Italian Lakes 2: Molto Bella Varenna

We'd deliberately not booked a hotel for the second half of our holiday to give us maximum flexibility - we could stay put or move on to somewhere new - and after a couple of days in Bellagio we felt like a change of scenery. Not having a hire car had turned out to be a godsend; it would have cost us a fortune to park it in Bellagio and it massively shortened the list of places we could consider staying at - to be considered now, any hotel had to be straightforward to get to with public transport.

At times like these, hotels with free WiFi really do shine - out came the MacBook, and soon after we'd hit on a perfect solution. The small town of Varenna that we'd admired from afar had quite a lot to offer, including a railway station with regular trains back to Milan - quite rare on the lakes! We easily found a hotel that could accomodate us, a short walk from the ferry pier. Job done! A short ferry-chug later and we were checked in and ready to explore.

Varenna was almost impossibly lovely. Where Bellagio had bustle, an exclusive air and touristy shops cheek-by-jowl, Varenna kept it very simple. Walking along a path hewn into a rock face brought you to the "city centre", which consisted of 4 restaurants and one souvenir shop, all nestled around a tiny harbour where ducks and swans bobbed around seemingly soaking in the tranquil atmosphere.

After a two-hour-lunch we attempted to burn off some pizza with some more exploration, and Varenna just kept getting better and better. Firstly, amongst the steps and quiet passages we found two friendly cats, always a good sign to ailurophiles such as ourselves!

We found a "beach" of sorts that had a lovely aspect towards the setting sun. To the right was a crude pier which featured an actor, presumably hired by the Italian Tourist Board to pose as a fisherman each evening close to sunset. Their cunning plan worked and we snapped many megabytes-worth of this "simple Italian peasant catching his dinner". We're onto you ITB, we're onto you ...


The next day we checked out Varenna's stunning Monastery Gardens - well worth a visit even if you're staying elsewhere on the lakes:

Our wonderful stay in Varenna was capped off with our last evening meal, an unexpectedly-brilliant take on the local lake-fish and pasta specialties. We reluctantly left the next morning, but we will surely return. Or as Bec loves to say: Certo!

Italian Lakes 1: Bellisimo Bellagio

An experiment that you can try at home: Say to a friend that you're about to go to the Italian Lakes. I hereby predict the following reactions:

• Jaw will drop
  
• Mouth will form perfect round 'O'
• Involuntary gasp/outlet of breath
• "Can I come too?"
  

It just seems to be one of those places that can do no wrong, blending stunning natural beauty with charming architecture and of course the addictive "La Dolce Vita" luxurious Italian lifestyle. We hit the Lakes for 5 days in late September - our last major holiday in Europe!

After flying in to Milan we trundled in the inimitable Italian-railway style up to Como, where we switched to a small bus which jostled, beeped and wiggled along the treacherous lakeside road to Bellagio, one of the lakes' most well-known towns. Packed with hideously-expensive designer boutiques, Bellagio seemed particularly popular with wealthy older Americans. But as usual for Italy, the food was delicious, never overpriced, and the ambience was warm and friendly.


Like so many of our favourite places, Bellagio is virtually car-free; most of the "streets" are actually stepped alleyways leading up from the edge of Lake Como. It makes for lovely views, particularly as the sun sets.


We had no real agenda for our first few days in Bellagio, mainly the plan was to soak up as much relaxed Italian goodness as possible. This proved very easy to achieve! Here's the view across to the village of Varenna:


We had planned to pick up a hire car and use it to explore the area a bit more, but upon arrival at the car hire place we discovered our printed opening hours didn't actually match up with reality, and it being Saturday midday, we'd not be able to pick up the car for almost 48 hours! Although we had been looking forward to scooting our little Cinquecento around, we were not too dismayed - we'd be able to get a full refund due to the hire company's mistake, and our brief experience of the roads around the lakes had shown them to be hugely stressful, requiring the absolute attention of the driver. Hardly ideal for sightseeing. Instead we would rely on the frequent ferries that service all the towns - oh and Bec managed to find a Cinquecento in Bellagio anyway!

YAGGAGC

Londoners, bless 'em, are very savvy about many things. Most, for example, know that bicycle-rickshaws, Harrods, and Madame Tussauds are London's biggest rip-offs and are to be avoided at all costs. But you could guess that. Some have the Central London Tube Map etched into their cerebrum, allowing instant journey planning and trouble-avoidance:


Not bad. Unfortunately though, very few Londoners would know a good cup of coffee from a bucket of tar. (This does put them ahead of most Americans though, whose drink of choice is a bucket of burnt tar).

As such, finding a really good coffee when you're away from your known-good haunts can be really tough. So Johnny, programmer-nerd, coffee-snob, and soon-to-be-ex-Londoner, has come up with a ready-reckoning system to give you the best possible chance of finding something passable. If any of the following conditions is TRUE, You Ain't Gonna Get A Good Coffee. Sorry. As a consolation, the further you get down the list, the better it will probably be:

• The establishment lists "Coffee" on the same line as "Tea" on the menu
• The particular style of coffee (e.g. Cappuccino) is spelt wrongly
• After taking your order for your Cappuccino/Latte/Whatever, your server turns and punches a button on a machine, and turns back to you
• You can't see the milk that's going into your coffee
• The café does not have a big, chromey, Italian coffee machine sitting prominently on the front counter
  
• The café does not have a freshly topped-up bean-grinder next to the big Italian coffee machine
• You have to add your own sugar at the end of the process
  
• The coffee machine does not have a human servant tending to its every whim and foible, meticulously wiping it down between shots, whispering sweet nothings in its openings, and generally treating it like the deity it is
• Your coffee-preparer does not bash the living hell out of the groupheads between cups to make sure there's no old grounds left in there
  
• Your coffee-preparer does not watch the milk as they froth it (despite having done it a million times before)

So there you have it. Good luck, intrepid coffee-connoisseurs, and May The Froth Be With You ...

Brighton - Ticking all the boxes

Brighton, on England's south coast, could well be said to be "London's beach getaway town" - in just 50 minutes by fast train, you can swap pigeons and pie-and-mash for seagulls and scampi-and-chips. Way back in June we decided to pounce on a particularly nicely-forecasted Saturday and see what Brighton had to offer.

In order to truly understand the appeal of Brighton, you must first grasp the fundamentals of the English seaside:

• The weather will most likely make actually going in the water extremely unappealing
• Thus, there must be plenty of amusements on hand
  
• The more (knowingly or not) outdated and/or tackier the amusements, the better
• There must be deckchairs
• There should be a seafront promenade, which all visitors must tour up and down
  
• There must be {fish/scampi/burger}-and-chip outlets all along the sea front
• No matter what the weather, thou shalt have an ice-cream
• If thou art a small child, thou shalt drop thy ice-cream and cry

In this regard, Brighton delivers on all fronts. But it goes even further, adding to the mix:

• A genuinely unique maze of lovely, quirky shop-filled lanes just behind the sea front
• A completely bonkers Royal Pavilion built by the Prince Regent in the early 1800s
• A whopping-great pier with an amusement-park on the end (not just a few dodgem cars either)
• A thriving local culture embracing two universities, a gay scene and live music

We were perhaps fortunate to visit Brighton on a sparkling summer day, but it was an absolute delight. After wandering though the eclectic and interesting independent shops of The Lanes, we arrived at the seafront promenade to this vista:


As per English Seaside requirements, we promenaded in both westerly and easterly directions, before stopping for refreshments, and plenty of 'em. It was seriously warm!


A visit to the Pavilion is an absolute must. Truly breathtaking in scale and ornate detail, both inside and out:


Finally we crunched our way out onto the beach itself and enjoyed the simple pleasures of England's gentle, non-threatening sunshine:

Off To Nether-Netherlands

Right children, we begin with a geography lesson. The Netherlands is the low-slung nation with the dykes and the windmills. Holland is one of its regions (actually two provinces, North and South) that sits right next to the North Sea. People use them interchangeably because the most-visited things in The Netherlands also happen to be in Holland - namely Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Delft.

But what about the other bits? Well as our friend Jenny has recently moved from Australia to the eastern side of the Netherlands, we are able to report, following a lightning visit in June. As usual with these things, there is of course a member of the opposite sex involved, and Erwin is a charming and highly-intelligent Dutchman - fluent in English and German too! They were truly excellent hosts, and went out of their way to give us a genuine Dutch weekend.

Let's start with the food. The Dutch apparently do! Breakfast was a lavish affair with numerous courses, ranging from savoury (eggs, salmon, meat, white asparagus) through to the uniquely-dutch chocolate sprinkles ("hagelslag") which are enjoyed on bread, or in Erwin's case, on everything.

First destination was a national park that draws Dutch people from miles around. Why? Because it actually has a few decent hills! The roads were busy with serious cyclists actually having to use their gears, but we were more interested in the friendly wild ponies (which by the way is now the THIRD time we've come across lovely wild mini-horses in Europe; Dartmoor and Iceland being the others)


We cruised around the area, going to a number of interesting small towns whose names we sadly can't remember, but including the home of Grolsch beer, and a place with a star-shaped network of defensive canals, with cannon still in position. Just in case those nearby Germans get any ideas....


No visit to The Netherlands could be complete without a bicycle-riding session; this is a nation where bicycles outnumber people, after all. We took a delightful spin around J & E's home town, enjoying the quite astonishing flatness (it makes London look Himalayan) - particularly Erwin, who affixed Jenny to his rear rack so that the rest of us could have a bike each!

Lost energy was replaced by visiting a traditional pannenkoekenhuis (dutch-pancake house) where we enjoyed pannekoek in both savoury (bacon and local forest mushroom) and sweet (delicious apple with stroop syrup) varieties:

Huge thanks to J & E for their excellent hospitality and for showing us that there's much more to Dutch life than Amsterdam's seedy charms...

Baltic Boating Part 8: Days At Sea

Pardon our horribly-slack blogging, we're packing up to go home! We're going to make it up to you by finishing off like we started - a blog a day! Yes, if you can remember almost three years ago, unemployed Johnny was cranking out a new blog post every day on average. Now those idle days are back again, so for the sake of symmetry (and catching up on a lot of adventures) he'll attempt to roll them out like he used to until it's time to head to Heathrow...

We just had a few more things to say about our cruise experience through Scandinavia, or more specifically about one of our new all-time favourite things: Days At Sea.

As cruise virgins, we'd been slightly worried about being bored on our four "Days At Sea". We'd supposed that only mad-keen Bridge or Bingo players would enjoy what the ship had to offer on these days. But we were so wrong. The Jewel Of The Seas was like a 5-star hotel dropped onto a Whitsunday Island, decorated with everything from the Weight Watchers Forbidden List. Our typical Day At Sea would see us shuffle into the all-day buffet at around 10.30 (just in time to catch the omelette-making-guy before he knocked off) and gorge ourselves before attempting to burn off the calories with EPIC table-tennis matches - rallies lasting hundreds of shots were not unheard-of. We'd then swing past the library to pick up the day's cerebral activities - fresh trivia, crossword and sudoku puzzles were provided each day - and settle down somewhere, possibly with a coffee from the (hideously-named) Latte-tudes Café. After swinging back past the buffet for another bout of eating, we'd often adjourn to the games room for some Scrabble, take our books to one of the pool areas, or do something a bit more active like Mini Golf, Rock Climbing or hitting the gym. And then all too quickly it would be time to eat again, this time in the Tides dining room with our regular dinner companions.

Of course we got to know our fellow diners very well. But with this cruise being an American-run enterprise, all of the service staff were hyper-attentive in that "Really want a good tip" way. Luckily our Peruvian waiter Juan and his Turkish assistant Mehmet were genuinely nice guys and had quite a Laurel-and-Hardy routine going - often unintentionally! Mehmet had more than a touch of Manuel from Fawlty Towers about him, while Juan was ever the consummate professional.


Our "stateroom attendant" Sori was a towel-folding magician - each time we came back from dinner we'd have a new sculpture awaiting us. It turns out that all stateroom attendants get taught how to do this, which slightly diminished the special feeling, but it was still impressive:

There were characters among our fellow passengers as well, some of whom achieved notoriety through participating in the various game shows run by our cruise director Joff (aka John Cleese - exceedingly witty and entertaining, even if his endless quips had a slightly well-practised feel to them). One couple in particular will forever remain in our memories. During a "Love and Marriage" show, the wife was asked who (aside from her, of course) her husband would most like to have with him on a desert island. She replied that he would choose his brother. When they swapped over, the husband (they'd been married for a year) simply could not think of an answer. Under intense pressure from Joff, his wife, and the crowd, he blurted out "My secretary?!?!?" at which point both the crowd and the wife exploded, but in rather different ways. For the remainder of the cruise that couple looked somewhat strained.

Johnny has already expressed his displeasure at violators of the dinner dress code - the passenger who most incurred his wrath was a Hispanic diner on the next-door table who consistently flouted not only the dress code but also basic rules of table manners and politeness. Thus he acquired the unenviable nickname of "Stupid Latino Ugly Guy", or SLUG for short. Sadly we have no picture of the Slug, but just imagine Jabba The Hut from Star Wars but with fewer interpersonal skills and you've got him nailed.

On the subject of famous likenesses, Johnny thinks that our cruise line may in fact be the forbidden lovechild of the Transformers' Autobots and Decepticons:

+ =

At 90,000 tons, if the Jewel ever does transform into a robot, JUST RUN!

Good and Bad News

Let's begin with the bad news - Johnny's reverse-Midas touch with employers continues. After 15 months at ICOM, the company has been declared insolvent and all employees made redundant on Wednesday (September 30).

This follows more than 9 months of late and partial payrolls, and we are all still owed for August AND September. Officially the company has NO assets so the chances of getting anything out of them are very remote. (In classic dodgy-business style, the bankrupt company that employed us is a separate entity to the one that owns all of the stuff like computers that could be sold off)

There is some chance of getting some compensation from the UK government's "National Insurance" arrangement that all companies have to pay into. It's exactly the kind of situation that NI is meant to cater for. It won't fully cover what is owed - not even close - but it will help.

Luckily, it's not too big a problem. John was in the process of resigning anyway, because, drum roll please...

We're heading back to Melbourne, for good, in November!

That's the "good news" bit if you were wondering. Yes, it will have been 3 years almost to the day - we've absolutely loved our time in the UK and gallivanting around Europe, and we always wanted to leave at the point where we felt we'd really got to know it well, but before it all became too familiar. We've averaged one international trip a month for the last 35 months, and have seen some fantastic stuff, but we can safely say we're "over" budget airlines now! And it really will be nice to spend some quality time with family and friends back home after relying on phone calls, emails and Facebook for so long.

So we're Melbourne bound at last!! See you soon!!