redclay
Darla & John Joined: December 28th 2005
Logged in: February 8th 2012
Logged in: February 8th 2012
Travel Blog Posts
Hello everyone. Just a quick note to say I had to reset all the emails as 'public' and delete the 'private' addresses. No one is cut off - just moved to a simpler category where you will not have to register or log in. The next blog will be later next week and you will get a message. Darla & John... read more
Angkor Wat
We took the five-hour bus trip from the beach at Mui Ne to Ho Chi Minh City on January 25thand then hopped in a taxi for the airport. HCMC was shut down for the Tet holiday so there was no chance to shop for the little things we thought we needed before our takeoff-at-dusk flight to Siam Reap in Cambodia. Siem Reap is the town adjacent to the ruins of the ancient city of Angkor Wat which was the capital of the Kmer kingdom from 800 - 1300 AD. Here there is a vast temple complex of some of the largest religious monuments in the world. We are only here for four nights so our experience here is a rather minimal, however, we saw in our first glance that Cambodia is a poorer country than Vietnam. ... read more
Roughing it in First Class
Happy New Year! It is New Year’s Day here in Vietnam. Usually there are a dozen or so round boats tending the nets on the sea in front of us here in Mui Ne (mooee nay) on the South China Sea. This little slice of paradise is a ten km long, south-facing crescent beach - so we see a stunning sunrise and sunset is every day. It is very calm at night and in the morning before the east wind whips up a heavy swell. Today is the Tet, the Vietamese lunar new year, is the most important holiday of the year - so no fishing. We were advised by a fellow traveller that a sign of respect is to place new bills in red envelopes and give them as presents. This is ‘lucky money’ and, ... read more
Castellamare del Golfo
Before we start into the week’s activities, let us say we are fine and many hundreds of kilometres from the devastation in l’Aquila which is in a deep valley between two spines of the Appenine range. The news is on Italian TV all day and there is still much to do to get to the outlying villages reachable by narrow roads that are blocked. Our hearts go out to the people and families of the area. In the meantime we have travelled by sea from Sicily to Tuscany (Pisa, Wednesday night) and the news is still of aftershocks in the area but we are not planning on going closer than Siena for the next week or so. It was another night of opera favourites and pasta at our very pleasant beachfront apartment hotel, near Agrigento on ... read more
Fire & Ice
Fortunately, the weather forecasters in Italy are no more accurate than our own back home. Monday was supposed to be cloudy but we did not see one all day - unless you want to count those ones hovering around the peak of Mount Etna, and they were probably the result of steam from snow melting on lava. We had hoped to climb the lower foothills of Etna and hike around her horizontally but the snow on Sunday made that idea ludicrous even for Canadians trying to escape winter. We drove up, anyway, to see what we could see: snowplows, snowboarders, chairlifts, etc. We ate an early lunch, or perhaps it was second breakfast, in the car in the parking lot of the little ski hill. The sun warmed the car. We got some good photos of ... read more
Greek Theatre, Syracuse
We were awakened by a lot of noise and talking at about 3:00am on Monday morning. A few hours later the delicious smell of fresh bread wafted in our window. Later, when it got light and we looked out we realized that one of our neighbours across the narrow street is a bakery. If I can make it over there in my pyjamas by 6:30am I can get a crusty loaf for 1 euro. We drove the 5km along the shore to where the cable car will take you up the cliffs to Taormina. This is a swanky town with glitzy shops geared to separating tourists from their euros. German was the predominant language we heard with a smattering of French and English. We realized that all the tourists, including ourselves, were of a certain age...we ... read more
Amalfi 1
We had a lot to do in the five days we had an apartment in Massa Lubrense on the south coast of the Peninsula of Sorrento. This was to be our base to visit Mount Vesuvius and the ruins, the Amalfi Coast and the Island of Capri. The area has a number of villages connected by twisting narrow roads switching back and forth negotiating the steep slopes. Terraced fields held olive, orange and lemon trees as well as many gardens planted in the black earth. Our first venture was the famous Amalfi coast - a series of little villages clinging to sides of very steep rocky mountains plunging to the sea. We had done so much reading ahead of the place it was almost like we had already been there. The road to Positano was stupefying ... read more
Foggy Fields
Does it rain in paradise? Of course! Grapes and olives need water to grow. We awoke to fog and rain our first morning outside Siena in a refurbished bishop’s palace next to a monastery. Undaunted by the weather, we set out in our little car on SS222, the Chianti Trail. Sloping fields of vines in many straight lines; yellow-brown, very rocky soil; gnarled oaks, wrapped with green ivy, still clinging onto last year’s shiny brown leaves; regiments of cypress trees standing tall and proud. The road twisted through the hills past farms, fields and forest. We arrived in Castellani in Chianti, a little, walled hill-town that had been a Sienese outpost against the Florentines. What better activity at 10:00am on a rainy day is there but to go wine tasting. Eschewing the spittoon, I gulped down ... read more
Monterosso Al Mare
We took the early Eurostar out of Venice on the first cloudy day since we arrived. Dozens of heavily laden, barge-like canal boats were steaming across the ten kilometres of open lagoon between the mainland and Venice. Back on the mainland we saw cars and traffic for the first time in a week. We saw black earth, farmers ploughing fields, grain sprouting. Venice was as far north as we had planned to go. Now we were heading across Italy from the west coast to the east; to what a few years ago was a forgotten corner of Italy but is now rapidly becoming an exciting tourist destination - the Cinque Terre. These are five villages clinging precipitously to the side of mountains so steep that only recently have some narrow roads been carved and, more important, ... read more
Gondoliers at Rialto Bridge
I think it’s deductive reasoning to say if Italy is the number one tourist destination in the world then Venice is the number one tourist destination in Italy. We are about to discover why. There are no cars in Venice - a good thing as our apartment faces the street on three sides and I doubt if you could stretch a tape measure out to the eight-foot mark before you hit any the neighbouring buildings. Every second cross-street is a little canal over which is an elegant stone bridge with marble steps. Four, five and six storey buildings looming over a patchwork maze of narrow walkways and canals. The train tracks to Venice end where the water begins. We got on a waterbus and headed for the Rialto Mercato stop where we were met by Chiara ... read more
