In the morning we had a wander around the area before heading off again. We were travelling on minor roads which provide great scenery but can be very steep in places as you pass over the hills and through the valleys. Ferd worked at Hotel Hochschober at the ski resort area of Turracher Höhe on the border of Carinthia and Styria at 1800m. The last part of the road before we arrived had to be driven in first gear but Dobby, our faithful servant, kept his cool. We pulled up in front of this really flash hotel and, thanks to a [View Full Entry]

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Drove back to St Poltein to find our friendly hardware store to buy an adaptor for our power cord, and by the time we found our way out again we had decided to only drive to the outskirts of Vienna today as we would not have enough time to see anything. So we hunted around for a camping ground or info centre without any success until about 7pm when we came across a bit of a forest which we could drive into quite easily so we tucked ourselves away from the road and parked. We still had plenty of light [View Full Entry]

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After a good nights sleep (the bed didn’t seem too hard - no worse than the Chinese beds!) we decided we were going to head west to a place called Bad Aussee (loosely translated bad means bath or bathe and see is lake) in an area we later discovered to be called Salzkammergut (love that name!). We were staying off the autobahns as we did not have a sticker on our window but most of the roads were pretty good. Once again there were many motorcyclists on big bikes taking advantage of the good weather on the weekend - and a [View Full Entry]

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The hotel where Ferd works is 2½ hours away but he had very kindly decided to take the week off to show us around his home town, so after a breakfast of sliced meats, bread, cheese and coffee, we headed out. First port of call was the airport where we picked up our wayward bags and then out to a small lake at Teichalm for a short wander around and a look at the big bull. This area is called Almenland and is famous for it’s beef due to the grasses and herbs that the cattle feed on which are big, [View Full Entry]

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Our last breakfast and we bid da svidaniya to everybody heading out for the day as we were catching a taxi to the airport at 11.30. We exchanged emails and suggested a reunion on our way back from Europe maybe if we fly by Melbourne on our way home. Altogether we have all got on well and it has been an enjoyable trip with a great bunch of Aussies - thanks guys. We booked our taxi so we would have plenty of time to spare, just as well because it was not fast going through security. No worries though and we [View Full Entry]

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Woke up on the train at 8.00am for breakfast, unfortunately due to a communication error the night before we failed to actually order anything to eat so we just got coffee. Never mind, we discovered as we were disembarking that the food plate in our cabin was free so we grabbed all the goodies before we left. We were now in St Petersburg, the ‘Northern Capital’ of Russia and the actual capital for some time. Unfortunately it was only 9.00am so we couldn’t go to our hotel and a bus tour of the city was the first thing on the agenda [View Full Entry]

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Breakfast at 9 and out at 10 once again. We were off on a bus tour to a few special spots around the city, first stop was the Church of Christ our Saviour. This was a church that has been rebuilt and only just reopened a few years ago after Stalin had it blown up and was going to have it replaced with a huge palace, complete with a statue of himself but didn’t go through with it due to foundation problems. Incredibly ornate and beautiful but like all the churhes, no photos allowed inside. Second stop was a nice quiet [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Moscow at around 5.30pm and were met once again by our local guide, this one was Nadia and it seemed as if she had had a long day and was a bit tired. The weather was dry and warm and we had a huge bus to transport the 14 of us to the hotel with Nadia pointing out places of interest on the way. Our hotel was one of the ones that was built for the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and had been refurbished at some time. It was reasonably well appointed but the lack of air conditioning [View Full Entry]

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The train pulled out at about 4.30, or 11.30 Moscow time. Russia covers 11 time zones but all the trains and train stations run on Moscow time, on this trip we put our clocks back five hours along the way. To add to the confusion the dining car ran on local time and we were not really sure exactly when we crossed the time zones, luckily it was open fairly long hours so we never saw it closed. There was also a lady that came past 2 or 3 times a day with a trolley or a basket of peroshki which [View Full Entry]

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Free time this morning, check-out was at 12 and we had to meet in the lobby at 2pm to get the bus to the train station. We wandered around town, went to the internet café to check the emails and got a few supplies for the train trip. One unusual thing about Irkutsk is that there are many old wooden houses in the city that apparently have no running water, there are wells with pump handles at various places on the sidewalk and the occupants collect their water from there. There can’t be too many though as we never saw anyone [View Full Entry]

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