#day:9

[drachedraws]

Made progress in Grimm Eclipse :D

[triblondon]

Day 9

Time to leave Kaya MJ behind us. Artur arrives at about 6:30am with the Land Rover and we load ourselves in for the journey to Maputo. Nick is in the back with Artur's wife and daughter, and I'm in the front. The weather is bright and sunny, and the car quickly gets hot and stuffy. We start by going to Barra Lodge to see if they have my sunglassses, which I lost on the ocean safari yesterday (they don't), and then on to Inhambane to fill up with fuel (an exorbitant 2100 meticals - about £65) and pick up Artur's luggage from his house. By the time we've done all that it's already 9:30am and we haven't even left Inhambane yet.

Once we get on the highway, progress is much faster, and we're soon passing senic landscapes and amazing coastlines as we drive south along the coast road. I move into the back, since the Land Rover's heater seems to be on full blast with no way of turning it off, and as a result the passenger footwell is hot enough to be painfully uncomfortable.

Towards the end of the 450km journey, the car starts making a hissing noise. Artur stops and fiddles with the engine for a while, and declares that there is something broken which will cause us to use more fuel than we should, but that we can carry on.

Arriving in Maputo, the city seems overflowing with practically everything: people, cars, rubbish, etc. Artur drops us off at our hotel, and we discover that the price Nick was quoted on the phone is per-person, rather than per-room, as we had expected. We take it anyway as there is little choice at this point, and set off to explore the town.

A short walk brings us to the docks, with rows of locals fishing directly off the embankment, and a car ferry slowly turning in the bay, ready to disgorge it's cargo of cars onto a suspiciously narrow pier. We walk along the dockside until we get to 'Robert Mugabe square', which is little more than a traffic junction, but certainly a sign of the scheme Mozambians seem fond of for street naming.

We climb up through the _____, an overgrown area of 'park' in the centre of the city, probably once an oasis in the middle of the city - Maputo's Hyde park perhaps - but now the unofficial city landfill site. At the top is the Hotel Cardoso, which Paul recommended (but was a bit out of our price range), and next to it, the Natural History Muesum (currently closed).

Walking down towards the East side of the city and the beach, we arrive at a restaurant/bar district. Dinner is piri piri chicken at a small cafe. We look around the Polana shopping mall, a modern retail complex where we get some water, moan about the prices of pretty much everything, and are amused by a bookshop that has a window display consisting of several dozen books all of which are either about food or pediatric urology.

Just down the road from the shopping centre we come across a trendy bar that has comfy sofas, and have a few interestingly named smoothies while the proprietor explains that the place only opened yesterday and the wifi advertised in the menu isn't online yet. I have a 'Naked Baby' (banana and strawberry smoothie).

[triblondon]

Day 9

location:Penang

summary:In which a new traveller is introduced, who makes an unexpected admission which threatens to ruin the trip

trip:sea04

day:9

[triblondon]

Day 9

We breakfasted at 9.05 AM, looking for potential beetrooters.  Because our two week tour was actually two one week tours, today we'd be getting some new people.  Very exciting.  There didn't seem to be anyone in the restaurant who looked like a likely candidate, and at 10 when we saw Sasha in the lobby he explained that the newcomers would join the group on the walking tour which Rob and I had done yesterday.  We turned up just long enough to meet the new guys and hitch a ride with them into the city.  There was Charlie, a single brummie in his fifties on a world tour.  Mike And Julia were a middle aged couple from New Zealand, also on a world tour.  Finally there was a trio of flat sharers Matt, Simone and Tanya, also from New Zealand and in their late twenties.

At Nevsky Prospekt, we split from the group and headed for the hermitage.  This enormous museum is one of the largest in the world, with three million works of art, although not all of them are on display at the same time!  The collection originated from Catherine the great when she began purchasing paintings in Europe in 1764.  Russian ambassadors in foreign capitals were commissioned to acquire the best collections, and the archive now occupies the entire Winter Palace.

The first thing we noticed about the building was that it was so amazingly clean.  Like many buildings in Saint Petersburg, it looks newly built and freshly painted.  In a courtyard in the winter palace we queued for tickets for hours, taking turns as it slowly shuffled forwards.  Having finally got our tickets we found a map and tried to plan a route through the five buildings.  Even the archaeological section had over 700,000 exhibits.  Trying not to be overwhelmed, we started on the ground floor.

The archaeological section featured the usual assortment of pottery, jewelry, coins etc.  On the first floor there was more modern stuff; silver, gold, statues, sculpture, books ...  But the hermitage itself was the most important feature on this level.  Finally we reached the gallery on the second floor.  The paintings included Picasso, Matisse, Monet - all "acquired by the Hermitage", a euphemism in many cases for "nicked from the Germans during the Second World War".

I bought a print of a Monet that I particularly liked, and we returned to the ground floor via a lot of backtracking to make sure we didn't get lost.  Before we left we discovered a section of the ground floor which we hadn't seen, featuring a photography exhibition.  There was some fantastic images, including the rather literally named "man looking in refrigerator", and a time lapse series showing a bombing accident in which an air force bomber accidentally dropped its payload on an aircraft flying underneath.

Via an Internet cafe and the photo developing place, we went for lunch.  In the afternoon we split up to see some more museums - Rob started with the ethnography, while I opted for the naval history.  This place was fascinating, with hundreds of intricately constructed models.  There was also an armored train, a model of a bombed city which I assumed to be Stalingrad, a world map that looked like it belonged in a nuclear command centre, and even some early aircraft carriers carrying seaplanes that would be winched into the water by crane.

I met up with Rob and we moved on to the Zoological museum.  The most impressive exhibit was a woolly mammoth - the only complete one in the world, and a blue whale skeleton.  I remember seeing one of these in the natural history museum at home but I think he's only a model, whereas this one is the real thing.  Otherwise the museum contains mainly stuffed animals, though their habitats were well modeled.

We walked to the metro via the riverside of the Admiralty, and noticed that new buildings seem to have been constructed where the docks once stood, at least based on the model I saw in the naval museum.  We made a quick detour to the Saint Peter and Paul beach to see some sand sculpture and see if we could spot anyone sunbathing standing up (apparently something they do here), but no joy.

Back at the hotel at 7.00 PM, we met the others and went for dinner in town.  Mike and Julia described themselves as "professional tourists" - they used to run a ferry boat service on new Zealand's south island, but now they travel the world on cargo ships rather than flying.  No one is interested in staying out so we all go back to the hotel and arrive about 10.30 PM.

location:St Petersburg

summary:New travellers, Hermitage, Naval history, Zoological museums, sunbathing standing up.

trip:russia03

day:9

[triblondon]

Day 9

location:Plett. Bay / Shamwari

summary:On the road, visiting Jeffrey's Bay on the way to Shamwari

trip:sa02

day:9

[triblondon]

Day 9

I checked out and headed for the station to leave my luggage. A large sign indicated the 'Luggage Room', which turned out to be a big but very dark room despite the bright sun outside. A man sitting behind the desk took my bag and wordlessly tore off a ticket for me. I wondered how many hours of sunlight he got each day. Maybe his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light and were now super-sensitive.Another short metro ride back to the centre of the city, and I switched lines to the city's park. Lunch used up most of my remaining florents at a restaurant near the national museum of culture. I'd had quite enough culture the previous evening and was feeling very poor, so I skipped that museum in favour of the transport museum, which cost just 150 florents to enter (about 40p, US$0.28).

The museum had a lot of train stuff, and I was beginning to think it was just a trainspotters paradise when I noticed the other sections. There were a few interesting bits of info to be gained, like a chronology of the Hungarian transport infrastructure through the second world war. In fact the whole network was almost entirely destroyed. I was also shocked to learn that Hungary has put a man in space, courtesy of the USSR, of course. Can't remember if they brought him back but I imagine they probably did.

I got to the train station early, anxious now to re-enter euroland. After I picked up my luggage from the man who sits in perpetual darkness, I noticed that there were lockers, so I could have saved money there too. But while I was mentally chiding myself for missing the obvious, I noticed that someone who had found the lockers was now regretting it. A girl was frantically beating the locker to within an inch of its life (though by all accounts it was already within millimetres of its life anyway), and looked at me hopefully.

Our combined efforts failed to open the locker, and she explained that she absolutely had to get the bags out immediately because she was going to Venice. I was going to Venice, so why wasn't I rushing then? I checked my watch, and confirmed that there was a good twenty minutes until the train left, so she didn't really have to be panicking at this stage. I followed, interested, as the uninterested luggage guy was coaxed out of his realm of darkness to sort out the locker, which he opened with great effort, and then made a well-that-was-simple-so-why-did-I-have-to-come-all-the-way-over-here-to-show-you-how-to-do-it gesture, turned and stormed off back where he came from.

Laura (for that was her name) was a British-born Australian who also spent time in England and Ireland for reasons that were far too complicated for me to remember. We walked over to the train and went our separate ways - she didn't have a seat reservation so we'd be travelling in different parts of the train.

Journey 5: Budapest to Venice 1 leg, 700km, 15 hr. Average speed: 46kph Origin/Destination Departs Arrives Carrier My Rating Budapest Keleti Venezia S.Lucia 18:00 09:00 TrenItalia

On the train, I discovered that my compartment was already full (except for my seat) and in fact the entire carriage was almost entirely occupied by a large group of Finnish civil engineering students on a field trip. Fortunately, they spoke English, but unfortunately they seemed to prefer talking in Finnish. I let them get on with the complicated discussions of bridge expansion theory, or whether their bum looked big in this, and went wandering along the train.

At about ten thirty, the train rolled silently into the border station of Gyékényes, where the platform suddenly sprang to life with immigration officials. In a scene reminiscent of the X-files they swarmed around the train with bright torches, carrying them loosely so that the lights danced all over the station. Each guy carried an old fashioned but very bright lantern-style torch (the sort with a handle) and a hammer on the end of a long pole. As they waked the length of the train, hammers clanged against the undercarriage. Were they trying to make a primitive musical instrument, I wondered? Didn't they realise that we had a schedule to keep? Eventually they decided that checking passports would be a good idea, and once again two sets of officials, one Hungarian, one Croation walked down the train. Both had to stamp my passport, and the Croatian one decided to place his entry stamp right on top of one of my American stamps.

An international incident was narrowly avoided when the two sets of officials ran into each other in the corridor, and we finally pulled away from the station having spent over an hour being clanged and prodded.

The train left the border stop in the opposite direction, which meant that I was now closer to the front of the train than the back, changed tracks, and swung round in an arc that took us into Croatia.

location:Budapest

summary:A jammed locker makes for an unelegant introduction to an interesting fellow traveller on the train to Venice

trip:europe02

day:9

[triblondon]

Day 9

On Charlotte's orders, we had to be in the lobby for 6:30am. I had set a wake up call for 5:45, and it didn't work, but I was awake anyway, having slept fitfully on an aching stomach. I was still the first to arrive in the lobby though, and started to check out for the second time, as Steve and Sue arrived. The laundry I had done yesterday had cost me 650 baht, very high considering that you can get the same amount of laundry done on Khao San Road for 100 baht or so. Came back in very nice shrink wrapped packaging though.

Lorna turned up a few minutes after Steve and Sue, and we left for the train station in a couple of taxis. There had been no time for breakfast and I was starving, so I ate a Thai doughnut while we waited for the train. I'm no expert on Thai doughnuts, but I'd say it tasted more like battered fish, without any fish.

We boarded the train on a 3rd class carriage, initially to my disappointment - 3rd class is pretty barren, with bench seating down the sides. The gloom was short lived though, as I realised that I could stick my head out of the window and see forwards. Such simple pleasures are now pretty much unobtainable in the idiot-proof nanny states of the Western world.

The first part of the journey went quickly. It was cool, I was clean, and sticking my head out of the window still had appeal. As the journey wore on, the temperature rose and the dust coated everything and everyone. I slept for a while, which was fairly easy despite the noise and dust because I was able to lie completely flat on the bench seating.

Sometime later we approached the infamous Bridge over the River Kwai, and the train started filling up with tourists wearing coloured stickers and branded name badges. The bridge itself is not the original as built by the allied prisoners of war, but a more solid steel sructure errected sometime later. The original was made out of wood, but only stood for 20 months before it was bombed and completely destroyed by the allies. Incidentally, the famous film "The Bridge over the River Kwai" is not very historically accurate, in that the bridge in the film was destroyed before a single train crossed the span, and it was taken out by commandos instead of by aerial bombing. Also in the film, as in real life, only one soldier managed to escape from the camps, but he was actually British, not American. Quelle suprise.

Having passed by the touristy stalls and markets that have grown up around the bridge (they even sold certificates saying 'I conquered the River Kwai Bridge'), the train crossed into a mountainous area with great scenery. Some of the sections of elevated track in the area did actually retain work done by the POWs, though the train didn't even slow down for those. A short while and more fantastic scenery later we pulled into Kanchanaburi, where we stopped for lunch. We were very dirty, and thankful for wet towellettes provided by the trackside restaurant where we ate.

We continued by minibus to Sangklaburi, stopping occassionaly at some senic spots along the way. At one stop there were a number of houses that appeared to be floating on a lake - we couldn't work out if they were actually floating or built up from the lake bed.

Finally, we arrived at the Burmese Inn, Sangklaburi (on the Burmese border). Charlotte was greeted by the lodge owner, Meo (pron. Me-ow), whose speaking style was a cross between Master Yoda and Ian Paisley - ie. in an odd order and very loud.

"SAWAT-DIE-KHA YOU ARE COMING FROM GECKO TOUR YES"

It wasn't a question.

"GOOD TRIP YOU HAVE"

That didn't seem to be a question either. We had had a good trip, and if we thought different then Meo was here to correct our mistake. Meo showed us to the cabins, Lorna and I following her with Sue and Steve behind. The first room was a twin/double, so Sue and Steve got that one and Lorna and I followed Meo to the next one. This also turned out to be a twin.

"TWO PEOPLE IN ROOM YES"

Nervous laughter broke out as we ummed and ahhed over this tricky social problem that Meo had handed us. After Charlotte cut in and quizzed Meo, we were offered single rooms, which were apparently nowhere near as good as this one.

"It does look very nice" I offered - as far as I was concerned this was a no-brainer: pokey single cabin at the back versus a spacious and well located one at the front with lake views and Lorna. Anyway, she seemed up for it so that was settled. "Yes, this'll be fine".

That issue resolved, we showered, having been pleasantly surprised by the availability of hot water, although the toilet was flushed by filling a bucket, and the sink had no waste pipe. I actually discovered this when I washed my hands and found I was washing my feet as well.

At dinner, Charlotte explained tomorrow's activities and Meo did the same in her own unique way:

"TOUR EARLY 9:00AM BOAT LEAVE HERE TOMORROW GET TO BED"

location:Bangkok - Sangklaburi

summary:Train to Kanchanaburi, Bridge over the River Kwai, interesting room allocations at the hotel

ihave:Crossed the Bridge on the River Kwai

_wp_old_slug:09

trip:thailand02

day:9

[triblondon]

Day 9

Otherwise known as the day Phil couldn't count. Lots of stops today, one significant one where the bus would pick up or drop off passengers: Townsville. On arrival, we got off to have our one-hour break in the town, and arriving back found the bus was a scene of chaos. There were about 50 seats on the bus, and about 70 people wanting to take them. Musical chairs was out of the question, and Phil was trying to decide what to do. He decided to board people one at a time after checking their reservation slips. The problem with this was that almost everyone had a valid reservation slip. After weeding out the three or four that didn't, Phil re-boarded the bus triumphantly to find that about fifteen people were standing in the aisle.

Two hours later we were still in Townsville. Calls to HQ had finally resolved the situation and those that were willing to take the next day's bus were re-booked. We moved on, and the second incident of the day happened a couple of hours later when Phil stalled the bus. On the upward slope of a hill. With no air pressure for the brakes. Fortunately, the people who make busses had thought of this and the bus did not roll back down the hill. It would not go forward either so we spent another 15 minutes stationery as Phil revved the engine until the air pressure was back to normal.

The hostel in Airlie beach was in darkness when we arrived. We decided to check out the beach itself (despite the darkness), and left our room to explore. The lighting ended at the entrance to a wooded passage which supposedly led to the beach, and certainly looked well trodden (the first bit did, we couldn't see the rest very well). Advancing into the trees, armed with maglites, we followed the path as best we could. Shadows cast by the tress in the torchlight made for a very creepy setting and the going was getting rough. Torches had to be focused on the ground ahead as the tree roots surged to the surface, creating nature's own tripwires.

Emerging on the other side of the path, the ground opened up and grass appeared underfoot. A few trees and a telephone/power line were silhouetted in the distance, but there was no immediate sign of the beach. We continued to walk straight ahead, crossing the grassy area in a few minutes, and soon noticed the ground was becoming softer - sand was making an appearance. A little farther on a deserted road with a single street lamp and a row of houses - but now the waves could be heard, and we were close. It appeared that to get to the beach itself we would have to slip through the gap between two houses, and so we did so as quietly as possible. Finally the trees, soil and tarmac gave way to a deserted stretch of beach lit up by the moonlight and two distant fires perhaps half a mile along the shore. The sight of moonlight being reflected from the surface of the water combined with the gentle lapping of the waves is a relaxing contrast to daily life aboard the Oz-bus.

location:Mission Beach - Airlie Beach

summary:Bus trip, the continuing adventures of Phil the bus driver

day:9