Back in London

I’m back, and reminding my liver what London involves with a night at the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society

Might end up in Scotland, might not, for reasons I won’t go into.

I’ve discovered I can bring 5 litres of spirits into Costa Rica… so the problem now is can I fit 5 litres of whiskey in my backpack 😂.

Because I’ll be doing some mountain trekking, I’ll be bringing my large backpack (no way to transport hiking poles except checked luggage, and if transporting those why not also my sleeping bag, etc, all of which require a larger backpack). So since I’m taking checked luggage, I guess I can take bottles of whiskey with me — I wonder if my host family drink whiskey? 😂

Amsterdam still

I’ve spent Xmas and the next few days in Amsterdam, but am heading back to London on Friday to celebrate NYE with friends there. While Amsterdam certainly is a place one can celebrate NYE, I’m not up for the insanity that is the place, I’ve done it once before. 

Amsterdam is pretty.

Amsterdam

I decided I’d treat myself to a single room rather than hostel dorms. It’s still a hostel, so this is not what you’d normally expect in a hotel 😁

To the right is a very (by comparison) spacious bathroom. 

I’m actually quite happy with it, the hostel has some great common space to stretch out and meet people if you want.

Vienna, Amsterdam

Lacking anything better to do after Zermatt, I headed to Vienna for a couple of days, but I only had accommodation there till Friday, so on Thursday I got back on the rails again and said “onward to Amsterdam!”. 10 hours later I’m on the last part of my trip.

People who don’t take European rail ask me why I’d take a 12 hour train trip instead of a 2.5hr flight. The answer is that a 2.5hr flight is always longer, you have to get to the airport at least an hour before (unless you’re confident in timings and have no checked luggage, and aren’t flying international), and airports are always out of the way, train stations are usually central, so add another 30 mins on each end, at least. Now we are looking at 4.5 hours. 

On a plane you can’t easily get up and walk around, there isn’t a dining car, the seats are small. 

To put it simply — air travel sucks.

If you are fortunate like me and have the time to spend travelling, rail is so much nicer. I do confess that getting to my hostel at 10pm does suck a bit, but to be honest, I’m not getting there exhausted from travelling — I had a nice day looking at the country side and watching movies (wifi on trains is a lot more reliable than planes).

I’ll take this mode of transport over air travel any time I’m not in a rush.

Zermatt should be illegal

I mean, come on, there’s no way something so stunning could ever be legal, there must be drugs in the air. 

It’s literally impossible to capture the beauty of this small town. I was grinning like a fool throughout my walks through the town — and that was just the town.

The scenery around, buried in a valley Zermatt is surrounded by such stunning mountain, including the famous Matterhorn itself

I look through my photos of the town and none of do it justice.

Of note is that there are no cars in Zermatt, just tiny electric vehicles — and only special ones, no Tesla’s in sight. Tom Scott did an excellent video on it. https://youtu.be/R2oD1ZHNMFE

Up and up

The morning brings my journey up the mountain — not to the peak in the photo above, but to the Matterhorn Glacier Park, which sits right next to it.

It’s a short 15 minute walk (or bus if you’re lazy and don’t like the stunning vista as you walk) to the gondola station. And then it’s up, up, and up. The gondola makes multiple stops along the way, as it serves all the skiers, they can ski down a field and take a ride back up without having to go all the way down (from the top it takes about an hour, if you ski fast, to get from the top to the bottom).

I’m just going to dump a bunch of photos from the ride up — 1600m (5300ft) to 3900m (12800ft).

Once you get to the top, you reach the main ski fields, the visitor centre, restaurant, and ice caves.

As I understand these ice sculptures are more or less permanent, the ice doesn’t thaw up here.

Now the obligatory selfies

The highest viewing platform is 3,896m (12,784ft) up. This is as high as I’ve been since the Nepal trip.

Why was I here? What drove me to take trains half way across Europe? My oxygen saturation stats were 85-90% unacclimatised at that altitude. That’s within limits, to go back to serious altitude. 

Ooops, no train!

Long story short, stopped in Visp by a rockfall on the tracks to Zermatt. Waiting for the bus, that doesn’t leave till 22:40. This will result in me getting to the hostel rather late 😂.

Tomorrow is Matterhorn Glacier Park, was intending it to be an early start, might give myself a few more hours sleep. 

In the meantime, Guinness is keeping me warm.

Bye Iceland, hi London, bye London, hi Zermatt

Oops, haven’t kept this up to date.

Iceland was fun, great catching up with friends, but unfortunately the weather didn’t play nice and I didn’t get to see the northern lights, just the northern clouds.

It didn’t get too cold there, but I did get to dance in snow!

Flying out of Iceland was delayed by an hour as it was too windy for them to open the aircraft door to let the previous passengers off! It was a tarmac gate and when our bus got to the stairs it was hailing horizontally. I was rather pleased I was wearing my jacket 😂.

Then it was an overnight in London, which included replacing my day pack with something better than the absolute garbage Amazon one I was using. 

My next destination was Zermatt, I have reasons for going there, and I could get there by flying to Geneva and then catching a train… or I could take a train from London to Zermatt.

This involved the Eurostar from London to Paris, then a rather complicated navigation to Paris Lyon station, since the usual method (metro D train) was cancelled.

After that I had an hour to kill before getting the TSV across the French countryside to Lausanne (just past Geneva) Switzerland. Unfortunately the French countryside was covered in fog, and when it wasn’t it was covered in dark.

It’s now 19:45 as I write this and I’m almost on my last leg to Zermatt. This has been a whole day trip, the total cost was about £100 more than I would have spent had I taken the cheapest airline ticket and cheapest rail, and it would have required me to take some really early flight, necessitating staying near an airport. Admittedly it would have gotten me in around 17:00 instead of what will be 22:00

Overall I think I prefer the rail, especially since part of the trip is as going to require it anyhow. It’s certainly much better than the mob that is RyanAir. 

Welcome to Iceland

Here in Reykjavik for a few days catching up with friends who I haven’t seen in a year — they’re stopping here on their way to Germany for Xmas. 

One thing I didn’t appreciate is the international airport is just over an hours drive from Reykjavik— this isn’t much of a problem, except that the buses to/from the airport add another 30mins or so with the stops etc. Combine this with my Heathrow gate being a remote gate (bussed to it), to go from London to Reykjavik, I spent 1.25hr on the train, almost 2hrs on a bus, and 3hrs on a plane. So the majority of the time was spent not on a plane 😂.

Anyway, Iceland is beautiful, and to be honest the early evening just reminded me of London. The late sunrise (due in a couple of hours) is a little different though. The twilight is beautiful though.

London for a couple of days

At the moment I’m back in London, visiting some friends but also swapping out gear.

Next stop is Iceland, where I’ve heard a rumour that it’s kinda cold there, so I need to swap out my warmer gear for cold. 

This has given me the opportunity to try what I said in a previous post — doing just carryon only. As such I’ve repacked, dropped some stuff, swapped out others, and here is what results (note: the big grey thing attached to the back is my very warm jacket, I’ll wear it onto the plane, so it doesn’t count 😁)

It’s a nice backpack, and i spent a couple of hours today wearing it when fully loaded and I had no problems. 

It does weigh 12kg now, but that does include my 2kg laptop and my jacket. The other space user is my meds, they can’t really be shrunk/compressed, as they need to stay in their original packaging, least some customs official wonder what this unlabelled bottle of pills are.

Adios Madrid

My brief time in Madrid has made me aware of two things — I need to learn more Spanish, and then return to Madrid. And to everyone who has tried to politely tell me that Central American Spanish is not the same as Spanish Spanish, yeah, I’m aware, but even a little is better than none, and my lessons don’t stop with the six weeks of language school.

I’m thinking if the budget and time allows, it might be nice to return to Spain at the end of the trip.

Madrid Pt 2

Past couple of days I’ve done afternoon meal with Martin 
who has said that he only eats two meals a day here, breakfast and afternoon meal.

Past two days that’s exactly what I’ve done, and it’s been good. Part of that is probably due to the size of the Spanish meals.

Words cannot describe the size of that nacho dish. We had to go mining with a spoon to find the chips.

I find myself once again still working on drawing, and not even writing a single line of code. I did however open my laptop and confirmed it still works. At least I’m drawing in the hostel common room, rather than locked away.

On the art front, I’ve finally called my Mal picture done. 

It’s taken awhile because I wanted to get every fine detail right. Still can’t get the face correct, but I’m blaming Mal for that.

Tomorrow is my last full day in Madrid, so I shall have to make the most of it, today was definitely a rest day from the large amount of walking I’ve been doing.

Hello Madrid

Following on from the previous post, I’m now in Madrid. The train ride from Valencia to Madrid was rather quick, look at that speed.

I did however discover i had booked a train going to the north of Madrid, not the southern station — about 40 minutes apart by metro, but no worries.

The hostel is very nice, exactly the sort of high quality I’d expect for the price (€50, you’d be paying twice that for a cheap worse hotel).

For everyone who has been asking, yes, I slept very well in the dorm. Everyone is respectful of noise, in fact I’ve stayed in hotels where the overall noise in the room (from AC and neighbours/street) was louder than this. 

Last night I went for a walk through the Sol district of the city, and to say it was busy is a vast understatement. 

Goodbye Valencia

Well, I’m terrible at keeping this up to date, but yesterday I took the trains to Madrid.

Cullera was a great place to visit, very beautiful. In the summer months the population goes up by an order of magnitude from all the Spanish and British people who own summer flats here.

Those condos are all basically empty during the winter.

Directly on the beach are smaller condos that apparently are occupied more often. Shockingly real estate prices are surprisingly low here. Makes it rather tempting!

I enjoyed the last few days here, and I thought I’d be spending my down time writing code — why else would I bring a heavy large laptop with me? — but instead I spent it working on my digital art. I’m assured that this is perfectly normal, there’s a history of artists holidaying in the south of France and Spain and being prolific in their works 😂.

My cousin has a lovely place about 20mins walk to the beach, and beautiful views of the river.