Backpack Storybook

London, UK - Not sure what the state of play is back in Australia, but here in London the capital's drive towards all things green is quite impressive.

Sure, some of it is lip service (high street stores seem to think we can spend our way to sustainability), but for the most part its quite surprising to see massive recycling schemes rolled out across the city.

The Mayor, big Ken Livingtone, is also a bit of a bicycle fanatic. During his watch there's been a big increase in the number of people cycling. something like 100% since 2000. There's more bike lanes. More bike parking areas.

On the weekend just gone he put on the London Freewheel event, which saw main roads between Buck Palace in the west and London Bridge in the east closed to traffic all day. More than 30,000 cyclists turned out to reclaim the city for a day.

I rode in solo from Earlsfield to check out. Ironically, I got stuck on an incredibly busy dual carrigeway road coming into London, couldn't get across the speeding lanes of traffic and overshot the event by a couple of kilometres.

If ever there was an argument for reducing cars, and traffic speed, in the capital, I had just experienced it.

I eventually got onto the closed loop through the city and enjoyed a leisurely ride past Westminster, down through the Embankement, over the Thames and then back almost the same way to St James Park near the palace.

It was good fun but I couldn't help feel it was more an event for those not already cycling, or people with young kids.

After a few Critical Masses (where anything goes) and several months of battling traffic to and from work, I thought riding the Freewheel track with its fences and marshals and absence of traffic was a little, well, boring.

Mind you, I almost got squashed by a bus riding home, so maybe an hour or two away from traffic was a good thing.

Labels: UK

Split, Croatia - I don't know what I was expecting of Croatia before we arrived. In fact, aside from swimming and drinking cheap beer, I actually hadn't given it much thought.

Spending most of the daylight hours on the top deck as the Penelopa chugged along gave me an unhurried look at the Dalmatian landscape. I was surprised at how rocky and mountainous the coastline between was Split and Dubrovnik.

Small towns and their accompanying olive groves and vineyards had squeezed themselves into the narrow, habitable space between the rocky shoreline and the steep, treeless mountains towering above.

Islands such as Hvar and Korcula were slightly flatter and featured acres of pine forest.

The port towns we stopped at each night were amazing. I always felt a little rushed that there was only an evening or perhaps half a morning to explore. I'd try and be among the first off the boat, Nikon around my neck, racing off to frame the narrow alleyways or capture the afternoon light falling on the moored fishing boats and the sandstone buildings.

The Old Towns of Dubrovnik and Korcula were absolute wonders to walk through. I could have spent days or weeks shooting among the streets, markets and town squares. Dubrovnik in particular was a highlight. Once inside the walls that guarded the city we explored its harbour, markets, narrow alleys, central square and even got up on the 2km long wall for a birds eye view of the town.

With the memory card almost full and the sun setting, Jacq, Chris and I strode off to a bar perched among the cliffs between the sea and the city wall.

Half of the Penelopa had the same idea. We grabbed a drink, a seat and watched the sky turn from pink to orange and then fade to dark blue...

And then we all went out into the town and ate and drank and burned up the dancefloor until 4am.

Labels: Croatia

Dubrovnik, Croatia - It really didn't take long for an easy routine to set in on the Penelopa, our home on the Adriatic for a week.

A simple breakfast of bread, cereal and juice was waiting for us when we climbed up from our tiny, dark cabins sometime after 8am. Hangovers were compared and stories swapped about the night before.

The hard working crew made sure we had a swim stop to recharge the batteries mid-morning or around lunchtime. It was often quite funny to watch the passengers go from relaxed sun bathers to a hive of activity as soon the anchor was dropped. We were on a reasonably tight schedule so when we stopped to swim, we swam.

At one stop I was one of the first to jump over the side and I swam to a nearby island. I looked back at the boat to see an amazing sight. Kayaks were being unfastened from the top deck and thrown over the side.

Blokes were back flipping from the railing. Snorkels and fins were fastened and people were going over the side. From around the back of the boat came Donche, the mustachioed tour leader, piloting the little inflatable tender and towing someone about on a body board at high speed.

In about a minute the quiet bay had gone from uninhabited and tranquil to some kind of crazed, aquatic circus. And then the lunch bell would go and we would all climb back aboard, anchor up and away we would go.

I wrote in the previous post that I was a little apprehensive that the cruise would be a Contiki trip on water. Me, being the intrepid, independent traveller, is obviously far too learned to lower myself to that sort of thing. But the group on the boat were a really cool bunch of people.

There were the three Kiwi boys who were at the end of a van tour through Europe and were so keen to get on our already full boat they bargained with Donche to sleep on the deck behind the wheel house. Which they did. Through storms, bright morning sun and the roaring boat engine.

There was Matt, who came across as quite a polite young Aussie when I first met him but by the end of the first day had revealed himself to be some sort of faux-camp extrovert that loved gimp masks and dance-offs.

Another Aussie bloke soldiered on despite getting a bunch of stitches in his lip after coming off second best with a Croat in a bar in Dubrovnik. The Croat hadn't seen the funny side of our man's dance floor shenanigans and punched him out with a right hook so fast he didn't know what had happened until he realised he was lying on the floor.

Yep, we were a regular bunch of weirdos, alcoholics and ne'er do wells. We probably drank more than a Contiki tour too. And I loved it.

For more photos, see the Flickr Croatia photo album here.

Labels: Croatia

Split, Croatia – I think my favourite moment came quite late in the week-long cruise between the two towns of Split and Dubrovnik on the Adriatic.

It was on the dancefloor of the Verandah night club up on the hill overlooking the port of Hvar. The Euro techno was pounding, the Karlovasco beer in my hand was cold and thirty of my new, best closest friends whom I met just five days ago were busting some serious dance moves.

At the the start of the holiday we had assembled from all corners of the globe. The lucky ones were on extended travels through Euro-land and saw the seven day boat cruise as a relaxing, boozy break from endless sight seeing expeditions and grimy pension accommodation.

Many others, including myself, my girlfriend Jacq, my sister Meesha and my faithful touch rugby go-to man Chris, had escaped London and were looking forward to sun, swimming and not having to catch one goddamn tube train for the whole week.

I have to admit, I had my doubts on what the cruise would be like. It was reasonably cheap; almost exclusively made up of Aussies, Kiwis and Saffas; and had been billed as a holiday for “like-minded twentysomethings”. Translation: loud, obnoxious antipodeans getting shit faced in the sun before coming ashore to terrorise the local population.

But you know what? It wasn't like that at all. Or at least not before 8pm.

Before the end of the first day more than thirty people who hadn't known each other from a bar of soap were getting along famously. The jars of Lasko beer poured by Deni the deckhand almost as quickly as we could drink them helped a bit. And so did the warm Croatian sunshine and the lazy chug of the Penelopa's diesel engines.

By the time we pulled into port for the first night at Makarska, we were chilled, tanned and ready for whatever Croatia had to offer.

As it turned out, that night Croatia offered an affordable steak house that did a mean risotto, litre bottles of wine and much later on a nightclub inside a cave on the waterfront.

For more photos, see the Flickr Croatia photo album here.

Labels: Croatia

London, United Kingdom - I've been saying for sometime now that it seems I've replaced surfing with touch rugby since I arrived in London.

I seem to be playing it an awful lot. Six games a week at some times. Four games on Saturday and playing with a a couple of different teams during the week. It's bloody addictive.

So it's no surprise that when a local magazine advertised a World Cup of Touch Rugby to celebrate the start of the real world cup later this month, I was interested. I even won a free team registration and put a team together for the one day competition.

The forty or so teams were each allocated a country and dutifuly played their pool games before playing off in the finals. We were given Canada, and did about as well as their team does in real life too: three losses and one draw.

Hard to believe, but there's touch players out there even more talented than me.

It was a tough day actually. The rock hard turf caused a few injuries. My knee has been a bit sore since and some of the boys have complained of tweaked ankles.

The worst injury was a girl in my team who fell over backwards onto her elbows. She emailed later in the week to say she had two fractured elbows and was in a double sling for six weeks. Ouch.

Labels: UK