Tag Archives: travel

Perth, Australia, from the air

Coming and going and the annual Perth trip.

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I’m writing this from Perth, where a cloudless day has turned into a breezy summer’s evening. I’m listening to the neighbour’s windchimes and the rustle of leaves. I’ve traded my winter coat and thick socks for a tshirt and skirt. This morning, I did a load of laundry and it dried within an hour or two of me hanging it outside. Earlier this evening I sat around with my family drinking Spritz Aperol.

Sorry (not sorry) to my Northern Hemisphere readers for telling you all this.

A hastily-taken plane window shot -- it gives the general impression at least.

A hastily-taken plane window shot — it gives the general impression at least.

I always find landing in Perth a surreal experience. I’m sure it’s partly the sleep deprivation — this year, I had Christmas in Munich with extended family which was super-fun but not sleep-conducive, then a day-long stopover in Dusseldorf on Boxing Day (more on that in another post), then Dusseldorf-Beijing-Singapore-Perth1.

Perth doesn't have sheep grazing on the banks of its river. Dusseldorf does.

Perth doesn’t have sheep grazing on the banks of its river. Dusseldorf does.

But landing in Perth is also weird because it has become something that marks the turning of the year, a point where time folds in on itself. Every year, I have a head-spinning moment of wondering if I’d ever really been away or if my life is Perth in late December/early January and everything else is a dream.

Yes ok, the sleep deprivation definitely contributes to the literal dizziness of that feeling. But the annual cycle is real. Except it’s not quite a cycle. People have gone on living a year here while I’ve been living a year elsewhere. Friendships evolve. Places change. New buildings go up, others get knocked down. And even after living in Perth for years and years, and visiting regularly, there are still things I notice for the first time when I arrive again. This time, it was the smell. A warm dirt and eucalyptus smell, a smell which I instantly recognized as “Perth smell” even if I’d never realized it before.

So for now, this coming and going is part of my life. I like it, even if it does make things more complicated. Like the immigration entry form. I am yet to decide whether I’m a “visitor from overseas, country of residence: Italy” or an “Australian returning to Australia”. Can I be both?

[1] Pro-tip for anyone attempting a similarly stupid-but-cheap itinerary: in Beijing, you have to line up to get your passport stamped even if you’re transferring from one international flight to another and don’t leave the airport. It’s a long queue, maybe have a snack on hand? But don’t get caught out like the people ahead of me in line did — they got almost to the front of the hour-long queue before they discovered that since their connecting flight had a stopover in Shanghai, it was actually a domestic flight and they had to go to a completely different desk to get a Chinese entry stamp.

How to pack light for Christmas holidays

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Normally I have a really easy time of this — I fly directly to Australia so I just throw a bunch of tshirts and a few pairs of shorts in a bag (clean or dirty, doesn’t matter, I can always wash them when I arrive at my parent’s place) and bam. This year, I’m heading to Germany tomorrow for Christmas and flying from there to Australia on the weekend. This raises the difficulty level enough that I need a step-by-step guide.

Step 0: Be overambitious. Carry-on only! A smaller backpack than anyone would think reasonable for 3 weeks! Bring the laptop even though it’s bulky!

[Actually, this year I’m skimping on step 0, since I finally replaced my ratty old 35-litre tear-shaped (ie: useless-shaped) backpack with a shiny new 40-litre bag that’s good and rectangular. I refuse to be drawn into a discussion of whether I should have replaced the old bag 3 years ago, when it had almost a full pint of beer spilt on it in a pub in Glasgow, or even 2 years ago when it started shedding its plastic lining all over everything I put in it.]

Shiny new beer-free backpack.

Shiny new beer-free backpack.

Step 1: “This will be easy.” You just need to substitute warm clothes for some of the tshirts, right? Start making a pile of clothes on the bed.

Step 2: Look at pile of clothes on the bed. It’s such a small pile! Add some more clothes.

Step 3: Put clothes in bag. Awesome, they all fit! You are the queen of minimalist packing!

Step 4: Oh yeah, your laptop needs to go in there. And the power adapter. And your journal. And a book to read on the train tomorrow. And some snacks. And shoes.

Step 5: Pull clothes out of bag. Start putting other things in. Ditch some tshirts.

Step 6: Repeat steps 3-5 a few times. Consider the fact that you have a Bachelors degree in mathematics but are unable to work out if a collection of items will fit in a bag without actually putting them in there to find out. Maybe this is why you’re now a physicist.

Step 7: Procrastinate! Make dinner. Clean the apartment. This is a vital step since procrasti-cooking and procrasti-cleaning are your primary means of eating a nutritious diet and not living in squalor.

Step 8: Try to find ways to leave things out. Maybe if you stay up all night reading the book you were going to read on the train, you can sleep on the train tomorrow and leave the book at home? Realize this will save you a small paperback’s worth of space and will make you miserable. This is barely enough to dissuade you.

Step 9: Success??! You have a bag, it has stuff in it. Time to pull your laptop back out and write a blog post about this. Maybe with an insufferably smug title that positions you as some sort of expert, like “How to pack light for Christmas holidays”.

Step 10: Realize you haven’t packed any toiletries. Packing is the worst.

That time I accidentally moved abroad

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I recently booked some flights back to Australia for Christmas. Inveterate travel cheapskate that I am, I decided to save money by flying Air China, via Beijing. It only adds 10 hours! It’s several hundred euro cheaper! How bad can it possibly be??? That last question is hypothetical, please don’t regale me with stories of how bad it will be.

Anyway, I’ve already done worse. I once flew Perth-New Orleans, via Singapore, London and Chicago. 3 airlines. 40+ hours. Shoving all my stuff into a carry-on so I wouldn’t have to collect bags and possibly miss a transfer. I even got extra security questions at Heathrow due to my weird itinerary.

Also, completely unintentionally, that trip was when I moved overseas.

It started innocently enough. I intended to go to a conference, spend a month in Italy, a few months in Scotland, be home in time for spring. And even that trip was more than I’d really wanted. I’d have been happy to just go to the conference. I’d moved around a bit the previous few years — a couple of 3-month stints overseas, plus changes of housemates and a move within Perth — and I just wanted to stay put for a while. Get some house plants. Give the batch of sourdough starter I’d made a chance to take off.

So when my PhD advisor said he was moving to Scotland and suggested I should also spend a few months there, I was unimpressed. “But I like Perth! I’m writing up, anyway, it’s not like I can’t just work from home if I wanted to. And why does it have to be Scotland, couldn’t you have picked somewhere sunny?”

In the end I’m not as strong-willed as all that, especially not against someone who managed to convince me to start a PhD in the first place because — this is what he said — if I went into industry I might have too much money to know what to do with it, and I’d end up owning investment property. I can’t remember what the arguments were for Scotland, there may not have even been any.

I agreed to some months in Glasgow, a “summer”, if you can call it that in Scotland.

And it was cold, and wet, and for a while there were mushrooms growing in my bathroom, and there was that time the office smelt exactly like a gas leak but it was actually just the drains. And there were the friendliest most sociable colleagues I’ve ever met, and nights spent dying of laughter while drinking whisky in a dark pub, and amazing scenery in the highlands. And I loved it, and with hardly any arm-twisting at all I agreed to stay another 6 months.

So pretty. Except that this it-will-be-dark-in-10-minutes dusk photo was taken at, like, 3pm.

Glasgow can be so pretty. Except that this it-will-be-dark-in-10-minutes dusk photo was taken at, like, 3pm. Winter in Scotland sucks.

When that time was up, the obvious thing to do next — as someone who didn’t want to leave Perth, remember? — would be to move home. So of course I took a job in Torino, Italy.

That was 2 and a half years ago, and I will grant that at some point, the move overseas stopped being accidental. You can’t live in a place for 2 years and not notice that you’re not living in your old hometown any more.

This image maybe over-represents how much sunshine and blue skies Torino really gets.

This image maybe over-represents how much sunshine and blue skies Torino really gets.

I can’t stay here forever, eventually my work contract will run out. What’s next?

Sometimes I’ve considered just not stopping, keeping on moving every 6-12 months. There’s an entire corner of the Internet full of people who’ve decided to perpetually travel. I can see why. Waking up in a city you’ve never been to before is genuinely exciting. And the possibility to re-invent yourself constantly, always being around new people who don’t need to know about your old hangups or unwanted personality traits or past mistakes — if you squint and hold your head at a funny angle, it looks like redemption.

But inertia has kept me in Torino for a while, and I’m glad it has. Waking up in new places is nice, but so is sleeping in your own bed. And what’s even better than having people not know you were a mess a year ago, is having people know perfectly well what a mess you are right now, and they love you anyway. Which, yes, Captain Obvious, but I’m a slow learner.

So I’d like to settle down somewhere eventually. Where? When? Who knows… I’m not sure I’m ready to move back to Australia just yet, but I suppose I shouldn’t rule out the possibility of doing it by mistake.

Trogir, Croatia

Sun and sea and ancient cities — Trogir and Split

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Some more notes from Croatia.

  • Spent 2 nights in Trogir, which is more or less a suburb of Split, but on an island which is neat, even if it’s only an island that you get to by bridge, not an island you get to by boat. The name “Trogir” will never not make me think of “Trogdor” — why yes I have moved in nerdy circles for at least 10 years, why do you ask?

    20140810_203347

    This is actually the new town. Now imagine how nice the old town is. You have to imagine; I didn’t bother to take any photos.

  • The hostel in Trogir is next to a small square, with a big shady tree and a tiny church. At night, the hostel guests sat around on the plastic chairs under the tree, drinking beer from the nearby convenience store and smoking and swapping notes on where they’d been. The local kids would play soccer in the square, using the church doorway as one of the goals. The hostel owner would sit and chat and occasionally arbitrate in disputes between the kids. “You should send the parents the bill for babysitting,” I joked. “Oh no way,” he said. “Then I’d have to be responsible for them!”
  • There’s not much to do in Trogir once you’ve walked through the old town, except find a beach and relax and watch the planes fly into nearby Split airport. As I learned while drinking beer under the tree, the secret to finding a good beach is to slather on the sunscreen and take a walk to the far side of the island, to where the locals go. I failed in the first step and got horrendously sunburnt, but the perfect clear water more than made up for it.

    Ahhhhhh...

    Ahhhhhh…

  • I only gave myself a morning in Split, figuring it would be over-touristy and underwhelming. It was certainly full of tourists, but if you treat it as a sort of Disneyland for ancient Roman nerds, it was rather fun. I had enough time to climb the cathedral tower, which was an occupational safety nightmare with 2-way traffic on steep, narrow, slippery stone stairways. But they kindly let me leave my heavy backpack at the bottom, and the views were amazing.
    Behind the pretty facade lurk terrifying stairs...

    Behind the pretty facade lurk terrifying stairs…

    ...but this sort of view is why you climb it.

    …but this sort of view is why you climb it.

In fairness, what I’ve left out of this write-up is that the area is somewhat industrial, the suburbs of Split do sprawl, and if you go to the beach in the wrong spot you’re liable to have a ciagrette butt float past you. Dare I say it, the beaches are cleaner and prettier in the south-west of Australia (but oh my goodness the water is so much warmer in Croatia!) If I were to travel here again, I’d rent a car and head further along the coast until I found somewhere a bit less crowded. But I would also spend some more time in Split and try to see it properly, and I’d definitely drop in at Trogir in the evening and see if the kids have managed to work out who’s goalie yet.

Festival delle Sagre, Asti, Italy

The time I ate donkey meat – festival delle sagre

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“Does asino mean what I think it–”

“Sure does.”

“Alrighty then. How many plates shall we get?”

Asino is Italian for donkey, and the context was a food stall selling meat-stuffed pasta. I’d gone with some friends to the Festival delle Sagre — the Festival of Festivals — a weekend food festival in Asti, south of Torino. Imagine an agricultural show/county fair with a ferris wheel, but with almost all the exhibits being food stalls. There must have been at least 50 of them. And not nasty showgrounds food. Each stall featured one or two freshly-made dishes, the local specialties of villages in a region known internationally for its food.

And now add in the fact that every stand has wine, typically included in the price of food. And you can buy an empty glass that comes with a holder so you can wear it around your neck as you walk around. Genius!

WINE HOLDER

WINE HOLDER

As soon as we’d arrived, we realized we were going to need a strategy for all this. We started with a reconnaisance — walking around, sussing out what options there were. Truffle risotto! Polenta with wild boar! The options were dizzying. By the time we were halfway through our recon run, it was getting hard to not buy everything in sight.

Once we had the lay of the land, we decided on our first stop, which was by far the highlight of the savoury options — friciula, a fried bread-y-pastry-y thing, with fatty pancetta. It came recommended to us, and it was a good call. Fat and starch and salt and everything delicious. “It’s funny, everyone back in England seems to think Italian food is healthy,” said S. We looked at what we were eating and laughed.

Hard at work serving wine to wash down the artery-clogging goodness.

Hard at work serving wine to wash down the artery-clogging goodness.

Our second stop was the agnolotti d’asino, the donkey pasta. I have to admit, I’m not really a huge meat eater and while I could tell the pasta was different to others I’ve had, I don’t know how much was the donkey meat and how much was the flavourings they used. It was tasty, but. And a good discussion starter — if horse is ok to eat, why not donkey? Or to go a step back towards Australian thinking — if cow is ok to eat, why not horse…?

While we were walking around, thinking about what to get next, we hit on the optimal food-finding strategy: hang around the central area where the tables were, look at what other people are eating, and if it looked good, ask them where it was from. It was through this, plus a discussion of whether polenta is similar to ugali, that we ended up with polenta and wild boar stew. (The verdict: polenta is not like ugali, but it is good.)

At this point we were extremely full. “No you finish the polenta; no you; no really, I can’t” level of full. We had to make some serious decisions about desserts. I think we got it right: zabaglione (custard but amazing custard made with wine not, like, custard powder custard), and “chocolate salami”, which is possibly the best chocolate slice I’ve ever had (it doesn’t contain salami, if you were wondering). Two very different options, both delicious.

It was a happy sleepy train ride home, full of food and wine. We are so doing this again next year.

Zagreb to Split by overnight train.

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Yeah, so this blog is rapidly turning into a collection of “Zoe catches a train” stories and I don’t care. As an aside, I definitely get it from my parents: a few years ago they took a trip around the US by train which from their accounts sounds amazing but if you know them you can just imagine Dad geeking out about AMERICA!!! the whole time and Mum being the most organized person to ever take a multi-week trip with only a small carry-on bag. Like I say, I get it from them.

So there I was at Zagreb’s main train station at 10.30 pm, peering into the train that was going to trundle down to Split overnight. It was a cool evening and I was glad I’d changed into jeans before I left my hostel. Almost everyone else on the platform was a backpacker, presumably with the same idea as me: get to the coast, with a night’s accomodation, for around 200 kuna (~30 euro). My ticket was for a seat, which I was quickly realizing was going to be a bolt-upright seat in a compartment of 6 — 3 facing 3. Uh oh. I can sleep on planes, but I need that 1–2 inches of reclining and I prefer not to have to negotiate leg room with the stranger facing me.

I kept walking along the train, and I’m glad I did because right at the end was the one car that had couchettes. A horizontal bed! What luxury! I found the conductor, and she had a spot available, for 13 euro (euros, not Croatian kuna. Huh?). I’ve paid more than that for mediocre sushi in Torino. Easiest sale she ever made.

I started to see why it was only 13 euro when I got into my compartment and there was zero aircon. It was sweat-pouring-down-your-face hot. There wasn’t much of a common language between the 6 of us in the compartment, except for the phrase “very hot” which we all agreed on, except for the Serbian lady who was apparently completely unaffected by heat and kept her cardigan on the whole time. As I was settling in for what promised to be a sticky night, I heard a girl in the next compartment say “Maybe we won’t be able to sleep, we’ll just have to party all night!” I got my earplugs out.

Once we got moving, the open window made a huge difference to the temperature and I ended up dozing beautifully, rocked by the motion of the train and the low background noise of the diesel engine (Ms Party All Night seemed to have slept, too).  I say dozing, because it’s hard to fall into a deep sleep when you’re on the upper (3rd) bunk and the straps that are supposed to stop you from falling out and breaking your leg are only tenuously attached.

But light sleep means you catch the early morning light, which makes everything worthwhile:

I swear my phone has an anti-Instagram filter and real life looked 20x more magic-light than this.

I swear my phone has an anti-Instagram filter and real life looked 20x more magic-light than this.

Yup I'm in a train.

Yup I’m on a train.

Practical details for future reference: You can buy tickets at Zagreb station and don’t particularly need to book in advance as far as I can tell (though I don’t know if the ticket window stays open as late as the train departure — I bought my tickets the day before). The lady at the ticket window didn’t mention to me there were couchettes, which is how I ended up with a seat ticket, but they do exist! The train leaves Zagreb at 11-ish and arrives in Split at 7-ish, at the train station which next to the bus station and the ferry terminal.

Zagreb: my kind of city

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Collage1
Zagreb, for me, was full of surprises.

I’d had a look at a Lonely Planet guide before I left home, which asked “Is Zagreb worth visiting?” It answered with something vague that suggested you may as well stay the night if you had to stop there on your way to the coast. I think it even used the word “pleasant”.

Let this be a lesson not to rely on Lonely Planet. I loved my 2.5 days in Zagreb.

It started as soon as I got off the train. The weather was perfect, and at 5pm the afternoon light was magical. Unlike Ljubljana, where I had come from and where the train station faces onto a bus station and some dreary office blocks, Zagreb station is near the centre of town and faces a grassy square with trees and surrounded by beautiful buildings. It was so pretty my diary from that day took a turn for the teenage-girl-ish: “I felt I had arrived.”

Overwrought sentiment aside, the city benefits from a strong Austro-Hungarian influence on the architecture, but it’s not a museum and mixed in are elegant 1920s apartment blocks, some modern city buildings, and even some art deco. The blend makes it perfect for strolling, which goes well with the sheer number of cafes in the city — my pattern was walk around a bit, have a coffee and read some of my book, repeat repeat repeat. I could live like that.
Other things I did:

  • The evening I arrived, there was a free organ & violin concert in the cathedral. Heck yes free concerts. And it got me to sit down for an hour in the cathedral and actually look at the art, which is pretty great for me who normally does a 2-minute lap of a church and then walks out again.
  • The Museum of Broken Relationships, which is the one museum that seemingly every backpacker who goes to Zagreb visits. It lives up to the hype. If you’re a sap like me, bring tissues. (I didn’t, and had to suppress every thought of “he left her then??” and focus on giggling about the Toaster of Vindication until I got out.)
  • The other museum I went to was the Croatian Museum of Naive Art, which I enjoyed although I wish there had been more explanations. Like, one of the artists had a chicken in almost all his paintings on display. Did he just like chickens? Did it have a symbolic significance? I started to make up my own interpretations. The chicken stands for human unwillingness to face life’s deep questions.
  • Maksimir Park was well worth the walk out of town. It’s a really well designed city park, very peaceful with beautiful gardens. And apparently one of the first free public parks in Europe.

Bits and pieces from Slovenia

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A few more memories from Slovenia that didn’t fit in any other post…

  • Not having enough water with me for the train ride to Bled, and trying to convince myself that eating the tomatoes I’d grabbed from the fridge on my way out of Torino that morning would serve me for rehydration. Two simultaneous truths: tomatoes aren’t that great for thirst; I was never really so thirsty that ‘rehydration’ was actually necessary.
  • Two roads diverged in a yellow wood… and I took the one for the pizzeria, obviously:

    Pizza this way

    Pizza this way

  • Also in Bled: a group of german teenage dirtbag Scouts, hanging around the bus station waiting for a taxi after missing the last bus to wherever it was they were going. Imagine a 1.5 litre plastic bottle of beer shared around, cigarettes, each of them wearing Scout scarves round their neck while trying to impress each other by melting bits of rubbish with their lighters (something something shouldn’t they have been using 2 sticks…)
  • Eating a horse hamburger in Ljubljana, which was very tasty (something something unknowingly eating horse hamburgers already in the uk) but it came in a bun that was the size of my face, filled with sauce. It defeated me.
  • Ljubljana was also where I met my first ever real life travelling-around-europe-on-a-gap-year girls. We were discussing our travels over breakfast in the hostel with a Croatian woman who was in Ljubljana to take her daughter to a figure-skating camp.
    “So then we got the train from Sofia to Zagreb,” said one of the girls.
    “It was 27 hours,” added the other.
    “Sofia? To Zagreb?! By train??! That’s… enthusiastic,” said the Croatian woman. She turned to the guy at the reception desk at the other end of the room. “Did you hear that? These girls, they got the train! from Sofia to Zagreb! Why?!”
  • My favourite “no dogs” sign ever, at Lake Bohinj:

    Only unexcited dogs allowed.

    Only unenthusiastic dogs allowed.

Grand Canyon, November 2011

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Another “where was Zoe?” post. This time, a tale of surprise, disappointment, and triumph… ;)

When I’d arrived in Phoenix, Arizona the week before, it had been so hot I’d immediately gone and bought a pair of flip flops to wear instead of shoes. And here I was, seven days later and only a few hundred miles away, trying not to slip on the ice at the edge of the Grand Canyon and regretting not having  pair of serious winter boots. Yeah: it turns out that the south rim of the Grand Canyon, being around 7000 feet (2000m) above sea level, does actually get cold. As in, snow and ice and everything:

Not what I'd planned.

None of the photos on the official website looked like this.

To make matters worse, the rim of the canyon was at approximately cloud-level, so visibility was only a few metres. Huddling in an enclosed lookout for warmth, I read a sign that showed me all the things I could have seen on the opposite rim of the canyon, and felt a twinge of envy when I overheard the couple nearby talking about the rim-to-rim hiking trip they’d made the year before. Hiking was out of the question that day, since all the trails into the canyon had turned into a gloriously slippery mix of mud and ice.

Since I’d already paid for my non-refundable room in a nearby hotel that night (yeah, shouldn’t have booked that without checking a weather forecast first), I decided to stick around and drink expensive bad hot chocolate at the cafeteria and hope that the clouds lifted. Which they did, sort of:

Something that's not grey or white!

Something that’s not grey or white! 5 minutes later, the cloud was covering this again.

In the end, I called it an early day and headed back to Tusayan to warm up with a serving of kitsch-mexican from the restaurant across the road from my hotel, and to drown my touristic disappointments in a slightly flourescent margarita.

I’m tempted to leave the story here, as a cautionary tale about checking weather forecasts before making travel plans, but the next morning, I woke up with the sun streaming through the gap in the curtains. Of course the day I had to get back to Phoenix to catch my flight was going to be glorious. I rushed through breakfast so I could get back to the Canyon as fast as possible. I only got an hour there, but it was totally worth it:

BLUE SKY!!!!

There really is a canyon there.

Austin, Texas, March 2011

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I thought I’d write a few “catch-up” posts between when I last regularly updated here and the blog revival. Maybe I should rename the blog “where was Zoe in 2011/2012?”

View to downtown Austin from the footbridge near South Lamar Blvd.

View to downtown Austin across the lake (apparently it’s a lake? it looked a lot like a river to me…?)

I made the mistake of going to Austin without a car. It’s got this reputation of being a crazy, left-wing (read: less right-wing) town, so I figured it would be like New Orleans or San Fransisco, where getting around without a car is feasible or even preferable. Yeah, not so much. I dunno. Maybe if I was really into bars I’d have been more excited by my car-free few days in Austin, but as it was, it turns out that most of the things I would have enjoyed doing involve being able to drive out of town.

However, to be fair on Austin, I would seriously consider going back with a car if I was in the area again: the lake is quite beautiful and good for walking along; I seriously spent half a morning in the Whole Foods flagship store which makes me hungry just remembering it; it’s easy enough to get a decent coffee, which is not to be underestimated in the US; the hostel I stayed in managed to be clean and not noisy at night and friendly; and I had an AMAZING Korean-Mexican fusion burrito from a van near the State Capitol, the calories from which I think I finally burnt off last week.