A Day in the Mountains

Wednesday 16 August 2000. If you have read the previous article you will know we are on a coach holiday in Austria and that yesterday the coach was struggling to get up hills. Our drivers, John and Keith had stayed up late into the early hours waiting for a DAF mechanic to give the fuel feed lines a once over.

Not only that, but they took it for a long drive up and down hills to make sure it was behaving. So we all got onboard this morning excited to be going high up into the Alps for a look at the Grossglockner glacier.

With many houses in Austria being built of wood or at least framed in wood, there are timber yards galore here. Wood is a big industry.

We started to climb and waved to a group of men cutting the grass on an extremely steep slope. This was being done with scythes, the old way. One or two waved back. A few minutes later the coach started slowing and Keith had to start going down through the gears. It made no difference. The coach was not going to get up some of the steep hills in front of us.

This must have been a nightmare for the drivers but they handled it very well. First a suitable place had to be found to turn the coach around without having to do a 261-point u-turn on a narrow steep road with a long drop to one side! Then we retraced our route back down, waving again to the grass cutters, at least one of whom looked a bit bemused as he waved back. We got to the DAF agent, whose mechanic had seen the coach last night and we would have to wait for a replacement coach.

Keith warned us that the replacement coach would come with its own driver but that he would go with us whilst John waited with our coach, which would be being repaired during the day. The Austrian driver had been dropping the oil on another coach and was worried that he was not in uniform. Once he turned up though, the ladies on the coach started pumping oestrogen all over the place as a tall, blonde muscular young man turned up in shorts...

Fran took her rucksack from the overhead rack, ready to move to the new coach. A bread roll, taken from the breakfast table as per Keith's instructions of last night, bounced down the aisle of the coach to shrieks of laughter from everyone who hadn't heard Keith ask us to bring it. "They've nicked the bread for their dinner!" came a gleeful yell, "are you hungry?!?"

By lunchtime we were on our way again and had reached a town called Heiligenblut. The name of the village means "Holy blood" and it was to here that a phial of blood from Jesus's body on the cross was brought. Gallons of this along with several forests'-worth of splinters from the cross were peddled across the world during the first 1000 years after Christ's crucifixion. In terms of the time lapse between the later findings, it's the same as someone today offering to sell you the real string from Robin Hood's bow (honest Guv...)

We had our lunch in this cafe. Pommes frites - chips or fries depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on! (Oh... and tomato ketchup naturally!) I hadn't a clue how to pronounce this - which was the only thing on the menu I recognised. I said the French "pom freet" upon which a chap eyeing us from the next table suddenly burst out laughing and then choked... "Pommus frittess!" the waitress said sternly. The choking diner looked sheepish and turned back to his own dinner. Whilst we enjoy our dinner, back at the DAF garage John the driver has found himself locked in the garage after the staff went for lunch without telling him...

There was time to look in a couple of shops. I've never been a big beer drinker, but these steins looked very impressive!

Keith explains to the women that no... Chris the Austrian driver can't spend the rest of the week with us...

We leave Heiligenblut and start to climb into the Alps. The road, to say the least, is spectacular! In the lower regions the scenery is full of superb views overlooking villages, chalets and churches.

Chris's coach has a TV screen showing the first satellite navigation system that most of us have ever seen. It's fascinating watching it. the map was stationary and the marker depicting the coach moved up from bottom to the top of the screen. It was uncanny how many times the top of the screen coincided with approaching the top of a steep climb where all that could be seen ahead through the window was sky. Then the top was reached, a further bit of road came into view, and the display reset with the next segment of map and the coach marker at the bottom of the screen!

Once the coach reached the higher ground, hairpin bends and breathtaking drops were the order of the day. We'll have a closer look at those going down. Then eventually the coach turned into a turning and stopped. We have reached the glacier. Well, shall we say that we have reached as far up as the coach can go. Now there is a climb, starting with a hundred or so steps up from the car park! The road is so steep that even walking a little way along from where the coach turned off the road, we are now way above the car park level. Now what did we bring that bread roll for?

Keith at last told us the reason for the bread rolls... Cue for more hilarity in the coach as the other passengers realised we had not snaffled our breakfast rolls to eat in case we got cut off by snow... The Austrian marmot is a great deal bigger than the praire marmots or praire dogs that I had seen before (in zoos - I'm not that well travelled!) They were doing quite nicely out of the crowds at the glacier, obviously having quite a liking for a good "butty" as we would say in the north of England! So much so that there wasn't really much need for me to throw them any more!

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Independent in Rhodes

Sunday, 22 August 2010. It's our last port of call. We wake up in Rhodes, moored against the dock and having decided that we are just going to walk off the ship and into the city which is so close to the harbour that even a bus isn't needed.

Rhodes Harbour. It was here (well... just around the corner to the right...) that another of the Seven Wonders, the Colossus of Rhodes was built, a huge bronze statue straddling the harbour. An earthquake destroyed it and lumps of it then littered the place for 700 years until it was sold for scrap and taken away on the backs of 400 camels.

St Paul visited Rhodes once he started his travels and there is a gateway into this fort that bears his name and that he was supposed to enter the city by.

This photo was taken from just inside the city walls and you can see how close the marina is. The harbour is not much further away. The city was well defended, having been fortified by the Knights Hospitallers after they were driven from Jerusalem. This medieval city is well worth exploring. But of course we are exploring the shops...

Hey hey! I've found one that's worth looking inside! Fran can't believe it and for a while walks up and down outside, with her head in her hands whilst I am inside buying a few guitar picks just in case I get another chance of a spot in the Horizons Bar!

There are just so many brilliant sights in Rhodes that I can only cherry pick here. There are bars-cum-restaurants every second doorway and walking along is to accept a constant barrage of "Drink? Beer? Coffee?" even though they have just watched you turn down their neighbours. One was particularly insistant. "You say 'no' to Georges?" he said to Fran, "you say 'no' to Georges?!?" he can't seem to believe it. "Say 'no' just one more time!"
"No!!!!!!" says Fran forcefully. He gives up. Well she frightened me, never mind him...

Up at the top of the hill we came across a number of painted trees. This was quite clever, taking the unique shape of the tree and building on it. Another one had a cat chasing a mouse down the trunk.

The fortifications are evident everywhere. It as though the entire city is the fortress and certainly the Knights Hospitallers were able to withstand several invasion attempts and sieges.

It was hot. We went back down the hill and stopped for a drink at the same bar we had used on a previous visit. Just sitting with a long drink and watching people was entertainment enough! We had walked several miles and after the drink walked a few more before returning to almost the same table and flopping for a second time.

Later in the Horizon Bar I was glad to have found the music shop as Tomas and Maris very generously invited me up on stage again. So whilst others were going home with new clothes, trinkets and souvenirs, I brought back half a dozen Greek guitar picks!

I played Joe Brown's Picture of You at the end of one of Tomas and Maris's 6 sets for the night and we sat afterwards chatting with them until it was time for them to go on again.

The week had started with a generator fault. At 11:30pm when we were well out at sea, Tomas and Maris were halfway through a song when the sound and all the lights went out. The emergency lighting came on after a brief moment and then after about ten minutes waiting Tomas and Maris carried on singing without the aid of any amplification and accompanied with just the guitar. Then the intercom bell sounded the code for a Captain's announcement and his voice came over the speakers: "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. As you may have noticed..."

A generator, the same or another, had hiccupped and as a result all the earth breaker switches onboard had tripped. It would take a full hour to reset them all with the air conditioning taking precedence. Tomas and Maris played a brilliant set acoustically and then an officer appeared to reset the switch and bring the sound system online. I wondered how the Captain had made the announcement but Tomas explained that there were both 240 and 110 volt circuits onboard and whilst they were using one circuit, the main intercom was on the other. Only the one had blown.

With all systems restored and only a short distance to sail back to Marmaris, we put aside hopes of an enforced extra day's holiday! So tomorrow will see us back on a flight to England and rain!

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Marmaris by Night - and Day - and Night

Monday, 16 August 2010. The generator problem on the Thomson Celebration hasn't been fixed. The engineering team will work through the night and then assess things at 7:00am. Well... worse things happen at sea, as they say!

Meanwhile we shrug and have a look around the Promenade Deck at Marmaris by night. There's not a huge number of people walking around the deck - 5x round which equals one mile.

The castle is floodlit and the clubs and bars are all it up. Even the Turkish carpet shop is floodlit! In the marina some of the more impressive boats show signs of life, even if it's only the owners relaxing and reading the newspaper.

Onboard the ship the entertainments team were gearing up for their first night. As with most ships there was a variety of entertainment onboard with a West End style show every evening, a programme of quizzes and game show formats to join in with, a classical duo of violin and piano, a four piece band from the UK who had some excellent harmonies and a duo called 2 Intense in our favourite bar, Horizons.

2 Intense were Tomas and Maris from the Philippines and when we first saw them we were sitting well away from the stage near the front windows of the bar. Maris announced a Carpenters song as their first number and I thought "Ooh... that's brave!" But when she started to sing you would have thought Karen Carpenter was in the room! She had a beautiful voice. And the rest of her matched... There will be more about Tomas and Maris in later entries as we got to know them and became good friends. In fact, they were so good we didn't see a single show in the main show lounge all week! Maris even claimed that singing a Carpenters song was her way of relaxing...

We had been up at 3:30am. So it wasn't a particularly late night for us!

Tuesday, 17 August 2010, 7:00am. We hadn't moved. An update to come at 12:00 noon.

17 August 2010, 12:00 noon. The engineering crew have fabricated a new part with the help of a local engineering firm. This is quite a feat I'm sure, having seen a similar repair on one of those fly-on-the-wall programmes set on the Costa Serena cruise ship. And given where we were, trying to get a spare from the manufacturers would have perhaps taken just a little longer. Next update at 6:00pm.

17 August 2010, 6:00pm. Hoping to sail at Midnight. There's a revised itinerary. After an extra day in Marmaris, tomorrow, which is Wednesday will be a day at sea. Thursday will be Istanbul, currently 321 nautical miles away as the crow swims. We will stay in Istanbul until 5:00am on Friday to allow people to savour Istanbul. Then Friday will be another day at sea but with a slow pass through the Dardanelles and a commentary as we pass Gallipoli and the monuments to the fallen of World War One. Saturday will be Kusadasi for Ephesus and Sunday will be our final (and only the third) port call in Santorini. So both Troy and Rhodes are off the plan. There's a slight atmosphere discernible and several passengers are seen to be counting on their fingers and shaking their heads.

Now all things being equal, one day lost would only equal one port lost. When you think about it though it requires ports to be able to accommodate an extra ship on a day it wasn't expected and for something like 12 to 15 coaches to be found for excursions to places that can cope with the extra numbers. So perhaps not all that straightforward.

To be honest, the ship's crew didn't really explain the loss of an extra day all that well. It was me who came up with the above arguments for instance. So from that point on the restaurants and bars all had their share of would-be lawyers preparing their case for compensation whilst we just shrugged and watched them ruin their own holidays by working themselves into a frenzy of indignation. There were even conspiracy theories that it was a ruse to save fuel - ignoring the fact that Istanbul was the furthest port and we were going there anyway and would pass within spitting distance of both Dikili and Rhodes.

17 August 2010, 11:30pm. Coming out of Horizons bar, still miles away from the stage but having enjoyed the music.

Wednesday, 18 August 5:00am. Ooh! Movement! We are sailing!

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Cruise Celebration at Marmaris

Monday 16 August 2010. We were up early as the airport taxi picks us up at 4:30am to head for Manchester where we catch a flight to Dalaman in Turkey. Once landed we pile onto a coach and swap excited banter with fellow passengers about the heat.

An hour and a half later finds us in Marmaris to embark for a week on the Thomson Celebration cruise ship. The itinerary is a day at sea, Istanbul, Dikili for Troy, Kusadasi for Ephesus, then Santorini and Rhodes.

It's our second time on the Celebration and we find ourselves in the cabin next door to where we were last year on the Pearls of the Aegean cruise. This year we are taking the Ottoman Treasures cruise.

This is Cabin 016 up on Deck 9. Spacious enough for a week's wandering around exotic ports! Ok, let's have a look where we are!

There's a marina to our port side and looking forrard (how these nautical terms just slip easily onto the keyboard...) we see the gorgeous blue of the southern Turkish coastal waters. Lunch. We find a few faces amongst the waiters who we recognise and, astonishingly, who recognise us from last year. Was I so badly behaved? Surely not!

There's a castle off the starboard side, aft of the ship but the low sun coming from behind it makes a photograph impossible. I have my trusty sketch pad with me however and spend half an hour scribbling until something vaguely resembling the scene appears. There may be one or two more buildings, their sizes may be a little more comfortable for their occupants than my depiction of a model village on the front corner and there were certainly more boats, but hey, whose sketch is it anyway?

And what's this on the intercom? The engineering crew are struggling to fix a faulty generator and are having to fabricate a part! There could be a bit of a delay to our sailing...

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Nice End to a Not Nice Week

It's been one of those weeks. Started with the car screeching one of those metallic squeals at us. Stopped at the next services on the motorway to find the rear wheel radiating heat alarmingly.

Hang on... I paid £200 to have that problem on that wheel fixed not so long ago! Luckily the problem this time (only this time?) was the handbrake sticking on which required a new handbrake cable fitted. Huge relief until I went to pick it up and found another bill for £200 waiting for me. "It's a right job with them...!" For £200 for a handbrake cable I should bloody hope it's a right job...

Long term readers (er... you do exist, right?) may remember me having to have an operation on the nose a few years ago and whilst it went spiffingly, (ignoring the following infection which had me off work for three months and resulted in some spectacular bouts of nose bleeding) the nasal passages have been steadily shrinking since then and it's getting to crisis point again. Date for the specialist has been set, but for now I'm going through all the familiar side effects of the steroid spray with 2 or 3 (smaller) nosebleeds a day.

Plus my ear bunged up with wax and I've gone fairly deaf in one ear - makes David's singing a bit more palatable of course, but not good really (my hearing I mean, not David's singing which at times approaches ok...) and my ear feels as though I'm in a descending aeroplane and wouldn't I just love it to go "pop" and clear! Putting ear oil in has only softened the outside of the wax "plug" and eventually after a full week of not being able to shift it, I got the doc to have a look to make sure I wasn't trying to soften the remains of a spider that had curled up and died in there... His reaction was that it was unlikely to shift before another week goes by and that it will need syringing out even then. Great... If you ask me a question and I don't respond it's nothing personal, ok?

And then poor Mum got confirmation that she has cancer, though relief all round when it turned out to be contained and should hopefully be easily operated on. But that was obviously the big scare and health story of the week and I'm not even thinking of joking about that.

Finally in the ever-growing health row of dominoes that I've had for the past few years, the doc gave me some water tablets to tackle the size of my feet, which now require clowns' shoes, following my introduction to the pills for hypertension. (I'm busy - I need high blood pressure!)

A week on the first lot made little difference, so yesterday morning the doc, after freaking out a little when I asked him to check there wasn't a spider in my ear, upped the doseage of my water pills with the result that today has been extremely interesting during a day out to the Lake District, where we took Mum for her birthday. That half hour was the longest boat trip I've ever taken. I was thinking I might have to make a personal apology to the residents of Manchester (whose drinking water is pumped from Lake Windermere) but, luckily, I made it onto the pier (unfortunate term...) at Ambleside and they had some Gents...

I don't follow football that much but sheesh I wish I was paid several annual wages every week just for cocking things up. Most people get into trouble for doing a rotten job. Footballers apparently get into a strop at a demonstration of fans' disappointment...

Talking of the World Cup, Marlene - one of the Ladies-over-the-Water, sent news of a woman who had torn her windpipe through blowing one of those vuvuzela horns. She said "I'm not blowing one again - it wasn't much fun..."

Meanwhile, Amanda, another of the threesome that make up the Ladies-over-the-Water, sent me a photo at Christmas of a new wine decanter she was very proud of. She and her hubby Paul and her neighbours were gathered round it drinking the wine from straws... Not sure they quite got the concept of a decanter, but anyway, she's broken it and asked if I'd print a memorial here... It was probably a fight over the last drop...

And (because I just can't leave her out can I?) Evy has had some new decking done in her garden outside her back door. There's been a long standing joke about her house because she once confused me by describing her stairs - it sounded as though they end abruptly halfway up her wall. Anyway... they obviously match the rest of the house because the back door has a drop of three feet to the garden...

Dissention in the Ranks

In the entry Stow-on-the-Wold I described how my first car, a Reliant Regal MkIV, needed to have the spark plugs cleaned every 20 miles.

This "sparked" (sorry!) an email from mate Alex:

"20 miles my arse - I remember going to the Regal (cinema not the Reliant) one time after you had spent half of Saturday afternoon cleaning your spark plugs, then you had to change the buggers again before we set off home!"

It's so sad when old friends lose their memories and succumb to old age, but the journey Alex is remembering was in my second car - a Reliant Regal MkV or MkVI which was a saloon car not a van and indeed messed up its spark plugs in a mere 7-10 miles. I had to ditch the van after the Department of Transport decided to ask me to have it weighed and it turned out to weigh more than the maximum allowed for a 16-year-old to drive.

This was due to a metal sheet that had been placed in the back of the van to cover holes in the wooden flooring! The blue Ford Anglia seat that had replaced Reliant's original deckchair style passenger seat couldn't have helped either...

I was lucky with cars - the saloon car gave up the ghost spectacularly when the engine mountings snapped one day, plunging the engine down and forward into the radiator, causing clouds of steam from the front of the car and great hilarity from the small crowd waiting at a bus stop just opposite...

Train of Disasters

Well, Fran and Gill got home ok on Sunday night but only just.

The train from Liverpool St Station - the Stansted Express - had to stop because of overhead problems at Cheshunt and they were told it wouldn't go any further. Ten carriages full of folk needing to get to the airport to catch flights. Some had already missed their check-in times by the time they were told it would go no further and most jumped off at the tiny station to form an impossibly long queue at a taxi rank that probably sees no more than two taxis at any one time. (The good folks at Cheshunt will forgive my ignorance if that assumption is a bit wild?)

The point being though that train companies show a complete and utter disregard for any passengers when this sort of thing happens. "It's not our problem", "It's not our fault", the best you can hope for is "You can claim your train fare back..."

Do they not have Risk Management at train companies I wonder? Presumably they do as far as health and safety goes, but they never seem to know what to do when a train breaks down or has to stop where it is for any length of time.

In mainline carriages where no windows open and you are totally reliant on the air conditioning that has gone off the guards still insist they cannot open doors even when it is so hot that smoke is coming from passengers' skin! "We'll sue you if you break that window" is the normal response.

Anyway, as the two ladies were getting somewhat worried and the time for their check-in to close loomed ever closer the decision was made that the train could, after all, carry on to Stansted. By which time Fran said there were not many more than two dozen passengers left on it. I wonder how many hundreds missed their flights?

Come on train companies - you should at least carry the phone numbers of all coach firms along your route, even if you leave it to passengers to pay for their coach trip.