Goodbye Greece, Hello Britain (Again)

Where was I?  I think we were cruising around some of Greece's finest and there certainly is some terrific places to visit here, but we have decided that the big cruise ships are not for us, too many queues and too much food and drinks, not good for my waist line. I no longer have a waist line so what am I worrying about?.
Next in line to be visited was Crete and the highlight here was a visit to a vineyard and a bit of a knees up for those that like knees ups, not I , no I never have, so I am afraid that Crete was a bit of a disappointment for me. Well not really, they actually put on quite a good show and no pressure on me to make a fool of myself.

My worst nightmare.

The good ship Louis Olympia.

The ever ready lifeboat number 13, not a good sign for the superstitious amongst us.

Now as can be seen we ended up assigned to lifeboat number 13 which if you are superstitious could be just a little unnerving , but this was good, ours was the only lifeboat with two engines and it was fully enclosed so no cold nights on the high seas for us, no sir, it was almost worth having to take to the boats so one could be  a little smug. No, this was the lifeboat that the captain and navigator were sure to be in.

The cruise we were on was perhaps a little bit of a pressurised affair with only three to four days to fit it all in. This meant we had to "Do" Crete in the morning and Santorini in the late afternoon, the ship cruising whilst we ate once more. Around three in the afternoon the P.A. announced that we should all assemble on the upper deck to witness the approach to Santorini and thence to the tenders to be taken ashore. Buses had been laid on to take us up the cliff, these were to be sadly lacking when the cliff needed descending later that evening.The highlight of the excursion was to Oia, a small town on the rim of the volcano, and a worthy highlight it is.

Oia, Santorini.

This is a place that needs a good walking around and in the couple of hours that we had available to us I think that we did it justice. Back on the bus and we were then deposited in Megalochori, the town above the old harbour and given cable car tickets with which to make our descent and then catch the tender back to the ship. Neither Mrs Currin nor I are great cable car enthusiasts but managed to keep it together and not showing ourselves up in front of our fellow cruisers. Actually it was rather gentle in the cable car scheme of things.

Your car awaits sir.

This was our last shore excursion and all that remained was to return on board and eat once more and sleep some more and eat some more and then we are back in Athens and another flight back to England.

We had booked a cottage in a small village near Marlborough in Wiltshire called Ogbourne St. George, not to be confused with its neighbour Ogbourne St. Andrew nor another neighbour Ogbourne Maizey. This is a little like being in Midsumer Murder country and I am sure it is only done to confuse the Postman. Mmmm just had some fresh raspberries and meringue, YUM. Marlborough is the nearest large town and has provided worthy of two evening meals since our arrival, not that we eat out o. a regular basis, no it's just we were late home and, well you know how it is.

This cottage is up there on our three best cottage list, very nice with a bathroom you can swing several cats in, the most delightful sunroom and even a smart T V. induction looking hob and all the bells and whistles.

Since being here no grass has been allowed to grow beneath our feet and we have clocked up an impressive amount of miles in our wee Peugeot 2008, visiting Winchester, Fareham, Chichester, Castle Combe, Lacock, Avebury and others that have temporarily slipped my mind. These have all been first rate places to visit and very informative.

As you will be aware it is coming up to All Hallows eve and it seems it is very big business here in Britain, also it is half term break and so everywhere you go there are a host of children. The British seem very good at this sort of thing and where ever you go there are activities arranged for the kids, usually with a halloween flavour. I went to a museum of heavy guns at Fort Nelson on the Portsdown hills above Portsmouth and true to from lots of kids were there. There was a room, actually several as this was the guardhouse cells from yesteryear, where said children could make Halloween costumes and decorate themselves before being taken down into the old tunnels which form a  honeycomb under the fort.  The children were delighted and I must admit to a little buzz myself as they came along towards me.

Some children in the tunnels beneath Fort Nelson.

This monster weighs in at 200 tons and can throw a 1 ton shell some 20 miles.

(needs a railway track to move along so is a little limited)

We went to Avebury today and it was great to see so many families out amongst the stones and sheep even though the day was not the best.

Great to see the kids out and about.

In the Manor house everything can be touched, sat on, worn or whatever else you do with it and everyone was having a great old time of it.

Earlier we had been to Lacock, which is again a National Trust property and together with one of the best kept and pretty villages in Britain is not to be missed. Here we noticed several of the villagers had left vegitables, plants , produce and baking out with the simple instruction "Put money in letter box". I  couldn't but wonder what would happen to said money at home.

Honesty box sales.

The jar on the left of the produce in the top picture is for you to leave your money in and had several pounds in it when we made our purchase.

One of Britain's best villages.

The Abbey in Lacock was for five hundred years the home of the Talbot family and their most famous son, one Henry Talbot was the one most responsible for modern photography when in the 1830s he developed ( excuse the pun )  the process involving negative imagery in the photographic process thus enabling many many copies to be made of the original.

Talbot's study.

"The idea occured to me" he wrote "  how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper. And why should it not be possible I asked myself ."

And so it was possible as Talbot had believed and we have millions upon millions of photographs to prove it so.

Talbot seems to be my sort of guy and was surrounded by many scientists of the day, Babbage, Whetstone and Herschell amongst them, they would enjoy great diners as they discussed matters of science and physical discovery current in the day.

Another visit of great interest was to Winchester one of the great cities along with the likes of Salisbury which are so prominent in Britain's past . It is full of historic and interesting buildings along with the "Odd" interesting fellow. We were privileged to have one of these eccentrics introduce himself to us. In the ensuing 10 to 15 minutes we had heard his opinions on most everything and put the world well and truly to rights.

Mr Eccentric, Winchester 2014.

Debtors prison Winchester

Looking Down on Mrs Currin from the roof of Debtors Prison.

Winchester College, the oldest continuously running school in England.

Possibly the part that Murray would have been most familiar with had he attended Winchester College.

Jane Austen's Home at the time of her death.

Castle Combe above and how it appeared in the film "War Horses" lower.

Well that about gets me back up to date and just as well as tiredness is approaching, so better get off to bed .

All the best and be careful in whatever it is that you do.

David.

A Land of lost dreams

Having left the Adriaric and returned to Britain it seemed only logical that we should now return to Greece, that place where European civilisation is said to have started, well Crete I think, but that is part of Greece anyway. So it was, then, that on the morning of last Saturday we again look to that clouds, this time with Aegean Airlines and landed in Athens in time for an evening drive into the city. Now Mrs Currin does not like fast driving but it seems our driver did so, and in what seemed no time we were at the hotel and after a nice meal on the rooftop took to our beds to recover our composure and prepare for the next week or two.
Sunday morning and we were picked up for a tour of Athens, this centred naturally enough on the acropolis  but included other sites such as the temple of Zeus. One can but wonder at the amazing engineering involved in building these ancient buildings without the machinery and tools of today. The Parthenon alone must have stretched their knowledge to almost breaking point. We are so used to seeing these ancient monuments a we see them to today that it is almost impossible to think of them in their brightly painted colours that they enjoyed in antiquity. The whole is explained and shown in great detail in the museum of The Acropolis nearby.

The theatre atop the Acropolis.

The Temple of Zeus

Modern Olympic Stadium (1896)

Statuary in the Acropolis Mueseum

Some of it can look quite realistic

A note here about Olympic stadiums, there being four of real note in Greece, the original from the modern Olympics of 1896 in Athens, the original ancient stadium in Olympia, the ancient stadium in Delphi and the one from the Athens games more recently. I can now say that I have visited all of the above and been duly impressed by them all.
If I may digress here just a little I had thought that I had a fair grasp of the Greek alphabet but when trying to actually make some sense of signs etc. in Greece they take on a while new life of their own. By the time we left the mainland for our cruise it was starting to come together a little. Must try harder.

There are many ancient theatre.

Some allow little girls to fulfill their dreams.

Being a Sunday, Greece does not function at its fullest with only food and suchlike shops being open, never mind an early night won't do anything harm.
Monday and the real fun begins, we are loaded into a tourist coach, along with God knows how many millions of others, and first stop is at that triumph of engineering, the Corinth Canal, first mooted in something like 1800 B.C. but not completed till 1800 something or other A.D., it contects the Gulf of Corinth with the Aegean thus joining the Ionian  sea with the Aegean and  cutting some 450 km off the trip. The resulting canal whilst still functioning is a little on the tight side for modern shipping and none to deep either.

The Corinth canal.

Now, the gulf of Corinth has two openings, one at either end since the completion of the canal. It is the end that opens into the Ionian that posed a problem, but the French once more had the answer. You see the Ionian sea end is quite wide , allowing shipping to transit freely, but not so road traffic, hence a 2.5 km bridge in the style of the famous Milau bridge. It is now the pride and joy of the area and is the only one of the great bridges where I have been able to climb on top of the toll bridge for photos.

Gulf of Corinth Bridge 

And, yes, I did scale the toll bridge.

The title of todays blog might seem just a tad obscure but springs from the observation that there seems to be an inordinate number of incomplete and abandoned buildings and I am not talking of the ancient ones. Also the rubbish is obviously more easily left to rot on the roadside than to have it collected . We were given an explanation for the rubbish which included something to do with the amalgamation of local bodies without defining just who was responsible for what . Ah well I guess it could be that.

Rubbish seems to just pile up.

The tour from here on is like a whose who of Greece, Athens , Corinth , Midea, Olympia , Delphi, Sparta, Meteora, and Thebes to mention the most obvious. I would have to say Meteora with it's monasteries perched precariously atop thousand feet high rocks takes some beating, the paintings which adorn the interior of the chapels were all done by one man over a period of years and are of impressive quality.

An assortment of Monastories and the lower one, a Nunnery.

(note the stairs cut into the rock second one up. Access can be a bit of a challenge)

It was at a lunch stop at the nearby town of Kalambaka that I suddenly realized that I no longer had my camera. It had been playing up a little and I had been out in Athens and purchased a small can of CRC and given it a squirt....... only to make it worse. We had decided that maybe a new camera was on the cards once we got back to Britain, but to my joy, the next morning the camera was working the best it had for some time so all was well. Now the camera was lost.  The bus was stopped for me to retrace my steps but to no avail. Our companions aboard the bus offered to give me copies of their snaps and an hour or so spent working out whether we had the correct cables etc to make these copies on my tablet. It was then that one of the young Asian ladies ( one that I had thought was a boy) tapped me on my shoulder and proffered the lost camera. It seems that it had somehow ended up on the floor beneath my seat on the bus and had gone unnoticed till now. Mrs Currin claims my face went red but I deny that. Needless to say the Aussies aboard thought this great sport. Now a pair of these said Aussies befriended us and proved to be amongst the most mean people we had ever met. We called them the Maussies which seemed quite fitting as they were actually quite annoying.
Anyway I had been reunited with my camera and felt quite pleased with myself. We have made many friends on previous tours and on the recent Adriaric one had become very good friends with a couple from Berkshire , he an architect and she a magistrate, with whom we enjoyed several happy evenings, but we are not good at maintaining these friendships much beyond the end of the tour. Must try harder again.

Back to Greece. The tour proceeded and each stop produced more spectacular archeological sites than the previous and I would be hard pressed to pick a winner.
We returned to Athens on Friday after covering around 1500 km and quite tired from it all, but wait there is more.... and so on Saturday it was an early start being picked  and deposited at the cruise ship warf ready for the next highlight, a short cruise around the Aegean, calling at Mykonos, Ephesus, Patmos, Crete and Santorini. This will get us back to Athens on Monday and a flight back once more to Britain. Now Mrs Currin is not the best of sailors and was never too keen on making her home on the sea however briefly this may be for. Well there has been this hurricane crossing the Mediterranean and the remnants are currently slap bang over the Aegean sea, just where we happen to be taking this wee cruisey thing. Bit of a slop, big ship but still rolling around a bit and Mrs Currin is not a happy camper. Nothing to worry about says I . Too rough to stop at Mykonos says the ship. Told you so says Mrs Currin.

Mrs Currin's worst nightmare.

First stop now Kusadasi for Ephesus.

Ephesus remains one of the world's great Greek...Roman archeological sites and although far behind Pompeii for completeness it is still just as interesting . We included a tour of the Terrace Houses in our overall tour and this was magnificent.

Public library, ancient Ephesus.

I think that I will have to leave things about now , we are at the airport in Athens awaiting our flight to Heathrow.

I mentioned earlier the people on the bus, the "Maussies" well on the some bus was an Islamic fellow , Hooshdil from *******astan, and I would greet him Each morning with "Salom Hooshdil" and he would respond with "Kia Ora David".  He approached me one day for a bit of a serious chat about why us kiwis and Aussies were always having ,what he thought, were arguments. It took quite some time to convince him that we were really friends and it was all harmless banter, it's just what Aussies and Kiwis do.

I had diner the other night with an american Indian Chief... had a picture of himself in full regalia on a visit to Washington. Last night though took the cake, another Islamic fellow and wife, food spread all over the table, encroaching on our half. I can understand them not eating pork , it would be cannibalism..

On that thought I shall leave you.

All the best and stay careful

David

Dalmation Coast

It has been a while since time has permitted an update to our travels, but here goes.
We left an ever cooling Britain last Wednesday and following a pleasant two and a half hour flight arrived in Dubrovnik around lunch time. It has been some time since I have been taken from aircraft to terminal by coach but that is the way they do things in Dubrovnik. The transfer to the Hotel Splendid took but half an hour and after checking in The serious business of sightseeing began with a tour of the old town, followed by free time to wander around. Dubrovnik old town is a fascinating place and deserves its billing as a top tourist destination appealing to both the eye and ones sense of history.
Interestingly we were sitting on the steps of a church eating an ice cream when  we were joined by a French couple, also eating an ice cream. M. Frenchman asked where we came from and on explaining N.Z. and then north of Wellington he said "Oh I have been to Wellington" . Somehow it seemed logical to ask
Me  "What were you doing there?"
M. "Playing rugby"
Me "Who for?"
M.  "France"
Me  "Oh when was this "
 M. " 52 year's ago"
Now I remember this tour very well as the first game was against the mighty Nelson Bays and the first training session at Waimea College where I was attending and watched with interest this touring side training and subsequently the game at Trafalgar Park. Now I was sitting next to one of the players from that game.

Dubrovnik old town from viewing point by roadside.

Dubrovnik old town.

The old boat harbour

Mrs. Currin enjoying the view

Incredibly calm seas.

We spent a day cruising the islands of Dubrovnik, they are part of the city, some of which are inhabited. This seemed to be met by universal approval.

The island ferry unloading supplies at one of the places we had stopped.

Dubrovnik islands are very nice.

Mrs Currin with some fellow travellers with whom we have become friendly

The skipper proved to be a most acceptable cook, providing a wonderful barbecue lunch of fish or kebabs for all 25 of us, no complaints heard from any of them.

We have now been in the Adriatic since last Wednesday and it is now Sunday and in that time not a cloud has sullied the sky and daytime temperature highs have been in the mid to high twenties so very happy campers.

Now if I may I shall jump forward a couple of days and relate an account of an excursion we made into neighbouring Albania. This is an interesting  country and one that few people find necessary to visit. Since the beginning of the second world war  and the times of King Zog it has been closed off to the world until the collapse of communism in 1990, no one was allowed in  or out for 50 years the borders were closed . This was relaxed in the 80s when some academics were permitted to visit some of the world's better universities so that they could then return and teach the young the ways of the world. They were not allowed to engage in any other activities when doing so and certainly not reveal conditions on the outside . One in every five people eventually became secret service agents, spying on their neighbours and some 70,000 bunkers were built as gun emplacements in case of invasion or uprising, the first seeming most unlikely the later less so.

These gun bunkers were built in all sorts of places, just in case.

All religious buildings were destroyed ( this Mosque escaped,   almost)

All private land and property was confiscated and the state built apartment blocks, all five stories high and painted black and grey, there as one state run TV station which broadcast propaganda. All in all a most miserable place to live in. Our guide told us how much better things were now but the evidence is not compelling and away from the main streets things did not look very appealing.

Paint it black and grey and this was where you lived.

In the centre of town we were left to wander around and soon found a nice lunch spot. Drinks and lunch for four set us back the princely sum of 11 euros, an ice cream tub for Mrs Currin's pudding a further 25 cents. Although Albania is still awaiting the invite to arrive in the post to join the EU they have adopted the euro as currency, wise move. 

Our lunch street was quite attractive and done out in the art deco style, all cafes very nice. The country is now predominately Muslim and the evidence can be seen all around with minarets dotting the countryside.

Our guide was telling us of finding a coke bottle as a young boy, it became his most prized possession, taking pride of place in his bedroom.

We are now in Montenegro and I would have to say it is the best of the four countries so far visited and we are staying in a genuine four star hotel, The Queen of Montenegro, very nice and great food with its own beach area on what has been voted the best beach in Europe. Arriving here by bus we went around an enormous bay, I  would  just love a boat here. We stopped at a walled town on the coast around this bay called Kotar and it was particularly attractive.

The Pillory in Kotar.

I think we could do with one of these in the square in Palmerston North. This one, dating from the 17th c. had the offender stand in front with a sign dangling from around his neck proclaiming his crime to all who passed...Shame shame.

The town in which our hotel is located also has a walled medina type old town and again it is very attractive.

 Before we travelled down to Montenegro we did a day trip to Mostar in Bosnia Hertzigovina, a pleasant day out and well worth the effort.

The most photographed site in Bosnia. (The fellow had just jumped from  the bridge not standing on a rock)

Fellow travellers, missing what is going on behind them. (Above)

This fellow doing a spot of advertising, motor did not sound good at all.

The river is quite beautiful. (Our restaurant can be seen just to the right of the Mosque)

Souvineers Bosnian style.

The Adriaric sea and most waterways are very clear and you can see the bottom to quite remarkable depths. We learned that this is caused by the hills being predominately limestone and when it rains the rain soaks straight into it and only reappears as crystal clear spring water years later.

Our tour of the Balkins ends tomorrow and we are undecided whether we would recommend it as a destination, I think that there are better places to go but this still has many sites that are well worth spending you time seeing.

An island near the Queen of Montenegro which was a village but has been brought by a hotel and converted to luxury accommodation.

Marshall Tito's Holiday Home Montenegro

6

2500 year old castle Albania  

We are back in Britain for two nights before being whisked away to Athens and another tour, it seems odd as only yesterday we were in the adjoining  country, Albania, but it seems difficult to go directly from one to the other. Albanians can still only travel for up to three months at a time and although they now enjoy what would have been unimaginable freedoms, the socialist government cannot still quite let go completely. Even from Dubrovnik there are no direct links.

Clear Adriaric waters.

Kotar Cathedral, built 802.

Minarets abound.

We have not gone on the optional tour today where one can view many different  birds in the wetlands around a large lake nearby. We felt we would have been a little out of place with no binoculars or bird watching parifinallia, and so I have had the time to do a bit of catching up o. a few things.

Just to end, we were very saddened to hear by Email this morning of the passing of Jill's mother Mary, we are so sorry Jill.

Thanks and all the best

David