Longest Day Shortened : Swiss Alps
“Petra? I think we’re being attacked by cows”. The darkness has barely glimmered into a deep blue dawn 2600 m up on our Alpine perch, and the very last thing I want to do is crawl out of my sleeping bag into the frigid air. The past two days have taken us on a hike across one mountain range and into another. I reek from a lack of showers. I bury deeper into my cocoon. “Farah, there are no cows”.
Fish Bait : Shark Encounters in Eastern Malaysia
Sharon and I spent a relaxing morning under a coconut palm. We’ve been on the go for nearly two weeks, making our way north from Singapore up the eastern coast of Malaysia. We arrived in Redang two days ago, looking forward to a few days of diving, hiking and sunbathing.
Go Budget Travel’s $500 Getaway Contest
Christmas in July : Shanghai
Shanghai is one of the most exciting and cosmopolitan cities in Asia. It is cutting edge and modern, with the bright lights and trendy clubs that China’s big cities are famous for. But when the fog rolls in and the ships are shining in the harbor, there’s an unmistakable feeling of the 1920s, when opium was the local past time and the sun still hadn’t set on the British Empire. Being in Shanghai at night is like stepping back to the time when spies lurked in trench coats and ‘the blue dog barked at midnight’. The only reminder you’re still in 2007 is this season’s Farigamo loafers in a window display.
Get Dirty, Already!
What did the weary traveler do before those little antibacterial liquid hand soaps became so popular?
Doubtlessly, one had to wallow in ones own filth before the advent of that little product. What a hideous thought
Our Travel Picks of The Week 10/5/07
Traipsing Through Marco Polo’s Backyard
Two very significant events happened while in Croatia. Both of which I had no idea the magnitude of while they were happening, and it wasn’t until after that did I realize their significance. The first was a soccer game that we watched from a sidewalk while trying to find a place to stay that night. It was Croatia-Israel and it was being played, I would later learn, in Israel. It was the first international sporting event held in Israel since the Hezbollah conflict from last summer. It was also a battle for first place, ahead of England, in their group for the Euro Championships.
Israel’s star player, Yossi Benayoun, was playing with a partially torn ACL. He was putting his future as a professional player on the line all for his country, his homeland, Israel, for this one game, and the entire country rallied behind him. I’m not going to dwell on my views on the Middle East, particularly on Israel, here, but despite what I may think or feel, I have to take my hat off to the sacrifice that was made that night. Yossi was drugged up before the game, despite the protestation from the team doctors, and incredibly finished the game mostly unscathed.
Brave Israel fell 4-2 to Croatia. Being in Croatia, I had to root for the Croats, and with Israel as the opponent, I had to root for the Croats. (The Croatians take their soccer very, very seriously. To figure out where Slobodan Milosevic (sp?) garnered his power, just look at the roster for the fan club of Serbia’s most famous soccer team, Red Star Belgrade. To find the beginning point of all of the terror and massacre, you just have to look at the soccer game the tipped it off: Red Star versus Croatia’s biggest team, Dynamo Zagreb.) It was a mesmerizing situation, though: two tarnished but proud nations battling it out, two countries who came out of the ravages of war with their pride (and in Croatia’s case) dignity intact. It was the reason why I feel like sport is the best microcosm for life that there is.
The second event was a mixture of many things. I was walking around the old town with some friends in Korcula, generally just killing the night. It was kind of late and we had just left from the one nightclub open in town. We had come to old town hoping to go to the top of the church’s bell tower, the tallest point in the city, but we found our way up locked, so we resorted to meandering the crooked and narrow streets.
Eventually we came to a wall at the end of the lane. We looked up and saw two towering lemon trees in the yards above. We all looked at each other and said in unison, “I want some lemons.” So, the girls looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders and scaled the wall. I chose to climb over to the larger of the two trees. There were two houses and each had a tree in its yard. The larger was also the farther, so I had to climb from one tree to the other. After a bit of exertion, I found myself standing in the yard of the second house with a whole galaxy of big, ripe lemons at my disposal. I chose a few good ones and tossed them down. Then, suddenly realizing I was standing in some Croat’s yard at 2 AM holding some lemons I had just ‘borrowed.’ I quickly climbed down, and we all scurried back to our apartment, partners in crime.
The next day we ventured to find the Marco Polo Museum. It was, as most things in Croatia are, located in the old town. After getting lost a few times, we finally found it. Marco Polo, the legend goes, was born in Korcula and lived there for most of his childhood. The museum is actually his house. Unfortunately, being the off-season, it was closed, so we were relegated to taking pictures of the outside. It was a modest little home, tucked away neatly amongst the other, equally modest homes. I was pretty disappointed that it was closed; the biggest reason I went to Korcula was to visit Marco Polo’s home. We all walked away, with varied levels of dejectedness and rounded the corner.
My friends and I immediately stopped. We looked up and so a wall with two lemon trees at the top. It all looked very, very familiar. One of us, I forget who, pointed to the larger tree, the one in Marco Polo’s backyard, and said, “Isn’t that the tree we stole the lemons from?” We all pondered for a while. Then someone posed the question, “Is that tree in Marco Polo’s yard?” I responded, a little dumb-stuck, “It is…and…it is.”
It turns out that I stole lemons from Macro Polo’s boyhood home. How many people can claim that? That made up ten fold for the museum being closed. I’d take the experience of trespassing through his yard and ‘borrowing’ a few lemons from good ol’ MP over walking through his house, as countless other camera wielding tourists before me have, any day. We all went home and put our respective lemons up to our noses in new appreciation.
Degrees of Poverty: Lille, France
I’ve seen far too many beggars and pickpockets in Lille today, so I assume the worst when I spot Farah being accosted by the old man. He’s wearing a shabby black overcoat and disrepute clings to him like a bad aura. Clutching our train tickets I hurry back to the bikes where she waits. She’s trying in vain to understand the stranger’s persistent requests, a wary expression on her face.
Totally Spoked Across Europe: Attersee, Austria
I am alone and on foot. Farah has returned to Salzburg for the night to keep an eye on the aluminum donkeys we left behind. I, on the other hand, have an appointment with a little piece of the past. The July air is damp but still warm, despite the sun which has snuggled into its misty blanket on the horizon. It makes the shadows of the mountains across the lake stretch and stretch until they’ve nearly covered all of Attersee valley. The hazy blue light makes everything look flat, even the wheat fields which just minutes ago burned with the sunset’s last light.
Finding Wonder in Croatia
Apparently in 2005 a little magazine called National Geographic named Croatia the ‘Most Beautiful Country On Earth.’ Any ‘Most’ title is subject to scrutiny, and when a superficial title such as ‘Most Beautiful’ comes into play, it’s most often a popularity contest rather than an actual concrete claim.
The title ‘Miss World’ or ‘Best Dressed’ is as much a popularity contest as it is an actual basis on physical looks or dress. However, when a magazine like National Geographic, with its pages filled with glossy, jaw-dropping photos, says that Croatia is the most beautiful place on the planet, you’re bound to put some trust in that claim…and having been there, I’ll have to agree with them.
I went to three cities in Croatia: Dubrovnik, Split (were we had to drive through 20 km of Bosnian soil—Bosnia claims about 20 km of coastline from Croatia due to the Treaty of Karlowitz, which dates back to 1699, that the Republic of Dubrovnik, of all empires, signed with the Venetian Empire, ceding land to them in order to avoid sharing a border with the Ottoman Empire. Bosnia then claimed that land as their own almost 400 years later; a land that effectively cuts Croatia in two. It just goes to show that the jigsaw puzzle that is Europe is constantly shifting like a giant amorphous amoeba.) and Korcula.
They were all, surprisingly, exactly the same—they all had ‘old towns,’ a walled off area with narrow, crooked cobblestone streets and small shops that stood shoulder to shoulder, all sharing crumbling walls from the original 15th buildings. Most things were closed; it’s currently the off-season for tourism, but that did little to dampen our experience.
Nights were spent wandering around looking for an open restaurant or bar. Days were spent wandering around the cities—garnering looks from old women in babushkas and old men in tweed hats and coats. Most of the young people were what I will dub, ‘Euro sheek.’ They all wore finely coiffed mullets and dramatic black clothing. The women wore lots of leather and stern looks.
All of them were huge. I consider myself a pretty normal sized guy. If anything, I guess I’d say I was short. By Croatian standards, I’m almost a midget. I don’t know what it is over there—we were told that the waters of the Adriatic are among the cleanest in the world and maybe that’s what it is—but everyone was huge. Men, women, kids, babies. We went to a nightclub and I came up to the navel of most of the people there.
Despite the region’s recent history of violence (See Serb-Croatian massacres, See Red Star Belgrade-Dynamo Zagreb) the people there seem overwhelmingly friendly. It makes sense when you learn that almost the entire economy is based on tourism. Apparently in the summer time, when the sun comes out, people flock there en masse. Being winter, we were the only ones there and we garnered more than a few strange looks with our giant backpacks and lost, confused looks.
Old men watched us from street side cafés and shot us looks as if to say, “Don’t you know you’re supposed to be here in the summer? Come back in seven months.” We stayed at private apartments in people’s homes. There are very few hotel bed in Croatia, despite the massive tourism industry, because most of the initial tourism, before the Dalmatian Coast became the new world’s ‘Must See’ destination, most of the tourists were from the former USSR and weren’t used to, or didn’t want, such ‘luxuries’ as to be waited on and have a fresh, sterile bed waiting for you in a soulless box of a hotel. That’s their thinking, at least.
Staying in apartments did have some tremendous advantages, though; privacy, space, kitchen area, an outdoor balcony that overlooked the water, character. In Korcula, my room was numbingly cold and it took me back to the days when I’d spend nights shivering under five or six blankets in the cold Cleveland winter. I slept better in Korcula than any other place I’ve been to.
