Photos: Cambodia

Cambodia

Photos: Budapest, Hungary

Budapest

Photos: Austria & Germany

The Eagle's Nest Obersalzberg, Germany

Salzburg, Austria

Hallstatt, Austria

Photos: Czech Republic

There are more photos to come, but for now, here is the Czech Republic. Click on the thumbnails.

Prague

Kutna Hora

Cesky Krumlov

Cambodia

This is a late update. We returned to Sydney over two weeks ago and I'm only now getting a chance to update the blog with the last leg of the trip.

After visiting Mai Li's family in Malaysia, we took a five-day trip to Cambodia with four others in Li's family -- her sister and her sister's husband, visiting from England, her cousin and her aunt.

Angkor, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries, is one of the ancient sites in the world I most wanted to see (the others at the top of my list being Machu Picchu in Peru and Teotihuacán in Mexico). Discovered submerged in the rainforest by the French in the late 19th century, it underwent a decades-long programme of restoration which is still ongoing, having resumed in 1993 after a 23-year interruption by the Cambodian civil war. The site has been open to tourism since about 1999. A friend went there in 2002 and said it was the most spectacular of the ancient sites he had seen (which included Machu Picchu and Teotihuacán). "Go now," he said, "before it is destroyed by tourism." Unfortunately, we weren't timely in taking his advice, and now it is common to be mobbed outside the temples by locals, many children, wielding counterfeit guide books so numerous and of such high quality they could only have been supplied by an organised syndicate. They don't take no for an answer when you don't want to buy one, not the first time and not the tenth time, and so you develop an unpleasant strategy of completely ignoring them until, after fifty metres of hounding you, they drift back to the next tourists.

And there are a lot of tourists. There is a massive influx of tourism dollars into Siem Reap and the Angkor temple complex, and corruption is rife (Cambodia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International). The corruption is not readily apparent (except when our tour guide had to bribe a police officer), but the cost of a ramshackle boat tooling through a "floating village" on Tonle Sap lake, paid to some mysterious office miles from the village, was US$90 for six of us for an hour. That might be a usual price for somewhere like Australia, but not in a third world country. One wonders where the exhorbitant profits go, because it sure isn't to the barefoot teenaged boat pilot. I also saw on ABC'S Four Corners (an investigative current affairs programme, for any non-Australians reading this) that the money paid to enter the Angkor temple complex (US$40 per person for three days) ends up in the hands of one man, a politican, and there is no accounting.

But all of this aside, it is worth going. The Cambodian people are friendly and we felt very safe, and though the distasteful aspects are here to stay, including the volume of tourists, Angkor is an incredible place. At over a thousand square kilometres, it was the largest pre-industrial city in the world. The main temples are enormous, and each has its unique characteristics. The most famous, Angkor Wat, has walls a kilometre long on each side and is surrounded by an outer wall which is itself circumscribed by a wide moat. The name actually means "the temple [which became a] city." My favourite temple, the Bayon, features more than thirty towers adorned with ten-foot tall faces, typically on four sides. Inside it is something of a compact maze, due to the number of times successive rulers and conquerers added to it, and outside is a host of well-preserved bas reliefs. The French chose to preserve another temple, Ta Prohm, in its "natural" state as an example of how most of Angkor looked when it was discovered. Overgrown with massive tree roots, it looks straight off an Indiana Jones set. Indeed, it was used as a location in the film Tomb Raider.

This is the last entry for the trip, but check back in a little while for links to the photos as I get them uploaded.

Last Day in Europe

As our flight out on Sunday was from Prague, we caught the train back from Budapest and, after a seven-hour journey and hostels for the past three weeks, indulged in our only accommodation splurge on the trip for our final night in Europe -- a five-star hotel. It was nice to have a good shower and comfortable bed in a clean room.

That Saturday night we went out to see the National Marionette Theatre company perform the Mozart opera Don Giovanni, a well-known performance with tall marionettes that has been performed continuously since 1991. At two hours, we thought it might be a bit long to keep us from getting bored, but it was very good -- very skilfull and quite humorous, and we really enjoyed it. We loaded up on mojitos afterwards at a Cuban bar and went back to the hotel splattered.

Mai Li almost left me behind in Amsterdam the following day. When we got to the Prague airport three hours early, as is our usual practice (and once again we found use for the additional hour) this grim-faced monotoned golem at the counter checked us in, giving us each a boarding pass from Prague to Amsterdam and another for the Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur leg. Airside, we bought some slivovice (iconic Czech plum brandy) and had to show our boarding passes for the duty-free rate, and noticed that the idiot had given us the two boarding passes from Amsterdam in Mai Li's name, sitting in completely disparate rows, no less. So, we had to get back out through customs to get to the transfer desk, where they laughed at how they had never seen such a gross error, to have my boarding pass reissued. Had I not noticed, I wouldn't have been able to get on the connecting flight in Amsterdam!

So now we are in Malaysia, spending a week visiting with Mai Li's family. On Monday, we go to Cambodia for four days to see the ancient temple complex Angkor Watt, after which we return to Sydney, so I don't expect to update this blog until sometime after August 10th. I then aim to edit, distill (from over 700) and upload all the trip photos in August or September.

Last day in Budapest

The languages on this European trip are more difficult than the last. Speaking a bit of French, I could muddle my way through Romance countries last year -- France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy. This time, I have to deal with German, which I have no background in (though it's at least related to English); Czech, a Slavic language related to Polish (try to pronounce ctrnáct dnyí!); and Hungarian, which is distantly related to Finnish and, according to my phrasebook, is reputedly one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. Apparently, English has more in common with Sinhala (from Sri Lanka) than with Hungarian.

Europeans can be very polite people, and the Hungarian language is apparently very courtly. So, it was with some surprise that, when a waiter on the footpath in Budapest crashed into me with a tray of plates when he wasn't looking, HE said to ME, "Watch out." I was aghast and turned to Mai Li. "'Watch out'?!" We laughed at how rude it was, but it seemed strange; his manner was deferential. So, I had a look in my Hungarian phrasebook and realised that he actually said "excuse me" -- when spoken softly, the Hungarian word "bocsánat" sounds like "watch out." I had great fun with this at the Budapest train station when an old lady was blocking my way onto the carriage and I said to her, "Watch out!" and she politely moved out of the way.

On our last day in Budapest we planned to visit the House of Terror, a museum housed in situ at 60 Andrassý Street, the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross party (the Hungarian arm of the Nazi party) and the subsequent ÁVH (State Security Office), documenting the torture and murder of Jews and the campaign of terror against the Hungarian citizens by the Stalinist secret police. It looks like a very well done museum, but it is so confronting that, walking inside, we didn't even get past the ticket booth before Mai Li was so upset she wanted to leave. Afterwards, she was a bit annoyed with herself because she was very interested to see it, but it is a place you need to be in a certain mood for.

Instead, we went to Statue Park, a kind of mortuary for Communist statues that were removed from around the city and erected here, out in the unkempt rural suburbs, after the fall of Communism. There is Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Béla Kun, the leader of the communist Republic of Councils who seized power in Hungary in 1919. And there are Stalin's boots. In 1956, a popular uprising toppled an 8-metre tall statue of Stalin by sawing through it at the knees, and nearly toppled the Communist government until the Soviets intervened, invaded the country, arrested 20,000 and executed two thousand for their roles, however minor, in the revolt.

Budapest

Parliament; Buda Castle

First arriving in big cities is disorienting, and Budapest is huge -- sixth
largest in Europe, in fact, after London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and...
somewhere else. The first day, arriving in the afternoon after a train
journey, is always spent getting your bearings. There's also a certain
amount of trepidation about what the hostel will be like (Mai Li has come
to hate hostels; this has been her first and last experience with them).
Combine this with arriving in Budapest in the rain and the day was a near
write-off, which really only left us two days to see this historical
metropolis.

Budapest lies on a fault -- the Danube being the rift between hilly, green
Buda and flat, urban Pest -- and natural springs percolate up from beneath
it. The city is famous for its thermal spas, several of which are Turkish
architectural masterpieces from the 16th and 17th centuries where the
experience has been compared to bathing in a cathedral. I am culturally
embarrassed to admit it's one of the things we didn't find time to do.

We did, however, see the Royal Palace and Buda Castle complex on the hill,
including the 700-year old Matthias Church which is apparently beautiful.
We couldn't tell what it looked like under all the scaffolding and netting;
probably something like an elaborate eggshell, given the "restoration"
technique of pressure washing the sandstone. In Prague, the Czechs opt to
carefully and painstakingly scrub their St Vitus Cathedral by hand. There
was also a fee to get inside -- the first church I've ever encountered
which charges a fee -- but we didn't know how much of the interior was
being worked on as well so didn't bother.

Matthias Church defines the view of the castle quarter from the whole of
the Pest side of the river, and is visible alongside the medieval
monastery-encompassing modern monstrosity of the Hilton Hotel, built in the
early eighties during Soviet rule and which is equally inspiring.

I make it all sound terrible, but that is only because the city and its
monuments are so beautiful that its frustrating to see them abused.

Summer in Europe

Mai Li and I have generated a low pressure system that is being reported by the weather bureau as the centre of rain in Europe. Elsewhere is experiencing 40°C weather. So, when we arrived in Hallstatt it was raining, and while we were there it rained, and when we left it deemed to rain. We caught the ferry across the lake and boarded the train at the little unmanned station, bound for Vienna in transit to Budapest. We headed south because I wanted to go via the historic Semmering Railway, though this would take longer and require more changes, but like a giant board game we reached a sign that read Bad Aussee and we had to turn back. It seems there was track maintenance and this little town was as far as we could get, so we headed north, the faster and boring way to Vienna. I looked at the map of the Austrian rail network. Perhaps it was better than finding ourselves in Rottenegg.

When we got to Vienna it rained. Mai Li's $6 umbrella snapped in the wind and cut open three of her fingers.

We spent just that afternoon and night in Vienna since our destination was Budapest, where we arrived the following day.

In the rain.

Hallstatt

A couple of hours out of Salzburg is a little lakeside village called
Hallstatt, which European travel guru Rick Steves lists as one of his
favourite little towns in Europe. Wooden houses cling like barnacles to the
side of a mountain as it descends into the water, strung together by
rolling, narrow footpaths and stone stairways. From the bathroom window of
the private room we rented at the top of a tight, winding staircase in Frau
Gummerer's house we could reach out to touch the rocks and plants of the
vertical mountainside. From the room itself the view was a bit less
claustrophobic: a vast and uninterrupted vista of the lake, looking across
to the little unmanned railway station in the distance where we lit from
the train to board the waiting ferry to the village.

There are two small chapels in Hallstatt: the simple Protestant church with
its tall spire and clock tower is the most prominent central feature of the
village; and the Catholic church with an elaborate interior, small cemetary
and beinhaus ("bone house") where, because of the lack of real estate in
the graveyard, bodies were disinterred after ten years, the bones then
bleached in the sun and scraped of any "remains of decay," and the skulls
painted with symbols and the names of the deceased and arranged in the
beinhaus.

The single cobblestone road in Hallstatt runs along the lake and is shared
by both cars and pedestrians, most of whom are tourists. Quirky art
installations are moored in the water, such as a wooden table and chairs on
a floating platform. At night, what may be old boardwalk pylons appear
beneath the surface in the gloom of the water like spectral fingers.