Travellers tales 6

Alice look; I see a floating palace, no happy hour tonight.

Travelling requires a lot of administrative tasks and the majority these were ably handled by Alice on her trusty notebook or in Internet cafes. Making ongoing travel arrangements by train or plane, downloading Ryan Air’s dreaded boarding passes, securing accommodations and noting directions for finding them were all taken care of by Alice and I wish here to thank her for these tasks I was unqualified for. Thanks ever so much Alice, without your determination there would have been no big adventure.

Alongside these there are many other organisational affairs the traveller must be alert to. You must have money and whilst things have changed very much for the better since travellers cheques over thirty years ago, ATMs / holes in the wall, whatever you call them need be approached with caution. Most of the machines we approached offered their services in multiple languages amongst which I was pleased to find English however their questioning format changed from bank to bank, country to country. Probably a translation issue, I often found them asking questions that were ambiguous or that I could not fathom. At least twice in Venice I aborted transactions and went looking for clearer instructions.

Such complications alongside our primal distrust of machines that sometimes take your money / cards and don’t run but rather sit smugly defying you to hit them, which you usually do to your own detriment, raise the heartbeat and anxiety level on each approach. I often feel it’s worth paying the two buck fee to use those ones in the pub where you never loose a hold on the card. My bank graciously informed me before I went that there was a flat rate charge for all transactions so I was better off withdrawing large amounts. They did not bother to advise me to raise my daily allowance. Do I think they see the irony in thus encouraging me to be robbed substantially though not outlandishly while at the same time picking my pocket? No. For the record the best ATM was the Deutsche Bank’s in Barcelona, German efficiency with a Catalan lisp.

Train travel has many advantages over planes not the least being sleepers and bars both of which we sampled. At the same time there are many lessons the unseasoned traveller needs to learn. Knowing where to get off is major and not as uncommon a problem as you might think. If I had a Euro for every time I was asked where we were or were we there when all I wanted was to ask the same, I’d be a good few Euros richer. Knowing that every stop, particularly in Italy, was an opportunity for beggars, con men and hawkers of all description to board and do their stuff takes some time to learn. Everyone is suspicious of that chubby guy in the ill fitting conductor’s uniform who unapologetically demands everyone’s passport on the night train from Paris to Venice and tromps off promising to return them in the morning. I had a dim ancestral memory of this practise but some of the Chilean women we were travelling with looked like they preferred the pub type machine where you never let go.

Bottom bunks in the six berth sleeper to Venice looked really good to Alice and I until we returned from the bar to find them set with a hole where the chair back had been down which we might fall and that there was so little space between our chest and the bottom of the overhead bunk that a teddy was out of the question. The four mature Chilean lasses were a bonus but we both immediately saw that this was a Xanax situation and with their help survived the night comfortably.


Woken by the chubby conductor with our passports an hour out from Venice we soon found ourselves in the square in front of the station in the cloud we were to discover was a feature of pre noon Venice. With a brief consultation of Alice’s notes we quickly found our delightful pension where we could leave our luggage but not settle till after eleven so we set out to adventure and breakfast.

Suffering dementia concerning our ongoing activities this day I asked Alice who answered by text and I quote: “Coffee in that café where you later found 90c coffee, then Laundromat, then cheap pasta at a restaurant hidden in the alleyways. Then getting lost in laneways, eating gelato and buying Murano glass while trying to find that square with the Indian woman letting pigeons sit on her arms. Eww…”


The square she spoke of was Piazza San Marco where in nearby lanes we had seen shops of such opulence with well dressed blokes outside warning “no photos’ of their windows. According to Wikipedia, this square is dominated by the basilica, the Doge’s palace and the campanile (bell tower) of the basilica To we stumblers though it was just one more vision of the ancient and romantic world of cultural heritage that led us to Leichhardt and its’ pasta. I’m sorry but to forever lost travellers unaided by an AHACGPS (art history and cultural global positioning systems), an as yet conceptual invention that would provide tourists through an I pod like device connected to satellite navigation and the internet with all they needed to know about what they were viewing, in their own language, down to the closest WC, it was the best we could do






I was pleased and surprised that the default name throughout most of Europe was WC, after all ‘water closet’ is very much English and by and large I did not find the continent abundant with English terms. Though I rarely see this term in Australia it was well known to me and was unmistakable in its meaning. It took a while for we travellers to learn that every sit down drink or meal was an opportunity that would not be available as they were at home where work place, home, public and almost public, pubs, were not necessarily available.

Next day saw us go to the island of Murano which while unnecessary except as an opportunity see more examples of their hideous overpriced glassware proved a wonderful opportunity to see Venice from the water and these things that explained the throng of tourists.


This is the cemetary island

In the afternoon we visited Lido, a long thin island on one side of which is what they mistakenly call a beach. With only two roads / streets down its length oddly it has cars, brought by ferries which seem ludicrous except perhaps as a reminder to Venetians of how evil they are.


I might have neglected the fact that Venice has no motorised vehicles on land. All land travel is by foot, not even bike, and all goods and bads like garbage must be man, or more strictly person, handled. When a plumber needs to replace some pipe he doesn’t rock up to the hardware store in his ute, rather he and his partner must carry, one at each end, the pipe to navigate the busy and narrow thoroughfares. Imagine the restrictions this places on a city in as much need of maintenance as Venice.
This is how i wished my luggage to travel

The essentials of life


At least they have wheels


It’s probably true that we did not spend enough time here to really come to terms with the questions we might have asked let alone learned the answers. Lucky it is then that we have these snaps Google and Wikki to help us re-live the experience
What the...


You know that feeling

Juliette awaiting her Jack