Shit; an apt first word describing the feeling of being back to London, the stale smell of the London Underground greeting me on my return and having to work again. After 3 months, 5 countries and 38 cities I’ve been forced back to a sane existence by that overly controlling western force - money, and a lack of it. The desire to continue travelling lingers heavily, but i can’t complain. It’s been a great run and it won’t be long till i’m back doing it all over again - bigger and better. The people i’ve met and the places i’ve seen have been beyond my wildest dreams.
Post Spain, I caught a 26 hour bus to Milan, still reeling from a draining week at Benicassim. I’d organised a two week stay on an organic farm 40km from Milan, Galbusera Bianca. The farm was made up of a number of rustic and crumbly buildings surrounded by 30 hectares of vegetables, fruits and beehives (including 100’s of varieties of tomatoes, apples, pears, plums and peaches), set within WWF protected park land. My hosts were Gaetano (the owner of the farm, who stayed in a gorgeous Italian mansion nearby replete with pool, tennis court, private parkland, a lake and apparently Italy’s tallest tree), Andrea & Milko (the bosses on the farm) and Rosa & Davide (Milko’s family who also stayed on the farm). Oh… and a bunch of dogs including Rocky, Vamos, Arturo and Willy. I initally stayed with another volunteer, Alberto, who is originally from the Friulli region in North West Italy and now lives in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and at the end of my stay with a couple of Swedish girls and a German.
About 5 minutes into my arrival, Andrea had already whipped up a spicy Amatriciana pasta dish, gave me a glass of fresh plum juice from the farm and I was in gastronomical heaven. Given that I eat huge portions of pasta daily, the Italian food was going to suit me. Every meal I had on the farm was beautiful, lots of cheeses, breads, pastas, polenta and freshly picked veggies, i’ve learnt a heap of recipes and i’ve consumed mutliple litres of olive oil consequentially because it is the true secret of Italian cooking. Work consisted of 6 hours each weekday and 3 hours on a Saturday, weeding, pruning, planting, watering, picking and processing the fruits and vegetables (besides selling raw fruit and vegetables we also transformed a lot of it into juices and preserves). Full credit to farmers, after a week my body was aching all over, at times it was pretty tiring work. But to see the results of thatwork, get dirty, produce quality food and work with the land was such a rewarding experience.
Alberto and Andrea became really good mates over the couple of weeks. Thankfully they both spoke pretty good English (Alberto’s was perfect, Andrea’s workable!). They took me out a few nights to the local Brianza music festival. Not quite Strokes or Franz Ferdinand, but some cool cover bands, punk groups, reggae, you name it. Essentially I was the bait for them to talk to girls (typical Italian blokes), but it was such a laugh meeting the locals and having them speak to me in vastly ranging levels of English and at times sign language. Giving them stick about being a nation of cheating footballers was also fun until I was told to stop by one fairly large Italian. I stopped immediately. Italian football contains no cheaters. The guys tried to teach me a bit of Italian, but the words I learnt were mostly restricted to ‘Rastafarian’ - Rastafari, ‘Assassin’ - Assassino and the like (not that difficult to remember I know) and about 100 variations of Italian swear words. I drove my first scooter one night back from the music festival. Not ideal when done with another bloke on the back, through the narrow and winding mountain roads, with dodgy headlights, no idea on directions and after a few beers. Sorry Mum.
Being used to the frenetic pace of London working life, the abundance of free time here became hard to fill. You could eat pasta, star gaze, lie in the spiral gardens and ultimately when completely bored start drinking. It’s a lifestyle I learned to love. Alberto kept me entertained with stories of Italian politics, culture, how much better his region of Italy was and teaching me about Biodynamic (the method of production used on the farm which relies heavily on factors such as the moon position and shape). The production methodology was developed by Rudolf Steiner (same guy whose theories are behind Steiner schools) and some of them are pretty amazing. In one, a bull horn is buried for several months containing a variety of flowers such as Dandelion and then retrieved and has incredible qualities as a manure. In another the bugs that are found on the Eggplant trees were collected, placed over the fire and ground into ashes, dynamised into water and then sprayed over the crop in a figure 8 action. It was very interesting stuff. Alberto is studying the method with the aim of eventually starting his own community with some friends of his in Friulli. Complete hippy and a great bloke.
After my stay on the farm I ventured south to the Cinque Terre, five idyllic Italian villages stretched across the coast near Genoa and positioned precariously on huge cliff-faces. I based myself in La Spezia for the night and caught the train up to each village and even walked between a couple of them. However it was late and I was leaving the next day for Venice. The coastline is unbelievably beautiful and I definetly want to come back and explore more. Venice was out of this world, a gorgeous water city full of way too many tourists. You see hundreds of photos and hear about Venice, but to actually go there is pretty breathtaking. I spent the day wandering around the little streets and enjoying the romance of being by myself. Finally I caught a train to Friuli where I was staying with Alberto from the farm. We went to Grado, an island off the coast about 100km from Venice (with a very cool church dating from the sixth century) where his brother was staying, caught up with his mates for beers and then the next day I made my way to Trieste on the Italian border and then Rijeka to catch a ferry to Split.
Yes I just wrote 5 paragraphs on Italy, I love it. I’m keen to try learn the language this year and return to travel around more and catch up with friends. Maybe even to live there in a couple of years for a bit, i’m sick of all the damn Aussies over here!
Following a largely sleepless night on the ferry given that I had to sleep in a walkway between the bar and restaurant, I arrived in Split, a fairly small harbour town half way down the Croatian Coast. The Croatian accomodation is fairly unique in that private rooms dominate hostels. So when you depart your bus/ferry/train you are besieged by hordes of old ladies holding signs asking you to stay at their place. I walked around Split for a few hours, Dioclesians retirement palace, a pretty small beach and 14,000 6 ft Croatian girls with 5 ft of legs (sounds like a Russell Crowe band). Later that afternoon Carl, a mate from work, and his girlfriend Lauren arrived - some welcome company. We dove straight off to some of the cool bars i’d spotted earlier in and around Dioclesians palace and ate with the locals at the freshest fish house in town - or so Lonely Planet said. The next day we caught a catamaran across to Hvar island, about an hour away. One particular old lady intrigued us more than others for some reason and we followed her ‘5 minutes’ to her house, which actually felt more like 20 minutes and was up a series of steep steps much to the novice backpacker Carl’s dismay. You big sook! The place was pretty basic, but at least we had a room. Quite a few backpackers looked set for a night sleeping on the dock having not been able to find a place to stay. We spent 4 nights in Hvar, did a couple of day trips across to Palmizana in the Pakleni Islands, Bol on Brac Island and spent lots of time at the Hula Hula Beach Bar a few coves away from the old town listening to chilled music, sipping on beers, spreading out on the rock platforms in the sun and going for the occasional snorkel in the Croatian sea (incredible hues of blue and green in the water). Not being able to catch a ferry to Dubrovnik we hopped on a 6 hour bus on the Thursday. Croatian buses don’t seem to ever take the amount of time they advertise, we arrived 8 hours later. Dubrovnik is an incredible walled city, surrounded by green seaside with plenty of secluded coves. On arrival, a big Croatian bloke, Nikola, hip and shouldered the old ladies successfully and we took up the offer of accomodation. The rooms were really cheap and although the place wasn’t very close to all the action of the old town, Nikola told us he doesn’t sleep and will drive us anywhere we want to go at any time of the night, every sentence sprouted including at some stage ‘I drive you, it take 5 minute’. This theory was tested by us on our first night. We went to a restaurant recommended by Nikola half way between the hostel and old town for some quite nice fish and pasta, then straight after our meal finished we were driven to the old town and again picked up when we had roamed the tight alleways and bars of Dubrovnik Old Town until 3:30 in the morning. What a great bloke. He even picked up a couple of other Aussies at 5:30am the same morning. Apparently he doesn’t sleep all summer and hibernates like a bear in a single room all winter with a big stockpile of food and a bed (well thats the theory we postulated anyway). Dubrovnik entailed more lizard-like laying on the seaside rocks and walking around the city walls. After a couple of days Carl and Lauren left whereupon I gave up on all sightseeing activities and chilled out mostly at the hostel. It was a trend that was set to continue to the end of the trip.
Getting to Budapest from Dubrovnik is a bit of a mission I discovered. After a 6 hour bus return to Split, I caught another 6 hour bus up to Zagreb, slept in the train station for 9 hours (well about 1 hour of that was sleep and 8 hours was avoiding strange people hanging around the platforms wearing daisies in their hair), then finally got a 5am train to Keleti station in Budapest, arriving at about midday. Those maths more than likely don’t add up, but stop counting and keep reading. From the face of it, Budapest was the kind of city I wasn’t going to join. Lots of invasive grey buildings, parliaments and museums. I caught a bus from the train station attempting to get to the hostel, immediately the inspector asked for my ticket, which given that I had never been checked for a ticket in the rest of Europe, I didn’t bother getting one at the station. My first experience of Budapest is a 2500 Forint fine which thankfully equates to about 5 quid, but I think you have to pay 10,000 normally, so I was lucky. Out of stubborness I decided to walk to the hostel which was actually the other side of town in Buda (Budapest is split into Buda and Pest halved down the middle by the Danube river). An hour and a half later I was still being stubborn so didn’t mind too much about the walk. Thankfully the hostel had a room. It’s much further out than a normal hostel, but I had heard great stories about it. If they hadn’t have had a room free I would’ve possibly cried until they gave me one, thankfully there was one bed left and in the worst case scenario you can camp in the back yard or just sleep on the floor. It’s the kind of hostel and environment where you would actually be happy to do that, i’ve never been to a better hostel. The whole place was full of really cool people, most of whom had been in Budapest for multiple weeks and had seen nothing more than the thermal baths… and I was keen to join them. Eventually that day I caught up with Carl and Lauren who came straight here from Dubrovnik and had been getting the inside tour by Lauren’s housemate Greg from England who grew up in Hungary and holidays there in the summer. That night we went to the Castle overlooking the city and a 24/7 restaurant that serves only savoury and sweet pancakes of different forms. I don’t know how I got back to the hostel, the transport here pretty much dies after 11:30, but when I returned it was to the entire hostel’s inhabitants cramped into the kitchen and lounge area getting completely wasted. I was so destroyed after two hours sleep at a train station the night before I gave it a miss, but I knew they’d do the same the next night anyway. The next day I went to the Gellert baths, the cities oldest thermal spa. It was such a relaxing experience, we spent about three hours criss-crossing between wave pools, 8 degree pools, 38 degree pools, saunas, swimming pools and avoiding the obviously sexually charged stares of other blokes in the men-only bathing area and massage rooms, sick old bastards - put your pants on! I wanted to collapse in a heap after the baths, instead we went to one of Greg’s favourite restaurants for one of the most filling lunches I’ve ever had and it all cost £2, a rare remnant of Hungary’s cheap diners from a few years back before affiliating with the EU. Crumbed fish, some sort of bean stew and potatoes - delicious. That night Carl and Lauren flew out, returning to London, I got back to the hostel to be greeted with the news that everyone was off to the Mongolian Barbecue all-you-can-eat all-you-can-drink restaurant - not ideal given my late lunch, but I was up for getting completely hosed, it was after all my last night of the trip. About 20 of us filled the restaurant, I watched as everyone else gorged on feasts of fish, meat and other unidentifiable objects which apparently tasted OK if barbecued well. The bastard maitre’d made me pay individually for beers which was ultimately going to cost more than getting the all-you-can-eat all-you-can-drink option, so of course I started taking beer, wine and sangria donations from every other occupant in the room, don’t remember half of the night (didn’t matter, noone else did either) had a bloody awesome night to cap of the trip and payed for the grand total of 2 beers. I’ve finally learnt how to budget. So whilst I didn’t see much of the city, Budapest was brilliant and I finally learnt that travel is not so much about the place you’re in but the people you’re with… and so ends my ’sitting on the knee of your grandpa and taking advice’ moment for you all.
I won’t go on anymore about how much i’ve loved this trip, it’s repetitive, i’ve used amazing, awesome, great and other superlatives about 10 times each and i’ve got sore hands from typing seriously for the first time in 3 months. Until the next exciting addition to this site - Adeus, Hasta Luego, Arrivederci, Do videnja and Viszlát. Be good or be good at it.
