I don’t have much time to write a post right now, I’m about to head out to a beer sampling tour of Prague, but I did upload photos from Germany so I figured I’d post them here.
So i promised many, many people that I would blog my trip and here I am 3 weeks in and i haven’t blogged at all. If you’re friends with me on facebook, google+ or twitter or foursquare then you’ll see some updates from me in all those places… but there’s something special about trying to write down your thoughts while travelling that a simple status update doesn’t cover. So here goes.
It may be strange to say, but even though I left Canada on June 21st, and am now into my fourth country (Iceland, UK, Holland, Germany), it doesn’t really feel like I’ve been travelling yet. Iceland was fantastic, but it was more a vacation than backpacking and for all but 2 nights since I’ve been staying with friends who have graciously let me stay with them in both London and Amsterdam.
Now, sitting in the bar under my hostel in Cologne, Germany I’m starting to feel like the trip is beginning for real. I’m nervous, excited, and I miss my partner something fierce… but with skype you’re never really apart from those you love even when you’re doing something silly like backpacking around the world for no apparent reason. 🙂
So. A quick recap to clear the cache and leave me ready for the road ahead.
I’m Canadian, and I come from a country with great wide vistas of unspoiled wilderness and I have been lucky enough to see some truly awe-inspiring landscapes in my own country, but Iceland is a whole different palette of landscapes. The colours, the shapes, the atmosphere is utterly unique and breath-taking. If you love dramatic landscapes you’ll love Iceland. Do yourself a favour and plan a couple guided excursions in the glacier region of the south-east of the island. You may think you can just go there yourself in the cheapest rental car available in the Keflavik airport, but they’re not kidding about needing 4×4 vehicles.
To top is all off, when you’re done with the landscapes and the sheer magnificence of the countryside, Reykjavik is a lovely Nordic city with great nightlife, world-class foodie level restaurants and fantastic shopping.
Oh, just one important note… bring lots of money, it’s expensive.
After a tearful departure from Iceland, with Moira heading back to toronto and me heading off on my own, I made my way to London to stay with Geoff. At this point my travelling starts to feel more like a personal episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, with Geoff bringing me to local haunts in Hackney, taking me to a Brazilian ju-jitsu lesson, a burlesque-comedy-cabaret featuring his fantastically funny girlfriend Lois-of-the-lane, and topping it all off having late night booze fueled deep discussions about political theory, monetary policy and art with our good friend Emily… well, it was a bit of a whirlwind of fantastic times with fantastic people.
After the weekend I made a quick stop over in Cambridge to visit the college of Sir Issac Newton, the father of modern physics and indulge my nerdery by otherwise soaking up the history of science through the several science focused museums in the area.
edit: photo album!
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| London, Canterbury and Cambridge |
I left Cambridge, taking the overnight ferry departing from Harwich to Holland and went to Amsterdam to visit an old friend Chris. Amsterdam is a beautiful city with a bad reputation. The whole red-light district is really just a couple seedy streets, surrounded by a much larger ring of coffee-shops, hostels, and tourist trap stores and restaurants. If you’re going to amsterdam for partying those few streets seem to be the epicentre, but if you’re going to amsterdam for a bit of history and culture the whole area can be safely avoided. If you must see it, just to see, do what I did and go during a weekday afternoon to avoid the crowds of roving drunk men and women. I concentrated my time in Amsterdam on walking around at random looking at the buildings and architecture and visiting museums. In keeping with my science nerd theme I went to NEMO, the science museum in amsterdam (highly recommend, especially if you’re travelling with kids), the Artis zoo which hilariously had raccoons in one of the exhibits, FOAM a museum dedicated to contemporary photography and the amsterdam hermitage.
Aside from Amsterdam I spent lots of quality time hanging out with Chris, his partner Alex, and even Chris’s aunt Deb who was also visiting at the time. They live outside of the city in a small town called Zaandam, which was Holland postcard beautiful with small cobbled streets and old fashioned wind-mills and topped off by a town wide smell of cocoa as there is a processing plant there. We went for what will probably be my flattest bicycle ride of this trip, I watched my first ever F1 race (team Red-bull won), and generally enjoyed the luxury of staying with an old friend in his house.
Well this section is yet to be written. I’m going to work on getting some pictures from the UK and Holland sorted and posted and maybe write something about Germany next week (no promises).
There, my cache is cleared, and I have room in my brain to think about the upcoming parts of my trip.
I originally wrote this while in Mexico last month, but I never published it… I intended to illustrate it with photos but as I don’t know if I’ll get around to doing that I guess I’ll just hit publish and be done with it!
January 28th, 2012
The diving is superb, but the town shows the strain of hosting the cruise industry. Cozumel is a small island, about a 30 minute high speed ferry ride away from Playa Del Carmen on the mainland of the Yucatan peninsula. I’ve come here to dive, but between dives there’s lots of time to spend exploring the island and ruminating on my thoughts.
Cozumel hosts cruise ships, I can’t believe how many ships dock here everyday. I picture the Caribbean sea as swarming with these enormous floating cities, plodding their way though an unmarked but well trodden highway in the water. Everyday, except Sunday as far as I can see, brings at least 3 and sometimes more cruise ships into the port of Cozumel. Something like 15,000 visitors who will stay a single day and be gone by 6pm in time for departure to the next Caribbean port waiting to sell them slightly different trinkets and expensive brand name gear identical to what they can get at home in Canada, the USA, or Europe, perhaps for less money.
Despite my griping, I’m sure the local citizens are happy to host these transient guests, they bring a seriously huge amount of money to an island who otherwise would have to depend on the money brought in by scuba diving tourists, who spend their money on the next tank of air rather than Mexican silver bracelets, rings, diamonds, and expensive watches.
The local satisfaction with this state of affairs notwithstanding, the huge infrastructure built up for these visitors which are gone by sunset makes the downtown of Cozumel feel like a ghost town at night. There are quite a few non-package tourists on the island, mostly staying in hotels in town or in super budget accommodation like my own, going to sleep early to dive the next morning… which also contributes to the ghostly’ness of the town at night. I think, minus the cruise infrastructure this would work, but the overall relaxed vibe of divers and the frenetic activity of the cruise passengers makes Cozumel feel like an unsettled place, unable to find it’s real groove.
I, unsurprisingly, was here to dive. The reefs around Cozumel are some of the best in the world, fed with a steady current that whips around the island, keeps the water temperature constant, and helps prevent the depredations of runoff and temperature change which are rapidly killing coral reefs around the world. During my 4 days of diving these reefs I’ve seen (numerous times) nurse sharks, sea turtles, octopus, rays of many sizes, trumpet fish, lobster, crabs, drummers, and countless other fish I don’t really know the names for.
Apparently someone stupidly introduced Lionfish to cozumel, a fish I’ve seen many times while diving in Thailand but one that lacks any natural predators in the Caribbean. The reefs around Cozumel are actually a national park, protected from fishing and probably more lucrative as a tourist destination, but for the Lionfish the park authority has decided to let the dive masters working the reef everyday take on the job of natural predator. It was on one dive where we saw three Lionfish that we had a really cool experience with a nurse shark – after having fed the first Lionfish to some grouper hanging around our divemaster decided to keep the last one in his pocket.
As we were getting close to the end of our dive, I was in fact just about ready to start my safety stop, a nurse shark swam up to ask our dive master for the tasty fish in his pocket. In case you don’t know, a nurse shark is a pretty tame shark, this one was about the size of a medium sized terrier and pretty much acted just like a puppy who wanted to play and smelled a treat in your pocket. This nurse shark hung around, swimming up to each of us and generally distracting us all as we tried to maintain an even depth of between 3 and 6 meters before surfacing. Even after he was fed he stuck with us, perhaps convinced that we were holding out on him, but eventually we all surfaced and he lost interest. In the end, we spent a good 10 minutes hanging out with the shark, it was perhaps the best experience of a solid run of great dives I had on the island.
Cozumel has been great, despite its conflicted personality, and it does seem to satisfy both the divers and the cruise passengers (not to mention the package tourists, but they really don’t spend lots of time in town anyways), and in the end it was a much needed mini-break for me before my big travel which should be starting in June/July of this year. I’ve had great dives, a ton of sun, and am ready to return to the frozen north… not to mention excited to finally see Pipes again when she returns from her adventure in Thailand.
Yes I’m travelling again, so that means writing a blog post. I am currently enjoying a cool breeze in the common area of a cheap but clean and so far good quality hostel in downtown Cozumel Mexico.
Today was pretty jet lagged (due to a stupid idea on my part to leave friday night, overnight in montreal, so I could catch the earliest saturday flight to cozumel. So that wasn’t my best plan, but I did make it to my hostel before noon today so I guess it worked, if you count having only had about 2 very much interrupted hours of sleep as a success.
Ok, enough about that, how about the food?
First meal of mexico was sorta a late lunch, I had to go to the dive shop to arrange details, size the equipment etc so after taking care of that I asked the owner/manager for the closest/best food. Ended up at a fairly busy touristy restaurant called La Choza, but despite the overabundance of tourist clientelle the food was still very tasty. I ordered the “Comida Nacional” which started with a tasty chicken noodle soup and ended with a plate full of beans, rice and fried beef. Good flavour but simple, and no real effort to spice it, not sure if that’s just how that dish is or if it’s the result of the tourist clients.
Cost with Cerveza – 107 Pesos
Next dinner at the closest place to the hostel – sorry I didn’t get the name. Unlike the restaurant near the dive shop this restaurant was pretty much exclusively mexican families, and they didn’t serve beer adding to it’s mexican family restaurant vibe. I had Fajitas Pollo con Quesa (chicken fajitas with cheese) and dang was it tasty! Enjoy some pics. Again not really spicy, but they did add some sauces which had good flavour but no heat.
Some photos here!
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