Grenoble

We'll, I'm all by myself now, since Rebecca left to go back to NZ on Sunday. It's definately not the same when you're on your own, but I've got the hang of having no one to check that I haven't left my bag on the bus, remembered the key for the hotel etc. I'm also having people come up to me and ask where I'm from and have a chat, which is nice except when they launch into their life story and how they we're locked up in a psychiatric unit 20 years ago (from a nice lady I spoke to yesterday!).

On Rebecca's last day in Paris we had a look around the Père Lachaise cemetary. If it wasn't for all the graves making it a bit morbid, it's a really nice quiet place. Found Jim Morrison's grave and Oscar Wilde's grave but very difficult to find any of the other famous people buried there since it's such a huge place. We also went down to the catacombs, which is fine until you realise that there are millions of skeletons lain out down there. Very creepy. Before Rebecca flew out we went up to Sacre Coeur, together with most of Paris by how many people were there! The inside of the church is not that exciting but the views over Paris from the top are pretty sweet.


After Rebecca took off, I took the train down to Grenoble in the hope of catching some of the Tour de France. Hasn't worked out though because to get to the Alpes d'Huez you had to spend two nights there and since the ride is closed, it's pretty much impossible to get there by public transport. At least it gives me a reason to come back to France so that I can follow it properly and be better prepared (not that I need a reason to come back to France, it's definately my favourite country I've been to so far).

So with no Tour de France to go to (I've only seen it on the tele) I've had to make do with exploring the parts of Grenoble we didn't see when we were here a couple of months ago. I decided to splash out and get the Grenoble Card - mostly so I could go for a ride on the mini train! Yesterday I went on a walking tour of Grenoble with our guide and a nice Spanish couple. Halfway through he said that a local journalist was doing an article on tourism in Grenoble, so we had our photo taken sampling some walnut chocolates, which apparently are a specialty in Grenoble. Very glad that no-one I know is going to be seeing that newspaper though!

I've also had another trip up in the pods to the fort, since it was so much fun last time. This morning I decided to get out of the city and headed to a little village on the outskirts of Grenoble to take a tour through the caves. Have to say not as cool as the caves in NZ, but it didn't help that they had these neon lights lighting up the caves, seems by themselves the caves are not exciting enough.

Tomorrow I'm off to Graz, Austria to join my bike tour so I'm excited about getting on a bike again, not so excited about the overnight train to get there though!

Prague

Taking full advantage of the free internet at our hostel at the moment, cause it's never fun when you have to pay (especially when you try to convert it to kiwi dollars!).

Our last morning in Mykonos, we took a little boat out to Delos, this little island 1 mile away from Mykonos. It's only about 6 square kms, but it has all these old ruins. We couldn't understand how the Greeks we're able to build these amazing temples on the island, it would have been a real effort transporting the materials. We then took a 5 1/2 hour ferry ride back to Athens, a lot nicer than our trip to Mykonos since it was a much bigger ferry.

We had a couple of hours sleep since we had a flight at 4.20am to Prague (you've got to love those cheap flights!). We obviously weren't looking that great because the Greek security guy at the airport was chatting up the two Aussie girls in front of us, but we barely got an hello :-) It was 27 degrees when we left Athens, and a chilly 16 degrees when we got to Prague at 6 o'clock, so we're using our cardies again. As you can imagine we weren't really up to much sightseeing that day, just had a bit of a nosey around our neighbourhood. We're right opposite the river, which is really handy to everything. The building is really old (like everything here), it even has a few cute little gargoyles.

Feeling a lot better the next day we got up early to bet the crowds to Charles Bridge. It was pretty cool to look at at 9am, but when walked back along it later that day, you could barely move for people! There are loads of statues lining the bridge, and it took us awhile to look at them. We spent the rest of the day at Prague Castle, which is really made up of a few castles joined together with courtyards. Saw another changing of the guard (must be our third or fourth now), this one was my favourite though because they had this band that played from the windows of the castle, sounded a bit like the star wars theme. There were some interesting areas within the castle, like a cute little lane of houses which are now used as souvenir shops, and this creepy exhibition of medievel torture instruments.

Today, we took in the astronomical clock, loved the little skeleton that rang the bell when the hour struck. We also had a look around St Nicholas church, a very elaborate baroque church (seen the inside of so many churches now, definately more now than the whole of the past 25 years!). Spent the rest of the afternoon at the Jewish museum, which is actually a number of synagogues with displays. It also included the Old Jewish cemetary, where there are apparently 12,000 people buried on top of each other, and all the gravestones are crooked. Quite weird.

Tomorrow we're back off to Paris and then Rebecca heads home and I'll be a bit of a loner for the next month or so!

Greek Islands

Arrived in Athens about a week ago, seemed to have a very good transport system I'm guessing this is because of the Olympics in 2004. Nice to have most things in English because you can't even guess what the words are because the Greek language is so different from English. Although it was still hot, in the early to mid 30s it didn't feel as bad because they have this cooling wind which helps a bit.

Really liked Athens, probably more so than Rome. The Greeks are generally a lot friendly than the Italians have been and they all seem to speak really good English. We spent our couple of days in Athens looking around at all the old stuff. The Acropolis is amazing, shame that it's been under scaffolding since 2000 with all the restoration work. You can figure out wherever you need to go by using the Acropolis as a reference point, you can see it from wherever you are in Athens. Temple of Olympic Zeus was huge, all that's really left are a few of the columns, but they are just enormous you just couldn't imagine how they managed to get them to stand.


That night we took a cable car up one of the hills for really good views over the city and Acropolis. The cable car was really expensive though and when we got up there we realised that there was a nice path leading up there anyway, which was a bit frustrating but nice to walk down there on the way home.

Next day we spent quite a bit of time at the Archealogical museum. Pretty packed with tour groups, but we're used to that by now. Rest of the day we had a look around the lesser known sites like Ancient Agora and Roman Agora.

We took an overnight ferry to Hania, Crete. This was such a beautiful place. Lots of English and German tourists around, but at least that means everything is in English. Our accomodation was right on the waterfront in the old port. Beautiful all lit up at sunset. Not a huge amount of sights in Hania, but it was nice to have a swim and have a look around the shops. After all, we haven't really had much down time so far!

Right now we're in Mykonos. Had a very rough ferry ride to get here. It was supposed to only take 4 and 1/2 hours but ended up taking about 7 hours because the sea was so rough. We were very glad that we had remembered to take our travel sickness pills though because everyone around us was making good use of the sick bags. Didn't help that we had a really anxious Greek woman in front of us who kept making the sign of the cross on herself and getting really worked up when the boat was rolling around. She ended up freaking out and throwing herself out of her chair. At least it distracted us from feeling sick ourselves though!

We've been having a look around the town this morning. All the houses are white with different coloured doors, exactly like all the pictures we've seen. Also been up to see the windmills, now I understand why they have so many after our trip here yesterday. Might have a swim this afternoon, we have a lovely beach a few hundred metres from where we're staying.

Mafia country

Moving on from Rome, we headed to the tourist resort of Sorrento to relax after hectic Rome. Lovely place, but quite expensive. First day we had a bit of a look around Sorrento, not a lot to see but a much nicer base than Naples, which seems to be the crime capital of Italy. It was a bit of a long trip with our packs on the train from Naples though. We were obviously looking a bit hot and tired, because this old Italian guy with no teeth was feeling sorry for us and trying to widen the gap between the doors to let more air in. It was very sweet, but the older people are a lot nicer generally than the Italians our age who won't even make eye contact with you when you ask for something!

Next day we were off for some celebrity spotting in Capri. Didn't actually see any celebrities though, I'm sure they would just hide out on their yachts anyway. Instead there were just a lot of wannabes with their ripoff YSL bags and sunnies, probably picked up from the street vendors in Rome. Once you get away from all that though it really is a beautiful island. We walked around the coast and didn't see anyone for ages.

We spent the whole of the next day in Pompeii, and we really needed all the time to try to see everything. People are right when they say it's huge. Like everywhere, once you get away from the tour groups it feels like there is hardly anyone there which is really nice. Some of the frescoes were amazingly intricate and well preserved, the paintings in the brothel though were quite interesting to say the least. You could really see how they lived though - much easier to imagine compared to the Forum in Rome.

Had a very windy trip along the Amalfi Coast to Amalfi. The scenery is spectacular but the roads are very narrow which is interesting when two buses are trying to pass each other. We finally got off the bus an hour and a half later feeling a bit sickly. Not a huge amount to see in Amalfi, though it is very stunning.
Instead we hopped on a sightseeing bus to take us round the coast to Ravello. Ravello was the most beautiful place I think we've been to so far. It's very green with terraces where they grow lemons and olives.
We checked out some gardens on the coast where there was stunning views around the coast. The terrace stretched out over the cliff though which was a bit freaky.


Our last day in Sorrento, we went to Herculaneum. This was another city which was destroyed when Mount Versuviaus erupted. It isn't as big as Pompeii, they're still excavating it and it looked like the modern town had been built over the ruins. This was where the rich people lived and you could really see the difference from Pompeii. They had a lot of huge mansions some even with a couple of storeys. Train trip there was a bit interesting, I had this slimey Italian bloke sit next to me and try to put his arm around me - yuck!!! We moved to another carriage after that, but we can see what people mean about Italian men though now.

Nearly missed our ferry to Sicily that night. We made sure we left in plenty of time but once we got to Naples we realised we got off at the wrong port and spent the next hour and a half walking towards the main port. Once we got there we were told we had to go to another port, by this stage we were running short on time so we just got a taxi. Sure we got ripped off though, since it was less than 5 mins to get there and he charged us 15 euro!!

Ferry ride was great though. We're in Palermo right now. Spent yesterday looking around the city but there wasn't a lot to see because it being a Sunday, everything was closed. Today we're off to Cefalu, a little town around the coast - might even get a swim! Next stop, Athens were it looks like it is going to be even hotter!!!!