Slightly ominous sound effects

15 years. 15 consecutive calender years between 2005 and 2019. I obtained my first passport in 2005 at 18 years of age, and in every subsequent year, I left the country at least once (Don't go back and check, because this only goes back to 2007 anyway).

And then we arrived in 2020, and in 2020 and 2021, for some reason we didn't go anywhere.

Ok, it wasn't just 'for some reason', I think we are all aware that the reason was the global pandemic, nowhere was safe, except locked up inside my house.

It wasn't the hassle of mandatory self-isolation, or mandatory testing that put us off, we could have handled that, and we definitely wouldn't have been 'those' people ending their holidays early to get home before isolation orders came into effect, because seriously, if you are rushing home from a holiday, in order to make it to work, your priorities are incredibly out of order and you need to slow down and take stock of your life for a minute. Here's a free life-hack for everyone if this ever happens again, if you return from a holiday during a mandated stay at home order for anyone returning from abroad, you have a free excuse for NOT showing up at work, that is enshrined in law. You are welcome.

No, the reason we didn't go away was because, seriously, did you not read any of the news? There was a global pandemic going on, and we didn't fancy getting sick. Also, when I'm on holiday, the various activities and the eating out at restaurants is the holiday, I'm not entirely sure what's left to do if you show up somewhere and everywhere is closed. Anyone?

Ok, so seeing as it is still 2022 now, and I have taken this blog down from the attic, blown off the dust and plopped 8 brand new size C batteries under the slightly cracked rear cover, you've probably already figured out that the travelling drought that was the first 2 years of this decade, was ended recently. Which it was.

We did a bit of proverbial toe-dipping by making 1 trip to Llandudno and 2 to Sheffield in order to watch snooker, and found those trips were fine, no issues whatsoever. So shortly afterwards, we were talking and we said, "Hey, maybe we should do that thing we like to do, you know the one, where we're in a place that isn't our house for a little while, where the weather is nicer, and we spend a bunch more money because we'll eat out every day".

The word we were looking for was 'Holiday', naturally, after such a long time, the lingo had eluded us.

So, approximately one week later, we found ourselves in sunny Montenegro, specifically, Kotor on the Adriatic sea.

Now comes the portion of the evening where I can punctuate my lines of text using images collected from my phone. We arrived on a Wednesday, several hours before the check-in time, and phoned the renter to ask if we could leave our bags anywhere. She said yes, then showed up and just let us in. That set the tone really for the rest of the holiday, everyone was just nice. 

We had an apartment overlooking a small river just outside the old town (which can be seen just towards the right hand side of this picture from the balcony).

After a walk and something to eat in the old town, the majority of day 1 was done, but we made the most of our time here and every day had a different activity of some description.

Oo, actually, lets do it like this:

Day 2 (Slightly ominous sound effect)

Day 2 took us on a walk along the coast where we followed a footpath between a small pebble beach and the road (which actually coincidentally separated a handful of restaurants from their outdoor eating areas, bringing to mind a level  from overcooked where a road separates a kitchen from the serving area. though in this scenario, the road was pretty quite and the waiters weren't working against the clock).

As we approached the end of the walkable stretch of coastline, we were offered a boat ride for a lower price than we had seen along the way, so we accepted. By the miracle of story telling, we can now jump straight to that boat ride as though that happened instantaneously and not a couple of hours later, when we had to return.

Our first stop was Our Lady of The Rocks, one of 2 tiny islands near the mouth of Kotor Bay, it consisted of a church and a gift shop and... yea.

The first interesting thing about the island is it is completely man made, and it is built upon the remains of sunken ships due to a history of attempted invasions being thwarted by blocking off the one entrance to the bay.

The other interesting thing is the gift shop (not now, now it's just a place to grab a magnet or a large novelty pencil), but it's original purpose was as a room to settle blood feuds. Feuding families would be locked inside the building, and would not be allowed out until the feud was settled. Or one of them was dead (though I suppose that does settle a feud too).

Next up was the submarine tunnels, or at least one of them, there are 3 of them hidden in the mountainside, all connected together so they can be walked between on foot, which were dug out by hand using slave labour from a local prison and used to repair submarines in secret with camouflaged gates that could be closed and the tunnels would be invisible to passing planes.

Next up was the island prison. I don't think it was the same one used for slave labour. Annoyingly this used to be a tourist spot that you could visit with many of the rooms and facilities still intact, but in the infinite wisdom of the government, it's been effectively bulldozed in favour of a large Hotel and Casino, because hooray for Capitalism eh?

Most interesting about passing this spot was my phone welcomed me to Croatia. So for a brief moment, I could have phoned or texted people without paying the extortionate roaming charges still present in Montenegro. Not that I really needed to.

The final (intended) stop of the boat tour was to the blue cave, which is a cave, where the water looks blue. This is the obligatory stop on any boat tour where you are allowed some time to swim.

No-one did. We were in the wrong shoulder season really, so the sea was far too cold, also, we had just been battered by winds while making our way out here, personally I was in no rush to make the journey back more uncomfortable.

This meant there was leftover time to visit Perast, a tiny coastal town facing the lady of the rocks from before. Only about 20 minutes though, so a quick wander down the coast to buy a small bottle of some ginger juice and return just in time to head back. 

On the boat we got chatting to a couple sat next to us, a lady from Montenegro and her husband from Liverpool (I believe it is one of the natural laws of the universe that you are guaranteed to find a scouser wherever you are in the world), she told us about a sort of pastry she enjoyed that you could buy from a bakery. I had forgotten the name by the time we entered a bakery a couple of days later, but I saw something that looked like what she had described, a sort of filled pastry, it was large, I thought we should at least try it, so thought we could get one to share and see if we liked it. I pointed to it and asked what it was. Not understanding me, she picked it up and wrapped it up for me. A moment later seemingly having not heard this attempted interaction, Rachael had the same idea upon spotting these items herself and came to the counter alongside me and asked what it was. Therefore we walked out with 2 of the things.

Day 3 (The same ominous sound effect)

Day 3 would become the day of the secret beach. We started the day by walking, this time heading in the opposite direction around the bay towards a part of the area we did look at apartments in. The area was quieter with smaller unlit roads, and down by the coastline was a tiny little pebble beach surrounded by a hill with trees, with no-one on it.

For the time we sat there, this beach was ours, we sat and read and we skimmed stones on the water, but not at the same time due to the risk of accidentally skimming e-readers across the water.

While walking back, we realised how we were glad we hadn't booked an apartment on this side, it was nice, that wasn't the problem, but walking along small coastal roads without pavements is fine during the day, but at night would have been a different story, and could effectively have given us a daylight curfew, or a necessity to take a taxi home if we found ourselves out in the old town at night. Which we generally were.

Day 4 (You know the sort of sound I mean? Like 2 notes, would sort of accompany text on a screen perhaps indicating the time or how long is left, as the scenes inbetween escalate up to something)

If you've been keeping track, Day 4 is a Saturday, and on this day we headed to the bus station and took a trip out of Kotor to Budva.

Budva is larger than Kotor with much larger hotels and beaches and is presumably a more popular tourist destination. Budva also has an old town, with similar tight streets, but without quite so many cats (Which are interestingly, 2 facts about Kotor I have yet to impart).

We stopped at a small restaurant and ate a pizza, where apparently someone on the next table mistook me for a waiter. This Guy. The one in shorts and a hawaiian shirt. He was sitting down and asked me if this table was ok. I replied, 'Yes. This one is our table'.

After a short walk through a park, where we stopped for a read, we headed back to the bus station and enjoyed the little zoo outside it. We had already come across it on the way out, but there was no point mentioning it twice, but this time, one of the rabbits stuck it's nose through the fence for Rachael to tickle him.

We returned to Kotor in time to see stages being set up, so we stuck around to watch the music later on.

The band were more or less what you would expect, guitarists, drummer and singer doing covers and songs in Montenegrin I could not understand, but that was when we discovered we had shown up for our holiday at the time they were celebrating their independence day, which was nice (Although, had we known in advance that no shops would be open for a large chunk of our holiday, we might have done some stocking up in advance of the weekend)

Day 5 (Something like that 'dun dun' at the start of law and order, I always thought that sound effect seemed a bit out of place, because it is sort of ominous, but I thought law and order was basically a procedural? Maybe it is secretly a horror, I don't know)

On this day, we began with something of a lazy day, but the day had other ideas.

We went out for a walk, we walked to the end of our road and came to a hill, the hill looked like it led to the castle on the top, the sky was a little dull and the air seemed cooler than normal, so we went for a stroll, a nice leisurely 2 hour stroll up a hill. In the scorching heat. Because of course the drop in temperature was a lie and the sun came back out to batter us on the way up.

It was fine really, and we really did take it at a leisurely pace, the return journey only took 45 minutes, but on the way up we kept stopping to rest and admire the view. As well as the goats.

That's where the hill could lead to, a goat farm, we stopped and watched the goats for quite a bit when we saw them, but we didn't continue on up towards the goat farm itself, we diverted so we could continue to walk towards the wall.

And then we made it, all the way up to the castle on the top of the hill.

Well, the outside of it at least, with a small rickety ladder, perched precariously on the edge of the rocks just outside the wall, leading up to a window which was much smaller on the inside than the outside, accompanied by a sign warning people not to attempt access through the window. We decided that it was probably best not to disobey the sign in this instance. This picture doesn't do justice to the positioning of the ladder, in the picture, it looks like there is plenty of room where it is stood. There was not.

Day 6 (Just to clarify, I'm not actually building to something sinister, there's no general narrative and finale event coming, this is just a series of disparate events tied together by the fact that they all happened while we were in a different country for a few days, otherwise known as a holiday.) (Also Dun dun)

On Day 6 we wandered down to the markets they have outside the old town and bought some fruits (Strawberries if memory serves) and a couple of fancy cheeses.

What? I did warn you I wasn't building to anything, the days can't all be action packed and full of boat rides and ladders. Would it help if I said the bakery story from earlier may have belonged in this day? I just told it early, because it paired with the couple on the boat.

Also, in the evening, I ordered fish, and she filleted it right at the table, which was pretty cool. She asked if I wanted the head. I did not.

Day 7 (Pressing the sound effect button appears to have no effect, maybe it's broken. I press it again, still nothing. I ask that you imagine the sound effect is playing again, because we appear to be having some technical difficulties)

So on day 7 (Dun Dun) Damn you butt..(Dun Dun).

Day 7 became... That thing isn't going to go off again is it? No, I think we're good. Day 7 became our cultural day, where we thought we would visit the museums and such that Kotor had to offer.

We started with an art gallery not far from the main square. We walked in to a lovely and cool building, occupied only by a man sat near the door. As we entered, he stood and told us extremely apologetically, that the entrance fee was 5 euros.

We genuinely assumed from his tone he was about to tell us the place was closed, I've never had someone so apologetic while telling us the price of something. And it was for a good cause, the gallery we had entered was the gallery of solidarity, which was created following an earthquake in 1979 which devastated a large part of the surrounding area, where they collected artworks from all across Yugoslavia (as it was at the time).

A particular favourite of mine was a painting of Our Lady of The Rocks, mostly because I was able to recognise it and recognise it was painted from Perast.

The art gallery was only small, 3 rooms of artworks that we were told rotated through their 400 strong collection. But the ticket price was not just for this gallery and the feeling you get for contributing a small amount to a solidarity fund, they also allowed entrance to St Pauls Church and St Michaels Church.

So when we left, we dutifully followed his directions to St Pauls and found a massive church building, which was undergoing renovations, so it also had a guy on a ladder with a 'Don't mind me, go about your tourism' vibe. Up some stairs was an outdoor museum with shelves of old pieces of ornate stonework.

And we next made our way over to St Michaels, which was another display of old pieces of ornate stonework. But this time, everything was numbered and we had little binders telling us what everything was, and this to the right was... one of them. Yes sorry I didn't take notes.

The last stop on our cultural tour was the cat museum, this wasn't on the same ticket as the other 3, it had it's own entrance fee, and collected artworks, coins, medals, album covers, anything at all to do with cats and displayed them for us the visitors to peruse.

Because did I mention the cats at all?

Kotor

is

absolutely

packed

full

of

them!

Ok. I am willing to concede that maybe the last one was a rat and was not in Kotor, but it doesn't make it any less true about the number of cats in Kotor.

(dun dun).

It's ok, I was finished anyway.

(And Rachael was worried I wouldn't remember everything if I waited a few weeks to write this thing)

A post focused entirely on our trip to Milan in 2019

 Who remembers 2019?

Do you see what 2020 has made me do? Because of the sheer ridiculousness of the present year, it has forced me to start a blog post as though I am a rubbish stand-up comedian. And it get's worse, because following several years of complete rank stupidity, it has become trite to criticize a single full circuit of the sun based upon the completely arbitrary points we have declared as the start and end of the 365 day cycle, which we have labelled with an arbitrary number based on when someone in Rome decided we should begin counting once.

All that is to say, sorry for calling 2020 ridiculous, it's just a year and it was wrong of me to suggest the previous one was much better just because I could go outside.

But yes, 2019, that near forgotten time when you could go on holiday without the fear of catching a deadly virus, or, worse (based on the insane people racing home before a 4am deadline a few weeks ago) being made to stay home with your family for a couple of weeks. (I mean seriously, where does anyone have to go that desperately that staying home is such an imposition? Don't say work. No-ones job is so important that their colleagues will be unable to cope for an additional 2 weeks).

I keep trying to talk about 2019, but it is possible that the year 2020 has had a far larger impact upon my writing than was initially intended. I'm sure it's fine, you probably wouldn't have noticed had I not pointed it out to you. Go back and look though. It's subtle but it's there.

We made use of our capacity to share a small flying breathing space with hundreds of similarly minded travelicians to spend a couple of days in Milan.

I had to check myself and confirm that this was in fact out only trip last year, and it was due to inconsistent work patterns and the fact that we decided to watch as much of the World Snooker Championship as possible in lieu of a holiday  (in person at the crucible, TV watching habits have a limited impact upon our travel plans).

We booked ourselves into an AirBnB near the city centre, which gave use our own apartment and that brief feeling of being a local as you share your common areas with people who actually live there. Plus a really nice welcome basket from the owner filled with jams and those hard things that look like bread.

Unfortunately it rained while we were in Milan, but that is something that can be expected. When you take your holiday after the end of summer you're always rolling the weather dice and you know that any nice weather you do get is residual and left over from the summer you chose not to holiday during. But as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, take those lemon skins and stitch them together into a makeshift fruit umbrella. I think that's how it goes.

In this case, our makeshift fruit umbrella was one of those open top tour buses. Something we had never done while on holiday was ride around on an open top bus, but as it turns out, they have a canopy style roof for when it rains so you can still enjoy the sights, albeit the somewhat much greyer sights. Also, open top buses are perhaps the most touristy thing it is possible to do and I needed to balance out that brief local feeling.

Due to being on a loop and being intended to allow hopping on and off, open top bus tickets last for a period of days and cover all of the routes, so we took advantage and traveled all of the routes. Including the one that visited all of the sporting attractions like the football pitch and the local teams headquarters or whatever you would call the building adorned with footballers labelled with one of the teams names.

It wasn't all rain and buses, we actually got off the buses in some locations and some of the days, the weather was quite nice. Here was a... building we visited. I really need to start taking notes.

I don't have a story about this picture, I just like it. I like how you can see some of the actual street the photograph is situated on around it. It isn't the same location behind it, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this image while I was just trawling through my photographs looking for things to share, so I decided that I would.

So yes, a quiet year for holidays abroad, but no matter, I'm sure we'll get to visit lots of places in 2020...

Rendang

I started writing a blog about our most recent holiday almost as soon as we came back from it. Following the multi-year hiatus of this blog, I returned to it and filled in the gaps, it became obvious that the best way to write the blogs was to do it immediately, when the holiday is still fresh and I can recall specific details that otherwise get forgotten.

So, what happened? Why didn't I finish? Sure, I was busy and I needed to prioritise university work when I had time in front of a computer, then time just started to get away from me, weeks had turned into months, the year ended and we drove headfirst into the new year, before I knew it, we were halfway through it and the couple of paragraphs I had written remained in my drafts, looking odd and alien, they didn't appear to be words I had written, but some stranger who had just returned from a holiday.

That's the excuse anyway. I don't think that's the reason for the delay, or at least it's not the only reason for the delay. If I'm being honest with myself (and by writing it down here, you) the reason it never materialised was the holiday itself. How on earth could I write something that lived up to the holiday?

But I hear you say 2 things. First of all, you went to Costa Rica the previous year, it was the greatest place you had ever been and that appeared online within weeks. Second of all, this entire blog is total shit, so what makes you so up yourself that you think any of your writings could "live up" to a holiday? Wanker.

I would respond asking you to mind your language and point out that that is a very subjective matter, please stop shaking your head and tutting at me, no-ones asking you to read it. Oh, I did? Never mind then. With regards to Costa Rica, yes I agree, but I was around 18 months younger and 18 months stupider back then, I was more cavalier in my attitude towards sharing an experience. Plus, I was able to do that whole bit about the name of the blog, which gave me a good intro.

Following a career change, I had found myself working away from home during the week, only arriving home on a Friday evening, before leaving again on a Sunday evening. Obviously, we're not living in the past, due to video calling services like Skype, those weekends weren't the only times we spoke, but quality time had been compressed into those 48 hours. This had also impacted upon Rachael's ability to take time away from work, many months had passed since Romania.

The holiday had to be good. Really good. Plus 2018 saw our 10 year anniversary, so something needed to mark that too.

So where could we go to:

• Make up for a prolonged loss of quality time
• Celebrate 10 years together
• That at least matched Costa Rica in terms of quality?

Piece of cake.

Costa Rica was originally inspired by a television advert, this holiday was also inspired by TV. On new years day on a slightly obscure channel somewhere in the deeper recesses of Freeview, there was a show about Sloths in Costa Rica. We had absolutely loved Costa Rica and we had seen sloths, so we watched with great interest. Right after the sloths, was a similar show, this one was about an orangutan sanctuary. There were so many of them, being looked after, being mischievous and being released released into the wild.  It turned out to be the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Borneo.

The show stuck with us, we decided to go to Borneo to try and see some Orangutans. As a matter of fact, we went to the very same place we had seen on the TV.

Following the longest flight we had ever been on and a change in Kuala Lumpar airport, we arrived at Sandakan Airport in the Sabah region of the Malaysian part of Borneo where we were met by our tour operator and taken to the Sepilok Nature resort to begin our holiday.

In the resort, we had a Chalet right in the jungle, where on our first morning, we were treated to an Orangutan climbing over our roof and off into the trees. We also got it on video, but that's just for us.

You could see them much closer if you actually went to the Rehabilitation Centre, but that isn't quite as special.

We were in Sepilok for 2 nights, during which time, we walked around a Rainforest, we visited the Orangutan Sanctuary and before moving onto the next part of the holiday, the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre.

The Bornean Sun Bear is unsurprisingly from its name, only found in Borneo, so these were somewhat special. Plus, a lady showed me how to take a photograph through the telescope things that they have.

Yes, pretty much all of the photos in this blog are going to be of animals, we were in a jungle, that's what you see in the jungle.

The Orangutan Sanctuary and the Sun Bears were on the second day of our trip, after we had already checked out of our Chalet, now we were part of a tour group and following the timetable of our tour group.

We don't normally go for "activity holidays" or even usually visit places with a tour-guide, but we wanted to see as much as we could while we were there, so it was an interesting change to spend almost every moment of the next few days with the same group of people, there was us, a couple from the Netherlands with their young son and a couple from Portugal. We set off up the kinabatangan river for the next part of the journey, the river lodge.

We did everything together, we would awake first thing in the morning for boat rides and we would eat every meal together. During evening meals it was compulsory to wear the traditional Malayan Sarong, as you can see, I could not pull it off.

While out on the river, the main objective was to see as much wildlife as we could, our tour guide seeming to have an incredible knack for spotting animals almost completely hidden from view.

On the way, we were able to see some Pygmy Elephants (Surprisingly, by their name, not actually small), we saw birds, snakes, crocodiles and a lot of Monkeys, the most interesting of which is probably the Proboscis Monkey.

Around this river, the Proboscis Monkey is very common, so we saw a lot of them, but they are interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, however common they are in Borneo, that is the only place in the world they can be found. But also, they are interesting because of their large noses.

It's not completely clear in this image, but they have large protruding noses, Males tend to be larger, with the largest noses being the most attractive to the females, but the monkeys having large noses like they do, gives them a sort of human quality, it makes them look like little old men climbing around in the trees.

After 2 nights on the river, it was time to return to dry land and separate from our tour group for the final part of our trip. We flew from Sandakan airport over to Kota Kinabalu.

The whole trip was booked in one go through a travel agency, we didn't pay a huge amount of attention to the specifics, we just wanted the Jungle bit at the start, then a resort bit afterwards to have a relaxing summer break, so it was something of a surprise that the resort bit was a little bit different to what we're used to.

We're used to an apartment, somewhere to sleep, relax and a base from which to visit the places we want to go. This place was pure luxury, it had everything you could need on site, restaurants, shops and the like, as well as everything you absolutely don't want on holiday (a gym).

And the food. Now there were a couple of different restaurants, for instance, on our first night, we ate at a Teppanyaki restaurant, where you can watch in fascination as someone cooks your food in-front of you. Have you ever watched someone make egg-fried rice? It's amazing.

But the most amazing place was the buffet restaurant, which also happened to be where breakfast was served. This is the seafood section. If I remember correctly, after that is sushi, carry on around and there are different meats waiting to be carved for you, different currys (plus the Rendang, oh my god, Beef Rendang) a desert section and almost anything you can think of.

It's a little different for breakfast, they take away the chocolate fountains and add omelette chefs and beef bacon. You may not think you want to eat curry for breakfast, but believe me. You do.

Now that I've finished salivating, I should probably talk about some of the things we could do there, despite the comfort and luxury, we managed to fill lots of time on activities on this part of the island too, there was a night time walk, where I saw what turned out to be a deadly python and we went canoeing, which was hard work.

And we played Jenga and ended up with a stupidly large tower, look at that, the bottom is ridiculous and there is maybe one possible move left. Unsurprisingly, this fell on the next turn.

And then we came home (Malaysian airlines helpfully providing a visual representation of the journey there for me) with only our memories, our photographs, and a real hankering for more Beef Rendang.

Escape Room Mania

While planning this holiday, Rachael really wanted to go somewhere with snow, obviously that is rarely a cast-iron guarantee, so originally we were going to look for somewhere mountainous, we were even seconds away from booking a trip to Finland until we realised that our flights didn't get there until midnight and the only accommodation was an airbnb, meaning we have to meet the owners before we could go inside and we would need to make our own way there (when public transport has stopped and transfer companies are a bit funny about taking you to non hotels).

On our return to the drawing board (please imagine us standing over a large map covered in pins and post-it notes possibly some pieces of string held between the pins to signify possible routes) we realised that for the days we wanted if we were going to be able to book anything (by this point it was only a couple of weeks away... I have never claimed that we were organised) we would have to drop the snow requirement.

This opened up the map significantly, though not so secretly, I had my own agenda. I have a scratch map on my wall at home where I can scratch off the countries I have visited, it is great, except that it makes you want to visit quite large places to make any obvious change to the map. It was a source of great disappointment how last year we went on the greatest holiday of our lives to Costa Rica which was like a different world, yet when I came to scratch it off the map it barely made a dent, I have a tiny barely noticeable purple mark surrounded by masses of unscratched golden lands, why could we not have visited Brazil instead?

The other recent holidays haven't helped much either, we had Madeira (a tiny speck in the ocean), Ireland (already scratched off) and Corfu (looks like it could have been scratched off by accident), the biggest dent we have made in the map was Denmark, the smallest Scandinavian country we could have chosen. Sure, they own Greenland, but that isn't attached, I can't scratch off that massive landmass because we haven't been there!

Well luckily for me, there was a pair of flights that suited our timetable to Bucharest, Romania is a decent sized country that I had yet to visit, sure I had passed through there in 2008 and been woken up by border guards with massive guns, but I think that unless you actually get off the train and visit the place, it doesn't count, so yes, this holiday I got to scratch off Romania! (also go there, which I suppose is just as important. Maybe next holiday we should go to Antarctica, then I can scratch off the bottom half of the map)

So aside from the important business of scratch maps we had a holiday in there somewhere too.

Bucharest like many places has a pedestrianised old town where we were staying, it wasn't huge, but it took a little bit of getting used to navigating it. Luckily for us, judging by the people that we met, Romanians are incredibly nice, ridiculously so. When we arrived, looking a bit lost, an old man asked us where we were going and offered to show us the way, just because he was out for a walk anyway so he didn't mind where he walked and he walked with us all the way until we found the hotel. He didn't even try to rob us, which I thought was nice of him.

Speaking of the pedestrianised area, I feel it is worth pointing out how much they made up for it in the surrounding roads with this road with (count them) 9 lanes of traffic in 1 direction!


Imagine approaching this and realising that you're in the wrong lane. I saw someone run across this road without waiting for the green man, I thought that man was crazy.

Now I suppose I should probably get onto the activities, I think I already gave that away in the title of the post, because as well as containing a clever homophone of Romania, it also contains 'Escape Room' which makes it even cleverer. Since we did 4 of them (over only 3 full days), you could also say that we were swept up with Escape Room Mania. I know how much people love to have things explained to them in great detail as though they were a child, but had I not, there was always a risk that it would be missed and you would never know just how clever I was being.

We love escape rooms, I couldn't even tell you how many we had done (I could probably work it out, but it sounds like a lot of effort), but we try and find them whenever we are on holiday now as well as one every year on my birthday and any others that we think look good or there is a decent Groupon offer for. I'm not saying that we're any good at them still, but we're always getting better and they're a lot of fun.

In Bucharest, the most expensive one we did was 120 Grandads (That's not what the currency is called, but that is what we called it. I will explain this no further. Also there are about 5 Grandads to a pound so that is about £24) total which is cheap for escape rooms. The cheapest was half that price, so we thought best to take advantage of it. There was a Dracula themed one (of course), one where you're trapped backstage at a rock show, a scientist themed one where you're trying to save the world from a deadly virus and a really bizarre one that was like being in a really strange dream.
We won them all, so hooray for us.

Before we came we had a look online to see what there was to do in Bucharest (aside from escape rooms) and came upon the Opera House. We don't particularly have an interest in the opera, though we did go to a show in Riga's opera house called Igudesman and Joo, though that was more of a comedy music show. It turned out that there was an opera on while we were there, Verdi's Don Carlos and when we looked at the tickets, we assumed it was some sort of mistake when we found that it would only cost £5. Total! For that price, it didn't matter whether we enjoyed it or not, it cost £5 for a night out.
The main thing I learned while watching the show that I didn't know before was that the Opera is subtitled! (actually they are called supertitles) so that it's possible to follow the plot by reading the words. I never knew that (probably because I couldn't go to the Opera for £5 here, since the opera is primarily the reserve of rich snobs here). It's a shame that I don't understand Romanian either, but it was nice to know.

And finally, I avoided pointing it out at the top as It seemed like a nice way to end it to point out that we got our snow anyway, here I am at the outdoor village museum that we visited. On the coldest day when we were there. I felt as though the ticket lady was looking at us like we were crazy for wanting to visit when it was so cold, but there were at least 2 other groups of people visiting that day.

Tunnels

Ever wondered how Madeira produces so much wine? It's the grapes! Look at the size of them, just hanging there over the streets, a single grape can fill 2 bottles.

Did you know that experts have warned people not to use hotel kettles to clean their underwear? That means that not only is that actually a thing, but it happens enough that experts have needed to warn people not to. Seriously, how does someone even think to do that? And why not just fill up a sink with the already boiled water? I didn't even know that putting things into a boiling kettle was a thing until someone said that you shouldn't boil eggs in a kettle a few years ago. That one surprised me and also seemed a little bit ingenious if it works, but this one disgusted me.

Presumably the people doing it don't also use it for it's intended purpose, so it seems like a totally self centred thing to do. "Well I don't drink tea or coffee, so this can just be a tiny underwear washing machine", no consideration for the people who might need to use it in the future. Apparently it doesn't even do a good job of cleaning the underwear, so all you have is hot wet pants out of the bargain.

We have a tiny travel kettle that we bring on holiday if we don't think we're going to have a kettle. It just about fills 2 mugs when it's full, but it's enough for a short period (Not drinking tea is not an option, I feel like I need it to live!). In light of these revelations, that policy has been updated to include every holiday. Leaving the hotel kettle free to wash my underwear.

So this year, we thought we would go on an island holiday, after a bit of shopping around, we settled on the Portuguese island of Madeira and in doing so, single handedly reduced the average age of people on the island of Madeira for 1 week. That's only a half joke, we were asked by a couple in a cable car if we weren't a bit young to be in Madeira. We were also in the cable car, we weren't just passing underneath and looked so out of place that we prompted a shouted question from the sky. That would have been pretty aggressive and may have made us feel unwelcome.

The cable car was taking us up a hill at the time, Madeira is pretty much just hills, walk for a couple of minutes in any direction and the road either becomes almost impossibly steep for anyone not actually out for a hike, or it leads to a tunnel through the hills that you cannot actually see the end of. Of course you are going to walk through the tunnel because that is a much more appealing prospect than turning around and demonstrating to any passersby that you don't know where you're actually going and you will squeal with delight when the sunlight starts to pour in as you round the curve and you realise that the tunnel doesn't continue across the entire island for some reason. Even though there was no indication at the entrance that the tunnel was almost infinite, you still weren't sure until you saw the other end. Of course that tunnel will just lead to a big road junction and the only logical direction to take is through another seemingly endless tunnel and although this one will have signs on the wall indicating the length of the tunnel, you will still wonder if for some reason the 'M' stands for Miles instead of Metres and if the other end of the tunnel just leads to another road junction and you will be forced to walk through another tunnel and then another for the rest of your lives because you can't work out how to leave the unending maze of tunnels and you only saw other pedestrians in the first tunnel and the cars are going by too fast to stop anyone and ask for directions, which of course you would never do anyway because in spite of the evidence to the contrary you will still believe in your own sense of direction winning through and delivering you back to civilisation eventually.

Or not, I don't know how you spend your holidays.

The cable cars brought us up to Monte, Monte has a Botanical gardens, which you can see pictured where I have just crossed some little stepping stones to get to a tiny room which had absolutely nothing in, the room seems to exist purely to be at the other side when you cross the stepping stones. I'm not entirely sure what I had hoped would be over there, but what you can see in the picture is pretty much all there is to it.

The best thing about Monte though and the main reason for taking the cable car up there (and not purchasing the return journey even though the return journey is less than 50% more than the one way journey) is the optional mode of transport back down the hill, the apparently quite famous toboggan ride! (Here's a link: http://www.madeira-web.com/PagesUK/monte-toboggan.html). You get to sit in a basket and be dragged down a hill by 2 men dressed for a game of boules. The toboggan brings you down about half way and there is a choice of a taxi down the rest of the way or just walk down the rest of the way. Naturally we walked, it was downhill, how hard could it be? Quite hard as it turns out, but we made it.

The other main activity of note (apart from the Kakuro puzzle book I bought especially) was the Catamaran trip, we've done Catamaran trips before, but this was the first time we actually saw Dolphins.

The Drive

What the crap is this? How do I move the lever? And can anyone tell me what the L stands for?
Also, my left foot and to a lesser extent, my left hand feel a bit lost, what are they supposed to do?

These were all questions I asked myself when climbing into my shiny new rental car. I hadn’t specified a transmission type, so I guess that gives you an automatic as standard. I was genuinely a bit flummoxed as to how to move the lever at first (as it turned out, I had to hold in the foot brake to move it). The L is a low gear for steep hills and towing and the left limbs just needed to relax and let their opposite number do all the work for once, except for you, you should be up here too, 10 and 2 my friend.

A bonus mid-year trip for us, we tried and failed to get Glastonbury tickets and found ourselves with a surplus of holiday days. After a bit of shopping around we found a couple of cheap flights to Dublin, which was perfect by virtue of being so close.

Just while I mention the flights, I thought I should mention Ryanair, who unsurprisingly due to it being Ireland, had the cheapest flights, so were who we had booked with.
A few years ago, it became law that all passengers had to be allocated seats when they checked in for their flight (prior to this, on budget airlines it was a bit of a free-for-all and in some cases a mad scramble to get in the queue by people trying to make sure they sat together). All in all, the change is quite positive as you have the safety reasons I presume they did it for (to balance the plane) and that mad scramble to get in a queue has gone as everyone already has a seat.
Because of this change, most airlines now have an early check-in option where you can pay a bit more to pick your seat if you want to guarantee you sit together or you can wait for the free check-in and your seats will be randomly allocated, but they cannot guarantee they will be together if the plane is already pretty full. That’s how it works with most airlines nowadays, Ryanair has a slightly different policy to everyone else, in that if you don’t pay to pick your seats, you definitely will be separated, it’s not that they don’t have any seats together, because after the allocate the seats a planes length apart, they once again offer to let you buy the neighbouring seat. So Ryanair have actually put a price on sitting together. That price is only a few pounds, but after the underhanded tactics, that becomes a few pounds too many (also, for a 40 minute flight, I think I can handle being by myself). I wasn’t the only one, no-one near me seemed to know their neighbours either (and there are stories of parties of 15 being separated across an aircraft: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/travel/2017/06/ryanair-sits-hen-party-in-fifteen-separate-rows-as-outrage-over-seating-policy-grows-)
It shouldn’t really be surprising, Ryanair were the masters of the hidden fee before they were banned and I have heard of them wanting to introduce a toilet charge and an extra charge for heavy people. I just wonder if this policy differs at all with families and if their booking processes would ever leave by themselves too? Possibly it is different, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

So, Ireland and that rental car, we went with the rental car just due to the price of accommodation in Dublin, at the cheapest end of the scale was about £200 a night, but about ½ an hours drive north is Laytown where we found a great little B&B called Tara House for less than ½ that (which we actually forgot to pay due to arriving really late and leaving really early – You will be glad to know we have since settled that debt, it would be a little strange to be sharing the story if we hadn’t), also, in Ireland they drive on the right (by which I mean the left) side of the road, so I knew I could drive there without confusion. OK, I admit, there is nothing inherently wrong with driving on the right, lots of people do it and probably find us really strange, but the left (by which I mean… wait, no I was already using the direction then, carry on) is the right side for me.

Having the car (however confusing the automatic transmission was to start off with, and you, leftie, what did I say? Get back on that wheel! 10 and 2!) was great as it meant we didn’t just have to spend our time in 1 city and in fact only actually went into Dublin City Centre once, here’s me in Dublin Castle to prove it (I’m not that pair of girls on the right or that couple sat in the distance, I’m on the left of this picture. Though one of those girls does seem to be looking at the person taking the photo, as if wondering why they are being photographed, you’re not! It’s me, over here. It’s really hard to get pictures with no-one else in them, though now I have put a focus on them, I’m wondering if I am supposed to have blurred the faces since I don’t have their permission to put the photo online? If they get in touch, I’ll take it off or blur it (the chances of that happening since I know they aren’t one of the one people I know to read this thing are almost astronomical, but just in case they do find it somehow, Hi! I hope you had a nice holiday / trip / day out)

There are lots of nice places to go and things to do nearby, we went to a place called GoQuest, which is a bit like a cross between the escape games we love so much (see Riga, Budapest and my last 3 birthdays – not blogged about – for proof) and the crystal maze, where there are loads of games and a 90 minute time limit, there were some games we couldn’t do as we there were only 2 of us, but we were Team Corndogs (of course) and we scored 19 points (quite respectable for a 2 person team they said).

There are some nice little towns nearby as well, like Swords, where there is a castle that is slowly being restored back to how it was built, they have rebuilt the front wall and a chapel and… actually, you know what, I’m going to allow this picture to pass without comment.

There’s also Malahide, which really we just used as a place to park the car while we took the train into Dublin, but it’s a nice little seaside town with a harbour and we came back to Malahide for our evening meal that day too. And Howth, which is a nice quiet little place, where (excitingly) it is free to park, obviously (I pretend) that’s not the main reason to spend a day there.

So we were free to explore and see the area at our own leisure, which was nice and we visited Ireland without any home alone-esque running for the plane, which was also nice. But when we came back, I was faced with this. What the crap is this?

Monkeys!

"It's crazy, no?"
This was the opinion of a Costa Rican taxi driver on the fact that the sun sets at different times throughout the year back home, because in Costa Rica, the sun sets at about 5:45. Every day. Imagine how blown his mind was when I told him there are some places that have days with no sunlight at all.

This holiday left me with a proper conundrum in relation to the blog, not one of those made up conundrums like what colour pin to use in the map, but a proper one as this holiday didn't even fit with the name of the blog. The address of the blog has always been europeanmusings.blogspot.com and the title at the top has always said "adventures in europe" having been initially created to talk about a single trip I took 10 years ago, the name and address has always remained accurate with all of the subsequent holidays as I'd still never left the continent before (Actually, technically I have as Turkey is in both Europe and Asia, but I still consider that to be Europe so that still fit).

Costa Rica isn't close to being in Europe, Not being as many people assume a part of Spain, but over 5,000 miles away in Central America. The options seemed to be, don't write about it (I don't understand what you mean), make a new non-european blog (Surely you already have enough blogs?) or change the name and address of the blog (I have no further comments on that option, that seems logical to me). Having pondered on the website issue for a moment and decided that I would just change the name of the blog, so the address is now travel.wannacorndog.co.uk and the title is changed to "A Travel Blog". Now it can be used for any holidays at all, it's so generic that I won't even have to change the name when they start selling seats on the easyrocket.

This year we decided to have a special holiday, where we not only went further away but for longer and on a chartered flight with in-flight films and everything.

We stayed in a small town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica called Quepos, mainly chosen because the airbnb we found there had lots of pictures of monkeys on it's advert pages. As it turned out, the monkeys were not snapped on one particularly lucky day, Most days while on our balcony or in the pool we would be visited by large troops of either White Faced Capuchins (referred to by locals as the Cost Rican Mafia, one distracts you, the rest rob you) or Squirrel Monkeys.

You can't talk about Costa Rica without talking about the wildlife, it's one of the main reasons people go there and with good reason, the biodiversity is incredible. At home at the right time of year, we might occasionally see squirrels, hedgehogs or rabbits which don't get me wrong is endlessly exciting when it happens, last year when blue tits nested near our house, we were fascinated by it, but in Costa Rica you can see Monkeys and Sloths (not from our apartment but there was one we could see above the pavement next to the zip-coaster in Manuel Antonio), we saw macaws and a toucan and lizards, the lizards are so much bigger than you find in Europe, here you get Iguanas.

The next town over from Quepos is Manuel Antonio, they're both very small and incredibly close together, that it's almost pointless them being separate towns, but they are because they both contain all 4 ingredients of a town in Costa Rica (School, church, bar and a football field - obviously). Manuel Antonio is basically one big hill, so to get there it still makes sense to take the bus (plus  it only costs about 50p). We travelled here on our first Monday to visit the National Park, the parks quite small at just a few kilometres squared but it is quite well known so it's a popular tourist destination. It also turns out to be closed on Mondays, so we failed, there's quite a nice beach at the same end of the town, so it wasn't a completely wasted day, plus we decided to wander back up the hill just until we found a restaurant to get a bit of food. Unfortunately, it also turns out nothing seems to be open in the day, there is nothing like walking uphill in the blistering heat to make a couple of miles seem infinite.

On attempt 2 the following day, we actually made it inside the national park, the best bit was probably sitting in the picnic area and watching Capuchins steal people's lunches, just to live up to that Mafia comment.

It wasn't just Monkeys (though to look through the photo's on our camera you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just 12 days of hanging around with Monkeys, don't you try and pretend that doesn't sound like a great holiday). There's was loads to do while we were there and the lady that ran the apartment complex was really helpful and would help book us on to whatever activities we wanted, so we had a go at a few new things, like white-water rafting.

I nearly had a go at white-water rafting once, in 2008, me and Titch were in Bad Gastein where it was one of the available activities, we chose instead to do canyoning, which was basically the same thing, just without the boat, since then I have thought I'd like to give it a crack some, but just never got round to trying it (it's not like it's been a dream or anything, this would have been quite easy to at any time, you can do it in Wales if you really want).

We decided to just do the more gentle rafting course, so there was very little of falling out the boat (there was just one occasion where that almost happened) but it was fun, the guide would try and make us surf the waves (which we were not good at) and ride down while spinning like a washing machine (which we were). They had a professional photographer out taking photographs, which we had to pay for if we wanted them, it's probably not a big reveal to say that we did buy them as I've probably already put at least one next to this block of text. We decided that we would probably miss having the photos more than the money, we could get more money, it's much harder to make copies of photos you don't have...

Then 2 days later we had a go at horseback riding in the town of London (named after a small little known English city), riding horses takes some getting used to, but it can be immensely satisfying when he does what you want him to.

What was quite good about the trips we went on, was how they all included food as part of it, it was generally the same thing, for breakfast it would be Gallo-pinto, which is rice and beans, usually with scrambled egg, then for lunch, it would be Cassado, which is... rice and beans, plus veg and chicken or fish, there are a lot of rice and beans in Costa Rica.

On our way back to the airport, we decided to fly from Quepos airport back to San Jose as it took about 20 minutes rather than the 3 hour taxi and actually cost about the same. It wasn't an option on the way in as the flights had stopped by the time we arrived because it is only a tiny airport and it only operates during the day because (and this is true you can look it up) there are no lights on the runway.

The British Airways flight that brought us to Costa Rica was the largest plane we had ever been in, but in flying back to the airport, we also rode in the smallest one we had ever been in during this holiday, it was a tiny 12 seater where the only crew is the 2 pilots, one of who sits momentarily in an empty seat for the brief safety talk "Remain seated, No smoking, enjoy the flight" just before lift off. Oh and the empty seats, it turned out that we were actually the only people on the plane, so for the price of 2 relatively cheap tickets, it was like we had hired a private plane.

We could see Quepos from the sky, easily recognisable by the harbour, I found the most striking thing about the view to be just how little there was around it, that's how the whole place is, nothing but trees and mountains. Leaving this holiday was harder than most, we had literally just spent 12 days in paradise.

Finally, did anyone know that this is how pineapples grow? For some reason I'd always envisioned them hanging from some sort of tree.