So after a 2 hour flight and several hours of stuffing around in airports, I met the lovely Miss Caroline at a train station & we headed back to her place to drop my bags. We headed out shortly after to a genius little dive bar called ‘the Debakel’ for few beers & a catch up from the last missing 7 years! I also met Carolines brother Robi over a (horribly lost) game of Foosball. Turns out the 3 of us have a very similar sense of humour & a nearly identical taste in music which made for some excellent jokes at the expense of the guy picking the playlist in the bar. I had a great first night & talked lots of music and crap – Good fun!
On Wednesday Caroline showed me some of the city’s sights via bicycle, then we headed to Robi’s place to grab some dinner before we hit a club.
What happened next was the greatest Schnitzel experience to grace my tastebuds in 26 years.
Caroline, Myself, Robi and his housemate Matias all headed for a traditional Austrian restaurant, apparently known by the locals for its traditional Austrian schnitzels.
I ordered the regular Wiener schnitzel (that’d be Viennese Schnitzel for those up the back) Caroline ordered a half-size regular Schnitz, while Robi and Matias both ordered the Schnitzel Cordon-Bleu.
My Schnitzel was Epic. It hung over the edges of an already large dinner plate, overlapped itself in several places and was accompanied by a separate bowl of creamy potato salad for extra stodgy goodness. Green stuff? Pfff! Who needs nutrition when you have a snitz bigger than your head! Bravado aside, I was slightly worried, it was a seriously enormous slab of delicious battered meat – but then I heard the manic laugher of Robi and Matias & looked across at the Cordon Bleu Snitz. Holy shit.

Robi and Matias were both laughing in terror at the monsterous Schnitzels in front of them. They had a Snitz that was easily as big as mine, but it had been folded over onto itself and stuffed with a metric tonne of cheese and ham.
Caroline’s “girly serving” was suddenly looking a lot more reasonable. At the Table next to us, a pair of fat British ladies were staring agape at the Cordon Bleu’s.
“Umm, excuse me” one of them enquired “is…that just one serving?”
Robi stopped giggling at his gargantuan plane of pork for a minute and explained that it indeed was, and it turned out that they had both ordered the standard one like mine and were quite clearly shocked at the prospect of eating one each.
While the fat british ladies summoned the waiter to revise their orders we got stuck in & it was seriously fantastic. Best Snitz of my career thus far. After many deep breaths, groaning and sweating, I managed to eat the whole damn thing!! Not Robbie or Matias though, they got about halfway through the Cordon-Bleu-of-Doom & threw in the paper towel (SOFT!) To be fair I wouldn’t have been able to do much better! Amongst many, many complaints of feeling too full to move, feeling sick and general whinging from the 3 of us silly males, Caroline lead us to a club called Flex down on the Danube as they had an indie night on Wednesdays & usually had some good tunes playing.

Dear Sydney. Before you install any more sound systems in bars, please go to Flex in Vienna and see how it’s done properly. None of the usual “we need one loudspeaker for every ear in the venue” scatterbomb approach that plagues the rest of earth, this bar had 2 small  line arrays up front and a Subwoofer enclosure that was actually the entire stage – cast into the floor with cement. The result was clear, crisp sound, plenty loud enough, but not uncomfortable or deafening! not only that, the venue handed out earplugs for those who found it too loud. So bloody nice for a change!
So I spent the next 2 days sleeping in till about lunchtime, hanging out and doing some casual sightseeing with Caroline and Robi. Highlights include but not limited to: A huge mansion/manor up on top of a hill with a sweet view of Vienna. The Museum Quarter with its famous outdoor chair things, an imperial Crypt under the city and an epic palace, which was only the royal “summer home” Fancy indeed!
When I first arrived, Caroline had told me that Vienna wasn’t a love-at-first-sight city, but rather it grew on you the longer you spend there. I didn’t really know what she was on about at first because I liked its casual mix of gritty and new right from the beginning, but sure enough, the longer I spent there the less I wanted to leave! Aussies tend to pride ourselves in having a “laid-back” attitude to most things, well I hate to break it to you but by the Viennese leave us for absolute dust! Imagine if you will, a city that never had the fun scoured out of it by the late 90’s “political correctness” fever, A city that isn’t shitscared of being sued by its inhabitants ham-fisted clumsiness, or a city that isn’t crippled by an irrational fear of terrorism.
Its the little things that make it such an appealing place to live – they have conveniences long lost in modern Sydney; things like garbage bins in train stations! remember them? Or proper play equipment for kids in parks, that aren’t surrounded by a fence or re-surfaced in rubber matting. Brilliant!
The whole place just gets on with things & doesn’t get stuck up on all the trivial little bullshit details, I love it!
One of the best examples of this relaxed attitude I saw was in a Cafe. It seems that Vienna has only just introduced a ‘No Smoking Indoors’ law, only a few years behind the rest of us. They haven’t banned it completely though, rather implemented the first step of having a sectioned off area for smoking & non smoking. The particular cafe I was in however, had realised that the vast majority of its clientele enjoyed a smoke with their coffee, as per the Viennese cafe culture, which might I add actually pre dates white settlement in Australia, but I digress. In the back of the cafe they had taken an interesting interpretation on the law, and glassed off a few tables in the back for non-smokers, while the rest of the cafe, including the barista/waitress, enjoyed some delicious second hand smoke.
My hair and clothes stunk like I’d been to the pittwatter RSL sports bar circa 2002. What a flashback.

So Having been to many of the major citys in Europe, I’m seriously re-considering my plan to work in London. Why? Well, while I had an absolute blast in London’s turbocharged full pace lifestyle as a traveller, I don’t really think I want to live there having seen the incredible lifestyle of Europe’s great cities. Space, relaxed attitude and casual work sure beat crammed, furious and high pressure in my book!
For the first time on my trip I actually felt like I could live in Vienna – a thought that is very different to the other common twang of: “jeez I’d like to live here” that has popped into my head in almost* every town I’ve stopped in (* Marseilles being the smelly exception)

There are some issues with this little idea of mine however,
Problem 1: I don’t Sprechen ze Deutsch. So much so, that I can’t even say ‘Sprechen’ properly (much to Robi’s amusement) It involves some rolling spit noise with the back of my throat that I’ve just never made before. Suddenly I feel sorry for the Japanese when they try to say English words like Lollipop.
A solution, as suggested by Caroline, would be to get a job in an Australian bar (English speaking) while learning German, hell I’ve always learnt best in the deep end.
Problem 2: and this is a bit more of a roadblock than not knowing a language: I don’t have a working Visa for Austria.
Sollution: I’m currently looking into it, watch this space.

Aaaanyway, so Sunday night rolled around and brit-rockers Kasabian were playing at a really cool open air venue just out of central Vienna. Unlike Australia, gigs and festivals are hilariously cheap in Europe, so when I found out the gig was 29 euro, I was in! So I tagged along with Caroline and her friend Connie to the gig. Arriving at the gate, we showed our tickets as usual and Caroline presented her bag for inspection. While it was being rummaged through by the scrutineering eye of a security guard, some bloke next to the guard took my camera from my shoulder, and handed me a ticket stub. Mumbling something in German, he taped the corresponding number to my camera and put it in a box. I was not pleased by this. Not at all & I freaked out a bit at this point, as I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I got Caroline to translate, & the guy had spotted my camera and knew it was “professional” I rebutted this by saying “look at the size of it man, I’m just travelling” in a feeble attempt to get it back. The camera thief couldn’t have looked more bored by this no doubt common exchange, and he grunted “its Professional enough” in English “little cameras ok, not these” he said gesturing at the box, which I now saw was full of SLR’s
“but It is little” I said weakly
No dice. I was sans camera. My precioussss was in a box, and all I had was a little yellow square of paper with 26 written on it. I didn’t realise how much that lump of glass and metal means to me until this point, but I felt like I’d lost a limb or I’d been robbed or something horrible. So blubbering like a child without his teddy, Caroline dragged me to the bar where we had a few beers, I ate a kebab type thing & felt a fair bit better.
Kasabian were awesome, the crowd loved it & the skies stayed clear of rain all night, & I really enjoyed it! As it was an open air show, they finished up before midnight & we hurried to get my camera, which thankfully wasn’t an issue, so I quickly ran back to the stage & snapped off a few shots of the awesome setup.
Robi hadn’t come to the gig, so we headed to the Debakel again to say farewell (it was my last night in Vienna y’see) Once again the music selection was hilarious, but for whatever reason, they started playing a bunch of old german euro-pop stuff. I was laughing at a song that had yodelling in it when Robbie translated the immortal words from another song: “everything has an end, but the sausage has two”
This got me thinking. (actually it got me laughing, but hey…)
So while I guess my brilliant time in Vienna was coming to an end, a sausage will still have two ends.
or is it that life is like a sausage? Perhaps when you first come to an end, there’s another end at the other end which could be a start depending on the end which you start with?
I’m still not sure, however I’m definitely getting a sausage with mustard when I get of this train though.

So I really can’t thank the lovely Caroline & Robi (great bloke, not so good at pool though…hehheh) enough for showing me around & letting me stay! I know you’re both probably going to read this, so I’ll just keep it at a really sincere thankyou! I haven’t felt at home anywhere in Europe except Vienna, & I know that’s only because you guys showed me the real city & the real people. Loved every second of it.
Hopefully see you guys again soon!

Prague blog (Praha) next!
(I’m in the incredible city of Berlin at the moment actually & sorry for the slack update schedule, but writing this thing takes up what little spare time I have & even longer to get on the internets with photos & such. So its usually a bit behind what I’m actually up to!)

What didn’t taste disgusting was the half kilo of raspberries I bought & not being able to help myself, I also bought a bag of Chilli Flavour gummy bears. Awesome.

The next morning Lambie had to ride off into the sunset (and by sunset I mean drizzle) as he had a job starting in at the Fringe Festival up in Scotland & needed to road-warrior his way back to the British Isles in a day, which was going to be a long, boring ride.
So we got up early, bade farewell & hit the road – Matt headed south west back to the ferry in Calais, France, whereas I went west from Germany into the Netherlands and up to Amsterdam In Pouring, freezing torrential death rain from hell.
Oh it was shit. To be fair it was the only real rain I’d got the whole trip – which is damn lucky – but that didn’t stop the clouds from making up for it by soaking me to the bone.
Every hour I had to pull over at a servo, strip off my freezing, sodden clothing and wring out my wool jumper, immediately after this I’d jog on the spot while putting on 2 new dry shirts on and trying to warm up my uncontrollably shaking blue hands, wrapping them around a cup of warm bark-chip strainings that truck stops pass off as coffee. (coincidently it’s still better than 99% of coffee in London) It was one of the worse rides of my life & I was a jittery fed-up mess when I arrived in Amsterdam, still soaked, I nursed Alice through the million bicycles and helmetless scooter riders that plague the city & got to my Hostel. It was a complete shithole, but it was WARM. I got out of my soaked clothing for the 4^th time that day & thawed out in the shower for a good half an hour. Marvellous.

Amsterdam is an absurd place. It’s breathing proof that “toleration” of drugs is both a blessing and a curse, Blessing in that it did prove the worlds governments wrong & legalising weed hasn’t destroyed or hurt society even in the slightest, infact it’s apparently lowered the national use of soft drugs by some particular statistic that I can’t remember! Impressive I know – but on the other side of the coin, every single group of louts from across Europe…ahem…The British Isles, hold it as their party Mecca and descend upon the pretty canals in large tracksuit wearing plagues of fake Burberry hats and nonsensical words, Innit, with the single goal of getting as fucked up as possible.
I didn’t know how to feel about the place when I first arrived, I felt super guilty just being there, like I was doing something I shouldn’t! Hookers winked at me, men in souvenir shops offered me cocaine, then crack as I was perusing some rubbishy trinkets, Stoned Italians helped themselves to my lunch & The smell of weed smoke was casually wafting out of the ‘coffeeshops’ every few meters, not to mention the people sitting by the canals with big bags of weed, casually rolling up joints as police trotted by on horses.
The next day I went on one of those excellent free walking tours of the city & met some really nice Kiwis and a their german friend. We got on well & hung out most of the afternoon, only to hit up an infamous Amsterdam pub crawl at night. It was a pretty messy one, but good fun nonetheless.

One of my favourite bands once said: “everything in moderation, especially moderation” I really like this quote, and to me it perfectly summed up the Amsterdam experience, as you need places like Vegas and Amsterdam to actually benchmark where the silly end of the moderation scale lies.

Feeling slightly fragile after my pub crawl with the kiwis, I packed up my still slightly damp things, threw them onto Alice and started the short ride to Bruges (its in Belgium)

Bruges (pronounced ‘Broozj’) was a really pretty little medieval town, & the only reason I knew of it was because of the brilliant black comedy, “In Bruges” A lot of people said it was a boring place, but I quite liked it. Lots of canals, old buildings, towers and an interesting church that recons it has some of jesus’s blood.

I went in to the inventively named ‘Basilica of the Holy Blood’ & checked out the impressive architecture as usual, then as I was about to leave, having seen no obvious vials of dried blood – a lady appeared on a dais said something in Flemish that seemed to attract the attention of those around me. There was a murmur and some priests came up to the dais with an ornate box & pulled out a golden cylinder. Some more Flemish from the lady and people started walking up to the dais, placing their hand on the cylinder, having a silent prayer & wandering off – so I joined the que, wandered up & had a closer look. I didn’t see any need to touch it or pray obviously being the heathen scum that I am, & the lady shot me a quizzical look, but I got up close peered in anyway. It contained a piece of cloth with a brown stain. Irrefutable Proof of jeeesars! Actually to be honest the ornate gold cylinder holding it was much more interesting than the brown stain, but I nodded at the lady in thanks & wandered off. Apparently it hasn’t been opened since its arrival in Bruges around the 1200’s and hasn’t been subjected to any authenticity tests which I think is a bit of a shame! Did I mean to type the ‘e’ in shame back there? Probably not.

In my hostel in bruge, I spied another motorbike sparked out front, with NSW license plates! Got chatting to the owner who was another 25 year old bloke from Sydney! He’d shipped his Transalp From Sydney to Malaysia & had ridden all the way across the continent to the coast of the Netherlands. Bloody good effort!!
I’d made the decision to sell Alice as soon as I got back to London, so while I was in Bruges I put an ad up on gumtree, the free website that I found her on in the first place.
Sure enough I rode from bruges to Calais, & was chatting to an old English couple on a massive BMW when my phone rang & someone wanted to see the bike that afternoon. I explained that I was still in France, so arranged to meet the bloke the next day. Sure enough, I rode out to some suburb in the outskirts of central London to a maccas car park, where I met some bloke. He was a decent guy, just wanted a bulletproof commuter bike & bought her on the spot for only 50 pounds less than I bought her for!
So. A few weeks prior, in an awesome blast from the past, I’d got a message from Caroline, Who was an exchange student at my highschool when we were in year 11/12. She’d stayed with a friend at the time & I used to drive her and a few others too and from school. She said if I was ever in Austrai, I was welcome to come and stay on her couch! So with the bike sold in one day, I had a pocket full of pounds and 3 weeks to kill before meeting Gowenlock & Steph in Amsterdam. So I face-mailed (thats an email sent via facebook mum) Caroline & booked a flight to Vienna, Austria.

The Traffic. Dear god.

To be fair, the Swiss traffic cops are notoriously harsh in dishing out massive fines for minor offences, plus the national speed limit on freeways is a blistering 90kmph, I’m not surprised the whole country drives nannas.

On top of this 60-and-not-a-smidge-over motorist behaviour, it would appear that tractors and combine harvesters are allowed to trundle along public roads no worries at an enforced 30kmph –  causing even more of a jam.
Blinkers? Pff! “Blinkers are for the rest of the world, I am Swiss! I do not need to let others know where I intend to go!” And as a result, Swiss roundabouts are fucking terrifying to say the least. At least the French are courteous enough to indicate before they barge across an intersection and into a cluster of innocent pedestrians.

Staying with Nic & Dan was an un unreal change from the whirled and grubby travelling lifestyle we’ve been living! It was just so damn good to just relax & hang out for a day. The evil Nicola devised a rigorous torture regime for us that consisted of: Swimming in the bright blue Lake Geneva (temperature: FREEEEESH) and lounging around on the lakefront for most of the sunny day, where matt made the somewhat miraculous transformation from ginger into a beetroot in just a few hours. We were then subjected to the Movenpick swiss ice-cream restaurant, a truly awful experience, and then to cap it all off, a BBQ and several beers on their deck as the sun went down. Shocking stuff.

We bid farewell to Nic & Dan and rode up to matt’s old family friend Ollie and his girlfriend Ursina’s palce in the swiss capitol, Bern. As it was a stinker of a day, Ollie suggested we go down to the river for a swim. I got us lost in swiss city traffic on the way to the river (I blame ze longwinden german streetnnamen) but it was well worth it once Ollie found us & lead us back down the hill. The idea was you walk up the riverbank for about a Km, then jump in & the freezing fast current & it sweeps you along at about jogging pace back to where you started. Along the river bank were red hand-rails, that indicated some kind of exit from the river. After watching some locals gracefully sweep themselves out of the water & up the steps, matt and I had a go.
“Failure” is probably the best way to describe it, I slipped on the stairs and took out some guy in speedo’s, but thankfully the group of pretty girls nearby didn’t see, as they were gasping at Lambie’s heroic sunburn. Ollie had got us out of the water about halfway down the river, as there was a footbridge spanning it at this point & the 4 of us got up on the railing & jumped off back into the river. Pretty good fun!

Ollie had the smallest webber style BBQ I’ve ever seen, probably about the size of a dinnerplate, but that didn’t stop him from cooking up a damn tasty BBQ for dinner!

We got up pretty early & headed out of the horrendous swiss city traffic & into the coma-inducing swiss countryside all the way up to Strasbourg. Unbeknownst to us, Strasbourg is the home of the EU council, the European council for human rights & some other important stuff as well.

However.
Arriving at the fairly modern hostel, we were greeted by the huge words ACCEPTANCE and TOLLERANCE plastered all over the walls…hmmm.
Sure enough, the place was a sickeningly wholesome affair, with more than one large school group staying there as well. Not the normal youth hostel vibe we’d come across, so alarm bells started ringing almost instantly. A short internet search later & as suspected, it was a church based place, but the creepy bit was instead of the usual ‘jesus is rockin’ throat cram, they were being really sneaky about it & definitely going out of their way to hide from the punters. We looked around the mostly deserted hostel & ended up in a basement area “games room”  that was clearly an old basement prison cell.
It was a wierd,creepy place. & after checking out the awesome gothic cathedral in the town square named Palais De Rohan. On the way back to the hostel, I had an awesome slow motion gumby stack off a massive 5 inches of curb in thongs – got a knee and a hand down, much to lambie’s amusement. we had an early one, woke up and got the hell out of there.

At a particular lunch stop along the way, Matt once again lost the “who can get better food for less money than the other ordering in another language” game. I’ve been winning this for the last 4 days in a row, despite having an even worse grasp on French than matt.
I grabbed what I thought was a can of soft drink, took a sip & discovered it was actually a shandy. You can buy stupid amounts of beer and grog at service stations in Europe, they almost encourage it – and to make matters worse, their nightclubs aren’t situated near the city center as you might imagine, but rather they plonk them all a good few kays out of town in rural/industrial areas. Safety First.

booze, not fizzy lemon stuff as i'd hoped

That day saw us do another 3 countrys in about 6 hours ride, from France we cut north over into Germany briefly for some autobahn action, then up into Luxemburg & a little town called Vianden. As a change to the beautiful weather we’ve been copping, our 6 hour ride was rained on for almost the entirety. Thankfully it cleared up a bit as we got into the twisty roads of Vianden.
Yet another insanely pretty little place, it has a huge medieval castle up on the hill & not a great deal going on in the town center. It’s a bit of a tourist trap by the looks of things, but we’ll go adventuring & sus it out.

Bastielle day celebrations were pretty mental. Tonnes of people were packed into touristy harbourfront area very similar to darling harbour. Matt & I wandered around through the crowds & discovered about 50 Riot police standing, fully armoured at the ready…What the hell was about to go on in this grimy city? Then up on a hill nearby, an old fort was lit up with floodlights & a bunch of fireworks started launching off it. To make things a little more cringeworthy, they’d slung a bunch of speakers up & started blasting French and American Pop music hits at the crowd in an effort to create some kind of “visual spectacular”
Of course the fireworks were a good few seconds out sync with the music, but the frenchies loved it. We grabbed a beer or 2 at a little bar as the fireworks were winding up, & sat out front, watching the massive crowd filtered by us. After a few beers, we realised that we were staying on the other side of the harbour & would have to walk past the riot squad and lingering revellers to get home.
We walked back along the harbour & were met with a pretty cool sight. The bright pink arc of a flare was waving around & plumes of smoke were floating through the crowd. The riot squad was standing at the ready in a line just waiting for the nod to go. People were firing roman candles at eachother & flicking bungers at feet as they walked by & generally being louts. It was very much a real life riot scene & we were walking throught the middle of it, but there wasn’t any anger in the crowd so it felt safe enough. Needless to say we didn’t stick around!

The next day wasn’t much fun. We had to ride up to Nice on the French Riviera & it was basically 6 hours of 40 degree heat in leathers, endless traffic jams and not a single bit of good road to boot! After several angry hours of traffic battle we finally got some clear roads into Cannes & got to cool off a bit. Seems THE mode of transport in this town is the scooter. Nobody wears riding gear, instead they prefer a safety singlet or some safety shorts & thongs. They just fang around the place, occasionally with a helmet on. Riding along the famous Cannes beachfront I saw a guy on a scooter come punting along, zipping between traffic as always, stand up in the seat & jump clean over a speed bump like it was a tabletop jump, then somehow land between oncoming traffic and his own direction – insane! The GPS told us the trip would take 30 mins, however 1.5 hours later in sweltering sticky heat & we finally got to nice.
Then we were given an impossible choice:
a) Look at the road and traffic ahead, or
b) Look at topless French girls lying on the beach meters to our right.
I watched Lambie come inches from running up the back of a car, and needless to say, gave him HEAPS over the radio. Minutes later, he was returning the bagging as I locked up the front wheel to avoid the back of a bus.
Our hostel was a few minutes from the beach in Nice, & our room had a really awesome group of people including 2 Aussies! We went for a swim at the rocky beach with our roommates them, grabbed a lamb roast dinner at the hostel and had a few beers for a winning 1 euro each!

The hostel we were staying at also owned another in an old monastery up the hill a bit & the bar girl at our hostel told us they were throwing a ‘beach’ theme party up there, (with more 1 euro beers!) so our room worth of people headed up. On our way up, the free shuttle bus arrived and we all piled in, except Lambie. As I was telling the driver to wait, I saw Lambie come barneying around a corner towards the bus. It turns out he’d decided to take a leak around a secluded corner & ended up getting locked in a secure apartment complex. Some deft fence scaling later and he was running towards us. It was an awesome night!

We slept in a bit & started the ride up to Bourg St Maurice. We rode up and over the absolute best bit of road I’ve experienced this trip so far, it was leading up to the highest paved scenic through rd in Europe over Col De La Bonette, a whopping 2800m! i won’t blab on about it, but it was basically a racetrack carved into the side of a mountain. You could see miles ahead, no cars & perfect, wide surface!

We had another big day riding, at one point we were stopped by an Italian guy on a Triumph cruser. He waived us over & despite our initial apprehension, he was really friendly & invited us to a biker Rally over in Italy. It sounded great, with live bands & free camping etc, but we had to push through. Next time!
we blasted through perfect mountain roads for a good 10 hours, & amidst a pitch black ghostly fog and light drizzle we slowly wound our way up yet another mountain & arrived into a little village called Nancroix (pronounced ‘non-qua’)  about midnight. When the morning came we both felt like we’d fallen down a flight of stairs, but it was an awesome little skiing village, wedged between the two sides of the Paradiski and Les’arcs ski resorts. http://www.lesarcsnet.com/pdf/les-arcs/paradiski-piste-map.jpg

Pretty amazing part of the world! We stayed at a little hostel run by an English couple by the name of Carol & Martin. They had an awesome little chalet that they’d turned into a snowboarder/mountainbiker hostel. It was jammed with character & we chilled out there for a day & had a few beers & a good chat with Carl & Martin! Having stayed there, I definitely want to spend a week or so snowboarding during the season, the hills just look phenomenal!

We headed off from Nancroix & Rode over into Italy & up into Switzerland. During our journey into Italy we stopped at a truck stop & were greeted by a really friendly old Italian couple who ran the truckstop. After many hand gestures, including the trademark kissing of fingertips while pointing at some fired onions, we ordered a sausage sandwich with 4 cheeses. The Gastronomic roadblock that landed on our plates was so freakin cheesy that Matt actually looked quite worried. I was so damn hungry I didn’t think twice & washed it down with a coke. We had a stunted conversation about where we hailed from involving may gestures & pointing at my Australian flag patch, They loved it & bid us a fond farewell after trying to force feed us espresso. Gotta love the Italian attitude to food!

We arrived in Switzerland & got stuck in some angry traffic. In front of us was a big group of bikers, one of whom had decide that the best way to attract passing Swiss females was to rev the living guts out of his GSXR1000. This got really annoying, but I took great satisfaction in watching a great cloud of oily blue smoke bellow out of his exhaust pipe every time he did it – a sure sign of blown piston rings. Enjoy your next engine service bill asshole!

Arriving at Nicola & Dan’s was unbelievable! They live in a stunning apartment with views of lake Geneva & we had an amazing meal of Swiss sausages & salad while we watched a new Top Gear. A few beers later & we hit the hay.
Spent the next day swimming in lake Geneva & generally lounging around in the sun. Life is so hard!
Nicola suggested we hit up the Movenpick ice-cream restaurant so with minimal arguments we hit that up!

Olivia

We rode along in the 40 degree heat on some boring, arid stretches of road. The coast behind us, this part of the country was quite hot and dry. Judging by the crops on the side of the road, the area produces a lot of sunflower seeds & not too much else. The further north we travelled, past Montpellier, it became a lot hotter, but the countryside got greener, & more vinyards & olive farms appeared.
I’d brought a pair of 2-way radios with me to use on the road & at festivals etc, they’d remained un-used up until today, as in a king bonehead move, I’d left the 2.5mm TRS “hands free” headsets back in Sydney, rendering the walkie talkies pretty much useless while we’re on the bikes. We pulled over at a massive supermarket and Lambie emerged with not only lunch, but a 5 euro ‘hands free’ headset, suitable for some obscure LG phone as well. We gave it a whirl & it worked a treat! I ran back inside and got another one. We put the radios in a pocket & threaded the headsets through our jackets & up into our helmets, sticking the microphone near our mouths with stage-tape, allowing at last for mid-ride conversations!
I’ll be honest, 90% of the time we’ll be alerting each other to the presence of (yet another) beautiful French girl, or a humorous town name (forques) but occasionally we can call back if someone gets stuck at a roundabout or call for a rest break etc. Its bloody handy!

We arrived in Uzes at Robs place; “Hey boys!” he said. “What the fuck are you doing down here!!!”
“No,” I replied “What the fuck are YOU doing living in a French village?!”
We went inside their gorgeous little house, (sarah’s familys holiday house) showered and headed out into the village for some beers. Talk about a gorgeous little town! Rob showed us the local scene, as unlike most villages, Uzes has a town square, not just an arterial road plowing straight through the guts of it. We had dinner, some more beers & hit the hay.

We bid our farewells & hit the road again. Thankfully, the ride from Uzes down to Marseille wasn’t as hot, but I was rocking a seriously bad headache so we pulled over & I washed down some neurofen with 1.5L of water. Apparently there was a hurricaine up north somewhere so as a result it was stupidly windy on the ride. Doing 110 into a howling 30 knott headwind isn’t much fun!

We arrived in Marseilles & were a little underwhelmed. We’ve been more or less blown away by every town we’d been to, but this place is a bit of a shithole. By all accounts it used to be a lot worse & they’ve put in a solid effort trying to spruce the place up, but it’s still a pretty gross city. Lots of derelict buildings, heaps of beggars & shady characters walking around – but the worst, Open sewers mean that the whole city smells like a drain. A Shame, because I’m sure it’s got some amazing history!
Its Bastille day today, so we might go check out the fireworks if there are any in this grubby little city!

Lambie realised that his rear brake fluid was a bit on the low side, and to add some fun to the mix, the reservoir was hidden behind a bit of plastic faring. An hour later, some fluid, cheap tools and lots of swearing later, we were back on the road.
We spent the morning fanging through more face meltingly good mountain passes & pulled over for a rest on top of a mountain somewhere. At the rest stop, we smashed a few red bulls and amused ourselves by bagging out an incredibly fat bloke on a GSXR1000. He was strutting around by himself in very tight, very bright, white leathers, a glistening helmet and WHITE plastic boots like a peacock. A few moments later we hit the road again, carving through the mountainside for 5 minutes or so, and were immediately carved up by a fat guy in bright white leathers. Goddamn I wish I had my nice bike with sticky tyres and no bloody luggage!
We continued along the road for a bit & had a reality check about 5 minutes after this, when we rounded a bend and spied a big group of riders pulled over. This is never means good news & sure enough, an older bloke on an old 80’s BMW had binned it. We pulled over and helped the other riders pull his bike out of the Armco. By the looks of things he’d lost the front tyre around a corner and slid into the railing. He was ok thankfully, a bit banged up, but was up and walking by the time we left. Once the incredible road had finished up again, we hit some boring road & blasted through a grottly little town on the Spanish coast & over into France. We took a detour via a windy coastal road for a bit, took a turn and got lost in the middle of nowhere. We fired up the ol’ tomtom and it sent us through sunflower paddocks and the smallest little town this side of Hobart. We found our way back to the coastal road & hit a monsterous backup of cars that stretched for about 2km because of a parked car. Dressed in leathers on a 38 degree day isn’t fun, so we blasted up the outside & left the traffic for dust.

We arrived in St Cyprian, despite GPS battery death & found ourselves in a pretty dead beach town. We hit the pub, drunk a few beers and watched Spain win the world cup. Unfortunately the town we were in was sort of a retirement-ish area & the crowd went mild when they won. Would have been unreal to be a few kays down the coast in Spain! There was a stray cat prowling around under the tables in the (outdoor) bar looking for food at one point. As I was watching, it jumped up onto an unsuspecting guys lap; the guy was engrossed in the Dive-Ball finals & he got a pretty big fright as you’d expect, but as well as jumping in his seat, his reaction was to basically backhand the cat in the face. The cat went flying, thrashing gracelessly through the air with a brilliant yowl & disappeared into the streets. Lambie got a Kebab, I went to sleep.

There was a minor cock up in the hotel bookings, which saw us ride for all of 10 minutes up the road to another beach town. Matt is basically in charge of booking hotels & stuff & I’m in charge of navigation, so I guess after the amount of times I got us lost it was inevitable that we arrived to discover a bloody double bed in the hotel room. Booo! Looks like I’ll be smashing up the floor. It was an absolute scorcher (+40 deg) so we spent most of the day at the beach, trying not to look at drop dead stunning topless french girls. So bloody good to finally go for a swim & catch some sun in the ocean again after a few months of landlocked London.  Real life is not going to be fun when I get back to it.

Its all about how you hold your tongue

We Left the nice new hostel and its crabby manageress in StJean Pier de Port, at around 9am, and about 5 mins later I spotted a hardware store & pulled over to try and find some bits for Alice. 1 Hour later, 0 English, 1 hacksaw, 1 threaded rod, 4 nuts, 4 bolts, 10 euro,  50 million hand gestures and some liberal application of Gaff tape later and alice’s engine was sitting nice and secure in the frame again! A nice weight off my mind!
Lambie and I checked our fuel & had about half a tank left each, so we decided to push on as we had a very very long way to go. The GPS decided that the “fastest route” between some of these towns was not the 90kmph ‘A’ roads, or even “B” roads, but somewhere around or ‘Y’ or ‘Z’ roads if we’re going by the whole letter thing. We ended up in the middle of nowhere on top of a misty French mountain. And by mist, I mean fog so damn thick you could barely see 10m in front. The road was thin and windy with lots of hairpins and twists, so we took it really slow. I won’t lie, it was eerie as all hell, so you cant imagine the scare I got when a disembodied, giant white bovine head appeared a few meters in front of me, followed by the ghostly figures of about 20 MASSIVE French cows, all hanging out right in the middle of the road. BRAAAKES! Ghost cows!

I have no idea what breed these things were, but they were pretty much the biggest cows I’ve ever seen. They were a pale beige colour that blended into the eerie mist all too well and they had cowbells around their necks – a faint ‘donk donk donk’ reporting all around us in surround sound as they lumbered around unseen in the fog, you know, adding even more spookyness to the vibe.
The Ghost Cows seemed quite intrigued by the misty mountain bikers, so we decided to blast the horns & try to get them to move. This sent them scarpering away slightly with a chorus of cowbells & we weaved through the heard.
After an hour or so of 20kmph fog, we rode outof Ghost Cow Pass , soaking wet, into the clear air & looked back. It sort of formed a white wall, there was no graduation. Crazy french mist!
We then rode down some more rural roads looking for fuel for a bout 50 miles, as the situation was starting to get dire & we were freaking out a bit. We stopped in a tiny little town called Arette, got some fuel and asked a friendly lady in an information booth the best way to get to Andorra. She gave me a much more detailed map of the area and suggested a scenic route over the Pyrenees mountains, into spain and through some back country over the mountains into Andorra.

Here’s our Amaze-route

What came next was simply the most spectacular, beautiful, stunning, amazing and *insert more synonyms for incredible here* bits of road I’ve EVER seen, It was the sort of thing you see on Top Gear, endless twisty mountain passes through gorgeous alpine valleys,sweeping corners beside creek beds, sharp, tight rocky passes across mountaintops, pitch black tunnels through hillsides and speed limit free straights through desert valleys
No cars,
No cops,
Just everlasting unbelievably perfect roads, nonstop, for 12 hours.
Every half an hour or so, the road would change, keeping you entertained and focussed, you’d get 30 mins of chilly mountain hairpins, with breathtaking views, then it would change into lush green twisty riverside sweepers, then you’d carve up an impossibly jagged, rocky ravine, cliff on one side, sheer drop on the other. The kind of place you’d expect to see Gollum peeking out of a cave. Then it would turn into blazing Spanish desert, Spaghetti western country – with incredible mesa mountains in the distance & before you knew it you’d be up in the mountains again 20 minutes later.

(anyone who’s a rider or enjoys incredible roads, please zoom right in on that map to pretty much anywhere on this road & check out some of the passes & twisties!)

I could pretty much go on about this for hours, it was the single best ride of my life & I’m pretty sure the roads are only going to get better from here on through the Alps!
We got to Andorra about midnight, completely and utterly exhausted, but absolutely buzzing from the epic ride. We got what we came for today!