran Castle.  So everybody except Marsha and Cameron talked themselves into needing to see it, which meant dumping our shit in our rooms and running back out and getting straight into taxis.  It was about 2pm by this stage, and it was a 45min drive to Bran, and from what we knew the castle shut at 4pm.  The taxis were a total fiasco.  We had 14 people wanting to go, and poor Tony had ordered 3 taxis and was trying to organise things so that there were four people in each.  One couple decided that they'd martyr themselves and not go, because otherwise two other people were going to have to miss out.  They made such a song and dance about it, originally because there weren't enough taxis for everybody, and then when we convinced them that we could just order another one, because it was unfair that two people should have to pay twice what everyone else had paid.  It was incredibly frustrating.  I'd never seen Tony be anything other than relaxed and happy, but even he was starting to look a bit tense in the facial area.  In the end I said I've got a bright idea, why don't we put three people into each of the last two taxis?  so Kim and I grabbed one of the single men and got into the next taxi that rolled up before we got too murdery.

So the castle itself, when we managed to get ourselves there, is pretty cool.  You can see why people would think that it might have been used as the setting for Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I love that it's turned into such a tourist attraction though - it might or might not have been the setting for the novel; Dracula the character might or might not have been based on Vlad the Impaler, or another member of his family; and Vlad the Impaler, although he lived in the area, never lived in that castle.  But it is perched up on a cliff and from the outside it definitely looks like it could be pretty creepy.

  

I also got a couple of decent photos inside..

 

 

Generally the inside wasn't as interesting or as Dracula-centric as you might expect.  That's not how they market it, it's just what's become the common perception.  Inside was quite plainly decorated and furnished.  There were some nice pieces of furniture but we walked through almost without pausing.

We wandered through the market at the bottom of the hill, which sold strange looking dolls and a lot of tacky Dracula souvenirs, then jumped in the taxis back to Brasov.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering around Brasov with Kim.  Her modus operandi is to make a list of what she wants to see in a place, then tick them all off, so she was a pretty good person to trail around behind.  We went for a coffee on the edge of town, then walked along the town wall past the black tower and the white tower (the black tower was cleaned a bit overambitiously so now it's white too).  I forget which tower this photo is of.  Potentially the black one.

Then we went to the churches and the "narrowest street", which we decided should be classed as an alleyway, not a street.

Wow.  Blogspot just made me download google chrome before I could keep working on my blog, and now it's changed the set up so I can't lay my photos out the way I want.  Very annoying.

Anyway.  Notice the Hollywood-style Brasov sign on the hill in the last photo?  There was another town we we went through called something like Radov that had one too.

This is the lovely town square.  Below is the massive church that was literally just off the town square.

And this is Kim in the street where we had dinner.  We sat outside.  It got colder.  And colder.  And colder.  Neither of us had any kind of warm clothing but the decision had been made to sit outside so we figured we could bear the consequences.

Then we went to the awesome self-serve soft-serve shop.  They had lots of different flavours.  Shame they were all a bit crap.  I meant to take a photo of it, but apparently I forgot.  Sorry!!

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.