Writing about: China First Hand
China First Hand is the story of my trip to China [...] The delay in publishing was caused by various factors, but not least by the restrictions within china on controversial internet activity. I try to be fair in all my articles, but I am also honest.
So a friend of mine is writing a blog about her travels in China. I imagine it’ll be an interesting read…
Home from home? It’s always nice to head out to Sweden, meet the family, eat some ice cream.
I used to be there for four or five weeks each year, when I was a child, but since I started university it’s really been only for a week, at most. The last couple of years have been long weekends, really. I’ve travelled in sweden a bit in the meantime, but not really spending time with my family – interrailing and doing a cycle tour.
The building in the photo is my mum’s stuga: her little cottage in the forest. Or rather, what’s left of the forest; the area is being rapidly developed and there’s not so much forest left.
The road we used to travel down on is the E6, and I can remember that road being basically deserted. Now it’s a relatively busy motorway, partly because of the bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö. Sweden seems to be doing fairly well at not letting the development destroy the culture, but I guess that only time will tell.
A while back I did one of those blogmemes – filling in a map with red in all the countries that I’ve been to. Here’s a more interesting version, for anyone with Google Earth – the same kind of thing as a KMZ File. Obviously, it’s not really everywhere that I’ve been, just the places that I feel some connection with.
Quite an illuminating exercise. I really need to get out of Europe more :-)
Off to Germany for the new year, which is always nice. However…
EGLL 261625Z 270018 01009KT 9999 FEW014 SCT020
PROB30 TEMPO 0409 5000 -SHSN BKN010
PROB40 TEMPO 0918 01015G25KT 3000 SHSN BKN012 BKN015CB
Snow showers and a fair wind forecast at Heathrow when I’m due to leave. Should be fun…
Went walking in the Lakes at the weekend, finally got along Striding Edge – very nice. When I get a moment, I’ll extend this into a full route description, but for the time being, it’s very brief.
We walked up from Glenridding to Lanty Tarn, and from there, we took the old path up the side of Birkhouse Moor to the Hole In the Wall, which is pleasant enough until the final trudge up to the hole.
From there, we climbed up to the start of Striding Edge. Helvellyn’s top was in cloud, but the ridge wasn’t at this point, although the cloud did move in just before we climbed down the Awkward Step.
As I was descending the Awkward Step (I went right, which turned out to be more complicated than going left), hanging in a little rock gully, a rather excitable Pointer puppy jumped down from the top, wedging herself in between my legs and the rock, which was somewhat offputting. After surviving that, we rested at High Spying How for a few minutes before beginning the long easy scramble up to the top of Helvellyn, where we stopped for lunch at the shelter.
As we were leaving, the wind really picked up, visibility dropped to a few metres, and it started to hail (!). We navigated to the start of Swirral Edge, just in time to see the ridge through a break in the cloud. The wind was still very strong, but westerly, so as soon as we dropped from the summit down onto the ridge, the wind dropped right away.
After an easy scramble down Swirral Edge, we descended via Red Tarn, and over Birkhouse Moor, before descending down the boring steps by Mires Beck, back to Glenridding.
It took us about 7 hours to do this walk, but we were going slowly; Andrea was practicing navigation, I was taking lots of photos, and we were taking it easy, both being somewhat out of practice at fellwalking. If you’re in reasonable shape, it’ll probably take 5 hours.
Mission Accomplished; my entire life packed up and relocated. For the benefit of anyone who may be thinking about hiring a van, I shall share my learning points.
I hired the van from Thrifty – £35 for 24 hrs (inc 20% discount tues-thurs), and spent about £30 on fuel for ~230 miles of driving. I also opted to spend another £9 on better insurance (excess reduced from £500 to £150).
The van was a current Ford Transit with 30k miles on the clock; the smallest, lightest, and least powerful in the range (short wheelbase, 85PS 2.0L diesel FWD with a low roof). They have the longer wheelbase vans too, but I didn’t need that for my trip. This van/engine is fine for any “normal” tasks – moving house, transporting domestic type things, but I wouldn’t want to be putting industrial palettes in it. The thrifty vans have a fibreboard lining on the payload space, with securing hooks mostly recessed into it, a bulkhead between driver and cargo, three seats in the front, and a radio :-)
Things that are useful to know if you’re considering hiring a van:
So there you go. I think that a total of £75 to shift all my stuff down the M1 is pretty good value. The bigger vans aren’t much more expensive – another tenner for a long wheelbase transit, and £10 more than that for a Merc Sprinter 311. If you’re feeling brave, you can get a Luton for £75/day…
I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, travelling to Germany and then to Sweden, visiting the g/f and then the family. Some photos from Sweden:
This is edge of Hofterup (a village that makes Barsebäck look like a thriving metropolis), and this photo just sums up the small villages in Skåne for me, for some reason.
The cathedral in Lund. I like the line of the towers against the sky.
This really sums up the feeling of sweden for me – pine trees and blue sky.
More photos on Flickr for those who are interested.
Andrea told me that she’d have written totally different things to me about our trip to Scandinavia. I asked her what she’d have said, and this is it:
Well, its been nearly two years since we went so Ive probably forgotten lots of things, and I cant look up the place names because I lent my travel guide (which is clearly superior to yours by the way, but that goes without saying;-) to a friend. But I think you will still find that we remember different things.
Its weird leaving a country by going to another country. A friend came to carry all my stuff back home to Germany, and I felt as if I was just going on holidays and come back to Coventry afterwards.
We had taken an overnight bus down to Stansted, arrived in Stockholm at about noon, falling asleep at random places. Well, thats what happens when you want to travel cheap. (The next night proved to be much more comfortable, slept in a boat that was slowly moving with the waves.)
Stockholm feels like a nice place, laid out over several islands. The underground is great, every station is a piece of art. Sadly, they have got a bit of a traffic problem. Wherever you are, you always have a big crossing or a major road in sight. But people where very friendly – the bus-driver would chat to random passengers – quite relaxed, a lot of trust in fellow citizens.
We took a boat through the archipelago islands yesterday, passing islands with just a tiny house and one tree on them, and spent the night on a small island called Finnhamn. It had mostly summerhouses; some people seemed to camp there for life. Two former soldiers had taken their children on an adventure weekend. You dont imagine that you are just outside a big city.
From Stockholm, we took a swimming hotel to Helsinki, which incidentally my grandparents had been a few years earlier. Got completely soaked on the way to the peer, so we abstained from buying the welcome photo on which we could have been mistaken for wet rats. The cabin we were upgraded to was really nice, Max shower gel liked it so much that it stayed there. The boat was too big to be shaken by the waves, felt like being in an ordinary hotel…an ordinary hotel with a duty free shop, where I introduced Max to Strohrum.
Helsinki is a wonderful place. A lot got rebuild during the 18th century so the architecture is very coherent. Its a bitRussian, a bit Swedish, a bit Finish. On the fortress island just outside Helsinki were You are leaving the American Sector-style signs in all three languages, especially my friends from Berlin really liked that. We stayed in Helsinki over the weekend. It was lovely weather, lots of musicians around the city, and lots of tourist guides speaking more languages than Ive got fingers on my hands (or maybe more than Ive got on one hand, but still.)
We took a train to Vasa, the famous lakes of Finland passing by. I would have liked to stay there for a bit, but Max probably wanted to go to Sweden quickly and I was already deformed enough by the mosquitoes we had near the city.(Thinking about it, deformed is probably French, but well…) We took a boat over to Umeåin Sweden, intending to go to Oestersund but ended up in Sundsvall, a nice small town without tourists but lots of randomly coloured dragons, probably designed by the same artist who brought the cows to Luxembourg. We walked around a little bit, grumbled about our incapacities in timetable reading (Apparently, neither a degree in law nor a chemistry PhD enables you to decipher letters into words.) and decided to make the best out of it by taking the train to Narvik. (Later, I got told of by a Swedish Erasmus Student for not having stopped in Luleå, his hometown.) We travelled all night and most of the next day. Impressive landscape, changing with every hour we went further north into higher mountains and bigger forests to become less vegetated in the very north.
Tromsø really feels like a place in the Arctic, even the hot weather could not defeat this impression. Not that I have any experience in how the Arctic should be like, at least the several museums about the region, the life there in the past and expeditions to the North Pole gave you a feel for it. People in Tromsø are longing for colour, so the houses were particularly brightly painted here. I went running in the morning in a swampland valley, at the end of it, there was, dont know if you can call hat a glacier, at least a big block of old ice in lots of different colours. Really impressive.
From Tromsø, we took a train down to Trondheim, only being interrupted by a piece of rock the train collided with. (Max slept through the entire event. Fortunately, Norwegian sounds a bit like Bavarian so I could understand what was going on.) The must have been quite close to derailing because we even made it on the radio news.
In Trondheim, we stayed in a repurposed students union. (The toilets had been turned into showers, just a showerhead above a toilet seat.) There were lots of other travelling students. Some Australian guy talked to me for about 15 minutes, but I guess Ill never find out what he actually said. In the dorm adjoining ours I met some French people and spent most of the night there. Nice sometimes not to have to make the effort to speak English.
We took the Hurtigruten down to Bergen, the former post boat is now turned into a cruise boat for German tourists in their 60s. I was a bit disappointed because from the boat, you dont really see much. In the end, we took the Flåmsbana to get at least an impression of the fjords, which was truly amazing.
We were running a bit short of time, so we only had 2 hours in Oslo which we spent sitting on a square by the station…watching a man in a pyjama shaving his eyebrows.
We spent our last night near a buzzing whatever it was in Stockholm. Could have been anywhere else because Stockholm at night did not seem to be related anyhow to the city we had started our trip at.
I arrived in Lübeck at about midnight, was home by three and had to work at seven in the morning. My boss sent me home at nine because I kept speaking English to random customers, which was funny for everybody but the parties involved. So by the end of our trip, I had finally gotten used to speaking English all day, most inappropriate then though.
I wasn’t blogging two years ago, otherwise I might have written an entry very much like this:
I spent a few weeks in 2003 travelling through Scandinavia with Andrea, which was really good fun. This was the first trip I’d been on where I was really taking a lot of photos – I averaged a roll a day, and I kept about 250 of the slides that I got back. My Gallery has more of the shots from this trip.
We flew Ryanair from Stansted to Stockholm Skavsta at some ungodly hour in the morning (hence taking the bus from Coventry at 1:45 or somesuch), followed by a bus into Stockholm itself, finally arriving around lunchtime, if my memory serves me correctly. We found the youth hostel where we were staying (half of which is actually in a ship!), and got our stuff moved in.
In the afternoon, we went up a TV tower in the park, and then walked around the town a bit, before heading back to the hostel. There were some hot air balloons over the city, which was cool. I took lots of photos of the bay, Andrea went straight to bed.
We went to see the Vasa – a warship from 1628 which sank on its maiden voyage, and was raised again in 1961. It’s got it’s own building, an impressive museum with the wreck at its centre.
In the afternoon, we walked around the city some more, and visited the Nobel museum, which contained an interesting series of installations, covering the recipients of the prize.
After dinner, we walked to the Tivoli amusement park, sadly to arrive just as it was closing (at 11!).
We got checked out of the hostel, then took a boat to the island of Finnhamn, a tiny place on the outer edge of Stockholm’s archipelago. This was the first day we were going to be camping, so we headed to the campsite (primitive!) and got set up, before going to explore the island. Which didn’t take long :-) Andrea tried salt liquorice ice cream, didn’t like.
We ate dinner sitting on an outcrop of rock overlooking the sea.
Rain. Had no choice to pack the tent up still wet, and head back to the boat. Hurried across Stockholm, to catch a much bigger boat to Helsinki, via the Åland islands.
The Åland islands are a small group inbetween Sweden and Finland, and their only relevance to this case is that they have an arrangement with the EU such that they count as international travel. Hence, no VAT onboard ship. This in turn led to my introduction to some scary Austrian rum called Stroh which is 80% proof, and still tasty. Danger!
We had dinner in the buffet restaurant on board, which was nice. Beer on tap… Going on these boats again, I’d probably choose to eat in one of the a la carte restaurants, they’re not much more expensive, and looked to be of a good standard.
We stayed in a very nice campsite in Helsinki. Discovered that wet tents don’t like being packed away and left in a hot cabin overnight – traces of mildew everywhere! The weather was nice, so we headed out to Suomenlinna- a fortress on an island just offshore from Helsinki. We spent most of the day there. Andrea got sunburned :-(
Still in Helsinki, we spent Saturday exploring the town. We visited the Helsinki museum, which had an interesting history of the city, had ice cream in the park, watched some guys playing vibraphone in the street, and finally found an internet cafe for a quick email check. Back at the campsite, we went for a walk around the estuary there. Found some keep-fit stations all along the path, and people actually using them!
Spent the morning relaxing in the camp, went for a walk along the waterfront again, and then caught a train to Vaasa, a small town further north in Finland. It was quite a walk from the train station to the campsite, but it was a good site, with a nice beach. We watched the sunset. At about 11pm.
We took a boat across back to Umeå in Sweden. This was a decrepit old passenger liner called Casino Express, that looked like it had been chugging around the baltic for decades. I particularly liked the picture of the boat in one of the stairwells, one of those classic images of the ship at night with all the rigging lit up. Except that it was a photo taken in the daytime, darkened, and with the lights painted on!
We arrived in Umeå, and planned to get across to Östersund and take the inland railway north within Sweden. The first step in this plan was to take a bus south to Sundsvall, where we could catch a train. However, on arrival in Sundsvall, it became clear that we’d mis-read a timetable, and would probably end up stranded in Sundsvall overnight. Which was a little boring.
So we changed plans, and took the last train out of Sundsvall that day – right up to the North of Norway, a town called Narvik. This was a 20hr train trip, passing back the way we’d just come by bus earlier in the day. Oh well.
We arrived into Narvik in the late afternoon and found the campsite, in a lovely location overlooking the fjord, but some way out of town. And in Narvik, the sun didn’t set. We were now far enough north that we had midnight sun.
We took a bus to Tromsø, the most northerly town in Europe. This place has a very solid feel to it, one can feel that living in this part of the world is a constant battle against the elements, for half the year at least. We found some space in the busy (but again, nice) campsite and relaxed there for the evening.
We visited the Polar Museum – an interesting museum about the arctic, with displays about hunting and trapping, polar bears, Svalbard, Roald Amundsen, and Fridtjof Nansen.
Afterwards, we stopped for a Kebab, and then visited Polaria, a more touristy but still interesting visit, with more about the arctic in general, and an aquarium which has some seals.
Afterwards, we took a round-trip on a bus, to the other side of the island. It was rather accidental, but ended up being a good sightseeing tour.
We took the bus back to Narvik, then had to walk from the railway station to the bus station due to an incorrect timetable (and not, for a change, incorrect timetable reading!), but still got there in plenty of time. From Narvik, we took a bus down to the most northerly point in the norwegian railhead, at Fauske. We took the night train south to Trondheim.
We nearly got derailled! Some rocks had fallen from the mountain, and so that stopped us dead in our tracks, so to speak. After sitting for a couple of hours, they managed to bring another train up behind us, to tow us back to the next station, from where we were bussed into Trondheim. In the end, it only added a few hours to the trip, we still arrived in Trondheim before lunch.
We wandered around the city for a while, taking photos and generally enjoying the ambience. We decided to stay in a makeshift backpackers, set up in the students’ union when it’s the summer holidays. Many beds in not much space, but not too bad.
We decided to take the Hurtigrute boat south to Bergen. The Hurtigrute is a coastal service, which used to be the lifeblood of the area but now is mostly full of elderly German tourists. It provides a good view of the fjords, and shows off some impressive seamanship, manouvering very large ferries in very small harbours.
After arriving in Bergen, we went directly to the Rail station, heading for Flåm. Or more specifically, to Myrdal, which seems to mostly serve as one end of the Flåmsbana – an amazing mountain railway. We stayed in another decent campsite in Flåm, taking the opportunity to relax after the long trip down from the arctic.
We took the Flåmsbana back up to Myrdal, then continued on to Olso on a more conventional intercity train. We only stayed in Oslo for a couple of hours, before taking the train back to Sockholm. We camped (illegally) in a park, having arrived late in the evening. It was much nicer weather this time, hot and busy on the streets.
We visited the Medieval museum, with some interesting displays about medieval Stockholm, and cooked lunch on the grass in front of it there, before heading to the station, and back home.
I’ve just come back from more jetsetting – this time a really good week away in Vienna, being all cultural. I’ve been to Wien before, back in 2001 when I was visiting a friend doing an ERASMUS placement there. I enjoyed myself then, and had been meaning to go back there ever since.
My Vienna photo gallery has many more photos.
I really like the whole cafehouse culture there – there are so many nice places to sit and enjoy a coffee and cake, or whatever. There are also many good, reasonably priced restaurants around. As Andrea said, the whole city is very baroque. It’s quite overpowering until you get used to it, the centre is all 5 or 6 story buildings with masses of ornate details, interspersed with some impressive imperial palaces. Topped off with an affordable and top-quality public transport system, it’s a nice place to be.
So. A brief summary of what we did:
Andrea arrived in the morning by bus, and walked around the entire city. I turned up in the afternoon, and we went for a walk around the town, just orienting myself really. Took tram #1 around the ring a couple of times to see the sights. Took some photos of the Hofburg at sunset.
Went to Schönbrunn, wandered ardound the gardens. Many cheesy tourist photos. Went to the Naschmarkt for a kebab for lunch, then back to Schönbrunn afterwards! Lots of gardens and forest to explore, including some extremely tame red squirrels which are rather a novelty for us islanders.
Visited Stephansdom, the enormous gothic hulk of a cathedral right in the centre of the city. Climbed up the North tower (the taller of the two) – it’s undergoing some restoration work at the moment, so the views are a little restricted, but it was good exercise.
Next, on for the traditional tourist excursion of eating Sachertorte, in Hotel Sacher – nice cake, nice coffee, only tourists there.
In the afternoon, we visited the Albertina – a couple of interesting exhibitions there, “from Goya to Picasso” was the main attraction, we also saw the exhibition of work by Piet Mondrian, but gave Anton Kolig a miss.
In the afternoon, we went to have a look at Karlskirche – a very impressive Baroque church in the Resselpark. Didn’t go in, but admired from the outside. From there, we went on the the Prater, which is a large park just to the edge of town, with a year-round funfair including the famous Riesenrad – not quite the London Eye…
In the morning, we visited the Haus der Musik which I enjoyed a lot. There’s a straightforward history of the Vienna Philharmonic (which we skipped), then an impressive floor about the nature of sound with lots of interactive things to do. Next up was a floor with good displays about Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler, and the Second School. There’s an interactive thingy where you can conduct the orchestra (on a TV screen) and they do what you want! If you’re too bad, they start complaining though..
In the afternoon, I went to take some photos of Gasometer and Hundertwasser’s incinerator plant.
Monday was a bank holiday in Austria, so not much was open. We spent most of the day walking in the Wienerwald, the forest surrounding Vienna. We took the U-bahn to Heiligenstadt, then Tram N to Nussdorf, and walked from there up to Kahlenberg. We had fried things (Schnitzel for me, chips for Andrea) and then more Sachertorte and strudel in a cafe with a magnificent terrace overlooking the town. By the time we were ready to move on it threatened to rain, so we took the bus down again.
In the afternoon, we went back to the Resselpark to take some more photos (after the SD card on my Coolpix camera went on the blink), and then to the Donauinsel afterwards.
We went shopping for gifts in the morning, and wandered around town some more. We went from there to “Vienna DC” – a large block of grey on the north side of the Danube, home to the UN buildings, and some other corporate goodness. We were just passing through, on the way to the Donauturm. This is a 252m tall TV transmitter tower which one can take go up inside. More disturbingly, they do bungee jumping from it if that’s your thing. Excellent views over the city. After strolling through the donaupark for a while, we went back into the city, for a coffee in Cafe Central (probably Vienna’s most famous Kaffeehaus). After some more ambling through the city, we set off to find the Hundertwasserhaus, a block of flats in the same style as the incinerator. I don’t like Hundertwasser’s architecture – it looks like a child has randomly coloured bits of the building. We took a tram from there back to the Prater, and walked through the park for a while.
We went for dinner at the “Goulash Museum” (Schulerstrasse 20) which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly goulash-based dishes for around €5-10. Back to Cafe Central for a nightcap, and then to bed.
Proper leaving weather on Wednesday – raining hard. We got up early with the intention of going to get breakfast in town somewhere, but in the end ate too much chocolate before leaving and so just wandered aimlessly around for a while, slightly hindered by the fact that most museums etc only open at 10. We walked along Mariahilferstrasse, aiming for an aquarium there, but by the time we arrived it was getting late, so we just went to sit in a nice Kaffeehaus called Servus. I took the S7 from Wien Mitte back to the airport, and that was that.