Train arrived from Vienna about 13:00, sorry the correct train arrived about 12:40, but I wasn’t paying attention as I was starting to pack things in the train and just looked up and saw a “K” at the start of the name of the station so jumped out. It was then that I realised no one else had gotten off the train. The place looked like some kind of wasteland like you see in movies set in a desolate near future. It was like Mad Max but not in the desert. I felt like I had landed in the set of [View Full Entry]

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Thought I’d do a typical tourist thing so I got going early and got my ticket for the Lipizzaner stallions “training with music”. The show is on tour at the moment so it was the younger horses, who were mostly grey still though a couple were pretty close to white. You could see how much better the older ones were, doing the walk backwards things, sideways and the other stuff they do. Despite many announcements about not taking photos some idiots still had their flashes going. At least I had the brains to turn the flash off and hide in the [View Full Entry]

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At Ulli’s suggestion I went to Schonbrun Palace the next day. It was pretty impressive, the only bad thing was that they were setting up the Christmas market so my photos have these wooden huts but no market in them. I did the tour of the apartments, which very rather nice. And the old Franz Joseph seemed like a pretty good bloke too - anyone could get an appointment to see him for any reason, you applied and got your date and time and turned out and made your case. Because he saw up to 100 people per morning each appointment [View Full Entry]

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Did the other tour today, can’t remember what it was called? I was a bit disappointed in it as it appeared to be more a sales pitch to the oldies that made up everyone else on the tour. But I hadn’t been able to get onto a Sundower safari tour where they go 4WDing over the dunes and things, and have a banquet out in the desert with belly dancing and things, so I had to do something. First stop was the Burj Dubai (‘burj’ means tower in Arabic). The thing is ridiculous. 2 square kilometers, 3000 people working 8 hour [View Full Entry]

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Was happy when we finally got in to Dubai. I was pretty tired by now and didn’t really give a shit. Saw the greeters from Arabian Adventures and they put me in a taxi (brand new Volvo, wasn’t too bad) to the hotel and I arrived at hotel in time for brekkie. First impressions - big and busy. The main drag is like Surfers except driving in your lane in optional, overuse of the horn is mandatory and there are no hot girls [View Full Entry]

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Well what a nice fuck up to start the trip - the dickhead at Civic station wasn’t changing the signs so I missed the train to Sydney I was going to be catching. Great. Then when I got to Broadmeadow I find out there is track work somewhere on the Central Coast and changed timetables, including buses between some of the stations. Now why the fuck can’t they out this into the database running the website?! So despite getting dropped off at Civic at 12:20, at 16:00 I was only just past Woy Woy and making it on time not too [View Full Entry]

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