Bochum and Hamburg

Spent a few days in Utrecht. Pretty cool. I ticked off RKB´s recommended sights - uni architecture, grift park, lombok, and some others. I had a chat with the aussie girl who runs the local crumpler store. that brand is huge here. good to see. Took the train to Ede and rode out to the Kroller Muller Museum in the national park. Awesome ride through purple wildflowers and pine forests. Saw some van goghs and some other great paintings, mostly by dutchies.

Drove with Tim to Ochum - hit the autobahn and he eased it up to 160km/h. I was shit scared!
his brother and his girlfriend are also staying for the weekend. we went to a bbq at tim´s uni and i met some of his mates, watched a game of soccer on the big screen and had free beers and sausages. welcome to germany! going to a mate´s 30th birtday in hamburg tonight.

latest in shopping technology

i''ve been staying with d. the lest few days. i had not seen her for 11 years so we had some catching up to do. staying at her parents place (they're in a caribbean).
went to a supermarket today with a diy check out where you scan your groceries yourself and put them through a conveyor belt and pay by credit card. no checkout operator - i've never seen that before!
utrecht tomorrow. T is in Germany til Tuesday so I'll camp or something then stay with him. He works in U four days a week and spends Friday and the weekend at Bochum so most likely I'll drive there for the weekend with him before heading for the Pfalz by bike.
In the next few days I want to try to get the rest of my itinery sorted - Berlin, London and Istanbul? We'll see.

on the road again

amsterdam was cool fun, man! i'm gonna miss this place. we went to the red light district last night and it was kinda whacky. some of those girls have quite aggressive marketing techniques! i took a photo of the full moon above two church spires and in the foreground is a punter looking into a red neon framed doorway. i think it looks better in my minds eye than in the photo itself, because i'm pretty bumbly when it comes to f-stops and aperatures.

we also road thru the centrum which is full of tourists and had a beer on the roof of one of the highrisers (eleven floors). so that was my big touristy day. went to the rijkmuseum and looked at rembrants too. beautiful big old pictures...

apart from that we've been going to the local climbing gym with some spanish friends of the singles board at the gym; riding to different parts of town usually trying to stay away from stoned american college boys...that kinda stuf.

riding to bloemendaal (wallpaper*s guide to a'dam rates it, so it must be a swanky seaside town) thru haarlem and then onto leiden, utrecht and germany.

City of Bikes

So today was a day full of bikes. I bought a touring bike! Panniers, racks, pump, puncture kit - I got the lot. I was tossing up whether to rent or buy. In the end I bought cos I can either sell it all before I go and get (some of) my money back or bring my new toys home, which is what I'd prefer to do.

I'm gonna spend another week of so here and then ride to Leiden (where Daphe lives), Utrecht (where Robyn studied) and then (either with a pitstop in Amsterdam first or directly) to Dusseldorf and Pflaz (Palatinate) to see Tim Merforth and some German climbers. Berlin is the ultimate goal, but some of that trip will be on the train, cos its a long way!!

Ash and I also went to the "My Bike" festival and Streetlab fashion show which were on in Westerpark. We set up a slackline. Pics are up.

Ash's brother, his wife and two month old baby came to dinner - flatbean cabonara, strawberry and rocket salad, creme broules.

Mitch Hedburg

Ben and Kurt recommend Mitch Hedburg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bESBs3Lg7M&mode=related&search=

the rest of my time in france

Finally, you may be saying, if you care and if you are still out there there is a new post on this crap travellogue...well sorry, i've been in the mountains, ok, and not the kind where there is no access to civilisation let alone email and blogs etc, the kind where there is an internet cafe but it cost about 10 euro a minute to use it.

so i looked around marseille for a bike shop to buy a velo d'occasion (2nd hand) cos i was going to ride to spain or tuscany or something. but there was only one velo shop in town, seriously and i tried to find the markets my landlord at the hotel that smelled like poo told me about (in Bougainville, which is at the end of the line) but i didn't find it. the hippie at the bike community/collective who was trying to save the world from cars was no use cos he had a huge pile of old wheels but only a granny shopping bike and a bambino's trike (oops that's italian and we're not there yet) to sell me.

so i abandoned plan b and hung out in marseille with ben. we saw Boulevarde de la Morte, in Kurt Russells says, "Je m'appelle "Mike le Stuntman". Tu est Papillion, n'est pas? Je sais une poeme, que je voudrais dire pous toi! Pappillion, Paillion tu est tres jolie!! Danser pour moi!"

and we saw a gypsie band at a cool little bar and danced around with some drunk french people. ben had just spent a week and a jango rheinhardt (sp?) festival near paris and carts a gypsie guitar around the place so he was stoked, as was i, sipping pastis and shaking it.

our hotel smelled too much and marseille was too dirty (if you read the lonely planet guide to that city it actually rates the trash, which gets caught in the wind and twirls around in eddies as a tourist attraction - its supposed to be whimsical of something) so we jumped a train to avignon where there was a theatre festival in progress. its a cool old place with walls and palaces and an old bridge that everyone who learned french in primary school would have sung about. i sang about it while i was there but i only knew one line, which got a bit frustrating.

we camped and it was great cos all the performers - actors and circus peeps and musicians were all there too. the town was covered in billboards and there were people in costumes everywhere handing out flyers to get the punters into their shows. every second bar or shop had been turned into a playhouse. there were performances in the streets - juggles and people dressed in medieval stuff playing lutes and singing, acrobats and mimes and clowns.

i left ben there and jumped the train to st cyr sur mer, a small beach side place east of marseille to catch up with the doctors - gez and frawphy from pete and my namibian adventures. jo and hilary who i'd met in bris vegas and their whole crew (the charlottes, adilla (sp?), stu and neil) were staying in a villa for a week and i joined up with them and seriously did nothing for a week except drink, read books play cards and board games (articulate - with high stakes!) and swim in the pool. everyone brought a pile of paperbacks and peeps would just lie in the sun by the pool and devour them, reading two or three books a day. i've never seen anything like it! Jo would finish one and go, "Hmm, that was good, not as good as her first one, but good." and Hilary would say, "Yeah I thought it was good too. Try this one, its good too." and then Jo would go two hours later, "Yeah, that was good. What else is good."

We only left the house to go to reastaurants and cocktail lounges and maybe to the beach or the bottleshop. that was cool. kinda weird at first when you meet up with friends that you haven't seen for four years but had a great time and just pissed myself the whole time.

gez had been working for mediciens sans frontiers in somalia last year and this year is a researcher at oxford, working on a malaria vaccine. everyone else was a doctor of some distription except me and stu who is also a bum. he's just left the RAF and was telling us about the legendary schlack stack in the faulklands.

so then what happened? i got an a sleeper to verona with a kid from san diago who had just been to romania cos they're really into water polo there.

verona was pretty - i looked at some old buildings.

i went to the mountains.

marseille

So orpierre and verdon were cool. ash n me, we climbed some rocks and ate some cheese. then i went to nice (dont rate it cos it was hot) i learned that an open gravelly drain will pass for a beach in this country. i watched a crap b grade tna movie set in cannes where this guy falls off a yacht and is stung to death by jelly fish, then the next day i went swimming at eze (near monaco) and go attacked by jellyfish (called madussa) that stung my neck arms and leg (welts r gone now) i had to navigate back 50m to shore thru a hord of the f*ckers and the whole time i was laughing cos i couldnt believe i was trapped in this french movie!!! now im in marseille eating a lot of cous cous for 5 euro in algerian restaurants and thinking about climbing the calanques but theyre shut cos of high wind and fire danger. ps im getting a bit sick of lugging climbing gear round on the off chance that ill find someone to clim with and im thinking seriously about plan b which involves posting my gear to lolita in paris buying an old purgeot 10 speed and hitting the road in my bikepants!