Travelling Man and Muse
2010 World Trip

The Last Post  In a couple of hours the hotel chauffeur will drive us to the airport and we will be on our way back home. We left the UK on Feb 1 and the last six weeks have just flown by.  We have seen some amazing places and had some wonderful experiences. With a few minor alterations to our itinerary, we would gladly start the whole trip all over again!  So what have been the high points, what have been the low points and what if any have been the disappointments? The best all-round experience by a very long way was Kangaroo Island and the Southern Ocean Lodge. Everything about this three-day stay was fantastic - the lodge itself, our suite, the food, the staff, the excursions, the scenery, the location, all were pretty near perfect. You might say, so it should be at the price, but it was just so good that you can't really argue about the cost. The only major Australian animal we didn't see there was the emu and I think I'll survive without getting up close and personal ...

Despite a weather forecast that suggested a cloudy, even stormy day, our last day in Cape Town is a scorcher. Even the mountain is visible today.  We wanted to visit District 6. This is the eastern district of the city about a mile and a half walk from our hotel that was razed to the ground over a fifteen year period by the apartheid government.  In the 1960s the government designated what was known as District 6 a whites only zone and declared that the whole area housing a thriving multiple-cultural community that had grown and developed since the late 1890s should be cleared to create more space for the white population.  The residents were resettled in areas outside the city centre in race-based townships and every single building throughout the neighborhood was demolished. Despite protests this was carried through and over 150,000 black, asian and mixed race people were forcibly resettled, their homes and businesses demolished and their communities destroyed. The District 6 museum ...

This is the last evening of our trip. We asked our hotel to find us something special preferably serving seafood. Kelly, the hotel receptionist who has been helpful from the first moment we arrived, booked us a table at Baia, considered to be the best restaurant of it's kind in Cape Town. She even arranged for the hotel's chauffeur to drive us there and collect us again after dinner.   The restaurant has a perfect location in the huge waterfront Victoria centre and it overlooks the harbour on two sides.  The food is certainly the best we've had in Cape Town and is one of the best meals since Southern Ocean Lodge.  In a London hotel this whole experience would cost a King's ransom. Here the most expensive main course is less than £25 and even with a very nice Sauvignon, our three courses of indulgence come to less than £100 in total.  Baia seats 400 people and it's full.  Sitting at the next table is an unassuming man and his companion. As we ask for our bill, he com...

The Cape Heritage Hotel is one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town at around 300 years old. In its courtyard winding itself round various frames and supports is what is known to be the oldest vine in South Africa and in much the same manner as happens in an Austrian 'Heurige' the grapes are harvested each year and turned into the hotel's own wine. It is however rather exclusive producing 4 magnums and just 12 bottles last year. The hotel is delightfully old-fashioned with just enough mod cons to make sure it has everything it needs, whilst retaining all of its georgian charm The floors are all polished timber, hopelessly uneven with old rugs; we have a four-poster bed, complete with canopy, but a great bathroom with a large free-standing Victorian style double-ended bath, separate lounge and air conditioning. Our ceiling is around 9ft high by the door, rising to at least 11ft by the windows. It's charming and rather fun. We're only staying tonight and tomorrow ...

The Comair flight to Cape Town is an early morning commuter flight. Our cabin is full of very serious looking individuals, tapping away at laptops or reading the early morning papers and all looking very smart. In the midst of this earnest group sit Travelling Man and Muse in our normal travel scruff outfits. This is a British Airways flight operated by Comair. I'm really not sure quite what that means. It's a BA plane, but the cabin staff aren't in BA uniforms and fuckadoodledoo the catering is pure BA - an absolute text book example of how to make good food disgusting. Breakfast on this flight started with a fruit platter. All you have to do to make this acceptable is cut up a small quantity of fresh fruit and arrange it on a plate. THEN STOP! Nope - BA can't do that. Instead they have employed an O-level chemistry student to create some disgusting, sticky, sweet, vaguely green slime to 'enhance' the appearance and flavour. What they have succeeded in doing...

Our 11 hour flight from Perth to Jo'Burg only took ten hours and SAA was as comfortable as a flying toothpaste tube can be. SAA don't have an equivalent to BA Club or Business so we get to travel First Class. Yes the food was OK, yes the the entertainment system was as good as these things get, yes the seats performed all manner or power-operated tricks and somersaults and yeas they went flat into what might have passed for beds. However, the designer may have misunderstood his brief or misunderstood the words 'soft' and 'flat'. For 'flat' he clearly read horizontal and it was indeed possible to place the seats/beds in a horizontal position. As for the idea that when in this position, these passed for beds in which one might get some sleep, well they fell a long way short of the mark. Were the Americans to adopt these rock hard and rather lumpy SAA First Class sleeper seats for use in interrogations where sleep deprivation was the intention, I susp...

The long way home via Cape Town.  It made sense to keep our apartment for an extra day, although we'll be vacating long before we can complete a night's sleep. We've come back after lunch and another bus ride for an afternoon snooze. Anyway it's got really hot today so we're both happy to be lounging around in air-conditioned comfort. It's meant we can shower, have a rest, finish the food in the fridge and change into our travelling clothes.   It was always going to be a long journey home. We have an eleven hour flight to Johannesburg, followed by a two-hour hop to Cape Town after a two-hour stopover and a seven hour time change.  Our Cape Town hotel has been very understanding. They've waived our first night room charge as we're arriving later than planned and they've rearranged our pick-up. It looks as though we're going to enjoy our stay albeit that it's shorter than planned.  At least we're starting in comfort in the Qantas club loung...

How best to spend our 'extra' time in Perth was not a difficult decision. We barely scratched the surface of Kings Park yesterday. Today we went to one of the non-Jacobs Ladder entrances on the western side of the city - an altogether easier entry point.  It's Monday so most people are at work. This huge space is almost deserted and we have a chance to walk round much more of it. Most of the park is actually an enormous botanic garden. It is broken up into dozens of separate areas all linked by attractive walks and pathways.  Each mini-park within the park features all the flora and fauna from a different part of Western Australia. Given that WA is larger than Texas and Alaska put together, that's a lot of botanic garden. The two main routes or walks around the whole thing are 'Lover's Walk' and 'Law Walk' - the first dovetailing neatly into the second......'twas ever thus! It's another glorious day naturally, the temperature hitting 31c by e...

Oh Shit! I have avoided mild obscenities up till now, but no longer. This is an 'oh shit' moment. After weeks of finding every booking working smoothly, whether it was a flight, a hotel or an excursion, we have encountered a minor cock-up, well more of a major catastrophe really. Our itinerary has us leaving Perth on March 8th at 11:00am. This is exactly as planned. Our apartment here was booked for March 5, 6 and 7 and our Cape Town hotel for March 8, 9 and 10. We are therefore enjoying a last comfortable night in our apartment. We're slowly packing, just looking out the tickets for tomorrow's flight. Oops! The tickets have us leaving about 8 hours ago! Our plane left this morning without us! Our tickets had us flying out on March 7th rather than the 8th. We were in Kings Park as our flight took off. The supreme irony is that at about the time it left, I was photographing the glorious view looking east from the park. In the photo is a Qantas plane taking off. I t...

We are nearing the end of our trip. We have this one last day in Perth and then we're on the way home with just the three day stop in Cape Town before we arrive back in the UK. I will post one or two more reports from Australia, but unless our Cape Town hotel provides free wifi or a business centre with free PC access, I will not be able to post our Cape Town reports until we get home In the USA, New Zealand and here in OZ it has made sense to buy a local SIM card. In South Africa, I don't expect that to be a viable proposition, so we'll take our chances and see what our hotel there is able to offer.  Sunday exploring Perth.....it's a beautiful day. The sun is shining out of a cloudless deep blue sky, but we could be walking out into a ghost town. There is absolutely no sign of life.  Where is everybody?  After a short walk, we have found them - the population of Perth, that is. Since 7:00am this morning they have been taking part in a triathlon event that seems to have...

One of the Muse's many functions whenever we travel is to ensure that I don't miss anything that should either be photographed or just looked at and appreciated.  That includes the local 'totty'!   Up until now there hasn't really been anything worthy of comment. We arrived in Sydney the day after the end of their gay Mardi Gras, yet disappointingly, the stranger creatures that had filled the newspapers the previous day had all but disappeared back into the undergrowth. Even the 5,000 or so who had apparently stripped naked and posed for a 'performance artist' on the steps of the Opera House had dispersed. In Perth, perhaps because it is hotter and sunnier here than anywhere else has been, there are one or two things that you can't really fail to notice.   I will just say this....if you're a leg man, then this would be one of the places you'd want to live. You would die happy! The favourite item of clothing for the Western Australian female aged...

We've decided to take a ferry along the Swan River into Fremantle and to take the train back. There is some very fancy residential real estate along both sides of the Swan River as we cruise downstream. One or two of the more prominent and extravagant constructions would set you back a cool AUD$60m or so, but you'd need pretty deep pockets if you wanted anything decent along the waterfront, even though it stretches for miles all the way from the city centre to the ocean on both banks of the river. And it seems that for every property there are at least a dozen boats. Apparently this area has the largest number of boats per head of population anywhere in the world. There are certainly plenty of yacht and boat marinas packed with boats of every size - mostly large! If you like waterfront living, this may well be the place. The properties are every bit as extravagant as they were in Sydney. The riverbank also boasts the world's smallest and most exclusive yacht club. It i...

Our longest - 4.5hr - Qantas internal flight was comfortable enough. As luck would have it, this was the only internal flight that we didn't get allocated the exit row seats, so it was a little more snug than previous flights. The in-flight lunch was a well thought out and carefully prepared chicken dish. It was disgusting. This was actually very considerate of Qantas, as it reminded us that we will shortly be returning to international travel, so we needed to be re-introduced to the standard that we can expect from BA! A couple of mindless in-flight movies helped pass the time and we soon touched down in Perth. Another efficient airport/airline performance ensured that within an hour of touchdown we were settling in to our apartment in the centre of the city. We have heard much about Perth, a city of only 2m people closer to Djakarta in Indonesia than it is to the major cities on Australia's east coast. It does have a flavour all it's own. We'd met people in Sydney wh...

We have spent our last full day in Sydney exploring its outer reaches. There hasn't been time for a trip out the Blue Mountains or to a number of the places that looked worth a visit. There are also many restaurants that will have to wait until we can return.  We won't even get to Bondi beach.....well who wants to see a whole lot of bronzed Aussies in marginally better physical shape than we are and a year or two younger to boot!  I'll cling to my fantasies and illusions thank you!!  Instead we have bought a one-day travel card which will allow us to use all the bus, ferry and train services throughout the city.  We start by heading out to Palm Beach. Apparently this is where the seriously monied have their ocean-front properties. The journey out is pleasant enough, though not quite on a par with the drive from Sorrento to Naples on the Italian Riviera. However, once you reach Palm Beach, Whale Beach and Avalon it is not difficult to see why the wealthy settled here, though...

The jazz/soul singer Nina Simone died 7 years ago. For one night only in Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall, her original backing band is giving a concert of her music. The singers include international jazz singer Diane Reeves and Patti Austin as well as Simone, who is Nina Simone's daughter.  We have managed to get tickets, centre stalls.  The concert lives up to all expectations. The musicians are superb and the venue itself makes it a really special evening.  The whole harbour area has a great buzz in the evening. Imagine Covent Garden's Piazza area but with glorious weather and water all around you.  A memorable evening.  

Today we've booked a trip with English emigre Annie Bennett who runs her own private yacht charter company. We set sail on her rather splendid 32ft sailing yacht for a day exploring Sydney's many harbour areas. Annie is based in Clontarf, a tiny sheltered harbour about a ten minute cab ride from Manly. The easiest way to reach Manly is by high speed catamaran. The Manly Flyer operates a commuter service between Sydney Harbour and Manly Marina. The journey takes exactly the time advertised - 18 minutes. By catching the 7:30 am boat, on a perfect morning, we have magnificent views of the morning sun bathing the Opera House and Harbour Bridge as we head out of Sydney Harbour. This is the picture-perfect postcard view of The city. Manly is delightful, a spit of land with a perfect surfer's beach on one side and a harbour and marina on the other. Because we're early there is time to wander down The Corso, the main shopping street. A rather lovely Italian deli provides u...

Aria footnote.  There is a difference between fine dining restaurants in the UK, USA and Australia.  In the USA, the waiter is obviously hoping to become a member of your family - 'Hi, my name is Tom and I'll be your waiter for tonight.' In the UK, not only has the waiter no interest in becoming a member of your family, he has no interest in waiting you either;  in fact he should be sitting where you are and you should be serving him.  In Australia, the waiter is already a member of your family and has no hesitation in relating intimate anecdotes about other members of the family (yours, his, 'ours').  We had been seated for dinner at our table in Aria for only a few moments when our waiter came to the table to discuss the menu. We were looking out of the window at the harbour bridge and remarked how wonderful the view was and how amazing it was that even as dusk fell, there were still groups of bridge walkers climbing to the top. 'Yes', said the waiter. ...

We have arrived in Sydney at a hotel called Sir Stamford on Circular Quay. We were pretty confident about what to expect just from the name - charm with a slightly old-fashioned look and feel - perhaps a gently down-at-heel country house. In fact the hotel has turned out to be delightful. The staff are friendly and helpful. The furnishings and decor hark back to the elegance of Edwardian England and we immediately feel at home. Perhaps that's because we have a rather typical English summer's day - grey skies with drizzle! We have used our brollies for the first time this trip. Weather forecasts say we'll have much the same tomorrow followed by two glorious sunny days. Into every life a little rain must fall! Our room was exactly what we ordered this time, a large comfortable room with a good seating area, king-size bed and a large modern bathroom with bath and shower. It was also blissfully quiet. We are a short walk - about 100yds - from the steps of the Opera House, so...

The news of the Chilean earthquake as we wake next morning includes tsunami warnings for the whole of the east coast of Australia. This is the day we have planned to go diving. We could be in for an interesting day. Although we have another early start, our hotel is only a two minute walk from the Reef Fleet Terminal where we catch our boat. The Big Cat Green Island boats take you about an hour offshore to a small rainforest covered island in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. It seems that the only consequence of the devastating events in Chile has been a 'King Tide' here. There are one or two minor floods in Cairns itself and almost no beach left to sit on once we reach Green Island as it's high tide, but things return pretty much to normal by 11:00am as the tide begins to go out. The boat provides a pretty good buffet lunch, drinks and snacks all day, a semi-submersible trip which gives a fabulous view of the reef's marine life, a glass-bottom boat and all the...

Despite having a difficult first night thanks to not the ideal suite, we spent our first day in Cairns on a whole day trip to the Kuranda rainforest and it was fantastic, a real highlight and quite unexpectedly so. It was a very full day that started at 8:30 when we were collected from our hotel. It was a fifteen minute trip to the start of our 7 mile cable car ride. Yes, you heard correctly a cable car, the Muse's absolutely least favourite method of transport. In fact getting her even near a cable car has been impossible up till now. However, this was one of the highlights of the day, as the cable car barely skims the treetops of the rainforest and provides an amazing view of this unique habitat. That's the second half of the cable car ride. But you have to get to that point and for the first couple of miles it climbs to the top of a mountain over forests and ravines and gets quite high. I'm not great with heights but for 'she who must be obeyed' they represent ...

This whole trip has been booked venue by venue and activity by activity online. We have used many different booking sites and agents. It is time to throw a little criticism in the direction of pretty well all of them. Wherever we have booked with hotels and tour operators directly we've got what we wanted, expected and paid for. Wherever we have gone through one of the endless variety of intermediary sites offering great deals, there have been issues. The most common one was with hotel bookings. Invariably we found two queen size beds where we had specified one king size. The hotels always sorted us out and we're talking minor irritation only, but it just became tiresome when it happened for the third time at the Cairns Shangri-La. However they were very helpful at the hotel. 'This always happens', was there response. They upgraded us to one of their management suites with a king-size bed and access to the 'luxury' floor. This has it's own lounge and dining ...

So we've reached the end of out stay at Longitude 131. The excursions and the guides have been wonderful, the breakfasts good and the lunches including today's smoked duck salad really very nice indeed. As I have commented already the resort is let down by poor attention to detail and lack of staff and organisation in their evening kitchen. They made our departure easy, however, doing our online check-in for us and organising the return trip to the airport (probably glad to see the back of a couple of whinging poms). One of the guides took us. We left the lodge less than an hour before our plane was due to depart and within 20 minutes we were airside waiting to board. Well ahead of the scheduled departure time, with all passengers clearly checked in, Qantas boarded the plane and we left. We reckon that from our last mouthful of lunch at 131 to take-off was less than an hour. Qantas are very efficient and it appears that not only is their director of catering a fan of this blog...

Throughout the resort there are 6in by 2in burrow entrances everywhere we look.  There are literally hundreds of them.   Our guides assure us that these belong to the very large and rather shy local lizards. The lizards are in fact members of the monitor family and average about 4ft in length.   I have been waiting to come across one.  We are a couple of hours from departure, when finally, some movement in the undergrowth and here he is.  The big camera is of course packed, so this will be our only lizard portrait. Nevertheless he is a very fine specimen and every inch of four feet long.   What a shame they only eat larger insects like the locust-sized grass hoppers that abound.  If only he would eat the flies, I'd catch him and wear him as a scarf. By the time  I took this picture, I must have had a hundred of the little sods buzzing around. That's the last time I step outside without my fly net and hat in place!

Every hotel with pretensions prides itself on the assortment of cosmetic preparations, shampoos, body washes and moisturising creams that it provides for it's guests. Very often these are in very exotic looking bottles and in very small quantities. All can be purchased on departure, however, at eye-watering prices. Southern Ocean Lodge succeeded in this department on every count, particularly on it's prices, which were not just high, but laughable. Longitude 131 was more sensible in this department. They might be just a little bit confused in the way the perfumes of their various products are coordinated, or should I say completely random. I have just emerged from a wonderful invigorating shower after a day's walking and sightseeing. I have used a body wash infused with grapefruit, coconut and tangerine oils and used a shampoo enhanced with lavender and mint extract. I smell like a cross between the fruit salad I had for breakfast and a room full of old dears who've a...

It is nine o'clock in the morning and we are sitting down to breakfast at 131. Before anybody thinks that we have had a leisurely start on this our last morning in the Australian outback, we have been up since 5:00am. I had no idea that this time of day existed! They don't like you to miss dawn coming up over the rock here. You can miss sleep, but not the sun coming up. Well it did come up, but decided to stay hidden in cloud. What we have had is a wonderful 4km walk around the eastern flank of the rock. Adrian, our guide, has been explaining the significance of the various features in the rock face - and amazingly, water holes - on the route. At one point, not only is the waterhole full, but water continues to trickle out of a small fissure in the sandstone.  A culture and people have survived and, until Europeans turned up, thrived in this land for over 20,000 years, which is something you quickly come to respect, as the heat and the flies take their toll. With all our techn...

Today so far, we have been dragged from our beds before dawn for a sunrise walk through a gorge in the Olgas, a rather extraordinary group of hills 45 minutes from the hotel.  It's still dark as we have breakfast and set off,  but it's a fabulous walk and at that time of day there are no other tourists.  We are the only group mad enough to be out.   After a short rest back at base camp, we're whisked off into Yulara, the local town or rather the local small group of hotels clustered around two or three shops and restaurants, whose only reason to exist is to provide somewhere for Uluru visitors to sleep and eat.  Now having walked from one end to the other - a process that has kept us out of trouble for 15 minutes we are both delighted not to be staying in any of them. Suddenly, 131 might be looking up! Lunch is a vast improvement on dinner - a really excellent King Prawn salad with a lime and chilli dressing, followed by a trio of sorbets, though service could be a lot bett...

OK dear reader, here it comes. This is the big one. We are now checked in and beginning to enjoy all the amenities and delights that the Voyages Longitude 131 Ayers Rock resort has to offer. This is the stop around which our whole six-week adventure was planned. This was billed as the best place we were going to stay on the whole trip. Our already sky-high expectations were raised even further by a delightful American couple whom we met at Kangaroo Island's Southern Ocean Lodge. They had come from 131 and in their view, fabulous though SOL was, 131 was by the slimmest of margins the better place to stay. Well, it is our view that they were wrong, not just a bit wrong, but completely and utterly and hopelessly wrong - in fact, bordering on bonkers! Longitude 131 is not a bad place. It's just that it doesn't even come close to Southern Ocean Lodge in any department - food, comfort, space, guest facilities, style, furnishing, even cleanliness. The room is not in the same leag...

I shall now return to the subject of Qantas and their unique approach to in-flight catering. The flight from Alice to Ayers Rock is no more than 30 minutes. Qantas, however, is going to serve and clear a meal of some description to its 150 passengers, come what may.  So at break-neck speed the cabin staff distribute a semi-opaque oval shaped clam shell style plastic box. I am sure that for those who have seen this before, effecting entry presents no problem. To the uninitiated it is a little more of a challenge, but eventually we're in!  It contains quite a lot of celophane, clearly the airline's material of choice. One celophane package contains a piece of vintage cheddar; another contains two crackers that we suspect are designed to be consumed with the cheese. The final and largest celophane package contains a large cookie. Finally there is a 250ml bottle of water.  My award for most carefully thought-out package goes to the cookie wrapper.  The package designers have done t...

I may have commented before about the way Australian airports operate.  Fair dinkum, mate would certainly apply to their smooth and occasionally slightly eccentric operation. Today is not the day for sightseeing and it is not the day for walking anywhere either. The rain is sheeting down, though it's  still 'bloody hot mate'. Alice Springs airport is not the largest in Australia and one or two things are missing, covered walkways all the way to the door of the plane being one of them. So at the gate Qantas issue each passenger with a large red and white umbrella and an odd little line of red and white domes snakes out across the tarmac to climb up the steps to the aircraft door, where the cabin staff retrieve the umbrella and drop it down to be recycled for the next passenger snake. But it all works efficiently in common with everything else at the airport.  The check-in queue disappears in seconds because they open more desks. Clearing security is quick, because there are ...

Good-bye Alice Springs - and not a moment too soon. Actually I'm probably being a little unfair. If it hadn't been for this place, Charles Todd might never have been able to establish the route for the Telegraph lines that linked Adelaide on the southern coast with Darwin in the north.....come to think of it, two other places where no sane person would want to live! To be fair to Alice, the ranchers and miners needed to have somewhere to come and get drunk and buy supplies. Today tourists come to buy things they don't need - except fly nets, which they do need - and the 'local indiginous population' come and get drunk.   As you drive through the bush you come across huge signs that say NO ALCOHOL and NO PORNOGRAPHY and in the small print give details of the federal laws which give effect to these bans. This is the government response to the inability of the Aboriginees to cope with booze and sexual excess. It probably seems a bit heavy handed to us, but apparently i...

Our first job on arrival was to phone the driver and bush guide we'd arranged to meet to confirm our Palm Valley tour. The result is our first problem all trip. Unexpected rains have washed out the roads to and inside Palm Valley. Tour cancelled! After a bit of replanning we booked a whole day tour of the West Macdonnell mountain ranges with Emu Run Tours. It turned out that we were only six in total on the tour, which meant we practically had a personal guide and driver, exactly as we had wanted in the first place. It also turned out to be another brilliant day. We were collected from our hotel at 7:45am and off we went into the bush, which starts within a couple of miles of the town centre. There is much more water out here than you expect. A couple of metres below the red dusty surface there is plenty of the stuff and this particular outback area is much greener than we anticipated. Alice normally gets about 3ins of rain a year. This year it has already had 6ins. Even some of ...