Return to Perth

 T hose of you who've read my Norwegian cruise blog will know that Susan and I have been eagerly awaiting the delivery of our Stressless chairs and they have arrived. We’ve placed in the room we were going to call the Reading room or the Gold room or the Lounge room but I think now it has to be called the Stressless Room. We have two of them, in a sage green colour, with matching footrests. And they are as comfortable as we remember them to be from the MS Richard With.   And that’s the trouble. We both want to sit in them all the time. Which is fine if we’re both reading. But it’s our second television room and there are a limited number of TV programs that we both want to watch. Susan is more likely to be watching Better Homes and Gardens or   24 Hours in Emergency and I’m more likely to be watching a murder mystery set in somewhere exotic. At the moment we have found a show to share – Outrageous, about the Mitford sisters – but that’s rare. So who gets to sit ...

  Since moving to Perth, I’ve had five trips back to Melbourne with two of them for memorial services. That’s the way of the world from this point on. The most recent trip was just a week after I returned from Europe in late September. Susan didn’t have time to miss me because (1) she was probably very glad not be sleeping in the same room as me anymore and (2) Sebastian joined her for a week. He’s a Lacrosse referee (when he’s not out searching for snakes and other reptiles) and came over to play that role in the Under-15’s National Championship. My travel reason this time was to join a dear friend, Loretta, and a number of her friends, at the Geelong Fibre Forum . It’s an annual event where a number of different fibre workshops are on offer, all delivered on the grounds of Geelong Grammar School. Courses included machine embroidery, shibori, portfolio boxes , basketry, crocheted portraits, and 3D textiles. Loretta has been going for a number of years and has created some beauti...

Having explored seven countries in six weeks, it does seem worth making some notes about the culinary aspects of the experience.  Tomatoes are always a much sweeter in Europe. I often avoid the large red ones in Australia because they tend to be somewhat soggy and rarely tasty. Instead I search out tiny cherry tomatoes for a snap of flavour. But here, the tomatoes were as I remember them. Because there’s so much geographical and cultural connections between the Balkan countries and their Eastern European cousins, one finds a variation of what we traditionally call a Greek Salad everywhere. Tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicum, olives, feta with some greenery. In Bucharest, in its most famous cafe Caru’ cu bere, the salad came with some beef strips on top and a honey mustard dressing. In Veiliko Tarnova, the old capital of Bulgaria, as we sat looking out to the Tsarevets fortress the cheese was scattered like tiny rivulets of snow over the top.  It was the end of summer but the waterm...

  We bookended our Hurtigruten tour with stays in Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo. The contrast between the grey, cool, rainy village of Bergen and the hot, intense, urban sprawl of Bucharest couldn’t have been stronger. Even though Bergen is clearly a tourist town and the streets were filled with different languages, there was a sense of peace compared to Bucharest. I suspect this might have been just in my mind but somehow there’s more violence embedded in the cobblestones of the east than the north. It turns out that the was 20th century violence in the north with villages burnt by the Germans during World War 2 but the communities were moved away rather than murdered. There is some evidence that the effects of violence can be generational, the experienced carnage absorbed at a cellular level, to be passed down from parent to child. And that’s what I felt in the east compared to the north. We had a few days in Bergen, a charming town on the North Sea, before joining the Hurtigruten c...

NORWAY CRUISE And before you ask, we did see the Northern Lights. Or rather, the iPhone saw them. The first time these swirling green lights appeared, it was 9pm at night but we were sailing into a small village. Their lights were on, the harbour lights were on, the ship’s lights were on. So although there was a tiny hint of colour in the sky, the phone saw much better than the naked eye. And as for the second question I know you’re going to ask, we only needed our gloves and puffer jackets once - in an Ice Hotel in Kirkenes. Although the average autumn temperature north of the Arctic Circle is supposedly 8 or 9 degrees Celsius, we wandered through the northern Norwegian towns coatless in 18 degrees.  The Hurtigruten Coastal Express was established in 1983 as a ferry service for the coast towns and villages of northern Norway. Over time it morphed into a tourist experience as well. People join the ship up and down the coast, some like us staying for the whole experience, some headi...

  As some of you know, I’m ambivalent about cruises. The first I ever had - a gulet tour of the archeological sites of the west coast of Turkey - was brilliant. The next - a large  cruise ship excursion to some Pacific islands - didn’t appeal to me at all. The third - an expedition-scale trip up the north west of coast of Australia - was a fantastic way to see generally inaccessible parts of the country. So, when Susan suggested a cruise of the Danube, I said yes while nurturing secret concerns about whether it was really my type of travel. And the result?  Travelling down the Danube is smooth like silk with barely a ripple in the water, albeit water that’s at very low levels due to another hot summer. We travelled from Budapest to Bucharest through Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania with the river regularly acting as a border between countries. The landscape for the most part is underwhelming. The occasional village; a family having a picnic on a sandy spot b...