Pricey Fun in the Sun

G’day all,

Well my spending sprees and indulging have come to a sad end as I’m now back in expensive “Western Europe.” My final days in Eastern Europe were spent zipping through Zagreb in Croatia and Ljubljana in Slovenia to meet my friend Christine in Venice, Italy on Friday. I stayed at a nice hostel in Zagreb called Hostel Lika and a crazy hostel in Ljubljana which was actually in an old jail and people slept in the cells. Ljubljana seemed like a pretty cool place it was very underground and happening but prices were almost the same as Western Europe. I was shocked when I found out that a train to Venice from Ljubljana was almost 50 Euro and was only a few hundred km’s away. I was used to paying about a third of that in the countries I’ve been travelling through the past few months so I decided to go with plan B. It was a risk that paid off because I got to Venice for only 16 Euro by catching the train to the border then walking for half an hour to Italy then catching another train to Venice from there…you beauty mate. When I arrived in Venice I almost cried as my daily budget was smashed with the first 2 hours of getting to the train station. My copious spending on cans of coke, chocky bars, kababs, ice creams, and anything else that I was used to paying nothing for had to come to an end. On Friday morning I met my friend Christine at the bus station as she planned to travel with me for the next 2 weeks. It was a great feeling to see a familiar face again after 3 months of travelling alone. We ended up staying in a camp ground our only night in Venice to try to keep to our budget, even if it took us half the day to get there and back. On Friday night we walked around Venice until midnight and had an awesome time as the tourists had disappeared so we got to explore and get lost in all the little alleyways and canals without the riffraff. The following day we headed off to Milan to base ourselves for a night before hiring a car and driving around the Swiss Alps for 3 days solid. Milan was ok, nothing too flash but the Alps were something else. My first hour in the car was one terrifying experience as I haven’t driven for yonkas and they drive on the wrong side of the road over here. Within my first 2 minutes of driving I almost turned onto the wrong side of the road and was driving so slow that everyone was tooting me. We were trying to be so cheap by not using the toll roads so we tried to navigate our way to Switzerland by using a compass and a dodgy map. It took us 3 hours to go the first 50km and we were still in Italy at night fall after leaving Milan at 10am. Christine just about used her whole camera battery on the scenery before we even got to Switzerland. We drove along this beautiful lake heading to the border but the road was also a racing strip for sports bikes. At one stage this smartarse overtook me and 1 minute later we drove past him and his girlfriend who had come off their bike and were sitting next to it injured on the ground and she looked pretty angry at him. Our non-toll roads ended up taking us to this ghost town literally on the peak of one of the Alps where we realized that we had to drive back 2 hours after the road was blocked due to an Avalanche. Although we wasted a lot of time and effort by not taking the toll roads we had a wild adventure cruising around the hairpin roads up and down cliff faces and through endless tunnels. At one stage the road got so wild we actually drove around a hairpin corner inside a tunnel inside a cliff with a 200m drop waiting on the other side. We slept in the car both nights in Switzerland and on our first night we freaked each other out by telling ghost stories and ended up getting hardly any sleep. On day 2 in Switzerland we ended up buying a toll pass and made a lot of ground and visited Zurich, Bern, and even went to another tiny random country called Liechtenstein. The highlight of the day was when we went to the Jungfrau region and saw the most amazing scenery you could ever imagine. It was picture perfect with green flower filled fields, cliffs with waterfalls shooting over them, rivers flowing through the valleys, and snow capped mountains in a 360° view. We planned to take a cable car up to the top of the mountains but after finding out it cost 60 euros we decided we were happy enough with the view we had. We drove around the Alps for a few hours but each road we came to ended up being closed due to Avalanches so we ended up taking the Autobahn towards the Italy border for our last nights sleep. While looking for a nice place to sleep the night, we thought we found a good spot until the police car in front of us arrested a man so we drove around a bit longer. We headed back to Milan the next morning but caught a train to Nice in France almost straight away. The weather in Nice was beaut when we arrived and we immediately loved the place before falling asleep for the rest of the day. On our second day in Nice we rented a scooter and rode along the coast line to Monte Carlo and Monaco and had a ball. In Monaco they were setting up for the Grand Prix so we rode around the track on the scooter and kept riding until sunset. Before returning our scooter the following day we decided to zip over to Cannes but ended up being caught on the 130km/hour Autobahn and had to ride in the emergency lane and get off at the first exit. We ended up spending 3 nights in Nice and really enjoyed ourselves there and on Friday night we caught the bus to Spain. We had to change busses in Barcelona on the way to Valencia but that was where our good luck and fun came to an end. Somehow while we were sitting on a bench at 6am waiting to book our tickets some guys stole Christine’s handbag without either of us seeing a thing. After asking the man sitting next to us if he’d seen anything he finally told us that he saw two guys take the handbag and walk in opposite directions. There was nothing we could really do other than report it to the police and think about how I would have loved to given the guy a ‘Darwin Coat Hanger’ if I had seen him do it. We arrived in Valencia yesterday afternoon and it has been raining ever since. Today I turned 26 and we celebrated last night with a few cheeky Sangrias while fireworks were coincidently going off at midnight for Mothers Day. Today we walked around the city and found this really cool area with space aged buildings and watched an IMAX film about the Swiss Alps and recognized all the mountains in it.

Happy Mothers Day,

Woodsy