Venice 2011 at Carnivale
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Category Archives: Travel
Some photo’s
For reasons I am not going into, photography things have been…sparse of late. I have photo’s of France, Warsaw and Berlin I would like to share with you but that is going to take a lot of work and time. So in the meantime here are some photo’s for you to look at! Enjoy!
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P.s. I didn’t know that wordpress came with a ‘slideshow’ option so I thought I would try it.
New Zealand Post 5 – Inside the Sky Tower
Terracotta Warriors
The Sky Tower, as visitors to the website will have found out, is a small part of Sky city, a hub of shops, restaurants, and many more places to part you from you money, I think there is a hotel there somewhere as well. Our visit to Auckland happened, by chance, to coincide with a visit from the Terracotta Warriors, the Sky casino was the setting for the warriors, and they had a few rooms and a corridor to themselves. Mind you I think they missed a photo opportunity of a Terracotta warrior next to a games machine, or is that just me? Anyway. The advantage of the warriors being in the casino meant I was able to take photographs galore and get up really close to the warriors themselves. The display was superb but not large. The organisers had evidently tried to lengthen the experience and therefore m
ake it seem more value for money by adding a lot of story boards concerning the warriors. It was a fascinating history, but it seemed to me obviously contrived to make the experience lon ger. The warriors had a room to themselves. They were on the the floor so it was possible to see exactly how tall they are. All in all it was a fantastic opportunit y, although sadly short.
New Zealand Post 4: Auckland Sky Tower
Dominating the Auckland skyline is the Sky Tower. It is very hard to miss, and you can see it from almost anywhere you stand in Auckland. It is a good landmark to navigate by. It costs to go up the tower (prices are on the website) but if you are going to eat in Orbit going up the tower is free. We went up the tower at night and saw Auckland in it’s night time glory. Auckland is a skyscraper dominated city and nearly all of them are light up in some way.
We ate in Orbit that evening. Slowly the restaurant turns as you eat, enabling you to see a 360 view of Auckland. We got there just as the sun was beginning to set and the moon was in the sky above the harbour. The starter is served to you at your table. In this case it was different sorts of freshly baked bread with Red wine and Grapefruit butter! Different and interesting. The rest of the meal is buffet based and sadly not much for vegetarians, but the omnivorous should have an excellent meal.
New Zealand Post 3 – Auckland Quay
Right Ladies and Gentlemen as you will have guessed by now I do have a lot of material here. So to make life easier, if you are on The Roaming Vegetarian home page, you will see a list of links on the right hand side of the screen. The links are in categories. Under the ‘Travel’ category, you will see a list of links called ‘New Zealand post 1′, ‘New Zealand Post 2′ etc. Just do the obvious, click on the link to read it. Meanwhile…
Auckland Quay
One of things I have learned to my cost was to avoid shellfish if you are suffering from Jet lag. It is difficult to know what to say about Aucklands quay. It is designed for tourists and sadly has no heart. There are
innumerable cafés and restaurants, and there are the Fuller’s ferries but little else.
One of the places we ate at near the ferry terminals was a sushi place. I can highly recommend the eel. I have loved eel since I tried it in a sushi place in Glasgow. There genuine veggie sushi on the menu although you should watch out if you are ordering the set lunches, make doubly sure that no meat is involved.
New Zealand post 2 – Auckland 1
We took a shuttle bus from Auckland airport as recommend by one of the volunteer tour guides. As a treat we stayed in the Heritage Auckland. To me it felt much like an upper class ibis. Not entirely surprising as it is a chain. The staff are charming and very helpful but to my mind it lacked character. That is a very minor complaint however as there is much to recommend it. As soon as the staff there found out we were on our honeymoon, we were presented with a complimentary bottle of champagne. The breakfast is sumptuous! There is plenty choice for vegetarians. There are two types of breakfast. The cold buffet and the hot buffet, the cold buffet is a few dollars cheaper than the hot one. There is a gym of sorts on the top floor and if you are suffering from Jet lag, there is nothing like a swim at 6 o’clock in the morning to set you up for the day!
The heritage charge 25NZD for non-optional valet parking.
A clustered network of souvenir shops and eateries. The chief product of the souvenir shop in New Zealand is paua shell, of which the New Zealanders can feel justly proud. I have never seen such a beautiful shell before, and clearly the New Zealanders know this. The paua shell is clearly very versatile as the countless forms it can take attests to. About 90% of the jewellery in every souvenir shop we visited in New Zealand is paua shell based. This does have the slight disadvantage of saturation but at least you can be selective as there is a great deal of choice. There is one shop in there that is worth a mention, but sadly for all the wrong reasons. It is an ‘antique’s’ shop, though ‘antique’ could be used as a euphemism for ‘tat’. It is run by an Irishman, and I suppose we should have noticed the lack of people in his stall. Let’s just just as soon as he realised that we were tourists from Britain, we were trapped there for about an hour. Perhaps at any other time I would have been interested, but this is not a man to meet if you are still suffering from jet lag.
New Zealand post 1
About a year ago, my husband and I went to New Zealand. Well it was our honeymoon. I have been working on the diary/pictures on and off since then. I now have some material I am going to post. I have hit upon a slight problem as to how I am going to organise the posts, so you’ll have to bear with me….
Introduction:
It is a two day journey from Britain, and for the first time instead of my usual rucksack I bought a small wheelie case to use as carry-on luggage. The thinking behind this was that as this was a longer journey on an aircraft naturally I was going to need more things to keep me occupied. I shouldn’t have worried. The in-flight entertainment was more than adequate for me as every seat in economy had a small screen as well as the usual newspapers and magazines if you felt like reading. We flew with Royal Brunei airlines, which, as we were warned beforehand, is a dry, Muslim airline. Flying with the airline was fascinating. The hostess wore veils, thus proving (at least to me) the veil can look flattering. Mind you I imagine the airline designed the uniform specifically with that in mind! Before the plane took off the flight was blessed. As the small screens showed intriguing and marvellous images of Muslim temples and Mecca a voice recited a prayer in Islam and for those not fortunate enough to speak that language, a translation was provided at the bottom of the screen.
Chasing the Sun
Whilst other passengers slept peacefully or watched the movies provided I looked out of the window. One of the reasons I like flying is flying through clear blue chasing the sun with a carpet of cloud underneath. The spectacular formation of clouds, each different, look almost like landscapes of their own. I confess though I am always wary of taking out my camera and snapping away at them, not because I am worried by the other passengers will think, it is mainly because I am not sure whether using a DSLR is allowed. Which I why a missed probably one of the a most beautiful scene. Before this flight I have never been on a plane flying from night into day. It is something not to be missed. The sky shades blend beautifully from black with the odd twinkle of stars to dark blue through the spectrum to orange and red as you catch the dawn of the new day.
Airports
The flight stopped at several airports on the way and when you travel a lot they do tend to start merging in with one another despite the desperate attempt by the people that own them to put an individual stamp of uniqueness on them, and usually failing. There was one airport on this journey that did stand out. Brunei Airport. Rather than the usual clean whiteness of most of the other airports I have ever been in, this was richly decorated in red’s and gold. Again there are the customary shops, but these were more like posh market stalls selling things that are associated with the country. This would fall into the category of ‘cheap tourist tat’ but in that airport you could see they had made the effort. There was the ‘cheap tat’ but also some very nice things too.
Rannoch Moor
My husband has said, correctly, that as this is supposed to be a photo blog, I don’t actually put many photograph here. This is partly due to laziness, the other reasons I will not go into in any great detail. Needless to say fear and pride are involved.
However since I am doing a photography degree, and since this is partly a photography blog. Here is a couple of pictures for my very few readers to chew over.
It is a picture of Rannoch Moor. For those who are not to familiar with Scotland let me explain a little about where this photo was taken from. Travelling through Scotland I am frequently struck by the fantastic scenery just outside the car window. I have stared out the window, my finger itching to get at my camera only to realise that it would sadly be impossible. However, Scotland being a tourist destination, sometimes provides dedicated spaces at the side of roads where you can park, get out and obviously take pictures. Sadly on this stretch of road there is a space at the beginning of the interesting scenery and there is a space at the end. The scenery I wanted to get at was in the middle. This meant playing dodgems with the speeding drivers. However some of the photo’s I took made the terror worthwhile…
Purple Skye
This is a post about a holiday on Skye that I wrote about a year ago. This is by far my fovourite post from my old blog, which has since been deleted (by me!!!)
Hello there, what follows is the incomplete (and never to be completed to be honest..) account of my holiday on Skye. I call it ‘Purple Skye’ because as we drove and walked through Skye the heather was in bloom and the landscape was coloured a delicate shade of purple. It is well worth seeing. There are some things I didn’t get around to writing about. The first week of the holiday was spent in Oban. Oban is the ideal place to base yourself if you are planning on island hopping. There is a special ticket you can buy from Caledonian Macbrayne that will enable you to island hop to your hearts content for a certain amount of time. But I think I mention that. We caught the ferry from Oban to Mull, and we travelled through Mull to Iona and Staffa. Staffa is the home of Fingals cave, which is well worth seeing as it is formed by volcanic eruption that form hexagonal columns. Also I do not mention the ‘Fairy Glen’ on Skye which is a little valley full of conical shaped hills, which are naturally formed. Anyway without further ado, here is the epically long blog post that I wrote at the time.
Called the misty Isle, once Ben and I had stayed here over-night we could easily see why. During the day it seems that the mist and clouds are content to surround and swirl at the top of their mountains. Once evening comes however a great white blanket descends and the roads you thought you knew seem suddenly different. It is as thought some great god is playing a game of hide and seek.
At first when we approached the holiday apartment that was to be our home for the next week, I was alarmed. To me it seemed completely isolated and in the middle of nowhere. Something Sherlock Holmes once said came to mind. He said the country side was isolated and dangerous and that is how I felt. However once I got over the sheer isolation of the place, it windswept beauty captivated me. Little white houses are dotted here and there over the moors, each one containing it’s own little community, which probably in the holiday season consists mostly of tourists. From the windows, the view leads on to heather covered moorland, to the little white houses that seem to be the standard on Skye, to the loch beyond. Portree is 15 miles away, which is about 30 minutes away by car. Portree is most definitely a large town, not a city. At 6.00pm when we were there fisherman were bringing in the days catch, most of which will either end up on a tourists plate by the end of the evening, or on it’s 3000 mile trip to Spain and Portugal. It has made me appreciate more the quality of local produce. The houses are prettily coloured in a style which regrettably I now associate with Balamory. It is a town with infinite charm and comfort as it has familiar supermarkets such as Co-op and a Somerfield. Apart from that though, it has retained a character which is entirely it’s own, though I suspect eventually it may succumb to the generic personality which are the feature of most towns and cities. Rather more pleasing is the preponderance of seafood restaurants. Admittedly restaurants are a feature you will find in most places that attract tourists, nevertheless they advertise themselves as ‘locally caught’ seafood, so when you are eating a mussel, by and large you are guaranteed to be eating a Scottish mussel.
I have taken to the place we are staying in. You can hear the wind whistle through the houses near us. There are sheep, probably belonging to our landlady or at least someone near us, in the back garden. Our landlady keeps hens and geese, and 2 watchdogs who bark when there are strangers about. Some guests managed to get some eggs from her. I am not brave enough to ask unfortunately. I have had eggs ‘straight from the chicken’ before and the flavour is unbeatable. The views as I have said before are windswept mountains covered in blooming purple heather with yellowing ferns, the occasional stream and tree are a feast for the eyes.
Even on sunny days Skye lives up to it’s name ‘Land of Shadows’(see Celtic mythology). As the sun shines brightly over head, the mountains cast long shadows over the moors. Skye is a photographers dream and nightmare. The nightmare I will come on to later. The fact is since we been here we have had a wide range of varied weather. Skye is best seen on sunny days, the mountainous landscape and purple moorlands are quite beautiful, but for me the mist is so eerily atmospheric, it has a character all of it’s own. The mist likes to play tricks. When I first get up in the morning for example, I can see from the kitchen window, the back garden, the small field our land lady keeps the sheep and hens in, the moorland, the sea, and on a clear day, the outer Hebrides, then the mist rolls in, within half an hour the visibility can be cut down to no more than a few meters. It is as though the mist likes to play games. When driving around in the mist, somehow it seems easier to imagine what life must have been like for the people who lived here hundreds of years ago. Having been to the ‘Skye Museum of Life’ in the mist the crofts that the people lived in, and often with their animals as well, were dark. It is easy to imagine the people sitting in their houses looking out at the rain whilst in the midst of a hard days work.
Most of Skye is geared towards tourism. You can wonder through a village on the remotest part of Skye thinking you have found a part of Skye that is untainted by the evils of tourism, and low and beyond, there is a b and b. This does not bother me particularly, as I believe they are moving with the necessities of time, more money can be made through tourism than agriculture. What I do like about this though is the fact that in the villages at least every house owns something live-stock related. Be that Chickens, geese, sheep or cows, by and large you will see something grazing in the back garden. It does make me wish I could keep chickens, That of course is impossible as you are not allowed to keep ‘livestock’ in a house that is classified as private residence and not a farm. On a slight side note there is something I have always wanted to know about keeping chickens, my sort-of uncle kept chickens (in Belgium), and when the cockerel died, he slit it’s throat, drained the blood and fed it to the hens, who drank it willingly, I want to know is this usual behaviour or was my uncle being weird?
As tourism is big on Skye, and as there are islands practically within view of your bedroom window, any tourist will follow the natural curiosity and go to visit them. The first island we visited whilst on Skye was the island of Rathsaay. It is a very small island, but has quite a large community, large enough at least to necessitate the building of a primary school. We took the Cal-Mac ferry from Sconser and after a 15 minute crossing arrived on Rathsay. It is an island worth visiting if you like walking. There are lots of hills and things to see if you have the time to stop for a few hours and do the walking. Ben and I just hopped over to the island to have lunch in the Isle of Rathsay Hotel. A very nice hotel, but I have to say the most memorable thing about it were the 2 resident cats who were adorable. They are not allowed in the bar area or the residents lounge, but invariably and through trickery they nearly always manage, until the manageress throws them out.
The outer Hebrides, to my surprise were visable from our apartment window. Coming from the south (the south east originally, now Glasgow) the outer Hebrides seemed to be a long way away, remote and far removed, but really from Uig they are less then a 2 hour ferry journey away. If you are staying on Skye, it is possible to take a day trip to them and it is well worth the expense. Ben and I had bought an island rover ticket from Oban which was 52 pounds each for foot passengers for eight days on any Cal-Mac ferry route. If you are planning a lot of island hopping on your scottish holiday, this is the ticket to buy. However it is also worth remembering that travelling as a foot passenger is automatically a lot cheaper than travelling with a car. 
Invariably when we landed in Lochmaddy, apart from being eaten alive by midges who had seemed to take up residence there, I was reminded of Skye. There are some similarities in the style of housing and the relative sizes of villages and towns. On Skye and from travelling for a mere few hours in the outer Hebrides I am struck by the differences not only between ‘town’, ‘village’ and ‘city’ but also between what I will now refer to as ‘city towns’ and ‘country towns’ and probably ‘island towns’. I haven’t done the journalist thing and talked at length with the locals, I am one of life’s tourist’s I am afraid, the differences I am picking up on are visual. I will let you decide. I get the impression that as these communities are small that there is an element of ‘everyone knows everyopne else’ and because of this crime is relatively unheard of. As the tour guide said, everyone leaves their cars open, and the doors to their houses unlocked. There is a court on North Uist (the island we arrived on), but the sheriff only comes on the frist tuesday of every month. It is amazing to me that there is that there are places that safe in Britian where you can leave your door open in the certain knowledge that no-one is going to pinch anything. Collections of few scattered houses gather along roadsides and to me they seem rather lonely. From what I can see, there are some houses that seem so far removed from every other house, you wonder who the inhabitants interact with. Of course outside every house you see is a car. A necessity when the nearest shop is a car drive away. 80% of the island is owned by Lord Granville, and the islanders pay a land rent of 25 pounds a year. They are happy to pay this as if they bought their own land, they would lose subsides that are given to them by the government. I was only in the outer Hebrides for a few hours but you can see why these subsides would be necessary. The bus travelled on main roads and I saw I co-op shop. There seemed to be a complete absence of the shops I am used to seeing in the high street. Whilst driving through North Uist, and indeed the week I have spent on Skye, I have not seen any Marks and Spencers, BHS’s, Asda’s, Tesco’s, Sainbury’s, House of Fraser’s, Waterstone’s, or Border’s. In a way it has been strange, but heavenly! I will miss the complete absence when we head back to Glasgow!
Both Islands we drove through on the bus were quite beautiful. Not just for their mountains, but also for their beaches. North Uist has the clearest white sand I have ever seen. Like the rest of the island it seems relatively untouched by commercialism ( I saw no bins on the beach for example). It is the perfect place to walk and take photographs, as with the countryside there it is virtually impossible to take a duff one.
The bus took us from Lochmaddy (home of the midges, we weren’t bothered by any anywhere else on the island, they must be able to smell fresh tourist) to Port nan Long and across a 7.8million pound causeway opened by Prince Charles, to Berneray to catch the ferry. Apparently Prince Charles used to stay on Berneray at least once a year before the causeway was opened, but now since he opened the causeway, and anyone can now visit Berneray, he has not been back. That show you what he thinks about visitors doesn’t it? Or maybe he thinks it is more easily accessible to terrorists now the causeway has opened. Though I think the only terrorists the Berneray may expect maybe the Urban in search of the Rural. Between Berneray and Leverburgh is six miles of water…which takes an hour to cross. I can’t help but imagine Cal-mac cursing when they agreed to take on this route and then realised what it would entail. Six miles of water which is literally full of shipping hazards in the shapes of small islands and pieces of rock in the water. I am not a sailor (it’s obvious really isn’t it?) but there is not one bit of water between these two islands that is clear of rock or small island. As a mere observer, it is fantastic to be on deck and look and wonder as the boat appears to pick it’s route daintily between them. The boat meanders this way and that, alarms sound as the boat goes to near the various buoys marking the route (I suppose that is what the buoys are for anyway, I said I know nothing about this kind of thing). Eventually the ferry lands at Leverburgh. Again a collection of houses and services have collected around the terminal, not only to serve the people that live there but also the tourists that come off the ferry. For me and Ben it was on another bus from Leverburgh to Tarbert on Harris. Harris is a different island to Uist. There are slightly more mountains, the most starling difference for me though was the colour of the sand. The sand on North Uist had been white, the sand on Harris was yellow. Not just yellow, but the right shade of yellow. The colour that you expect when, as a young child, you get taken to the beach for the first time and you expect sand to be the same colour as the sun. It was bright yellow. I wonder what it is like in the summer months? Is it full of sunbathing tourists? I would not be surprised. It seemed that the tourism for the beach we stopped at seemed to be geared up for photo’s. There was a bin on the roadside, and parking spaces on the road, but none nearer to the beach. You can get to the beach from the car park, but if you were with children and you had, say several inflatable things to carry, it would be a bit of an obstacle course to get to.
The islands are very beautiful and well worth the visit.
