Syndicate
On our drive to the Amalfi Coast, we stopped for lunch at a small town called Matera. Matera is three cities in one, the New City, Medieval, and below both, “Sassi” the original Troglodyte City below the ground; Troglodytes are people that live below ground. As normal we ignored the New City to wander through Sassi and the Medieval quarter. The Troglodyte City was the point of interest. It’s built on the upper area of a ravine, and you can see from the photos in the gallery that the buildings are clustered like a beehive on top of each other.
So what do we mean by the heel of Italy, for those who don’t know, if you look at a map of Italy, it looks like a boot, so after leaving Croatia, exploring the heel of Italy was our first destination. The boot area has also a very different feel from the rest of Italy, due to the different rulers who have controlled it over the centuries, the Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Turks, the Byzantines, and even the Norman’s at one stage to name a few, so many more diverse influences than elsewhere in Italy.
Dubrovnik, jewel of Dalmatia and one hell of a drive down the coast. Dubrovnik sits about 230km south of Split, normally an easy drive, except the only way to drive to Dubrovnik is down a very narrow and winding coast road including a side trip into Bosnia (our car didn’t have insurance in Bosnia so we made sure we drove very carefully). The drive took us about 5 hours while negotiating endless tour buses traveling North to Spilt. It was a fun drive to do, but I’d still recommend flying or catching the ferry down.
From Pula we traveled down the coast to Split in Croatia. A long drive, and to save time we thought we’d go by the coastal highway J instead of driving a 100kms inland before turning south on the freeway. Though to be honest we had a hard time following the signs to the coast road as all the signs to Split (way point) always looped back to the freeway and the inland road.
South into Croatia we go, first passing the salt farms of Socovlje where salt has been farmed since Roman times, we cross the Border into the Istria Peninsula of Croatia.
Our first stop on the peninsula was the town of Porec, where we stopped to see a 13th century Byzantine Church. The Church contains marvellous mosaic decorations around the altar. Unfortunately, the rest of the town is a small medieval with everything designed to overcharge tourists. I think they have realised that being the first stop into the country they can charge a lot more for items.
Our last stop in Slovenia was a tiny fishing village in the South on the Adriatic Coast, called Piran. A UNESCO listed village with its wonderful maze of narrow medieval streets and small fishing harbour. Our drive into the village was meet with torrential rain, not a good start to a visit to the coast. Our trip to the hostel was very wet as the cobblestone streets are not designed to handle such downpours as there were very few drains and where there were, they were overflowing as the city sits right on the water level.
South we drive to the famous Postojna Jama (Cave) and its lesser known and just as interesting Predjama castle set in the mountain. Postojna Cave is one of the largest and deepest caves in the world and one of over 7000 caves in Slovenia itself, a speleologists dream.
Lake Bled is almost a picture perfect lake with a fairytale island. Have a look at the pictures, you see what we mean Lake, mountains behind, small island with a church and a castle perched high above. In Bled we arranged to stay at an apartment, apartments in Slovenia are basically B&B’s with rooms set aside for visitors. The couple we stayed with were very friendly and had an excellent setup.
After relying on public transport for the entire trip so far, we finally get our own set of wheels . We’ve leased a Peugeot 407 wagon for 34 days to do a loop of the Adriatic Sea and eventually finish up Paris in late October.
A nice morning flight down from Helsinki to Milan, over the Alps into Northern Italy. Nice and clear most the way down till it reach Italy and it was very smoggy or in the least a lot of haze in the air, we were thinking more the later after a hot summer and little rain.
The Finnish train from St Petersburg to Helsinki was wonderful. It had the dining car design we expected on the Trans-Mongolian. A bar where you could buy food with lots of tables and standing areas with small table (like in bars) to socialise around and they took credit cards which was great. Kane ordered a giant meat pie, which when served was a bun with beef mince smeared inside, actually tasted very nice, but his also included cheese and frankfurts in the bun as well!
St Petersburg is a very different city from Moscow, Moscow has the feel of a business city on the go. Whereas St Petersburg has a more relaxed feel about it, it doesn’t have the large number of expensive European cars roaring around it, bad parking or the extremely high dress standards for the locals though most still dress nicely). But it’s a wonderful city to visit and we all really enjoyed our time there and would love to visit again.
Moscow, Moscow, Queen of the Russian land … as the catchy eighties hit by Genghis Khan went.
Beijing->Mongolia->Moscow
What can we say, 7865km’s, 5 nights, 40 stops and two missing passengers? This journey is often confused with the true Trans-Siberian railway journey which runs entirely within Russia from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Russia to Moscow, our journey travels from Beijing up through Mongolia into the Siberian wilderness of Eastern Russia before heading West to Moscow.
The political heart of communist China and formerly its imperial capital then known as Peking, all very exciting for our first visit to Beijing and to proper China as well, Hong Kong doesn’t really count as even after 10 years it’s still more British than Chinese. Our flight from Hong Kong wasn’t as enjoyable as the one up from Perth, as the crew seemed a little inexperienced, except for the pilots luckily!