Walking the path of light

End of the Tunnel.

Just over 100 years ago shale oil was a significant industry in the Wolgan Valley in the Blue Mountains. Shale oil had been known of for centuries but was largely used for it’s purported medicinal qualities: one learned genleman opined that it was said to have been “tried by divers persons in Aches and Pains with much benefit.”. Things changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution when shale oil was used for lighting, particularly as whale oil became increasingly scarce.

The township of Newnes was the shale oil centre and the industry was significant enough to lead to the building of its own railway line. But by the 1930s the availability of cheaper crude oil led to the closure of the works and the rail line was abandoned until it was pulled up and the rails were sent to Europe to form beach defences. (And just to show that everything moves in cycles, shale oil is once again in the news as a possible replacement for our diminishing supplies of crude oil.)

Today the path taken by the old railway line forms a pleasantly graded track interspaced with the occasional reminder of its industrial past. Drains are made of thick cast iron riveted into pipes – either old train boilers or the product of the same works. There are bridges reinforced with enormous iron girders and roughly built sandstone block retaining walls.

Our aim though was more natural than industrial – we set out to find some local residents who had taken advantage of an abandoned tunnel to set up home. The larvae of the fungus gnat likes dark, damp, quiet conditions – and has found them in the middle of a long curved tunnel. Where the train track once ran there is now a stream bubbling along in the pitch dark and above the stream are hundreds of tiny larvae, each shinning with a cold blue light to attract their prey. Turn off your torch and the glow-worms create a constellation of points of light; galaxies gathering around particular cracks and faults in the rock. I’ve never seen glow worms in such atmospheric conditions, just our little group and the darkness of the tunnel with the stream running past – magical.

The other end of the glow-worm tunnel lets out into a fern-filled bowl, perfect for a lunch stop. The contrast created by emerging from the black tunnel into the verdant green of the ferns is just stunning. After eating we headed on intending to make a loop around the cliffs the tunnel cuts through and eventually back to the car park. This turned out to be a beautiful but exhausting walk. The track follows the cliff-side above the Newnes valley and has wonderful views out over the green fields on one side and on the other the whorled sandstone cliff walls. Eventually you come to the old coach road and follow that back up through a ravine echoing with the call of bellbirds to finally rejoin the glow-worm track. We were thrilled to run into a family of Lyre birds along the way.

The signage said that the loop was 7.5 km but none of us believed that – it felt significantly longer. It’s a very beautiful walk but you need to allow 3-4 hours for the loop no matter your normal walking speed. We emerged at the other end with a few aches and pains, which might have done with some shale oil treatment, but all agreed it was one of the best Blue Mountains walks we’d done.

On the Glow Worm Tunnel track.

Emerging from the tunnel.

End of the Tunnel.

Ferny gully.

On the track.

Detail from a tree.

Tags: Blue Mountains, bush walk, Glow work walk, Newnes, Shale oil

Finding self catering accommodation

On this trip, we stayed in over thirty different self catering apartments and houses. It is a great way to travel with children, both because you get far more space than you get in any hotel room, and because you save a lot of money, and eat far more healthily, by cooking, rather than eating in restaurants the whole time. You also get the feeling of living like a local, as you go grocery shopping, and use public transport the way the local would.

That means I’ve done a lot of booking. The hard part about booking this kind of accommodation is that it is unique (unlike a hotel room) and so you will not find individual places listed in any travel guide, or with any travel agent. It takes more research, and you are frequently dealing directly with the owner (for whom it is often their own holiday home).

That, in turn, means that there are a few restrictions on renting. Often, there is a minimum stay of a week. And if the place is in a summer holiday kind of place (by the beach, say), you might be restricted to only renting from Saturday to Saturday.  Fortunately, that worked very well for us – we generally stayed for a week or two, and by default, Saturday became our travel day most of the time.

The two websites I have used most in Europe are homeaway, which has a huge list of holiday cottages and apartments, and way to stay, which is mostly for apartments in big cities. Homeaway is a massive group that has been developed from individual sites in different countries. I like it both because it has a huge choice, but also because it is the most easily searchable of all of this kind of sites (for things like internet access, washing machines, and location).

In France, gites-de-france is an official French site that I only found out about near the end of our time in France. French gites are holiday cottages, and most french owned holiday cottages will be listed there, as well as (maybe) on an English speaking site.

In the US, tripadvisor sometimes has a better selection of places, but in most other places it is not as good. I’ve also used a few location specific sites (in Amsterdam, for example, a place that specialised in houseboats)

Basically the more research you are willing to do, and risk (in terms of handing over money) you are willing to take, the more you will get for your money. Research includes original language sites – in Spain, for example, you get a bigger choice if you use the Spanish language sites (which I didn’t do, as I wasn’t confident enough in google translate). Some of the aggregators, particularly for the nicer parts of France, aimed at the US market, seem to have enormous markups compared with similar places listed on Homeaway. But the plus with using one of these is that you know you will get a good place, and they have got rid of the duds for you.

Using Homeaway you are connected directly to the owner, and way to stay is an aggregator who has done some of the work for you (in vetting the reality of the place), but isn’t guaranteeing quite as much quality as an upmarket place like this one (which we didn’t use) which means they tend to be more expensive, but you don’t have to worry quite so much about handing money over before you get there.

I find with any of these aggregators, the best way to find a good place is to choose places with reviews and read them. Negative reviews don’t always mean the place is bad (I saw one review which complained about stairs which were prominently mentioned in the ad!) but they give you a sense of the place by the aspects they like and dislike.

When we’ve stayed in places with rave reviews, we have generally loved them, too (although occasionally we’ve been unpleasantly surprised – Bordeaux for example).

Places with an internet connection (generally listed) and flat screen TVs (visible in the pictures) are generally nicer all round – the owner has put the effort into modernising, and it shows in the whole flat. We also always choose a place with a washing machine, and preferably a dishwasher, too.

All the apartment sites have fairly complete lists of what is in the apartment, and which beds are where, which show you how many rooms there really are (sometimes 2 bedrooms just means one bedroom and a sitting room, but usually it means 2 bedrooms). They all generally include a total size, which is incredibly helpful in understanding how much space you will have. I generally tried for a minimum size of 75 metres squared, but in cheaper places I could splash out (for example our gorgeous apartment in Krakow was 110 metres squared, and felt very spacious).

The key is to understand what is important to you. After a bit of experimentation, for us it is more important to be close to the centre (particularly in a big city) than in a big place. But that is how we live at home, in Australia, as well.

A word of warning. We were almost scammed by one place in the US. The owner’s email had been hacked and without knowing it, we were corresponding with the hackers. I became nervous after they offered to take my credit card details only if I also provided a recent utilities bill to prove it was me. The place itself had some great reviews (which I usually think is a good sign that they are not a scammer). Every site suggests that you phone people before giving them money. Because of time differences and our lack of a cheap mobile phone, I never did that, but I was conscious I was taking a risk, particularly with places that asked for deposits into bank accounts.

Staying in self catering accommodation isn’t for everyone. But for us, I think I will continue to do it any time we are staying in a place longer than a few days. You can live in some amazing places, and you live a bit more like a local than any hotel.

Tags: apartment, family accommodation, self-catering

On the road again

Taking off.

We picked the boys up from two nights of building gingerbread houses with their grandparents and headed South out of Sydney this morning.

The first part of the drive down to Kiama is on the Grand Scenic Route, which was disappointing. There wasn’t a lot of grand or enormously scenic on the way; the weather didn’t help but that certainly wasn’t the whole story. Where the poor weather did help, though, was at the Kiama Blow Hole. A long cave worn through a rock shelf sees big Pacific waves rush through and then erupt, geyser-like into the air. Thanks to the unsettled weather the waves were pouring in and the Blow Hole put on a fine show.

On the white sand.

Our destination for the day though was further South: Jervis Bay. The bay is an enormous, almost circular inlet ringed with white beaches and trees. The water is incredibly clear and even on a cloudy day managed to look amazingly blue. We went for a walk along the beach and had a great time playing at a spot where a little river had formed a lagoon. The combination of the river and outgoing tide turned the lagoon’s outlet into a minor raging torrent which eroded the sand banks in front of our eyes – and which we helped along the way.

Kangaroos.

After dinner we drove down to Greenpatch Beach. There are a couple of beaches there that according to the Guinness Book of Records have the whitest sand in the World. I’m not sure how to judge that in any absolute sense, but the sand is certainly fine and clean and very, very white. We walked down to the beach surrounded by a chorus of cries from hundreds of parrots and lorikeets flashing through the trees in blazes of red and blue. On the ground underneath the trees, Eastern Grey kangaroos were grazing and one was feeding her joey.

A great day all-in-all: It’s good to be travelling again; and it’s good to be home.

 

Tags: Eastern Grey Kangaroo, Greenpatch Beach, Jervis Bay, Kiama, Lorikeets

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Being back in Sydney feels frighteningly surreal. Everything is the same, but yet subtly different and it’s extremely hard to get a grasp on reality. Everything feels just a bit blurred, hard to get in tight focus.

Seeing family and friends is both wonderful and grounding. But even that can be peculiar as everyone else is deep in their normal lives while we’re still floating about.

After several hectic days we have found a place to live for at least the first six months – although we don’t move in until just before Christmas. We imagine we’ll feel differently once we’re in a place where we can settle for a while and we have our own things around us. Certainly for the boys that should help them settle, as will seeing some of their friends – which has proved difficult at the moment because they are still in school and so on.

Jetlag has not helped. And a combination of fragile sleep from all the various things we now have to think about and a night of false fire alarms (see Cal and Dec‘s posts on this) has not helped with jetlag.

Another couple of days and we move again. Down to a holiday house on the South Coast of New South Wales with some friends. That should be wonderful and much more like our ‘normal’ speed.

Coming home was alway going to be strange but we had persevered with the pipe-dream that it would be easier than it has turned out to be so far.

Has anyone seen our missing night?

Gray Sydney day as we get some fresh air after our flight.

If you find a lost night wandering the streets of some strange country, you might want to point it our way.

Almost exactly a year to the hour after departing Sydney we stepped off the plane; home again. To complete the strange sense of dislocation we’re staying in the apartment next door to the one we rented before leaving last year. Has the last year really happened?

Of course it has, we have the numbers. We’ve visited 26 countries and stayed in 91 different places across those countries. We’ve used 58 different sorts of transport from kayaks to cable cars, from camel to car ferry.

The packs at the end of the road.

We spent the majority of nights (252) in rented apartments or houses, but have a nice range of other places from tents to canalboats and from train to airplanes. In full: Apartment / house 252, Train 5, Bedouin tent 1. Airport 1, Canal boat 4, Ferry 1, Narrow-boat 7, B&B 2, Friends house 1, Hostel 15, Tent 3, Jungle lodge 7, Airplane 2.

The most numerically astute amongst you, dear readers, might find that my list adds up to only 364 nights. Gaining fractions on days as we moved West meant we really managed to lose an entire night along the way from our spreadsheet. Careless I know.

So we’re clear, it is possible to lose a night even as you count them individually going round the world, no matter how silly that sounds. As we moved we had a number of days which we counted as one but which really had more than 24 hours in them thanks to moving timezones. Those incremental additions add up to the missing night. Put another way we had all the hours in the year, just not all the nights. I so hope that makes sense as I’ve now been over 36 hours without sleep and I’m not sure whether my brain is blathering.

Tags: Returning home

We have…

We’ve zip-lined through the Amazon canopy, Segwayed the streets of Madrid, karted through Lisbon. We have cycled around Lucca’s ancient walls, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the ripening vineyards of France.

We have swum with piranhas and bathed in Icelandic hot-springs. We’ve been buried in water in a Singapore water park and soaked by towering waterfalls in Iceland.

We’ve ridden horses in the Scottish hills, along isolated beaches and through American woods. We have sailed through icebergs and on felucas down the Nile. We have motored down French rivers and strolled through fields of sunflowers.

We’ve flown in a helicopter into the Grand Canyon and skydived in a Montreal wind-tunnel. We’ve canoed down the Ord in France, kayaked in Corsica, cut though the waters on an Amazonian dugout, and paddled with sea lions in San Diego. We have navigated a narrow boat through the English countryside and were lifted up the Falkirk Wheel.

We’ve been inside the Pyramids, marveled at the Forbidden City, walked the ruins of Macchu Pichu. We’ve explored ancient castles from Crusader times, marvelled at Pompeii and climbed the high places above Petra.

We got altitude sickness on the Peruvian alto plano and floated on the low, low salty waters of the Dead Sea. We slid down into the depths of an Austrian salt mine and peered out over the roofs of Brugge from the top of the Cathedral.

We threw snow balls at Christmas and set off fireworks at New Year in Germany. We saw chanting, robed figures walk the dark streets of Southern Italy at Easter. We watched turkeys being bought in flocks for American Thanksgiving.

We have seen hieroglyphics in tombs, prehistoric cave paintings and modern masters. We’ve investigates science in museums all over the world.

We have eaten Belgian chocolate, Italian sorbet, French pastries, Canadian maple syrup, Polish pancakes and pasta, well, everywhere.

We have stayed in a Scottish castle, an Amsterdam canal boat and a Beduoin tent. We’ve camped under the stars in the Andes and slept on trains speeding through the European night.

We have done all this and so much more over this year. And we’ve done it all together. And really it is that which is priceless; we have spent an entire year together as a family.

Tags: Coming home

The final full day

Wow! A year has passed in the blink of an eye and today was our final full day of our trip. Tomorrow we spend on a plane riding time zones and losing all that artificial time we gained heading Westward over the last year.

I can’t honestly say we approach returning home with mixed feelings: Our feelings are actually unequivocal. We’re looking forward to seeing friends and family, but none of us are happy to be stopping traveling. For the boys in particular they’ve now spent a significant proportion of their cognisant lives on the road – it is ‘normal’. For Jennifer and me, we’re only to aware that going home means returning to normality. We’ve been making resolutions about living with fewer things and going on lots of holidays – only time will tell if we manage to keep them in focus amidst the quotidian whirl.

Already we’ve started dealing with the reality of finding a place to live, resurrecting credit cards and phone accounts and all the other minutiae of the place you permanently live. The whole travelling thing which means that nothing matters too much because you’re always moving on, comes to a crashing halt as we contemplate moving home. We’re not renting for a week, we’re renting for six months or a year; a bit too far out on public transport will mean a lot of days of early starts and late finishes; and all that stuff we have sitting in storage takes up more room than the four backpacks we’ve lived out of for a year.

So we’ve all been a little on edge today. We decided on a calming approach to the day and returned to the Children’s Creativity Museum. We all had an absolutely brilliant time, which was honestly made even cooler because the staff had seen our posts on our earlier visit and knew who we were. That made the visit lovely, but also made our final day even more poignant as we realised we were about to leave the coolness of being world-travellers behind us.

We had a great time anyway. Declan made a great Angry Birds stop-motion video and Callum made a movie based on Plants vs Zombies.

Tomorrow we fly.

Tags: Childrens Creativity Museum, Round the world last days, San Francisco

A cablecar named quintessential

San Francisco cable car.

What could be more San Francisco that a ride on a cable car? In my view nothing – and it is just such unalloyed fun.

Cable cars were introduced in San Francisco in the late 1800s as a novel way of dealing with the hills which were confounding horse-drawn trams. They are like the cable cars of the Swiss Alps in the sense they work by grabbing hold of a moving cable; the difference is that in San Francisco the cable runs underground.

With a maximum speed of 9.55 miles-an-hour, the cars do not reach death-defying speeds and that means that you can sit facing outwards or even stand upon the running-board. Thanks to the hills, it’s an exhilarating experience and the fact it’s so manual makes it… quaint. The driver or ‘gripman’, manually controls the car by pulling on a lever that grips the moving cable. Driving is more about feel and judgement than any defined buttons or positions. Our first driver knew perfectly well that he was driving as many tourists as locals and made the whole experience totally entertaining.

Riding the footplate.

We caught the cable car from the centre of the city down to the waterfront. At the end of the line the car is turned around on a turntable. We couldn’t work out how the whole thing functioned until we realised it was all done by hand. The driver and conductor push the car onto the turntable, stomp round to make it turn and then push it back off until the car engages with the moving cable. It’s just a lovely system.

On the way back up the hills we stopped at the, free, powerhouse where you can see some fascinating history of the cable cars and the City. More significantly you can watch the motors turn and push the cables round the whole system. While, at one level, it’s just some huge wheels turning several miles of metal cable, it’s entirely engaging and mesmerising. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience in every way.

Tags: Cable car, San Francisco

Alcatraz, rule number 5 and making a Chinese fortune

Alcatraz in the fog.

Just a mile out in San Francisco Bay the waters part around the substantial lump of rock that is Alcatraz Island. The Island itself, of course, is surmounted by what is probably the most famous prison in the world – Alcatraz.

Usually the views of The Rock, and the views from it, are supposed to be fantastic. Today the entire Bay was shrouded in thick, dense white fog and you couldn’t see more than 50 feet in any direction. While it was a shame to miss the views, the fog certainly made our visit out to Alcatraz all the more atmospheric.

Cell with escape hole on the back wall.

There are some interesting aspects to Alcatraz’s history, but really they pale beside the 30 years that it served as the country’s maximum security prison and home to Al Capone, Alvin Creepy Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, and the Birdman. Seeing the prison is a fascinating and sobering insight to life in a tough place. The experience was brought to life by the absolutely excellent audio tour and the enthusiasm of the volunteers. We each spent a sobering minute inside the pitch darkness of the metal-lined ‘hole’, a place troublesome prisoners could be held in for up to 19 madness inducing days. We saw where what may be the only successful escape attempt originated (which thanks to Mythbusters, the boys were fully up to speed on). We saw the shrapnel marks where the Marines were called in the quell the Battle of Alcatraz. It was all completely fascinating.

One thing Jennifer and I have decided to introduce to our family is Rule Number 5 of Alcatraz’s rule book for prisoners: “You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Anything else that you get is a privilege.” Strangely, the boys’ tell us they fail to see the point.

After we made our way through the persistent fog back to the mainland we had lunch at the organic farmers market and then wandered up to Chinatown.  Chinatown is a great place, full of little unusual shops and interesting smells – it almost felt more Chinese than Beijing did. The boys played in a playground surrounded by tons of old Chinese gentlemen playing go, chequers and cards.

Making fortune cookies.

We were aiming for a tiny shop down a small alleyway; we’d been warned it would be hard to find and that proved to be the case. Eventually, we followed our noses and found a tiny space filled with the lovely smell of baking biscuits. Near the front a man filled wicker baskets with fortune cookies and further back two women sat chatting loudly in Cantonese and deftly creating fortune cookies using a machine that looked older than they did. The man smiled and offered us samples of the biscuit and we bought a bag of completed cookies. The fortunate thing though was getting to see the cookies being handmade in such a lovely little factory.

Tags: Alcatraz, China Town, Fortune cookies, San Francisco

Boys’ final writing for the year

The boys have just posted their latest, and probably final for the year, writing efforts on their bogs.

Cal’s is here.

Dec’s is here.