Hello Scotland

So last night I flew in to Edinburgh and Gary, his girlfriend Joanne and an Aussie mate of his (Craig, not Greg. Gary can't speak english properly). Apparently we are not allowed to battle to see which side of the Tasman sea is better.

We dropped our stuff off at Garys flat (they had just driven down from Caithness) and had a beer. Unfortunately we drank the last beers in the house so we thought the pub might be a good option. And that was about it. I hadn't had dinner so I got pretty hammered drunk pretty quick but apparently that suited Scotland better anyway. We had some tasty kebab things on the way home. I had a pretty good sleep in the closet (literally a closet, only just big enough for a bed), and now I am waiting for my cooked breakfast before we make a plan for today.

Bye Switzerland

This morning we had a "sleep in" which I think meant that Grant and Bea woke up about 8. Good luck trying to convince me that that (man english is messed up sometimes) is a sleep in. Grant and I went for a run and we went up to the table where we cooked sausages (3rd time for me, pretty sweet table). I showed Grant where the geocache was and he took a travel bug to take home to New Zealand. Now he is committed to buying a GPS and doing some caching. We decided to do some explore running on the way home and set off down a wee track. We seemed to be going pretty good with our route finding until we went down a track that petered out completely. This felt familiar to me from the other day. Since bush bashing had gone so well before we decided to do it again. I said "the worst thing that can happen is that  we get bluffed out" and then we got bluffed out. It wasn't too bad though, not real bluffs, just wet steep slippery slopes down to a river and a creek. We could see the road from the top so we backtracked up the creek and found somewhere to get down that minimised potential injuries. Then just as we got close to the road we had to go across another creek and up a steep bank through a tangle of blackberries. Needless to say: the bush bash didn't go so well this time.

We then went to look for presents for staying with the Eckerts and pick up Bea from Winterturgh (about 15min away from Pfungen. Unfortunately when we arrived we rang Beas phone and it did a weird beeping thing. We carried on with the rest of our plan and got a dry bag and a pack cover for Werner. Then we tried Beas phone a couple more times to no avail. We decided that her phone must be broken and pulled the pin on the rescue Bea part of the plan. On the way home Grant was optimistic that she would be back at the house magically, but she was not. So we started lunch without her (Ridiculously tasty sausages and shredded potatoes). Luckily a bedraggled Bea (it had started raining pretty hard) turned up 10 min later and explained her phone company had cut her off because she hadn't paid the bill. She had caught a train home. Speaking of rain, we were so lucky with the weather, apparently some of Werners friends had gone hiking somewhere close to where we had gone (the day before) and it was pissing down.

So we packed up our stuff and left Werners house. I am so grateful that we had such an awesome place to stay and feel pretty lucky that I got to go to see a small part of the Swiss alps. Werner said I could go back and stay with him and he has a friend that has done mountain guiding before that could take me into the serious mountains. I just might have to take him up on that some time, anyone else keen? Looking at you Rowan, Vaughn, Micky D. You are invited too Jimmy but I know how you feel about walking/being overseas.

So I have just got to Heathrow from Zurich and I am waiting for a flight to Edinburgh to hang out with Gary Sinclair for a while.

Swiss Alps

This morning saw us getting up at 5:15am to make sure we could beat the traffic in Zurich to get to the mountains. We were successful and we found a cafe thing to have breakfast in. I think we parked at a place called Gadmen but I'm not sure if that was the place of the area. We caught a cable car up the valley which cut about 2 hours off the walk. Really cool views.

So from here it was just quite a bit of walking for a couple of hours. Sorry Rowan but there is gonna be quite a few photos in this update!

When we got to the top we found another cafe, at 1880m. Kinda hilarious. I think you could also stay there. Look up "Windegghutte, Gadmen" on google maps.

I didn't feel like coffee so I decided to go for a huss up to a repeater tower thing on the ridge. It was a bit more of a climb than I though but I think it was worth it. Unfortunately, now that I was on the ridge I could see the next peak, and the one after that, and the one after that, all the way up to the to a peak much higher than the one I was on, despite the urge to keep climbing I thought they might be expecting me back at the cafe in the next 15min, not 8 hours. We carried along the track mostly downhill to a swing bridge which was pretty impressive. It was 100m above the river and 170m long. More photos:

From here (and from the ridge I had climbed up to) we had some amazing views of the mountain range with glaciers in it. I think the peaks we could see were around 3000m and the range behind it went up to about 3600m. Hopefully I will get a chance to come back someday to have a crack at a few of them! So many people thought, we were there on a Wednesday and there was heaps of people on the track, hopefully there would be less up the serious mountains. It was a pretty easy walk back down to the cables car where we had a disagreement about cable car courtesy but luckily Grant had not left without Bea and I when we got to the bottom so that was good.

We then went to the Aareschlucht gorge (limestone). There was a walkway all the way through it that was cantilevered from the side of the gorge and included a series of tunneled section too. I don't really know why I didn't take any photos but it was not too different to the other gorges I have been in anyway. On the way back we found that the tunnels had quite a good echo in them so we started making ghost noises (isn't that what everyone does?) We were quite subtle about it and it was pretty funny to watch the confused looks on peoples faces. We had only just left the tunnels when a massive asian tour group was just entering. Grant, Bea and I exchanged look, and without saying anything turned around and made another pass through the tunnels to make ghost noises. We are so awesome.

On the way home we decided to take the senic route which was a good option. We wound our way up to a pass at about 2200m. On the way home we passed by Luzern which is apparently a bit like Queenstown. It looked similar too with a Lake and mountains that rose straight up from the sides of the lake to the high peaks. The mountains in Switzerland are pretty damned awesome.

Unfortunately the drive home after we left the mountains was quite long. We were held up on the motorway for a while with some roadworks and when we decided to exit to try our luck on the secondary roads we hit serious traffic. We were pretty surprised as it was just normal commuting traffic but it was 7:30pm! Lame for them.

We had a pretty quick dinner and a shower before meeting an old school friend of Grants. He had been working in Germany and Switzerland for about 15 years but still had one of the strongest kiwi accents I have heard. I bought a beer for 9 franks whichI didn't even bother to convert to NZD in my head because I know it would have been about a million dollars, crikey!

Some very tired teddies crawled in to bed about midnight.

Road Trip Day 5 - not really road tripping anymore in Switzerland

This morning we were up and ready to go at 7am. These early mornings may eventually kill me, but for the moment I think it is a good thing. We went with Beas uncle, Werner, for a wander in the hills behind the town. It was really good to be out and about in the forest. 

We kept an eye out for critters but didn't find much other than some big ass slugs. At the top we built a campfire and cooked saveloy over it for breakfast. Here is a nice unflattering picture of Bea and Grant doing just that.

We needed to be back by 11am to start cre-arting a heat generating source for cooking food over. After Grant and I had demonstrated our fire cre-arting abilities on the top of the hill, Werner deemed us capable of getting the BBQ going while he left for supplies. We were very successful, and Werner was even more successful at cooking some beautifully marinated pork steaks. Two of Beas aunties came over for lunch and we had a great time having a yarn as everyone had done quite a bit of travel and they had all been to New Zealand.

Just before dinner I decided I would do some exploring by trying out a new fad called jogging. I think its a soft J, apparently you just run for an extended period of time. I was initially intending to follow some local knowledge directions but at the halfway point only 8 min had elapsed, so I thought I would add some filler. I headed off down some random road and made arbitrary decisions at all the forks in the road. Unfortunately it got extremely muddy and overgrown, which slowed progress down quite a bit. Then the path ran out completely. hmmm. I decided that going back the way I came would be too boring so I decided I might try a bush bash. So I headed down a steep slope to the right of the road for about 600m and kept trying to remember dead trees and stuff so that I could find my way back. I eventually came back on to a good gravel track. Up the road another 20min I found a couple of weird ass wooden instrument things. One was vertical and the other was horizontal. They consisted of a bunch of different sized pieces of wood and you bashed them with a wooden hammer to make a musical echo in the valley. Smashing stuff. I thought I should probably head home at this point but I also didn't want to take the same route back, so I did some exploratory probing of small tracks to see if they went where I wanted to go. I was heartened at one intersection by a sign that said Pfungen so that was good, I thought I should be able to follow the ridge back to the table where we cooked saveloys in the morning. Turns out I had pretty good bearings because I stumbled across it and found a mountain biker. After a quick chat he told me he was geo-caching and had found a cache hidden just beside where we cooked our breakfast! I asked him if I could take a travel bug because I could take it to Scotland or Canada and he reckoned that was a good idea. So now I have a wee panda guy with me for some travels. Awesome huh?

We ate some tasty pork things and eggs for dinner. I didn't know you could have eggs that tasted so damn good, I wonder what they feed the chickens, rainbows and diamonds I suspect. After dinner there was some playing of a dice game called "Maya" where you basically just accuse people of lying all the time. These guys would love spies but unfortunately we didn't have enough people.

Bed now as we have an early start at 5am tomorrow to beat the traffic and have enough time in the mountains. Looks like crap weather unfortunately. Meow.

Road Trip Day 4 - Munchen to Pfungen (cos it Rhymes)

So this morning we were super efficient at getting organised as we had a deadline to meet and a lot of driving to do. Our deadline was 6:30pm at the Zurich airport to drop Ji off and we also wanted to see a couple of things on the way so we rattled our dags the best ways we knew how. We hit the road at dead on 8am to find another yummy bakery breakfast. We then managed to leave there at our estimated time and arrived at Dachau Concentration Camp at opening time at 9am. It is hard for me to describe anything about going to the camp. I have always been keen to go to a concentration camp, but even that sounds like a terrible thing to say for some reason. So wandering around I was a ridiculous combination of excited/depressed/apprehensive. It was kinda creepy/interesting inside the camp. I have always seemed to struggle to grasp the concept of historic events and visualise what it must have been like at the time but I did my best. Out the front was a memorial/monument to remember the people that died:

The exhibition was really interesting and we had audio guide thingamy jiggers again to talk to us. The best/worst (seems like nothing about a concentration camp can be described with a single adjective) part of this was personal accounts from survivors and people who were involved with the liberation of the people. I learnt quite a bit about how Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power which was good/bad (my learning obviously, not the actual Nazis rising to power, that was definitely bad). There was also some interesting/disturbing information about medical experiments the Nazi doctors carried out on prisoners. The camp was kinda unique in that it was already a prison before the Nazi party existed and slowly evolved as the war progressed to house more people with even less resources. At the peak of the camps use there were barracks designed for 50 people with 400 crammed in them. The camp did have gas chambers for mass executions but there is no accounts of these ever being used. About 30,000 people died at the camp. After the war the Nazi party claimed that American soldiers built the gas chambers themselves to make the Nazi's look bad. Worth a crack Nigel.

So enough of that! We hopped in a car to raced to Neuschwanstein Castle. We arrived at 1pm and were horribly disappointed to find that 80% of it was covered in scaffolding! I mainly blame Grant as he has been whinging about scaffolding so much during this trip that he jinxed it. Such a shame, as it was a fantastic day so we could have got some amazing photos. We decided to line up to have a look inside anyway and found that the first available entry time would be 4pm. It would have then been trick to make the 3 hour drive to get Ji to Zurich so we had to abandon that plan. We decided instead to take the back roads to Zurich and take our time. Which I am pretty stoked about, as we found this:

Bah hah hah, Wank! After some obvious jokes (e.g. that was a good wank, I wonder how big that wank was, hah hah hah...wank...hah hah etc.) we carried on to Zurich and marvelled at the countryside. It was very green and kinda similar to New Zealand but something was a little bit different, I don't really know what though. One thing that was interesting is that there are very few fences. I can only assume that the cows just like their own paddocks so much they never try to leave. Either that or the bloody annoying bells around the necks prevent them from moving to much at a time for fear of going mad.

We arrived in Zurich with enough time to have a quick beer with Ji and an intense conversation about religion (it was only a matter of time!) before Ji left. Then we went to Bea's unkles house in Pfungen which is about 10km out of Zurich where we were lodging for a couple of nights. We had a big yarn to him and a few beers before turning in for the night. Very cool to be staying with locals.

Road Trip Day 3 - Dinner and a Blog

So this evening we met Phil and his mates for some more dreaded beer and some food. It was a great meal and we got to hear Phils joke about the lawnmower. Even the beer kinda tasted good so things were looking up.

Now I have no idea what time it is, all I know is I have been catching up on this blog for what seems to be the 4 hours. Luckily I had typed up the days when I did not have internet access so lots has been cutting and pasting but I still had to vet and archive my photos. That is why the last 3 days have all been uploaded within hours of each other. It does not have anything to do with the time compression device I bought the other day.

Bed is going to be so damn good. Goodnight.

Road Trip Day 3 - Munich

So today (27/8) was pretty rough. I got about 2 hours of sleep and woke up a little bit pissed. I knew I would regret not getting up and joining in the days activites though. So I manned up, got up and just had to make sure I did a metric shit tonne of winging to make sure everyone appreciated my effort to be with them. Luckily for me, no one else was really at the top of their game anyway:

We went for a wander around Munich and found the Residence. It was another big ole house thing with a ludicrously lavish interior, see the banquet hall below:

There was also a sweet statue of Perseus holding the madjusas head aloft in triumph, little did he know that Kratos was just around the bend to take his.

Included in the 7 euro entry fee was an audio tour guy (like the tower of london) so we started listening to all sorts of crap about stuff. About half way through I realised that I wasn't actually listening to any of it and gave up. Then I discovered that if you picked one of the audio tracks that had music at the start of it and held a handset up to each ear it sounded amazing. I'm sure the residence was amazing but I just wasn't capable of enjoying it, hell, I couldn't have even operated a bread-maker. The dual-audio-tour-handset-syncapated-music thing was probably the highlight. Here is a demonstration of how cool we looked doing it:

Then we dropped a couple of weary girls off a the accommodation and Grant and I went to have a look around BMW Vert, the BMW museum. It was kick ass. A really interesting building and lots of interesting ways of presenting the exhibits. We also had a win as the entry fee was waived for some reason. I suspect it was because me and Grant just looked so damned sexy.

Road Trip Day 2 - Romantic Fast Track and Drinking With Phil

We had a fairly rushed day 2 to our road trip as we were running out of time to meet Phil in Munich, or as it is pronounced if you want anyone to understand you, "monhyen". We saw much of the same stuff we had seen on day 1 so wasn't too much of a worry, ambiguous Schloss (Castle) and bridge photo below:

We were getting excited because a town called Ausburg had 10 pages dedicated to it in the guide book an our favourite, Rothemburg, only had 8. But when we got there we found it was just a big place so had a lot of stuff going on. Ate some tasty food there though.

We met Phil at the accommodation and headed into Munich town for a night of debauchery. We drank some wonderful beers and we ate some tasty German sausage. Many tall stories were told and many laughs were had. We went to a number of great pubs but one highlight was going to this pub on the second floor of a random building. It was how I could imagine little village pubs must be. It was tiny, and there was only about 30 people in it but everyone was singing at the top of their lungs alongside the entertainment for the evening: a man that was reasonably awful at singing (I hope he doesn't read this) and reasonably awesome at playing the accordion. I was considering asking him to try his hand at the song "Disappointment of the worlds largest prairie dog" but didn't think that song had gone mainstream yet. Parts of the party split off over the course of the night and for some reason I was left with an Irishman (Mark). I'm not sure if a kiwi and an Irishman is a good combo at all. We went and tried to get into a number of places but kept getting turned away because we were wearing shorts. I had a big yarn to a bouncer and told him that in NZ if it is hot, everyone wears shorts and bars don't have a problem with it. I was lying to him but it didn't work anyway. We did get into a couple of places though. The first was a packed wee place with seedy red lights that was cranking an eclectic mix of music, it seemed like the DJ must have had a multiple personality disorder. I have never heard "Du Hast" and "Candle in the wind" played back to back (come to think of it, I have never heard candle in the wind played at a pub!) but everyone seemed to think it was a good idea and sang along with great enthusiasm including myself. The last bar we went to was apparently the "last resort" in Munich. The place you go when no one else will let you in or everywhere has closed. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. After a couple more beers we left and went hunting for some tucker and I got a big greasy feed of BK. Some habits stick with you on the other side of the world it seems. On the way we walked past a couple of girls cranking "Seasons of Love" on an iPhone and singing (not particularly well) so I threw in my two cents worth as well (which I'm not sure improved the situation at all). After the song finished I asked them where they were from and one of them was a kiwi. Hilariously she had an epic American accent because all of her friend were American. We had a big yarn about musicals and shit and turns out her brother was probably in the Starlight Express I saw in Christchurch. Also funny was that as we talked her american accent faded into a true blue kiwi accent, it was kinda weird. Then Mark told her friend he thought it would be a good idea if she climbed over the closest car, which happened to be a Porsche. So that happened, and then they did the bolt. Which was a good thing because I realised something terrible was happening: the sun was coming up. We quickly located some BK and caught a taxi back to the  hotel thing. When I got back to the room Grants alarm was going off. Bad news for the amount of sleep I was gonna get but I crawled in to bed hopeful for a couple of minutes kip.

Road Trip Day 1 - Rothemburg and stuff

It was a reasonably early start for us in Frankfurt this morning (24/8). We decided to deprive ourselves of breakfast for a while and push on to Wurzberg (there are meant to be German umlouts in some of these words but I have no bloody idea how to get those in there) to find food. We travelled for about an hour and were pretty starving so Grant and I ordered an obscene amount of food and heartily gobbled it all up, much to the enjoyment of Bea, Ji and the staff at the bakery. Everything only came to about 6 euro each though, shit yeah! We then went for a bit of a wander and found this:

We ended up going into "the residence" which apparently means "some big ass swanky house". It was pretty incredible, I felt pretty uncultured compared to my seasoned traveller friends (who have been inside swankier places) but I thought all the paintings on the ceilings, and intense pictures of Alexander the great conquering shit on rugs hanging on the walls was the most elaborate stuff ever.

The garden was equally swanky:

Then we hit the Romantische strasse (Romantic road) at about midday, which was a problem because we had just spent half a day at the start of the road and there was 5 days worth of stuff to cram in. After looking around the first couple of stops on the romantic road we decided that we needed to speed up the trip a bit. We added structure (when in Rome) by introducing a drive-by-voting system, where we each said yay or nay to stop at the town. We also introduced a rule where we all had two "hey lets go check that out" points and if the place was crap we lost a point, if the place was good then you got 2 extra points. Bea lost one of hers instantly with a pathetic side street. We were losing a bit of faith in the road (due to a wimpy sundial in Rottengen and a generally lacklustre Bad Mergentheim, maybe the names were a givaway) when we hit the beautiful and serene Rothenburg. As Grant said "it was like the greatest hits of everything we had seen so far. We went up a tower thing for some sweet views and spent a long time wandering the streets.

Almost too much time as we checked our watches at 4:50pm and decided we should look for accommodation there. We raced back to the information center and booked a couple of rooms just before they closed at 5pm. We checked into a great little place for 25 euro each including breakfast. It was above a little shop that sells general foodstuffs, fresh vegetables and model cars. Hilarious combo. With a bit more daylight on our hands we circumnavigated the town around its medieval wall:

most of which we could walk inside. Wearily we staggered back to our accommodation and found that there was walking tour that started in 10mins time. After much debating if we should go or not we decided to go wait at the start point and make a decision there. When the tour guide turned up our decision was made for us as he was in a full "night watchman" costume complete with halberd and a candle lantern. It was a really great tour and included an interesting bit of history as follows: in WW2 they tried to bomb Rothemburg by plane but it was too foggy so most of the shells missed. Then they decided to shell the hell out of it with artillery until some American joker caught wind of it. This American jokers Mum had been to Rothemburg before he was born and fell in love with the place, accordingly he grew up hearing about this wonderful wee town and so requested that the artillery plan was abandoned. Instead they requested that Rothemburg surrenders. Luckily the Nazi General that was usually station at Rothemburg was away and the Major that was left in charge decided to accept surrender (he suspected that the war would soon be over anyway) despite that fact that he would be tried for treason if he was caught "surrendering". So Rothemburg surrendered, was saved and the war finished days later. Hope that story didn't need more Dragons for ya.

We then tracked down some amazing Wiener Schnitzel for dinner to round off a cracker Day 1. Holy crap, I guess this is what happens when I write this down when everything is fresh in my mind, too much writing me thinks!

Frankfurt

Arrived in Frankfurt (23/8) to meet Grant and Bea at the airport. Grant had wisely upgraded the car we were hiring which was lucky as our stuff only just fit in the larger SUV boot. After some shinanigans with the car GPS (apparently it only speaks in German, I will look into it tomorrow) we found our hotel, checked in and had a quiet drink to catch up the last 3 days they have been in Paris. The main reason I am writing this post is to marvel at the fact that there is a "stop" function on the toilet to stop it flushing. I don't know whether that is genius or ridiculous, but either way it is hilarious.

Bring on the sweet Germany to Switzerland road trip!

Alexander Palace and London Escape

Last day in England for a while.... (23/8) Gaz and I had yet another lazy morning and the went to check Alexander Palace. It was a bit of a walk but worth it for the palace and the view. I have no idea what the Palace was built for or when it was built, but it was used around 1919 to house German prisoners. Now it has an ice rink in it for some reason. Here is a picture so that you can judge it for yourself. 

Bloody big aerial on it, I'm not sure if it adds any value. The Palace was up on a bit of a hill thing so you can see out over most of Londinium. Cue pic of me and Gaz standing in front of the view. 

Out to the right of us you can just make out some of the big buildings in London including the Shard (big ole guy, apparently tallest in Europe or some shit).

Then we headed back to Haydens flat and I repacked my bag after he went to work. I am typing this on the plane to Frankfurt which will be about part 4 (or part 5 if you count Auckland) of my journey. Seems like a hell of a lot longer than 3 weeks has passed. I am pretty ready to move on from London, I think if I were to live there then I wouldn't be getting bored but I think a week is enough for touristy stuff. Bring on zee Germans (and the Swiss).

P.S. wrote this a while ago but no internet until now, hence wacky dating.

In Bruges

So I gotta somehow get back into the habit of writing this more often so another update is: I watched In Bruges with Gaz. It was a good movie, I haven't actually been to Bruges. Goodnight.

Legal Stuff and London Imperial War Museum

So I'm pretty sorry that the last few posts have been a bit up to not much as I have been too lazy to update the blogosphere in the same day that I have done stuff. I have just written yesterday and the day before and I really can't be bothered with today but I'll give it a whirl. Also apologies for spelling/grammar mistakes as I sure as hell can't be bothered proofing all this. Sorry.

This morning we went on a tour around the 4 inns of some legal stuff to do with people with wigs and capes. It was kinda interesting but nothing to write home about.

We then went to the Imperial War Museum which was pretty awesome but really confusing (due to the museum layout, not the subject matter). Hayden and I kept getting lost and there is only so many cases of military nick nacks (I'm terribly sorry, I'm not trying to be insulting to war stuff, but I really don't need to see some dudes dismantled boots, or some other dudes necklace). I guess we started out with the intent to at least pass through everywhere in the place, but little did we know how gigantic it was. The problem mainly came when we walked into a room and had to have a 30 min debate about whether we had seen this particular nick nack case or not.

There was some really cool stuff in there though and some interesting stories from some soldiers from Afghanistan. It also hit home for me how successful the Germans were in WW2. I think it was because I had been wandering around London (becoming pretty familiar with it) and then saw how bombed to hell it was during WW2. There was a creepy old picture of a Nazi plane flying over the Thames with fires and explosions all over London. I think coming from New Zealand (far away from all the action), and not having any immediate family involved with the war, I never really got why any one would join the army, but if someone started bombing my back yard I would certainly want to do something about it. I hate to get even more sombre but there was also an amazing (feels like the wrong word to use, but aweful wouldn't fit either) holocaust exhibition. Holy shit that Hitler dude had some crazy ideas, it wasn't even that long ago.

So to bring it back to a lighter note, here is a photo of a V2 rocket for James O:

and below is a picture of Hayden standing next to a rocket with a bunch of other rockets strapped to it. I can just imagine them sitting round a table discussing how they could give their one big rocket more blasting power, "I know, lets gaff some other smaller rockets to it". Genius. I also had to put a bit of "attitude cam" on to get the whole thing in the frame.

I think we sunk a good 5 hours or so into the place before they kicked us out and we probably only read / listened to about 9% of the information (of which only a small fraction was actually absorbed).

We went back to Haydens and he cooked me a delicious burger extravanganza sensations for dinner and now I have finally caught up with all this blogging shit. Crickey, I hope I don't get this behind again.

Westminster Walking tour and We Will Rock You

We had a pretty lazy morning and then went to check out some Westminster shit. Its all big and old and stuff. Here is me drinking some delicious red liquid in front of the Abbey.

We decided to try to get tickets to We Will Rock You. During the walk to Leicester Square I took an Obligatory photo of some stuff down the Thames River.

So we were successful in securing tickets to We Will Rock You which I was pretty excited about since I was so disappointed with Rock Of Ages. For pre-show nourishment we went to hunt some Chinese (food) in Chinatown. We found a 7 pound all you can eat buffet place which was pretty amazing. I'm not sure how legit all of the meat was but it was slathered in delicious MSG so I was pretty happy.

We Will Rock You was fantastic. I don't know if it was just that it was Queen songs, or I had such a bad taste in my mouth from Rock of Ages but I really enjoyed it. Wacky bloody storyline but it seemed to work somehow and there was lots of hilarious references to pop culture. I thought it was a way better tribute to Rock than Rock of Ages was anyway (did I tell you how aweful it was?). Some really kick ass bits with Freddy singing in it too. SO GOOD!

After the show we went to get some dessert from some Italian place which was mighty tasty despite not being able to understand what the hell the waiter said when he brought it out.

Natural History Museum

On Monday I met Charlie and Hayden and Giraffe (Haydens work) and we went for a look around the natural history museum. We didn't really have too much time in there so it was only a quick look. We did manage to find some Dinosaurs though, here is one of "T-Rex trying to be a museum exhibit"

We then went for a wander to find out where Julian Assange was chilling out while he is hiding from the world. There was some stinkey hippies protesting outside too. Necessary picture of the Ecaudor Embassy (where he was hiding) below:

A little more wandering found us in kiwi thingame jigger in memorial to the ANZAC soldiers. So the obligatory kiwi photo needed to be taken:

We then said goodbye to Charlie and headed home to cook up a mean feed of Haydens pasta thing. I think he is working on a better name for it.

London Greenery and Jack the Ripper

Yesterday Grant, Bea and Ji came to Haydens place to have some elaborate sandwiches for lunch. Yum. We then went for a wander along the road to a park so that Hayden could prove that there was some grass in London. I was stoked to find Rowan there too:

I felt like the worlds biggest cliche tourist taking the photo as there were about half a dozen of them jumping around. Kinda like people taking photos of sheep in New Zealand but it was worth it. As Grant said "of all the animals that they have introduced into NZ, that have torn our native animals to pieces, why didn't they introduce squirrels?". Squirrels are awesome.

Grant, Bea and I then went to the Jack the Ripper walking tour which was pretty cool. We connected through Baker street, one of the oldest subway stations in London. I think the tube system is absolutely incredible so I had to get at least one photo of it:

The walking tour was led by Donald Rumbelow (some big shot historian with multiple books abour Jack the Ripper) around most of the sites of his victims were killed and gave a lot of back story about the murders. He was a pretty brutal fella. Apparently now they have a list of about 200 suspects including all sorts or conspiracy stories about Royalty and such. Most of the evidence was destroyed by idiot policemen due to some issue between London city police and Metropolitan police. As an aside, there are two police forces in London as there are two city districts in London, each with their own governance, mayor and such. One is inside "the square mile" in the heart of London and the other is the rest of the city. How stupid!

Tower of London, Rugby, Pub crawl

I've been pretty slack in updating the blog so this is from a couple of days ago (18/8/12).

In the morning Grant, Bea and I went to check out the Tower of London. We aimed to get there at 9am (when it opens) so that we could make it to the rugby at 11am. So we were up at 6:30 am, which I thought was quite early. I can't quite figure out where we put all the time but we only got to the tower of London at 8:45. Maybe the subway system sucks up some time tax or something, which might explain why everyone wants to get the hell out of it so fast. We hunted some food down at Pret a Manger (which I can't pronounce, ask Hayden) and went into the Tower. We bought some audio tour thingamy jiggers that gave us a commentary. The whole place was pretty amazing. Pic below is taken of tower bridge from one of the walls.

Very hard to get your head round how old it is and that it was once used as something other than a tourist attraction. Apparently the White Tower (below) was once the tallest building in Europe so it is hard to imagine it standing in its full majesty when there are now 20 story buildings all around the tower.

Inside the White Tower was pretty awesome. It was huge and we kept wandering from massive room to massive room where all sorts of museum artifacts were, such as suits of armour, swords, muskets, ponies (horses) and whatever the hell this guy is:

I guess he is some sort of Dagron, but I'm not really sure what he has to do with the price of fish in China on a weekday, let alone the Tower of London. Maybe I should have read something about him. We were kinda hurrying at this point as the rugby match was pretty close to kick off, I don't know where the two hours went while we were there (maybe the subway has some remote time sucking ability as well). So we quickly had a look around the Crown Jewels collection (which was very impressive, I don't know who the hell needs a giant golden mace but there was about 6 of them) and the Torture chamber (which wasn't quite as impressive) and headed out. At the gate we were greeted by about a million people queueing to get in and we were happy with our choice of time of day to walk round. Now the long set of queueing barriers at the entrance to the Crown Jewels exhibition made sense (we just walked straight in) and we decided that queueing in the sun (it was meant to get to 30!) would have been bloody awful. We definitely picked a good time of day.

We made our way to "The Walkabout" at Temple to meet Hayden and Ji to watch the second half of the All Blacks vs Australia match. Interesting that it was about 70/30 NZers to Aussies but not that surprising I guess. All Blacks won, Hooray.

I then went to catch up with Jess and Jesse for a Reddit pub crawl. For those of you who don't know what reddit is: it is an online social community, so I find it kinda hilarious that they organise real-life events. Pretty cool though as it is an interesting cross section of society. It was so damn hot we pulled out of the pub crawl early (apparently it was going to go until 5am or something) to go back to Jess and Jesses to have cold showers and drink some cheaper alcohol.

Camden Market and Rock of Ages

Hayden and I were only firing on about 1 cylinder between us this morning so planning was pretty tricky. There was some communications issues which meant that we missed our flip on the walking tour with Grant. Probably a good thing though  as we were tired enough with our sleep in. We met Grant, Bea and Bea's friend Ji at Camden market. We had lunch there and put in a few good hours of people watching. Lots of punk stuff there.

Tonight we went to Rock of Ages at Shaftesbury theatre and it was fucking aweful. I think there must be something wrong with me though as the rest of the audience seemed to love it and gave them a massive standing ovation. I really can't put my finger on what I didn't like. Maybe something to do with it being a contrived jukebox musical. Good to go though as you have to see crap stuff to appreciate good stuff.

I am only firing on 1 cylinder again now so I hope some of that made sense. Maybe I should try embellish tomorrow if I have time.

Shakespeares Globe Theatre and Other Shinanigans

Yesterday we had a very lazy start to the morning. We had a quick gourmet beef burger at the Borough market before meeting Grant and Bea at the Globe. We went to see Richard III and I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it was. We were debating about how good it would be based on the 5 pound entry fee we paid for standing tickets. You could sit for 40 pound though so that would probably bank role the production. Bloody waste of time trying to understand a word they were saying but the quality of the play was top notch. The dude playing Richard was amazing and it also featured Owen from the Vicar of Dibley. I was sure he was going to bring out his farting duck any second but that probably wouldn't have fit into the play very well.

After a de-brief in a pub we went to visit Jess and Jesse who didn't even know I was travelling, let alone in London. We had dinner and a few beers with them before going to check out Haydens old work place, Burrito Cafe. One of his mates was working there so we got free burritos which were pretty good. Then we went to a pub called Slim Jims which had a DJ playing awesome old songs. Plenty of swing music too (just for you Becky!). At some stage Hayden and I got mis-mothered (Hayden had work the next day so we had vaguely planned this) and I was left in the middle of London to get to Hayden's house by myself without the aid of technology. Me and a hilarious Canadian mate of Haydens went for a walk to find a bus that would go to Seven Sisters. We asked a couple of drunk people what they thought and promptly ignored their advice. I then found a bus stop that seemed to say that there was a bus going to Seven Sisters. I was having a yarn to girl at the bus stop when another bus came along and at the last second she said "get on this one, it'll go to Seven Sisters" so I got her bus wondering what direction I was going in. She got off after a couple of stops but was pretty adamant that the bus would go to Seven Sisters. It took a while but I got there eventually, with no thanks to the dude throwing up on his shoes quite a lot, he wasn't helping anyone. I got off at the underground station because that was the only place I knew I could get to Haydens place from (even though I think there was a bus stop right outside his house) and masterfully navigated my way home for some well needed kip.

Shapeshifter at The Electric Ballroom

Turns out we had acres of time to get to Shapeshifter. They went on stage at 9pm and was a really great gig. Heaps of kiwis there and the people we were with liked hearing so many familiar accents. I guess I haven't been away long enough to appreciate that, and I have been hanging out with Hayden the whole time. I am noticing the kiwi accent way more though. I can't seem to say New Zealand properly anymore as it always sounds like Nu Seelund.

We had a debrief beer after the gig and I'm just crawling into bed now. Goodnight.

P.S. (don't know if you write P.S's in blogs but now this is happening) I had someone say they felt like reading my blog was a bit too one way communication so I'd love to hear from any of you reading this. Apparently commenting is turned off but I would rather a quick 2 line email than a comment anyway. Having said that I feel like I have been away for months and it has been less than two weeks so feel free to wait a while.

Burgh Island and Coast

Yesterday we went to have a look around a bit of Devon. We went to the Island pictured below which was only a real island when it is high tide. Most of the time you can walk over a sand bar to get there. We helped Charlie with the invention of his new beach game involving an indoor soccer ball. He is aiming to have the sport played competitively at the 2040 Olympics.

We then went back to the farm to have a bit of a jam in the studio. We put a bit of a structure around a couple of songs that Charlie is working on for a new band called "Manfeelings" (because men have feelings too). One called "There's nothing like a fat chick covered in ketchup" and the other "The disappointment of the worlds largest prairie dog", which features me on a creepy accordian. You heard it here first.

After dins and some faffing we got our sexy clothes on for a big night in town. For the first time in my life I went to town in a boat, I would like to say it was a flash super yacht but it was actually just a dingy shaped a bit like a bathtub with a little motor strapped to it. We had some warm up drinks at Salcombe and then went to a night club called Coast where it was "Vodka Tuesday". Who needs alliteration? Vodka mixers were only a pound. It was cheap, it was nasty, it was hilarious. Me and Gaz were in fine form jumping around the dance floor like a couple of retarded springboks that have had parts of their brains removed. Thanks very much to Al, James, Rory and Charlie for helping us say goodbye to Devon in style (or lack of it as the case may be).

We said goodbye to the Ansell farm. I really had a great time in Devon, reminded me a bit of New Zealand for some reason. The Ansells really have a fantastic life there. I will hopefully get another chance to get back some time.

I am just writing this as we wait for a train back to Paddington (Bear) station. We had a bit of a fopar with trains as we missed the train (due to some poor reading of 24 hour time) we wanted at Totnes station and for the second time on this trip (already!) we raced the train to the next station, Newton Abbot. Unfortunately we missed it here by seconds so now have about an hour to wait. Bit dumb as we might miss the start of the Shapeshifter concert tonight, nevermind.

Start Farm Exploration

Yesterday morning Mary-Jane was going to the supermarket at Dartmouth so we decided to go and have a look around while she did that. We wandered down to a wall thing with gun emplacements and read that it was built around the 1500s. Which reminds me, the Ansell family home is about 400 years old. Thats MENTAL, Cook only started poking around New Zealand in 1769! Anyway, that may not seem as ridiculous to people that are more cultured than me.

In the afternoon we went for some pioneering exploration of our own around the farm. We saw a critter right outside the gate, see figure 1 below for the rare "ginga cat". I think we have a couple of these in New Zealand though. There is also another kitty called Bramble around somewhere that is 17 years old!   

The next critter we saw was this guy:

I think we also have those in New Zealand as well but a fine specimen nonetheless. We carried on down to the coast for some amazing views, Hayden and I had a bit of trouble with the route finding though. A couple of times we took the path less traveled (a bit of a scrub bash) and a couple of times we were engulfed in brambles (not the cat though), which may live in New Zealand but I haven't seen them before. It looks kinda like a hardcore version of Blackberry. Ankle socks were a bad choice.

As the farm is out on quite a high point, there is a lighthouse (pictured below) and two transmitting masts (not pictured below).

Below is the 400 year old farm house, which reminds me, is pretty hilarious inside. It could be well described as "ad-hoc" as it has been extended over the years to suit different needs/requirements. In the Kitchen/Dining room and hallways downstairs it has a beautiful slate slab floor. One of the best features of the house is that it has back to back staircases. James knows about our theory that every house should have at least one room that has two entrances for extreme high-speed chases. Well how about having two ways to get up stairs? Amazing! Apparently there is a third staircase somewhere but it is hidden and a bit average. Also makes me think that it is a pretty good house to hole up in for a zombie invasion.

One more pic of the farm showing the valley down to the sea.

We then went to have a look around Freddies studio which is kitted out with all sorts of instruments and recording equipment. Apparently Ben Howard has been to the studio to record a couple things and is coming back later in the month (famous people!). We had a bit of a jam and then Charlie came home and ruined it. (I'm kidding Charlie is all over the music thing). Freddy works a lot with Steve Cradock from Ocean Colour Scene so he gets given a bunch of instruments and amps from the manufacturers.

For dinner we had a delectable roast and for dessert we had a chocolate fudge cake with a trio of ice cream. It was off the hook. After dins we went to the Millbrook pub in South Pool for a wee quiet binge with a couple of Charlies mates.

Olympics Closing Ceremony

Just watched the closing ceremony and was musing over how I could have never thought I would be at the Ansell farm watching it four years ago. I wonder what the hell I will be up to in 2016.

Frogmore Regatta

Today the Ansells took us to a wee local "regatta", which is pretty much like an NZ AMP show. There was about 500 people there.

Something I have noticed since I have been here is the abundance of dogs. So many bloody dogs everywhere (how many dogs? (Too many))! I am thinking it could be that there is the same dog to person ratio as NZ but there are just way more people here. I don't think Jimmy would be able to walk anywhere as there would be too many dog distractions but I think that could be spun as a good selling point for coming to have a look (I'm throwing you a bone here Becky, no pun intended). Below is a picture of the family dog show, just for you Jimmy.

Me and Hayden were still pretty tired and sore from the beach olympics so we went to get a seat in the front row early to watch the tug of war. We watched the first round and then a dude from one of the teams came over and told us that we had to join his team. He chucked out a couple of girls and replaced them with us. We weren't sure it was a very good idea, but before we knew it we had won one the first pull. The next two didn't go to well though and Gaz reckons he pulled something in his quad so while it was fairly hilarious to be part of, our bodies were pretty pissed off at our ignorance.

It was great that Charlie made an hour and half journey to see us tonight, he has to work tomorrow packing out the Sidmouth folk festival so will drive there tomorrow morning and come back tomorrow night again. We had a choice for dinner tonight: BBQ with friends or fry up at the Ansells. Charlie really didn't sell the BBQ out at all, something to do with them being raving hippies that have fruit tunnels or something so we decided to stay in. We will also be able to watch the olympics closing ceremony. 

Goodbye Cornwall, Hello Devon

Today Hayden and I said goodbye to the house in Cornwall and goodbye to the great bunch of people we shared it with for the week.

From left to right: Jack (aka Jack with a soft J) Gibbons, Daniel (aka Dan) Pike, Me! Greg (aka Geg, Smeg, Gregles) Latter, Michelle Dutton, Sabrina (aka Sabzy) Chan, Maria (aka Mazza, Miriam) Palmer, Tina (aka Teen Bean, Beano, anything else with a bean in it e.g. Jelly bean, Chilli Bean etc.) Ridings, Alana (Scottish) Troup, Hayden (Gazedn, Gaz, Denny) Lawrence, Alison (aka Ali, Scottish, Elliot) Alexander, Sara (aka Saz, Henry, Moomin) Spurr, Beth (aka Bum, Bethany, Heffer, Beffer) Spurr. Also present was Chris Balson but unfortunately he missed the photo shoot.

Thanks a lot to everyone for giving me such a warm welcome to England and such a kick ass start to my travels. I can't believe I have only been overseas for about a week, seems like ages ago that I was bumming around Christchurch!

So we left the house and headed towards Launcesten. At the last second we were told that Lawnston was further up the railway line towards Totnes (where me and Hayden were going) so we went to have brunch there. After brunch we went in search of the train station at Launcesten. Our iPhone technology was only telling us about a steam train station at Launcesten (which didn't bode well) and our fears were realised when we asked a local where the station was and were told that Lawnston did not have a train station. Since there was an accident on the A30 to London our driver decided that we would take another road which meant we could get dropped off at Exeter so everything worked out OK.

We caught the train from Exeter to Totnes with no drama and had a lovely dinner with Mary-Jane and Nick Ansell at the Waterside Bistro. On the way back to the Ansell farm we went to get an education at the Pigs Nose pub in East Prawle. After a beer we headed to the farm and an absolutely knackered Blair crashed into bed . Only woke up at about 11:30am and although it was a shame to waste half a day with the Ansells I think the past weeks activities, especially the olympic sprinting and hole digging from Friday, finally caught up with me.

Padstow Beach Action

Today we went back to Padstow beach with the intention of some beach olympics. We had another cracker day with the weather, I suspect that this may have been the second day in the history of England. Although names were picked out of a hat, Hayden and I were on the same team. If it were some of my other friends running the "random" selection process I would have been sceptical.

Before the olympics started we had some free time roaming around the olympic village so obviously Hayden and Dan were buried alive by Greg and Jack. I'm pretty sure thats what real olympians do in their down time too.

Unfortunately the olympic race action was too highly intense for photography, but obviously "Michelles Diamonds" won (the team with me and Gaz in it, Michelle was the team leader and the name of our team in no way has anything to do with our sexuality). We may have had some advantages though as quite a few of the events involved running.

After the olympics we had more free time so we dug a gigantic hole. We were musing over the ability of a beach to reduce our mentality to that of small children, small children with massive muscles, and enough dedication to dig 2m deep holes. Photographic evidence provided below, courtesy of Miss Beth Spur.

After the beach some people went to buy fish and chips from Rick Steins fish and chip store but it was probably gonna be about $35NZD for a couple of bits of fish and some chips. Seems absurd for fish and chips!

Port Isaac

Yesterday we went to have a poke around a seaside port town called Port Isaac. In figure 1 below you can see Gaz demonstrating how stupid the wee lion on the Peugeot logo looks in the carpark.

Seriously, you have a look at the lion logo, what the hell is he up to?

For the first time in Cornwall (in its entire history I think) the weather really turned it on and we were kinda caught out without sunscreen. I was absolutely dumbstruck that England was capable of any kind of burning from the sun. So we went in search of sunscreen and when we found it the labelling was kinda confusing. SPF15, SPF 25 and SPF40 all cost 6 pound. The SPF40 was even labelled as "kids sunscreen". While we were somewhat skeptical about the SPF claims we went for the highest SPF rating (kids stuff) and went on our way around a coastal track.

After a short wander we came upon a small rocky bay where we decided to hang around for a while. Some crabs were found, much to their dismay. I climbed around the edge of the shore and up to a cliff edge to take a couple of photos:

We then headed home via the "co-op" (which is apparently a supermarket) to buy some BBQ food for dins. What I didn't realise was that many of the BBQs here require you to build a wood fire and then pour coals on to it. This one was no exception. What a ridiculous idea! It took about 3 hours to get it to a state where it was capable of cooking food. Dumb. Following dinner there was a few more rounds of "The Renaissance" (spy game) and people began to realise how destructive it can be. Hilarious.