The Palunawack Tours - Episode 11: Boats, bushfires and hiding under bushes.

In the last Episode of The Palunawack Tours...
Swedish highschool students, romps through Venice and 3 mad weeks in Malta. And I though things couldn't get any more crazy.

As always, the email is long. I haven't even written it yet and I know it's going to be long. So some...

Housekeeping! (woohoo...)

Miss you all! Thanks for the ongoing replies, it's good to hear all the day to day happenings around the world.
Photos and videos are woefully behind (due to reasons I'll explain shortly) but will go up soon. There's some good one coming, trust me. David Hasslehoff and George Cloony feature as special guests.

More shameless selling out!
Anyone is into the Fringe Festival? My brother Matt the thespian, as see winning $20,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire recently, is staging a play he has written. It's called Small Talk and runs from 25th September - check out the invite at the end of the email and go and get some culture!

And now, our feature presentation...

Farewell Malta, hello Italy
So I'm on the train in Sicily, heading north up Italy having just finished 3 weeks in Malta. I like trains, they give you time to relax and reflect on the fact you have no idea where you're going.

After 3 weeks on Malta I'd lost the traveling edge - being able to plan, book and travel with ease between locations was no longer second nature and I was anxious. So when it came to planning where to go next I more or less went with the prettiest picture I'd seen of Italy - and found myself headed for Amalfi.

6 hours later and a hellish night train experience later (the next strange Italian grandfather who ruffles my hair is getting a black eye) I found myself gawping out the window of the ferry along the coast to Amalfi. Describing this place is difficult: Imagine cliffs up to 500m high falling directly into the ocean. Gouge out some extremely tight valleys into these cliffs, wedge tiny townships into them and a couple more on the peaks, and that's Amalfi. Absolutely stunning.

Unfortunately these vistas come at a price; extremely narrow and steep roads. And when your suitcase weighs 25kg and there's no footpath, dodging buses is no longer a creative description. If the buses didn't honk before taking each corner I'd have had a very short tour of the cliffs, followed by an intimate introduction to the Mediterranean.

After checking into the hostel I was told I could get free internet and good deals from the cafe down by the beach. I should have realised the second an Italian mentioned a "Good deal, he look after you!" what I was in for. Sure enough...

"Hey my friend, you new here? you look new here, you eat here I look after you, you travel alone? no girl? I know plenty of girls. Where you from, you Australian? I know good Australian girls, you come visit me tonight yes? Good good, I be seeing you my friend!"

Being hustled by an Italian is disturbingly like being interrogated. You don't answer, they just keep talking until they get all the facts right. So shaken was I by this bombardment that it took me even longer than my standard 30 minutes to realise I'd been offered a prostitute, again. Apparently travel has cultivated me an aura of desperation.

That night found me in the next town over looking for some dinner as far away as possible from my 'good friend' and taking in the sights. Here I learned two very important facts about Amalfi. One: the food is extremely good. Two: there is a cover charge at the restaurants.
So I sit down with 14 Euro in my pocket. I order 13 Euro of food, just to be safe.

The bill arrives.
16 Euro.
Uh oh.

I have no card on me and the rest of my cash is a 15 minute walk away. The english here isn't that great and I don't like my odds of explaining the situation to the waiter, who looked pissed off enough just having me eat there.

Bugger.

So what was my responsible and culturally aware solution to this dillema?

Run away. Carefully placed my 14 Euro in the dish, got up, walked to the nearest alley and ran for my freakin' life.

Breakfast at this hostel was interesting. I for one didn't know croissants came in wrappers. But it does give you a good opportunity to meet people, and me and a Canadian fella named Hart ended up hiking up one of the numerous cliff for a view. Amazingly enough we passed dozens of houses with no road access, and these steps were steep. All I can say is the people living there must have enormous calves.

One thing leads to another and me and Hart met a few more backpackers. Next thing you know, we’re on a boat.

The life aquatic

Hiring a boat is the single best idea anyone will ever have in Amalfi. Throw in a couple of bottles of red wine procured from my ‘good friend’ and you’re in for an afternoon of excellent fun. For one thing, you can drive to the caves you normally have to pay 20 euro to get into and attempt to break into them. Having dropped anchor and discovered it didn’t actually touch the bottom, we attempted to use the back entrance to The Blue Grotto – by swimming through an underwater tunnel.

4 attempts and a near-drowning later, we realized what we were doing was monumentally stupid and decided to hoon about in the boat for a while instead. And it’s just as well that the anchor chain wasn’t long enough to touch the bottom, because we forgot to pull it up. It took us a solid 15 minutes to figure out why the boat was dragging on one side…

Incompetence aside, there is no better way to appreciate Amalfi than drinking red wine in a life ring, floating in the endless blue of the Mediterranean, while pretending to be a pirate.

The Hoff gets concussion

In fact the only way to improve on the experience is to hire a BIGGER, FASTER boat the next day and pretend to be David Hasselhoff. I don’t know what red wine fuelled inspiration came to Hart, but the next thing you know he’s standing on the bow, yelling ‘I’m gonna save your life!’ at some rather bemused swimmers, before diving off the front of the boat.

Wrong angle.

So we were treated to the spectacular sight of a man doing a half cartwheel across the top of the water, before sinking quietly below the waves…

Leaving Amalfi is an adventure in itself. You can either take the boat, which is nice but pricey, or you can take the cheaper bus. I did wonder why the bus was so much cheaper. In retrospect it was probably because of the 200-400m vertical cliffs on one side of the single-lane roads they use. The buses honk before every corner. This is to prevent them knocking cars over this precipice. I am not joking about this.

45 minutes later and rather more aware of mortality, I was off to Rome.

Roma

Look, I’ll be honest; Rome was ok. When you take out all the obvious things to say about the Coliseum and Roman ruins and the Vatican, there wasn’t much more to it. Needless to say it is all well worth doing and quite surreal to see, first person. The poor buggers dressed up as Roman soldiers in the middle of summer earn their cash alright – in fact they will chase you, complete with sword, if you try and take a photo without paying.

Exodus of the street vendors

While in Rome, take the opportunity to study the herd-migrations of the street vendors. There’s nothing quite like walking up the Spanish Steps and being passed by 20-odd of these guys galloping away from the cop who has encroached on their domain. Threatened by their natural predator, the vendors will shelter their precious cargo of imitation handbags and sunglasses, secure in the knowledge that the cop sure as hell can’t be stuffed climbing all those stairs. Once the predator leaves, the vendors will cautiously drift back down to their turf and re-commence their business. This pattern in known to repeat itself every couple of hours.

Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican

Murphy’s Law states that things will go wrong at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way, so in heading to the centre of all things puritan, it was virtually guaranteed I was going to screw up. I am now firmly informed that the following constitute ‘Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican’.

• Shorts and sleeveless shirts are forbidden in the Vatican in order to ensure a proper state of dress. Asking in a loud voice why ‘knees are considered an abomination unto God’ is Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican.
• Managing to walk around the entire visit with your fly undone, even if unintentional, is Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican.
• Filling up your drink bottle from the Holy Water (not me for once) is Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican.
• And finally, declaring ‘Thank Christ I’m a Buddhist’ during the guided tour is definitely Inappropriate Behavior in the Vatican.

And I am apologising for none of it. You wacky Catholics…

I humbly wish to apologise…  
There is a common trap when backpacking to think of everyone else as tourists. “I’m not a tourist, I’m far more enlightened, culturally sensitive, capable, etc. All the stereotypes don’t apply to me”

“Wrong” says the god of poetic justice, “You are a tourist and here’s a nice little humiliating experience to prove it to you”.

The train tickets in Italy come from an automatic machine – you put your card in, pay and get your ticket. Except my credit card didn’t come out this time. Naturally, I instantly remembered all the travel horror stories about identity theft and panicked. After eventually finding a maintenance guy, I explained the problem and expected a quick fix. Nope: “Impossible! Cannot happen” he tells me. 30 seconds of emphatic declaration that it was possible because it had happened ended with me dragging him to the machine where he checked it over, all the while insisting in fragments of English that it wasn’t possible for the machine to eat my card. I insist that it must be possible because the bloody card is still in there mate! He demands that I should check my pockets.

Sure enough…

The look on the poor guy’s face when I pulled the card out my pocket should have killed me where I stood. I made a quick exit, secure in the knowledge that I am officially a dumb tourist.

Corsica
Right back in the first months of the trip I was contacted by friends from Perth, inviting me to come hiking in Corsica in July. They needed a 4^th party member and since I was in Europe already I was the obvious choice.

Unfortunately, these things tend to slip the mind, so I found myself rather late in June trying to figure out, firstly where Corsica was, and secondly how to get there.

Turns out Corsica is a small French-owned island between it and Italy. A beautiful rugged landscape with dramatic hills and coastlines. The local people are a bit more rustic than mainland French and retain a strong sense of independence, which occasionally manifests in the cheerful bombing of symbols of France. Just to keep them on their toes

After eventually meeting up with my friends after getting prodigiously lost at our first stop (flat phone, wrong address, no english, no taxis), we set off in the summer sun on our 5 day hike from east coast to west. Well, they called it a ‘hike’. I call it ‘walking between 5-star hotels’. Some of the places we stayed at on this trip were beyond belief – 3 course meals, complimentary wine, candles and mountain views were standard fare.

‘Hiking’

But by far the best night was the second one. Much of the details of this trip were arranged by a friend of a friend who spoke some French, and we were a little unclear on the details for this night. All we knew was a man would pick us up from the town. When he turned up in a ute and told us, with the 6 words of English he had, to get in the back, we got a little worried.

Never judge a book by it’s cover! The cottages he took us too had one of the best views on the entire trip and after a few bottles of the local red wine we ended up having a great night. We yelled the 4 phrases we knew in French and they yelled the ones they knew in English and it all seemed to work somehow. We seemed to make a good impression in any case because the owner refused to take the full price we offered him and actually offered us jobs on his farm. Herding pigs apparently, though I’m not trusting that translation.

Where there’s smoke…

We’d commented a few times during the hike how similar Corsican landscape was to parts of Australia. Little did we know how true that was about to turn out.

It was day 4 when we spotted the smoke. At first you sort of assumed it was a chimney or something, or a bonfire at worst. After all, Europe doesn’t have bushfires, does it? Right?

Wrong. 4 hours later we sat in town with the entire local populace and watched the flames reach the crest of the mountains in the distance. The same mountain range we were scheduled to walk over the next day. It was promptly agreed day 5 was cancelled. Australians know a thing or two about fires, but it’s very easy to let paranoia get to you, ‘just in case’. Even though we knew the fires had no chance of reaching our town that night, we still slept in our clothes. As one of our party eloquently put it, “It’s bad enough having someone burst into your room at 3am screaming ‘fire!’. Imagine if they did it in french!”

Sleeping under bushes with emotionally unstable French women.

Bet that title got you hooked. Ok, here’s what happened:

After arriving at the end of our hike, we planned to go our separate way. I was headed back to Switzerland to catch up with some friends. To do this I planned to take two buses to the north of Corsica, a ferry to Italy and two trains to Switzerland. With careful planning, I had arranged to do this massive trip in a single day and was very proud of myself.

So I turn up for the first bus, nice and early at 5:50am. There’s a woman standing by the stop. I politely ask whether I’m at the right stop. Now, you know how sometimes you start a conversation with someone and the second they open their mouth you know you’ve made a mistake? Bingo. Asking this woman a single question was like bursting a dam.

It turns out she was on holiday with her boyfriend, caught him with another woman, promptly packed and left the hotel and walked for 3 days to get to this bus station. By this point I already knew I was in trouble. Consoling a heart-broken woman is bad enough when you know them properly and speak the same language. This was going to be painful.

2 hours on the bus later I am now in a state of extreme anxiety because this lady has told me that the bus I was expecting to take to my ferry does not exist. She has also volunteered to help me find an alternative – we are now travel buddies.

Long story short, I miss the ferry and on her suggestion (since she only has 14 euros left to her name since her ex has cancelled her credit card) I find myself bedding down for the night underneath a bush in the front yard of a block of luxury apartments, while my French friend rabbits on about relationships and meeting new people and starts to make some very pointed comments about moving on. Sleep was elusive that night.

And in the perfect conclusion to this situation, we were woken the next morning by a bucket of water thrown from the third floor.

Laying there in the early morning sunshine, covered in soapy water and attempting not to scream, I took a moment to ponder how exactly the hell I got into this situation and how I would NEVER EVER AGAIN fail to read a timetable IN DETAIL and make TRIPLICATE COPIES GOD DAMMIT.

Knife fighting in Milan.

Later that morning saw me on the ferry and some welcome relief. Catching the next train from the port to Milan was no problems and I expected an easy transfer from there to Switzerland and a warm welcome home to the Kandersteg ski chalet I was working in all those months ago.

So I got to Milan. And I checked the timetable for the next train to Switzerland. And I checked it again. And I went to the info point just to be sure. And then I sat down for a bit and attempted not to cry.

I’d done it again. I had screwed up my connection for the second time in 48 hours and the last train to Switzerland had left 2 hours previous. I have no hostel and no internet access to book one. Only one option left: spend the night until the first train in the gardens outside Milan train station.

“Milan!” you’re probably thinking, “The fashion capital! Surely a safe and beautiful place to be stuck in.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The best illustration of the entire evening was that I actually went to McDonalds in order to avoid having to sit outside for any longer than necessary.

Me. In McDonalds. Absolutely unheard of. Contrary to everything I stand for. And yet I would do it again if I ever found myself in that situation twice. I spent the rest of the night seated on top of my suitcase with my pocket knife open and held in clear sight. Paranoid? I wish.

As I sat there a young man snuck up next to an American couple who were in the same situation as me, but who had fallen asleep beside their bags. I watched as this fella quietly took hold of their bags and began to pull them away. Then he spotted me watching him. He grinned at me and just kept on pulling!

Naturally I went over and woke up the couple, but where you would expect a thief to run for it at this point, this guy actually came up to me and started abusing me, I assume for getting in the way of his ‘legitimate business’. I decided vacating the area for a while was the safest option and ended up boarding the train to Switzerland at 6am, filthy, exhausted but relaxed for the first time in 3 days.

Kandersteg revisited

Long term readers will know I started my trip with three months working in a International Scout Centre, a ski resort in Kandersteg, Switzerland. Many newer readers will have actually met me there. Having left there in March with snow still on the ground, returning in the peak of summer was quite a shock. For one thing there was green, and for another there was smell! And best of all, we managed to get 7 of the 11 people I was working with back there at the same time, so we had a bit of a reunion at the same time.

Peaking

The main reason for returning to Kandersteg however was pretty simple: ever since I arrived there the first time in the dead of winter, I took one look at those mountains and wanted to climb them. In winter, snow and avalanche risk makes this impossible, but in summer it’s another story.

In retrospect it was a bit ambitious trying for three peaks in the one day. After making number two at 6pm, getting some serious head-spins on the way up, and having a close encounter with a mountain goat on the way down I decided to ease off the pace a little.

So instead of more mountain peaks, we decided to have a go at the Via Feratta. A via feratta is a pretty simple concept: find a cliff, hammer a bunch of metal stakes into it, climb. Sounds pretty straight forward in principal right?

Then you climb it. Sure there’s a safety cable, but it’s only once you’re up 200m above the ground, perched on two tiny pieces of slippery metal that you realise that each section of safety cable is 10 meters long, which means you’re not only in for a hell of a fall, you’re going to hit every one of those steel spikes on the way down. This is not a good though to be having at thios altitude, especially when one of the rules of a via feratta is that under no circumstances can you go back down once you have started. Once you’re on it, you either finish it or fork out $10,000 for a helicopter evacuation.

Detention

Eventually I had to push on and catch my flight to the UK and on to Ireland. So on the 31^st July I took a train to Zurich station, put on my ski clothes again, checked in my luggage and headed for the gate. But the Swiss border police had other ideas.

When the guy pulled me aside the first thing that went through my head was that he thought I was smuggling something in my ski clothes. I have to admit they look pretty bloody suspicious in the middle of summer, but my suitcase is too heavy to leave them in...

But no. It seems I had over stayed my tourist visa by 15 days. Not a problem traveling by train as no one checks passports, but flying is another story. I was given 3 options: pay a 350 euro fine, spend two days in jail, or defer the matter to a tribunal and risk being banned from Europe for 2 years. I took door number three. Given I am now attempting to visit Germany again in a week or so, I may be posting the next email from a cell. Stay tuned!

Two Episodes for the price of one!

I made a promise to one of my Irish mates that after the exceedingly good times they showed me, I couldn’t leave Ireland at the bottom of an email where no one is going to read it.

 

So stay tuned, because the next one is already in the works.

Episode 12: Ireland will be out in 2 day maximum. Who says I don’t offer value for your hypothetical dollar!

What cheer!

Gordon