Prague Castle

From Prague

Golden Lane in Prague Castle, featuring Kafka's sister's house (the blue one) where he lived for a year and wrote a book of short stories. It's now a shop which sells books, including the one I'm talking about, which I bought.

Wrecked.

Holidaying is hard yakka. Yes, you mugs at work have got it easy. Up again
this morning at 5 a.m. and I've only just lain down to bed at 8:30 p.m.
We've been on our feet for about 12 hours, and longer yesterday. Hard work
with jet lag and a cracked rib, but we've had a good look at the Charles
Bridge and Prague Castle.

The tram is the easiest way to get to the Prague Castle. We bought a
24-hour transit ticket on Friday which ran out before we returned from the
castle to the Old Town on Saturday. The ticket machines at the tram stops
only take coins and we didn't have enough, so having caught transit several
times and never been bothered we decided to chance it without a ticket
until we could get to a tobacconist to buy another couple of 24-hour
tickets, but the plain-clothed transit officer sitting at the tram stop who
overheard our plans and boarded our tram fined us 700 crowns ($50) and
kicked us off. More walking.

Prague's cobblestone streets

City of Kafka and Velkopopovický

Arrived in Prague at 08:30 and caught public transit into the centre of Staré Mesto (Old Town) where we are staying. We really didn't do anything on the first day, just spent it orienting ourselves, eating and drinking the delicious Czech beer.

The rib I suspect I cracked keeping goal in the last soccer game has been grieving me a bit -- nothing major, but I feel it when I lean over or lift things a certain way. Not the best when backpacking.

Jetlagged, we had a nap in the afternoon and went to bed early, about 21:30. We understand why the locals are tourist cranky, given that there were some loud British and Italian drunken tours at it in the street four floors below us until 04:30, by which time we just decided to get up and check out the Charles Bridge at dawn before it was mobbed by the swarming tourists.

First day.

We touched down in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 05:00. The flight to Europe
is in two legs because we bought two flights, the first one on points, so
we didn't have a clean transit -- 18 hours in KL. So, we ducked out through
customs (dead at that hour), checked our luggage into lockers (just taking
our shoulder packs), and caught the train into the city to visit Mai Li's
family. We showered and changed and I managed a short nap and Mai Li one
shorter, had breakfast, had dinner, visited all the reloes and we were off
again, to return in three weeks.

On the flight from KL to Prague I managed to get quite a bit of sleep,
probably because I got so little on the previous leg. After about six hours
I woke to the steady sound of the engines like rushing water, and with my
eyes shut I thought how quiet apart from this the plane was. I opened my
eyes and the lady sitting next to me was gone, and so was Mai Li, and when
I looked around I couldn't see anyone -- everyone was gone! No one was
sitting in any seat. There were no stewardesses. I got up and quickly
strode down the aisle to the front of the plane, past rows of empty seats.
Business class and first class were also empty. You can't get to the
cockpit because it's secure, and I had no way of knowing the pilots were
still on board. I walked back in the direction of my seat and checked the
toilets -- all vacant. What a relief. There's nothing worse than needing to
pee and all the toilets are taken.

The Plan.

All plans go to plan. This is ours.


View Larger Map

Click on the placemarks in the map above for more detail.

09 July: Fly to Kuala Lumpur for 18-hour layover.
10 July: Arrive Prague, Czech Republic.
14 July: Cezky Krumlov, Czech Republic.
17 July: Salzburg, Austria.
20 July: Hallstatt, Austria.
22 July: Transit Vienna, Austria, en route to Budapest.
23 July: Budapest, Hungary.
26 July: Transit to Prague.
27 July: Fly from Prague to Malaysia.
28 July: Arrive Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
05 August: Angkor Watt ancient temple complex, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
09 August: Arrive Sydney.

Testing of the new emergency broadcasting system.

This is a trial run of a blog entry from my handheld Palm Treo PDA
smartphone. From 10 July to 10 August 2008, I'll be documenting Mai Li's
and my return to Europe.

Done!

Bookstore fly
Originally uploaded by Meaney

After two months, I've finally uploaded over 300 of what I think are the best photos (see the links in the post below.)

Photos now go here

I've changed technologies. Earlier, I posted links here to my snapshots on Google Photos, but I'm now posting everything, including those same photos, on Flickr, which is just better. You can look at my Europe Collection here, or another way to look is by clicking on my photo tags, here. Tags are just labels; each photo has several labels, such as "Roman," "aqueduct," and "ruins." If you click "ruins," you can view all photos tagged as ruins, be they Roman or otherwise. Except that they're all Roman. Ahem. In any case, the more photos are labeled with a tag, the bigger that particular tag appears.

My other photos are still on Google Photos here, if you still want to access them.

Switzerland: Lucerne, Interlaken; Italy: Tuscany, Rome; Paris

Okay, just a quick catch-up on Switzerland: we spent three days in Lucerne, which they say is everything Switzerland has to offer rolled up into one little easily navigated city. The old cobbled streets are pedestrian only. The price of, well, everything is expensive, except for accommodation, which was one of our cheapest hotels yet. Perhaps it was because it was not yet tourist season, though the weather was beautiful, albeit extraordinary for that time of year. It was as if it was summer.

Next stop was Interlaken, where we spent two days and which we used as a jumping off point for Jungfraujoch, an alpine peak to which a 19th century train line climbs. The view was impressive.

From there we went to Florence, as noted below, at which we didn't realise we were arriving on Liberation Day in Italy, 25th of April, a Thursday before the Tuesday May Day holiday, meaning that all of Italy took the Friday and Monday off work and went to Florence. And Rome, but more on that later. The crowds drove us to spend the following day out of town in San Gimignano, a hilltop town about an hour away. It once featured 75 towers, like medieval skyscrapers, but battles with Florence, the plague and time have whittled them down to about 15. Nevertheless, the city is unique among the Tuscan hilltowns for the towers.

Then, Orvieto, and the most spectacular cathedral I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot on this trip. The detail and craftsmanship to the tiniest detail is exquisite, and the variety of materials includes gold leaf and inlaid stone. We had no idea there was even a cathedral here, and when I first came across it, I just gawped and said, "Wow."

We then went to a little Etruscan-medieval hilltop town called Civita di Bagnoregio, known as the dying city because the clay hill on which it is built is slowly crumbling into the valley below, taking the buildings with it. Population: 14. Fourteen. Oh, and one dog, named Barillo.

And then there was Rome. Arriving the night before May Day and still having been too dense to figure out we should book a hotel before we get there, we were greeted with wide eyes by the tourist bureau when we asked if they could find us a room for the night. They said that people had been booking hotels in Naples—two hours away—to stay in Rome. The bloke did a bit of searching and ringing and amazingly as our luck would have it he found a hotel room just ten minutes away from the centre of Rome by train. Or fifteen euros to return by taxi after the train line shuts down at 9pm. He said we were very lucky, and I take his word for it. Still, it was a rigamarole to get there (it was still a 650 metre hike with the backpacks from the station) and we had already lost a day because of our adjusted itinerary, but we managed to squeeze in the Roman Forum and the Palatine. On any other day, the ticket for the Palatine, for which the queue is about one hundred times shorter, includes entrance to the Colosseum, but because it was May Day they decided not to make this the case, so we would have had to spend one of the three hours we had spare just standing in the Colosseum queue. Alas, I had to (angrily) skip it.

All in all, Rome was dusty and bustling and too busy and big, and always being under time pressure we really didn't have the luxury to enjoy it, and so we left with a kind of relief when we pulled out on the night train to Paris. We slept in our own private cabin on the 15-hour journey and as I write this from Paris we have spent four days here. We now will be spending five and a mere afternoon in Amsterdam because we didn't reserve a seat on the train and all of them are booked up tomorrow. All of them! Lesson: book ahead of time and be wary of weekends and public holidays.

Paris has been relaxing and it's perhaps my favourite city in Europe. It's a very liveable city. The other day we zipped around on Segways on a tour of the city (run by Americans) and had so much fun on the Segways we barely looked at the city at all. Three hours was gone in half the time, and we now want to own one. Or rather, two. But at US$5000 apiece, and no service outlet in Sydney (that I'm aware of, anyway) that's perhaps a silly idea. But when you ride one, you want one.

Well, that's going to have to be it for now, and perhaps for the trip. After Amsterdam we will spend three days in London with Mai Li's sister and her husband before heading home, and I likely won't get any time to update the blog until after we reach Sydney on the 12th of May. Check in later and I'll get some more photos up.