Today started yesterday with an early start, and uneventful flight from Barcelona, passing over geography that barely registers in my mental atlas - Georgia and Turmenistan, the Caspian and Black seas etc. Arrived a bit tired as the sleeping pill that we took didn't work until we were 3 or 4 hours out. Since we have been here we have been using the amazingly efficient MRT system - underground and buses. We have spent our time with animals - firstly at Joorong bird park which has some amazing birds - all in natural settings. Masses of pink flamingoes and Pelicans, numbers [View Full Entry]

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Travel day today. Woke up early - beautiful day so laid all our stuff outside on the ground and packed from there—not a lot of room inside the van. There was a lot more volume so had to expand the blue case! Cleaned out the van and took off with Sandy - our trusty computer navigator leading the way - except the road had been fixed up and was new so she had us the middle of paddocks and couldn’t tell us which of the next two turns was ours - so we guessed and headed off down the motorway in [View Full Entry]

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Got up and had about 500 more K’s for breakfast and arrived at Colditz—the computer got it fairly wrong and we ended up going down some very narrow roads, but no mirror clipping this time. The Saxony government had taken over the running of the castle and is doing it up - in a ten year plan. The bit of the castle of the castle where the German officers were housed is now a flash youth hostel, and some of it will be an arts centre and some a museum. The guided tour was really interesting. There were a couple of [View Full Entry]

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It started raining in the evening and although it looked like the usual thunderstorm it didn’t stop, and it was still raining fairly steadily in the morning. We had done a wash in the evening so hung the line across the inside of the van from the bathroom door to a catch on the ceiling over the bed. The washing dries in the breeze as it flaps back and forward from the movement of the van. The camp is near the Vienna Woods so we took a detour through this lovely forested area - all deciduous trees - not sure what [View Full Entry]

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The second day in Vienna, we went to the Royal Apartments and the Sisi Museum. Sisi was the Empress Elizabeth—a gorgeously beautiful girl who married the Crown Prince of the Austro Hungarian empire at aged 15 just at the end of the 19th century—and how she was oppressed by this, was obviously bulimic, then depressed, was fixated on keeping her beauty, had her children alienated from her, travelled incessantly and restlessly, and finally was assassinated—so many of the same issues as Diana. When she died she was idolised and many films have been made about her glamour and beau [View Full Entry]

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Vienna at last. We first visited Austria 26 years ago but didn’t get this far east. The camping ground was great - with a washing machine finally!!!! So the first thing we did was wash clothes. Then travelled into the centre by train and underground. Very efficient and clean. The underground trains run at 5 minute intervals and the trains every 20 minutes or so - meaning very little waiting around. First stop was the Museum of Medical History. We had forgotten how much of our medical history was based around Vienna. They had info and instruments etc from a large [View Full Entry]

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Spis Castle is a very big very old ruin of a castle and very famous. It is on quite a little hill but the site is very well chosen as it’s visible in any direction and obviously good at guarding all around. On the road we went thru a very long tunnel— 5 kilometres of very high tech roading—as we came out there was the castle a few km away framed in the opening of the tunnel -guarding the high tech road as well and a great example of the high tech many centuries ago compared with high tech now. You [View Full Entry]

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Today we had even more trouble finding someone to pay, and ended up being quite late to leave because of this. We stopped along the way at a small town called Levoca. It has a fully intact town wall, and inside there are a number of beautiful Renaissance houses and other buildings, with a central square. There was the Cage of Shame - near the town hall where women who had done something wrong were held to be publicly disgraced. We went into the cathedral there, and a school bus tour came in, kids about 15 and 16. They all went [View Full Entry]

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Eventually found someone to pay for the night in the campground - we are certainly still in the low season, and headed down the Orava valley. First stop was the village of Podbiel with little wooden houses. Near here we say a stork nesting on a special pole. Elsewhere we have see stork nests on the top of powerpoles! There was a school nearby and in the window amongst the other pictures were pictures of the stork. We drove on heading for Orava Castle. First glimpse is of a knife thin spike of rock with the castle on top. This was [View Full Entry]

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We stayed overnight near Krakow and then went to the Wielizca Salt Mine. We managed to catch one of the English tours. The trip starts by going down around 400 stairs - Around and around 6 stairs down, a landing, another 6 stairs down, a landing over and over. There are a number of salt statues and they have been able to demonstrate how the mine worked over the ages by using figures of miners etc made out of salt. Most of the rock is gray because of a few impurities, but where it has dissolved in the underground water and [View Full Entry]

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