Instal 13
Mon July 2
Well had a good relaxing week with dick and yvonne.....he had plenty of hedgecutting lined up and we managed to talk him into doing that while we lounged around during day and caught up with him at nights.....as we didnt want him taking the week off to cart us around everywhere as we were ready for a feet up...we did poke into york and managed to get us a couple of cabin bags for the swedish trip as best way with ryanair is to have one carry-on bag each which can weigh up to 10kg but has to be the right dimensions so got a couple from oxfam (an op. shop) for a fiver each both brand new ....if you book other bags onto those flights they cost fifty quid each !!
The downside of cheap airflights is that they usually originate at satelite airports and at odd times of the day and this was no exception......so today we had to megabus down to london which involved a bus/train replica of the trip up....standing at st pancreas station in the pouring rain and only half an hour to fight our way through the underground in the rush hour to get to stanstead bus ....in a rare moment of financial suicide i decided to lash out on a taxi to baker st where easy-bus depats for stanstead and couldnt be stuffed trying to fight thru underground with all our luggage and anyway only just got there in time by direct taxi.....arrived baker st passed no 22/1b...no sign of sherlock but we did find bus only just in time.....got up to stanstead and found that our so-called airport lodge is about 10km away in small village called takely....an indian company goes round buying up old houses and converting them to units for b&b and call them lodges...a room cost 55 quid and they look after your bags while you were away and the breakfast was continental but plenty of options
Tue 2 july
Up 4.0am breakfast and manager takes us to airport 5.0am (9 quid of course for ride)....stanstead is bloody bedlam even at that time of day and there are 99 departure gates , the trick being which one to pick....but we got thru pretty good as no check in luggage and we had already printed out our boarding passes online which is just as well as there was huge lines of people who were waiting at ryanaire counters to check in bags and or get boarding passes(costs another 25 quid each if you havent printed them yourself)so we waltzed straight thru so i am now a big fan of travelling with just carry-on luggage as you gan get a lot into 10kg bags anyway
Flew out towards sweden 6.30am...fortunately tore and gunvor had done a bit of research on line as i had only told them the flight no and gothenburg city airport and never thought much more about it but when we landed about 3 hours later immediatly realised that we were not at a big airport as there was agricultural aircraft parked up and we were the only passenger jet in site....and a piddly little terminal (should have thought of that as ryanair likes that type of airport as landing fees are cheap)...anyway they were there to meet us and we headed off across into central sweden to where they live which is a town called jarpas near to the bigger town of lidkoping........
The first thing you notice about sweden is that the country is very green and very open...can see for miles....there are trees but they tend to be in blocks as no shelter belts as such because no fences.......like britain , a lot of the country is in crop
At godesgarden which is the torstenssons main farm, along with a lot of other farms in sweden , they have gone out of milking cows....in their case about about 4 years ago...along with other farms the big livestock barns sit empty....the farm is run by tore and gunvors son roland and he works partly off farm as a loans officer for a rural type bank....on the farm he has believe it or not a small flock of suffolk sheep but the majority of the farms are in grain(organic)...he has had a massive grain dryer built to do both their own grain and others as well..to operate the dryer and heat the houses they have built a seriously big hot water boiler....it is about 30 meters long and 3 high....60,000 liters of hot water and the firebox opens up for access by front-end loader ....is big enough to burn big logs, stumps,rubbish of all kinds and as a back--up, large bales of straw......funding for it came from themselves , plus the church which is nearby and gets it and its houses heated as well , and the swedish govt.(the church/graveyard and top part of the village are right in the middle of the farm)
Around this part of sweden it is very neat and tidy although tore says that he thinks it is rough compared to norway where their oldest son lives
When i lived in sweden the church (lutheran) was run by the state and everyone was deemed to be in it at birth and had to apply in later life if they didnt want to be in it....in the 80s the state cut the church loose but it is still a very dominant institution and all its members pay a tithe of about 1.5% of their income which is how come they can lash out on such things as part ownership of boilers etc...the church also funds maitenance of grounds around its houses and the graveyard
The grave yard is a work of art in its self....immaculate with most graves having small gardens in front and if an inmates family die out and there is no-one left to visit and help maintain the grave then the headstone is removed and someone else is installed.....tore says in that way they have buried over 30,000 people in that graveyard since about the year 1200.
Speaking of graveyards , i was out with tore having a look at their big cultivator/air seeder which was a fair way away doing a job for a research farm and on the way home he stopped to show me a graveyard with a big wooden structure in the middle of it ....hanging from it was the oldest recorded church bell in sweden.....i was getting the photo and he wandered off to talk to a woman who was tending a grave.....there was a big bell-pull rope hanging from the bell and the small boy came out in me and somehow or other my hands got hold of that rope and i started to get that bell to swing.....just before i got it to strike, tore came running over to say not good idea as is only to be rung for a death and it wouldnt be cool to give the attached village a false alarm.....so you could say..."i was saved from the bell !! )
While i was swanning around on such ventures kate was with gunvor learning to be a bee keeper(despite kate not being a great fan of bees !)...something that gunvor has been getting into more and more in later years and the old milkroom from the cow days is now the extraction room....i also got involved at one stage and kate and i both attached the wax sheets to a heap of frames and we spun out the honey from a lot of hives as well....the little buggers are actually a lot of work during the honey season and each full box will have up to 20kgs of honey init and it is a sticky business as well so dont think i will rush into doing same at home !!
In the 5 days we were up there we were invited to a 61st birthday one night which was at the victims house and involved a full sitdown meal and we met a couple of women there who were fairly radical in their circumstances (both fans of "allo allo " and there was much humour when they found out that i was once general ludvig von schmelling
On another night we went to the annual dinner for a village group which they are involved in ....they have an outdoor museum which involves a number of restored buildings which they have shifted in from various locations over the years....they are all restored and some are old residences , others are barns , a grain mill etc and there was about 60 there....the meal was outdoor and involved pickled herrings which are an aquired taste....quite strong and sweet served with new spuds and salads etc....a small band of a drummer, a keyboard and a sax player....in between this there was a course of games which we had to split up into teams for such as darts,weight guessing ,rolling pin throwing etc and singing as well...all in swedish of course and us not called on to do a kiwi item fortunately
One day we bused into lidkoping which is the main town in the territory and had a poke around there..in my working days there sweden was very conservative and the town which i think was about 16000 pop only had two pubs ..found my old pub and bugger me it has been turned into a bank....what is the world coming to
July 7
next minute the week was over and gunvor and tore insisted on taking us back to airport despite us suggesting we train.......on the way we stopped at trollhatten to see the big lock system...this is where the river heading towards gothenburg is linked to the gota canal......so you can travel right thru sweden via the two big lakes and come out into the baltic on the east coast or visa versa....something peter wilson and we are going to do when we get our barge organised!!
flew out 9.40 and arrived stanstead 10.30 with the change of time zones....had a bitch of a time finding the shuttle for the b&b as we were waiting in wrong place but an hr and a half later we were back and reunited with our main luggage
July 8
Well this was something we organised on way down to catch plane before we went to sweden.....kate has had this endless determination to get to austria but it was not a go this time but just before we left for sweden she had spied an advt in a paper for a cheap package trip down to the channel island of guernsey which involved 3 days and two nights and a free rental car thrown in....so on a whim we rang to see if we could go today while we were still at stanstead and they confirmed that was a go so had a leisurly start today....left the main cases at the b&b again and got a ride to stanstead and we were away on air aurigny in an atr 72/42(which is what air nz fly locally)......landed guernsey an hour later......needless to say there is no such thing as a free rental car as the bastards always get you on having to buy out the 1500 quid insurance excess(they said there was already some scratches on the ka to be noted and i couldnt see them so figured we would get lumbered if we didnt esp when i saw that a scratch on a wing mirror could be $80nz alone and full cover only $70 for the two days plus had to reimburse $20 petrol they put in it .(you can then take it back empty but....that half filled tank as fuel cheap down there and try as i could , i only managed to use half of it
When i saw the guernsey roads i was glad we bought out the insurance!!...they are pretty tight and high sided like cornish hedges....the sides may have grass or weeds on them but under that lurks a wall of grannit and not enough room to pass in a lot of cases so you either have to back off or shoot up someones driveway....they have an interesting thing at intersections called a "filter" where you all take turns to go in order ....the speed limit is 25mph in built up area or 35mph for so called open roads but not easy to tell which is which......and there are speed cameras and cops galore ....must be more cops per population than anywhere else in europe and all they have to do is speeding and parking fines...road names are sort of a mixture of old english and mongrolised french.....must be a bit of irish influence there too as our hotel was only 10 mins from airport and at one stage we saw a sign post to it but no mention of it at the next junction which is fairly typical of what you get in ireland....i actually fluked to find "green acres hotel" about 20 mins later which wasnt bad cause the couple we sat next to at breakfast next morn , took an hour and a half to find it!.....the hotel was sort of like something out of a timewarp....sort of a cross between the chateau tongariro and faulty towers....but quite ok ....had a good roast beef dinner but drinkies fairly steep
One of the main reasons we went to guernsey was that when billy berwick lived with us in nz , he had a mate on guersey and then his mate started sending us little bits and pieces over the years as he said he always felt indebted to nz because of the new zealand red cross parcels they got during the war when they were starving (just before the german invasion a lot of the kids were evacuated to england but malcolms mother got the call in the middle of the night and malc. was sound asleep and his ma thought he looked so peacful that she didnt like to wake him so he spent the entire occupation on the island).......well day 2 on the island we went and visited malcolm and his wife pam....for a cup of char and a yarn.....asked pam about her war experiences as well and she said she was a kid in england at the time and nothing too dramatic happened ....then she added in a by-the-by sort of way that a german parachute mine fell on their house and they were buried in the rubble but fortunately they had a "morrison shelter" in their living room which was essentially a big oblong steel box which doubled as a table and they had all been huddled in that.....the firewardens had a record of which families in a street , had these shelters and when the heavy rescue teams arrived , these were the houses that they started serching thru first and a day later they were dug out of the rubble....apart from that it was pretty uneventful she said except for a rogue jerry aircraft machine-gunning them in the street on another occassion that is.........
Asked Malcolm what is a must see on the island.......he said "the occupation museum"....i could just see the look of joy on kates face....but hey it was my only military museum of the trip and only took 4 hrs so not too bad.......when the germans invaded they shifted a heap of slave labourers onto the channel islands to fortify it and they used vast quantities of concrete to build large gun emplacements and a chain of huge observation towers around the island , the job of which was to range-find for the guns.....the british were tickled pink as they had no intention of mounting a counter invasion against the germans as adolf had figured they would.....they simply stayed outside the 26odd mile range of the guns and let the germans spend all that time and resources for nought.....the only cock-up was that at invasion time jerry bombed the wharf and killed 35 odd islanders and then found out that the islands were not defended and they had only to walk in....they blamed the brits for not telling them but apparently that was crap as from france apparently you can see cars driving on the roads of the channel islands with a good set of binnoculars so they should have known without being told
Other than that we cruised around the island looking at various sites and on the last morning gave it a last circumnavigation to try and use up that petrol and promptly got lost which caused kate to squirm a bit as we were cutting it fine for the plane....got on right road and got stuck behind a convoy of tractor and trailers which were carting rock to a job near the airport and had to stay there as no options to pass.....more squirming......but we got there in the end .....advantage of buying out insurance is that you dont have to have an inspection at the end....you just throw them the keys at their airport desk as you run past.....back on aurigny .........had to go to jersey first and pick up some more passengers there before back to stanstead aboout 1.30......didnt go back to b&b...got them to drop bags down to airport for us and then we jumped on a pre-booked easy-bus down to london
Arrived baker st....took tube to london bridge station which is where you get district train to kent right on 5.00 rush time.....picked wrong day as they were having an olympic games practise....half station closed off.... crawling with cops and everybody had to go out in the street to get between the two stations(underground and district)....talk about a crowd....i got a vantage point up above the street and did the tv nz bit....was like a big herd of ants......saw a pub over road and we repaired across there to have tea and wait for the rush hour to finish......just coming out of that which is beside a large church when the top of the church sort of exploded into flame....they had probably advertised it locally but it still scared the bejeebers out of those who didnt know....a fireworks practise for the olympics....a pity it was broad daylight....you would have thought they could have waited till dark
Got the train to kent arriving 8.00pm
July 11th
Back at long-suffering julia and peter's stonecross for a couple of days.....did a few jobs for them....weather in england still crap....fine at start of day...thunder showers in arvo every bloody day...worst summer in uk for the last century
Sited up a couple of tanks for rainwater collection , cut a hedge and actually helped shift some sheep....normally the share farmer does all the work but on this occassion we had a few hundred ewes and lambs in a section below the house....whilst mustering them without dogs ....a woman of african origins turned up in the middle of it with two large alsatians and a border collie (there is a public walkway right thru the farm....one of the reasons the sf told me he doesnt like having ewes with young lambs on this property....fortunately these lambs were all of weaning age cause this woman who was probably walking dogs for other people , couldnt hang onto the dogs when they saw the sheep and one of the alsatians broke free and into the mob.....what a circus....sheep everywhere and this woman chasing after this dog whilst still hanging on to the other two....sheep jumping fences and her screaming like a banshee....fortunately the dog was mostly just pouncing on them and not ripping great hunks out of them but it would only have been a matter of time....the sheep were wondering what the hell was going on too as they are not normally scared of dogs as there is a constant stream of people with dogs going thru them every day , normally on leads though....so just as well helen clark didnt get the " right-to-roam" law passed when they were in power.......oh for my parker hale 30-06 at a moment like that , but eventually she managed to catch the bloody thing which by now had run an old ewe to ground and was about to start eating it.....she apologised about a thousand times and i put in a plug about her buying a good quality dog muzzle for next time she cant hang on to her pooches
Fri 13th july
Julia dropped us up to ewan and carol's (smyth )as their loft conversion is finally finished and we wanted to get a weekend in with them....went to their local ....the ""snooty fox at three bridges...met all their immediate circle of pals and they were all good troops so a good night....
Sat 14th......had a look around smyths business which is based around ground anchoring systems and they are on a roll at the moment as smyth has developed and patented a special anchor which is much in demand by various large firms....at night went to one of the pals birthday partys which started as a chineese meal and finished at one of the houses where we did a bit of boogeying
Sun15...roast beef and yorkshire puddings.....the last in britain
Mon 16 july
good old smyth again....volunteered to take us to heathrow just after lunch....great to have a ride not from the economics but from not having to haul cases on and off trains as we would have had to train to victoria and change to underground for heathrow
Got there 5 hrs before takeoff and were virtually first in line when booking opened but still couldnt get the premo seats which are the ones at the bulkheads or by the doors which dont have seats in front of them.....what obviously happens is that a lot of people must book on line or by machine and in both those cases you get to pick seats....but never to mind we were away 8.0pm heading for korea on korean air again.777-300.....ka are not as good as singapore air in my opinion ....the level of service is a bit lower and they have crap inflight movies....i only managed 1 movie and was reduced to watching old episodes of tv series V......i actually went to sleep for a few hours which is something i dont usually manage to do on planes
Tue 17 july
On way up korean air had paid for our stopover at airport and it was top-hole but this time on way home namesake had us booked into a hotel in the city and we had to get there off our own bats.(we were told both stop-overs would be included but apparently no-one told korean air so think namesake might have had to lash out for this one himself)...took a bit of advice and headed across to airport railway stn...the terminal is linked to the station by a huge atrium which is probably as big as the dunedin stadium alone the whole complex is massive.....got ouselves on the economy arex train and takes about an hour into town to seoul station.....then we had to get to our hotel which was at dongdaemun...so we had to take on the seoul metro in the rush hour....the tickets are all by machine which fortunately are able to be worked in english and a helpful guy gave us a bit of a hand(koreans are pretty good at wandering up and volunteering to help if they can speak english )....however i dont think we would have had as much of a good run if we hadnt done our time in the london underground on our various trips as the trick is not just to find your station on the map...it is to work out which way the train coming in is heading....could be towards your station which is good or could be coming from your station which is bad as you then have to find your way over onto the opposite platform
Anyway we got to the selected station ok (we had checked our big bags thru to auckland fortunately and only had the ones we bought to go to sweden and guernsey) and came out into what could be described as a fairly cosmopolitan area ....couldnt find hotel...eventually helpfiul korean turned up and transpired we were right outside of it............aand it was a bloody dump so just as well we were not paying for it but will be having a word about it to namesake when we have the debrief
Anyway it was survivable and at least it had an ensuite but that was about it ...had a jug but no tea or coffeemaking equipment...was dirty and didnt smell too good either...i have seen better center-city backpackers ....anyway we resolved to make the most of it and wernt going to eat there as meals wernt included in the deal and it wasnt the sort of place to go fine-dining....so we hit the streets about 8.30pm......im not a real big fan of asia as my limited experiences there always reminds me of the smell of cooked cabbage and this area was no exception......dongdaemun is a main market area of town and during the day there are about 35,000 small shops/stalls operating as well as big shopping centers....its a bit seedy and there was a lot of other smells that wernt cabbage and a fair bit of litter to trudge thu...i should have added that in daylight the whole of seoul was enveloped in smog....hence quite a few people wearing sars masks...it was about 28degrees and very humid......by night it wasnt much better but the worms were biting and we trudged along bypassing subway , mcdonalds and various indian restaurants as we wanted to try something local....spied an upsairs restaurant across street ...quite small but a good view so we headed up a set of stairs and in we went....i have never seen such a look of horror on a waitresses face as then.....poor bugger she was mortified that two westeners had just appeared and no-one on staff with any english at all....so she scooted over to a couple of young fellows at a table and found that one of them could speak a little english....i explained that we wanted something korean....he say this not korean restaurant , this is trditional chinese ....i say never mind this will do so what can we eat....he say you like lamb and he does a bit of baaing to get the idea across....i say that would be good....he brightened and said...is australian lamb...i said that is bad but we will try and not choke......so waitress opens up a stainless steel trapdoor in the middle of our table and comes out with a frame full of flaming ceramic pipes ....she slots this into the hole in the table and opens a lever ....this is an extarctor which draws the smoke away down a pipe so you dont get smoked out and the lamb turned up on about 20 small skewers and between the waitress and kate they proceeded to cook these on the frame....sort of a version of the stonegrills you get here in places....the "sauce" to dip them in was actually dried powder and some of it was fairly hot and there was a few side salads a bits and pieces to go with it and they showed us how the frame had slots in it so you can slowly pull your meat to the end of the skewer each time you want a mouthful and you dont have to become a sword swallower....it was bloody delicious and was washed down with large bottles of tsingtao beer....they were very impressed that i was familiar with their beer and i said i usually have one of those at the asian restaurant in dunedin when going to movies at rialto but obviously all that was lost in translation
Now you can say what you like about where the maori came from.....but the theory about islands off the coast of china looks the best bet as these chinese which were serving us looked pretty much like bros to me
Wed 18th july
Foolishly turned off aircon in night which made it too hot to sleep properly and besides we were up early as wanted a look around in morning.....asked the numb-nuts behind the reception desk where we could get a short city tour....he said ah yes good tour endless bus hop-on-hop-off take two hours and showed us a station on the metro where it left from so we checked out 8.0am and away on metro in rush hour again.....an hour and a half later we got there but couldnt find anyone who could speak english and direct us as to which exit to take to find bloody bus....these stations are big and each exit goes to a different street so by 10.0...no good we decide to head back to airport in disgust....back to seoul station and about to buy ticket for train back to airport when see tourist info counter.....yes the bus we were looking for stops right outside and next one is at 11.30 am and takes 2 hours...thought that could be cutting it a bit fine but we could make up time by taking express train to aport when we got back...twice the price as normal one but damn the expense...full steam ahead......so off we went....as ive just said before....there is a lot of haze in seoul which you could call smog if you felt that way and it was no better today despite the fact that it was raining....bloody stuff chases us around the world this trip
So we got a bit of a cooks tour around seoul in a bus that had a set ofheadphones and a prerecorded commentary in advance telling you inadavnce one stop at a time what you were going to see and a number came up on the panel in front of you corresponding to one on the supplied map......was staggered to find that bus went right past our hotel too so a gypsy curse on that receptionist......now i should have studdied that map a bit better when we started as we got on at stop number 5 and when we got to stop number 27 they announced that thankyou i hope you enjoyed the trip bla-de-bla....and i said to girl who was hostess...."you told us this was an endless bus"...she said it is but now we stop for lunch before we start off at no one again....................well you can imagine the sinking feeling in the old tummy about that and i am afraid to say i did a bit of a hissy fit and the result was that she flagged down a taxi for us to get back to seoul station but we had such a rush to get our gear off bus and into taxi that we realised later in nz that kate had left her camera on the seat of the bus.....which was a major disaster as i hadnt copied any onto our portable hard drive since the end of the boat cruise so all her photos since then lost................so have mixed memories of korea
Got back to airport in plenty of time on express which in fact was only about 20mins quicker than ordinary train would have been.......plane full and we should have got our boarding passes yesterday before we went into the city ...so i end up at one end of plane and kate at the other
Thur 19 july
well not a scaric of sleep on flight over night....read a book and watched about 5 more episodes of V but neither put me to sleep although kate did get a bit of kip.....into auckland 7.30am and got things into perspective....you dont realise how small we are here.....all of auckland airport would fit into the atrium outside of seoul's airport i reckon and the domestic terminal at auckland is a dump to boot
Down to ch ch at lunchtime....anne had broken her arm a few days ago and couldnt pick us up so got taxi which is usually $20 to their place but now they have to pay $8 to come into the airport each time and they pass that onto you as well so what a bloody rip off......welcome home indeed !!!
In the afternoon i really tempted fate by going with brendy and annes son david to transfere their plane from rangiora to chch airport where they needed it to go to a fly-in to omarama the following day....it was my 13th plane flight for the trip but it all went off without a hitch....david is a good pilot and is normally flying in africa doing low level surveying for mining companies but home for a holiday at the moment......so for the second time today i flew into chch
Fri 20th.....heavy frost...caught naked bus home a couple of weeks earlier than we have done in the past....looks a bit wintery
Main regrets of trip........boat being late which meant we missed lizzies diamond jubilee weekend.......missed big trooping of the colours because we were in yorkshire but it rained anyway......same for the dedication of the monument to bomber command that was opened shortly afterwards as the lancaster of the queens flight flew over hyde park and dropped a million poppies out of the bomb bay......also wanted to go to "war and peace" which is a monster 4 day 200 acre event for people who own military hardware (started the day we flew out )and also wouldnt have minded a tour of the olympic games site but otherwise have pronounced the trip a successful mission
Well thats it for now but i will add some more photos when i get organised......kate emailing tour bus company in faint hope someone handed camera in
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