Bad Decision

Today I made a bad decision. I don't often make bad decisions; I typically pride myself on this aspect of my personality. Excusing circumstances when no educated guess can be made (such as which restaurant to have lunch at in Vienna which turned out to be bad yesterday) I try to weigh options, pose logical solutions, and think practically and objectively about the outcomes of the choices I make. On vacation, it's far easier to make bad choices since every place is new (and, in this case, foreign) and you just don't know what to expect. In this case, I was just plain being an idiot.

No, I was not drunk. I don't drink often and I have yet to drink on this trip at all, save a shot of Bailey's on the plane (it was free!). Today we went to the permanent amusement park in Vienna to have a look around. Our original intent was to ride the 100 year old ferris wheel (sorry mom) and see if there were any other rides that look fun. Which there were. Two rides piqued our attention: a river rafting-style ride (similar to Rip Roaring Rapids at Great America for the Bay Area residents) and a super spinning tea-cups-on-crack style ride. Kane isn't a huge fan of rides so Jon and I decided to patronize the spinning-pods-on-spinning-tenticles ride. This was my bad decision of the year.

As a child I always loved roller coasters and to the best of my knowledge I still do. I also always like the teacups rides which are the ones where you sit in a pod that spins on a platform that spins attached to a central apparatus that spins. It's dizzying madness and it's always made me very happy and appropriately disoriented. This ride was just like a teacups ride but it also went upside down. Apparently this makes all the difference in the world.
The ride starts right side up. And so I started laughing. Fun! It starts to invert. Wooow, crazy more fun! We're all the way upside down. We're thrown around up and down. Which way are we facing? Is that the floor? I feel vomit-ish. I close my eyes. Laughter turns to moaning. Groaning, really. We slow down.
To Jon I say, "Oh thank goodness, I don't think I could have lasted much longer without throwing up"

Jon's response is a notable silence...

We start to spin backwards. We do the whole thing again backwards, though it doesn't really matter because being tossed around in a clothes dryer is pretty much the same no matter which way you're facing. It finally stops. We stagger off. I think I feel better, but this is just the beginning of my sickness. I think I was in shock. Cold sweats followed by hot sweats. I can't walk. Sitting hurts. I check to see that a garbage can is within projectile vomit range. Talking hurts. Jon is ok. I am a wreck.
I collapse onto a bench. At least I have the smell of cotton candy and children to help ease the pain. A half hour later I'm ok to walk to another bench thirty feet away. We forego any other rides; I am too fragile to engage in anything further. The thought of a train ride makes me shiver. A soda helps me regain composure. We continue the day without further incident; a salad a couple hours later and I was good as new. Apparently I'm too old for upside-down-triple-spin rides.

My first words after stepping off that hellish ride? For fans of Anchorman..."Milk was a bad choice". And indeed it was a bad choice.

Ice Caves

We went to ice caves in Austria today which has inspired this entry that is relatively unrelated to both ice and caves. They have instead, as the apex of a series of similar experiences throughout Germany and Austria, inspired a rant about these people who refuse to give out information. And I don't just mean because I can't read the signs in German anymore, I mean there are often no signs and no one tells you crap. I will explain.

Yesterday we arrived in Austria and had a very nice day and night in Salzburg. Today we were scheduled to drive to Vienna and stop at a couple attractions along the way which included salt mines and ice caves. The salt mines were really cool, but that's not the point of this blog entry. We arrived at the ice caves just after 3pm. Our guidebook said the last tour was at 4pm, so we were happy to have made it in time. Our guide book also said that the tour was €9. Upon arrival and after deciphering the sign posted, we were informed that the actual cost, including the gondola ride up the monstrous mountain (which would have taken hours to walk up) was no less than €26 each. To translate, that's about $38 USD or about $50 AUD. Per person. What does this include? Well that's part of the surprise; they don't really tell you. Gondola ride up, ice cave tour, gondola back down. Sounds pretty simple I guess.

We take the insane gondola ride up, ears popping. We land on a massive mountain and get a tour group number. The man tells us that the entrance to the cave is a 15 minute walk up the hill so make sure to be there on time for our 4pm tour. Ok, we can do that. We start to walk toward the entrance of the cave. What no sign or personnel told us is that the “walk” up to this cave is a heinous 45 degree slope mountainous climb in direct sunlight on an 85 degree day (well I suppose we could have figured the temperature on our own). With no water or bathrooms at the top. Oh, cool, I wanted to strain my quadriceps today. What if we were with someone elderly? Or handicapped? Or just lazy? Incidentally we were with someone lazy; two someones in fact. Jon and I had a complain fest; why were we not told of this obstacle? And better yet, why doesn't the damn gondola take us all the way up here? You think I came here to hike? I digress. The day was beautiful, the view was gorgeous, and we were about to see a freaking ice cave. On we went.

We get to the cave entrance and see that tour number 5 leaves in 15 minutes. It's already 4pm and we're in tour group number 6....so we're not really sure what's supposed to happen here. People start to go into the cave for tour group number 5 and fortunately Jon, who understands German, overheard some people asking about tour group 6, to which the guide replied something like, “yeah, this is the last tour so you better come with us”. God forbid we get a proper announcement or any indication in the language that we speak, even though supposedly the tour is in both English and German. So we follow this double sized group into the cave. The group is so large and unwieldy that we can't get anywhere near the guide and are instead fighting through a crowd of people at each turn. I don't want to be with this many people unless a band is playing at the front of the place, ok? But, it's a good cave, I'll give it that. It was enormous and well lit and full of ice as promised. It was, of course, quite cold (freezing actually), but we were warned about this which makes all the damn difference in the world.As the tour began, we noticed that the guide was not repeating anything in English as our last tour (at the salt mines) had done*. So, even though they had told us that the tours were in both English and German (which we assumed to mean at the same time) they apparently had sent us off on a German only tour. Even though I bought the tickets in English. Where is the disconnect here? Can you people throw me a bone?

The funniest thing was that as we entered the cave everyone was stopping at a little unlabeled machine to get a ticket. I asked Jon, “what are these tickets for?” but he hadn't heard the guide say. Jon procured a ticket through the masses but it said nothing on it. A ticket with no text. What? Kane and I passed through sans ticket hoping that it wasn't like the ticket to get out of the ice cave or something. Via Jon's translation, there was supposedly no mention of this ticket for the entire tour. (Incidentally, there was also no mention of when or how this ice cave was discovered way up in the middle of an Austrian mountain.) Anyway, upon exiting the cave, there was a similar mad rush to another machine where one was to insert his/her previously aquired ticket. It apparently printed some text on the card or something, but we never really found out since Jon's ticket wouldn't go in. Yet another enigma.

So, what I'm noticing is that they don't sign things very well here (roads excepted, thank goodness). No warnings, no explanations, no instructions. You move forward, pay your money, and hope everything works out to your satisfaction. And if it doesn't, too damn bad. I suppose it's because I come from a land where that same ice cave would have had 150 warning signs, a liability waiver, an extensive informational pamphlet, six foot continuous guard rails, and required helmet rentals (fully sanitized, of course). Better yet, we Americans might have just knocked down the mountain to install a Black Angus Steakhouse and reassembled the ice cave at a more convenient location like Vegas or Gilroy. Maybe we baby our citizens too much but these people don't even seem to know what babies are**. So, if you're a sensitive soul like me, know that there is much laughter, incredulous sighing, and confused discussions to be had if you choose to travel around central Europe.

*At the salt mines, the guide would say a ten minute shpeal in German followed by the English “translation” of about one sentence worth of heavily accented information. For some reason I felt like we were getting left out a bit. Jon verified this.
**Although, someone did, for some reason, think it was a decent and appropriate idea to bring their baby to the ice cave. Wow, how surprising that a baby is going to wail and cough the entire time he's being dragged around a place that's as comfortable as a walk in freezer. What a truly excellent idea. At least idiocy exists internationally even if signs don't.

South Germany

This past week we've done a bit of a road trip around the South parts of Germany. It's been generally good and fun and scenic, though we have had a few problems. Actually, we have had one problem: we do not speak German. None at all. We don't read it or write it or understand it in any measure. This has been our main obstacle during our time here which we have overcome with a combination of cowardice and avoidance (and, when we have the time, a German to English dictionary). Let's just say we have been eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our hotel rooms. Ok, this plan was also to save money (yes, we're cheap and unable to communicate – come travel with us!) not just to avoid the German menus and surly restaurant attendants. Though it was a satisfactory solution to both of these obstacles.

Let's discuss the positives since I tend to dwell on the negatives because they are more entertaining and, let's face it, sarcasm does become me*. Germany is a beautiful place. At least the parts we've seen at this time of year. I understand it gets all snowy in the winter (probably also very pretty, but in an “Oh, you don't like to ski? Well then go freeze your ass off anyway” sort of way) and I really don't know what happens in the fall and spring except that I imagine it's something like between summer and winter (gold star for deductive reasoning!). The landscape is never ending hills of green, green, green – trees, forests, meadows, fields, crops, vineyards, and on and on. Just driving around is a real treat.

My favorite thing about the towns we visited was the part of each town called the 'Altstadt' or Old Town which is typically the original area of the town filled with buildings built anywhere from 200-600+ years ago and often surrounded by a big stone wall (and sometimes a disused moat!). This part of the town is typically the tourist center where shops, cafes, and landmarks abound. They are as picturesque as they are delightful** to wander around in. We had the pleasure of exploring the Altstadt areas of Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Freiburg, which were our main three destinations on this trip.


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The first two cities also have really nice castles overlooking the towns and I would say that Heidelberg Castle (Schloss Heidelberg) has been the highlight so far. Now mostly ruins, this castle was built over a span of 300 years starting in the 1400s and then mostly destroyed by wars in the 1600s and a fire (from lightening striking the bell tower – so Back to the Future!) in the 1700s. Only one part of the castle was rebuilt in the 1800s and we took an excellent tour of the whole thing (in English).

We spent the last few days of this trip exploring the Black Forest in the south west corner of Germany – an area heavily influenced by the French and Swiss due to the close proximity. The Black Forest is really beautiful; an entire region of mountainous greenery with tiny, quaint towns nestled into the valleys. For most of one day we just drove all around, stopping at a waterfall here, a lake there, and lunch at a tiny town in between. And, this is one of the few places where it's actually easier and nicer to have a car than to take a train. We could have asked for better weather since it rained most of the time, but I guess that's why everything's so green! See the latest round of pictures here.
Now we're back in Munich to pick up some cargo (mainly Jon) before we head off to Vienna, Budapest, Krakow (Poland), and then Prague over the next 2 weeks. The adventure continues!

*I am aware that sarcasm is said to be the lowest form of wit, but I also find it to be the highest form of intelligence.
**Yes, I used the word 'delightful', what are you gonna do about it?

Munich

Welcome to Europe. We flew into Munich last Friday the 10th and have been dutifully relaxing, sightseeing, and hanging out with Jon for one solid week. This is my first time in Germany and Kane's first time in Europe altogether. So, we had (and still have) a few things to get used to. Let's start with the basics:

• They speak German here. This was something I had obviously known in an abstract way beforehand, but not really thought about. We were in Australia before; tons of new stuff to get used to but you can always ask someone about it. Now we're sort of on our own when we're not with Jon. Menus, road signs, tram ticket machines - all in German. Though most people secretly speak English, it's embarrassing to ask them to. We're getting by but it's an interesting, and often frustrating change.
• They drive on the right. Hallelujah! Well, sort of. We, obviously, have been conditioned by years of driving in the US to think on the right side of the road. We had only minor problems in Australia, but some things really are just ingrained. Other things, however, we've only experienced while driving in Australia. Example: roundabouts. I am not used to going counterclockwise in a roundabout. This is odd. We are dealing with it.
• It's summertime in the northern hemisphere. The sun rises at...some early time in the morning before I'm awake. It gets dark after 9pm. It's warm and, often, sunny. This is what I'm talking about.

And for some smaller points that are thought provoking and sometimes baffling:

• They do not serve tap water at restaurants. Not as a norm at least. If you ask for water you get disgusting bubbly water. Everyone else drinks beer, soda or juice. It's ridiculous.
• They do not keep their milk refrigerated at the grocery store. In the store aisles, milk comes in little 1 liter boxes which are not refrigerated. Nothing is wrong with this, the milk is boiled or whatever and then sealed, but it's still odd at first.
• People don't smile here. You know when you walk down the street and make eye contact with a stranger and you each give a little half smile to indicate that you are mutually friendly people even though you don't know each other? They don't do that here. Sometimes they stare sans smile (love the alliteration, don't you) but rarely a smirking stranger for no reason.
• There are very strict noise laws. In Munich, you cannot be loud or disruptive, even in your own home (provided that it disturbs others), after 10pm (till 6am) or on Sundays. This includes loud music, mowing your lawn, hammering, and possibly even running your washing machine. It does not seem to include the heinously loud and frequent police sirens reminiscent of the Nazi era. Those can go anytime they want.

Other than taking in the oddities that make Munich the place it is, we've been sightseeing rather dedicatedly. At least for us. Here's a rundown of what we've seen so far:

Saturday - Gay Pride Parade. They know how to queer it up here.
Sunday - Tollwood Festival. I don't know what it was a festival for, but there were adequate amounts of people, beer, stalls of food, and nick knacks. It was good.
Monday - Walking Tour. Free walking tour of Munich with a little bit of history and a lot of standing in the sun. Got to see a bit of the city though.
Tuesday - Nymphenburg Palace. Big mansion from the 1600s. Pretty nice.
Wednesday - Day at Jon's house to plan and book our next week of travel around south Germany. Also bought a GPS.
Thursday - Pick up the car and tour at Dachau Concentration Camp. Acquired the car with no problems, Dachau was interesting.
Friday - Neuschwanstein Castle and Hohenschwangau Castle. The first one is the really famous German castle that the Disney castle was based on. They were both nice but I had expected more for some reason. No idea how to pronounce the latter.
Saturday (today) - Deutsches Museum. Apparently it's huge and very in depth...unleash the nerds!

And that's been our stay so far; here are the pics that made the cut. We're having a nice time and the weather has been warm and sunny for most of the time, though it decided to start raining yesterday and today. We leave tomorrow (Sunday) for our five day road trip around south Germany and return to Munich next Friday.

Spendings - The Dirt

Yeah, you want to know the dirt on our trip, don't you? You don't care about the Sydney Opera House or Kakadu National Park. You think our pics are mediocre and just browse through them as you peruse your usual internet sites. You scoff when I mis-spell things or trip over a punctuation mark. You are overwhelmed when you log on after two weeks and I have 17 new posts that you will never catch up on and, frankly, don't much care to read. I mean, they're boring. Documentation of the day to day activities of traveling - come on! Write something interesting! Make something up if you have to, right?

Well, this entry is for the prying minds, the curious cats, the chatty Kathys. This one will tell you all about the bottom line, the real deal. So, the question remains: how much money did we spend on this trip around Australia? You already looked down, didn't you. The pie chart is just too tantalizing to resist - I know better than most*. Well, you may as well look now if you haven't already:
Let's analyze, shall we? We left June 8 and got back July 4. That means the trip was 26 days** long, which translates to $317 per day for both of us, or $158/day each. It sounds expensive, doesn't it? It was, damn it, that wasn't a trick question. Regardless, if you are acquainted with Kane and me, you are aware that we are relatively frugal. Not so frugal that I would resort to, say, camping or eating at McDonald's, but we're certainly budget conscious. As evidenced by the very existence (and accuracy) of the pie chart.

I don't have a lot of excuses; this country is expensive. I was impressed to see that almost a quarter of our expenses were for activities - I had not realized we had paid so much money for tours, cruises, etc. The bulk of our activity money was spent on: Fraser Island Tour; two Whitsunday Island boat/snorkeling tours; Reggie Watts tickets; the Australia Zoo; Great Barrier Reef Cruise and Snorkeling tour at Port Douglas; and two river cruises in Kakadu. To be fair, the Fraser Island trip was a two day deal that included one night accommodation and food and accounts for about a quarter of the activities costs. I just need to take deep breaths and keep saying the "once in a lifetime" mantra to keep calm with these ridiculous prices.

Transportation and accommodation were the next two big hitters - we rented a car for the entire trip which was just plain expensive and also very nice. It cost an average of $64/day for the car, but a lot of that was because they charge you a whole lot extra for pickup one place and drop off another - not really sure why. Accommodation averaged out to about $62/night which is about as good as you'll get here. We stayed in hostels most nights; got nice hotels in two places for 6 nights total. Totally worth it. Plus, you have to account for the fact that we weren't paying rent during this, and our rent here was $2173 a month. So, really, we were saving money on accommodation as compared to the past year and a half. Like how I worked the numbers there?

Food is probably where we could have saved the most money - we ate out almost every lunch and dinner. We tried not to go to super expensive places, but a standard meal for dinner here is typically between $20-$30 per plate which just racks up a huge bill really quickly. We did almost every breakfast in our hostel/hotel with cereal and powdered milk which probably saved us a few hundred bucks. Flights were the next offender, exacerbated by the trip to Darwin. Could have saved a few hundred bucks each if we had just come back to Melbourne from Cairns.

The stragglers are gas, stuff, and other. I was impressed that gas was such a small chunk of our spendings; we spent $513 driving 5719km (=3800 miles) for an average of about 33 miles to the gallon per Kane's calculations. Note also that gas here is between $4.60 and $5.60 per gallon (though it's sold in liters so the price doesn't sound so heinous). "Stuff" just means random crap we bought which mostly consisted of a bag I acquired and towels we purchased to replace the ones we left at a hostel, in addition to books, magnets, drug store supplies, internet, laundry, post cards, etc. "Other" was a category that I see was not used correctly as it also includes laundry and internet. If I cared more, I might fix that. I think we'll live.

So there you have it. You now know how much poorer we are from this trip around Australia. It was good times; can't really put a price tag on experiences and all that, right? I'll just keep telling myself that as I mourn my bank account. And that wasn't even the start of our troubles...Europe will surely trick us out of the rest of the money we have so dedicatedly saved up over the last year. Sigh. Save, save, save...spennnnndddd!!!

*I freaking love pie charts. In case it wasn't clear in the body of the post.

**I'm not counting July 4 as a day on the actual trip since we arrived back in Melbourne at 7am.

Darwin and Kakadu

The final leg of our Australian Road Trip was spent in the north of the Northern Territory - right at the top of the middle of the country. We flew from Cairns to Darwin on June 30 and spent three days driving in a loop to see Kakadu National Park and Litchfield National Park. Kakadu is a pretty famous park that we had looked into a long time ago, so we sort of tacked it onto the end of our trip since we probably won't make the effort to get over there ever again.

And, to be honest, I wouldn't really recommend it. Kakadu was nice and, actually, Litchfield was really nice, but Darwin is quite a hole and the effort and expense to get to that part of the country wasn't really worth it for me. It was nice, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't spectacular and it's in the middle of freaking nowhere so it sort of needs to be spectacular for me to make that kind of effort. That's my two cents.

An interesting fact: Darwin is closer to the capital cities of 5 other countries than it is to the capital of Australia. Think about that one! That kind of fact is probably true for places in Europe where the countries are all small and smashed together, but Darwin is almost 3000 miles from Australia's capital (Canberra) and there isn't really a city to speak of near Darwin for probably 1000 miles. It's like if Seattle was a city of 120,000 people and the closest city with over 5000 people was Denver. This country is so ridiculously sparse!

Kakadu is actually a really interesting place because the difference between the dry, "cold" season (now) and the warm, wet season (December-April-ish) is immense. The climate is tropical but in the dry season the place is a desert. This was the "cold" season and the days were easily over 90 degrees F. It was sort of miserable actually; I cannot imagine the horror of wet season heat and humidity. Anyway, in the wet season much of the park can be underwater as all the rivers flood. Some ridiculous percent of the world's birds migrate there to breed in the wet season and apparently it's just an entirely different place. It sounds like it would actually be much more interesting in the wet, but I would most likely only be happy viewing it from a temperature controlled bubble. So, maybe it was better that we saw the boring dry.

Since we were there in the dry, we did the standard crocodile river cruises (saw many crocs) and went to the Aboriginal rock art sites, which were ok. Like I said, it was nice, but not really worth traveling across the country. Litchfield National Park, though only large enough to fill one day with activity, was really nice. There are a series of waterfalls and creeks that are safe and warm to swim in, in addition to being beautiful. We had a good time Friday exploring all the sites that Litchfield had to offer. We even swam in a lake - how uncharacteristic of us! And, Kane did not get seasick, thank god (I was beginning to think that a bathtub might make him sick...). Here are the pics from Kakadu and Litchfield.

Friday night we did not need a hotel because our flight back to Melbourne was at 2:25am. Yargh. After a drawn out dinner and coffee, we watched a movie in our car in the airport parking lot until it was time to check in at 1am. We arrived safely back in freezing Melbourne (in our sad flip flops and t-shirts) on the 4th at 7am and have been staying with Marc and Alana again since. But we only get a small break - we fly to Munich on Thursday at which point I will become...EURO ANGIE!!!

Cairns and Port Douglas

We're actually back in Melbourne now staying with our friends again as of yesterday the 4th. Since we did not have internet access for the last 4 days of our trip, I will go back a bit and post about the last few places we went. Cairns (pronounced "Cans" by Australians) and Port Douglas are towns in the tropical far north of Queensland in Australia, approximately 3500 kilometers (2500 miles) north of Melbourne via the coastal route and were the final destinations of our 3-week long road trip up the east coast.


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Cairns is the larger town (150,000 people approx) in the area but thankfully we only stayed for one night because we didn't much like it. It's just a small port town and there is a lively tourist area with endless restaurants and shops, but the feel of it is a bit dingy and Thailand-esque. We didn't hate it, but it wasn't the best. Fortunately, Port Douglas was far nicer. We made the hour or so drive from Cairns on Saturday (27 June) and arrived in what might be my favorite place of the whole trip.

PD is a tiny little town that is basically just an upscale tourist trap. The key word here is upscale. So many tourist towns are run down and/or dominated by drunken 18 year-olds and that just makes them boring for us old farts. I enjoy a nice atmosphere, decent restaurants, perhaps some nice hikes or museums, and friendly, respectable clientele. Port Douglas has all of these things. And on top of that we scored a super cheap hotel ($85/night compared to $99 for a room with a bathroom at the hostel!) that was completely perfect:
On Sunday we partook in the single most expensive activity of the trip: the $200/person outer reef pontoon cruise. This was quite a plush tour that included an hour and a half boat ride to and from a stationary pontoon at the outer barrier reef. On the pontoon we had a buffet lunch, unlimited snorkeling access, submersible boat cruises, access to an underwater viewing platform, and a variety of additional activities available for hire (snorkeling or scuba diving lessons, helicopter rides, etc.). Despite the cost (or more likely because of it), it was really nice. Of course Kane was sick the whole time - and this time I think we may have learned our lesson - so he didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did.

Just look at the video on their website:

We took advantage of the underwater submersible boat trip, the underwater viewing platform, and, of course, the buffet (twice). And I did a bit of snorkeling while Kane laid down on the picnic table benches. It was a really nice tour and I even got to pet a giant fish! Here's me from the underwater viewing platform in my Lycra blue stinger suit:
See more pictures in this photo album (combined with the Whitsundays photos).

The second day we took a leisurely drive up to the Daintree rainforest where we took a river cruise to see some crocs and birds. It was fun and the weather was great, if a bit hot. We took it pretty easy on our final day and got back to PD for an early night. Monday we were back to Cairns to return our car and catch a flight to Darwin for our 3 day trip around Kakadu National Park.