Well, it’s been a week since the wedding and we’ve had a real busy time with 25 hours of flights and 14 hour stop in Brunei, two days in England and 5 days down of the 12 day trek around Europe.

We arrived in Brunei for our stop over on the way to Europe and we did a 4 hour trip around the small country which drives solely on the money from oil.  I was surprised when we landed that I understood a lot of the words on signs – turns out they speak the same language as in Indonesian, the language of Malay.  If I had done some research beforehand I probably would have boned up on what I’d learnt from our trips to Indo to make it easier travelling.

We saw the ‘Venice of the East’ which was fitting, knowing that we were going to Venice in a few days to compare the two.  The bay in Brunei had houses built with wooden stumps dropped down into the mud to create a village on the water which had 30,000 residents – crazy so many people can fit into such a small area on the water.

Then we had the crappy 17 hour flight through Dubai and onto London.  We arrived about 6:30 in the morning and managed to find our way to our friend Peta’s place in East London.  Best of all we slept almost all of the full 25 hours of flying, so we didn’t have any jetlag the day we landed so we headed straight to the Tower of London – where all kings and queens have lived, and many of famous prisoner’s over the last 500 years have had their heads cut off.  Rach was in her element.. she’s the biggest 16^th century English history buff, so she saw all the places in the tower she’s read about and it was pretty interesting to see the real armour used by king Henry VIII and the axe that was to come down on a couple of his queens.

The next day we headed to Hampton Court, which was another ‘Rachael day’ and it is the place of residence in the country for a fair few kings, mainly King Henry who was probably the most popular of kings.  The palace was so well maintained you’d swear it was all fake, with the walls, windows, clock tower, tapestry and paintings.  We had to ask, and we were told everything was the original including all the famous paintings from 500 years plus.  I also had fun when we walked outside and there were the biggest ducks you’ve ever seen and some funny geese so I chased them and tried to catch them... probably looking like an idiot to the hoity toity English folk.

After a few hours and two sets of swollen ankles later from all the walking we headed back into London in time to start the ‘Jack the Ripper’ tour.  Hooray for me, it was time to see how good Johnny Depp did at portraying the famous the unsolved crime.  We walked the streets of Whitechapel to see the original buildings where some of the murders happened, and also where one murder took place but is now just a multi-story car park.  What a downer.  There were a lot of speculation on the tour as to who it was, but realistically no one knows and it certainly won’t be getting solved anytime soon.  The scariest part was just trying to get home through the back streets of East London late at night.

An early rise and we were on our way to London city to catch our bus to start the tour around Europe.  First stop was the white cliffs of Dover before hopping on a ferry to cruise over to Calais in France and keep driving on our way to Amsterdam.  We went through Antwerpen in Belgium, which is where I stayed for 10 days last year with a few of the RFD boys and met Jimmy Verburgh and a few other of the Euro guys.  Amsterdam was a pretty crazy place, and I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, and you’d be correct. 

There was an overpowering smell of wacky tobaccy while watching tourists flock to the city boats to float up the canals and a red light district right in the centre of town.  Amsterdam did actually have a lot of cool culture to it too, and one part that we didn’t expect was walking into this tiny little ‘wine shop’ and met a shopkeeper that wasn’t shy of having a chat.  We learnt a lot about the culture they are accustomed too, all the while standing over a traditional absinthe set up.  His speciality in the shop was that he sold the only ‘real’ absinthe in Amsterdam, and that you can only purchase the real stuff from Holland.  I didn’t know much about absinthe before we met him but with his little guided tour we now know the origins of it all.

We then stumbled on a music and drum shop, that was so packed that they had drums stored up in the roof, and these were high-end kits, like a Gretch limited edition kit with everything on it in gold, huge sets of Tama Starclassic’s, and plenty of hand made cymbals and snare drums.  If only my luggage couldn’t exceed 23kg’s to come home or I would have bought a kit. 

Our tour guide said we had to try the Amsterdam hot chips.  Apparently they are life changing, they’re the perfect hot chip – crunch on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside.  They also do it different over there by giving you a paper cone and filling it up with chips and then having Mayo on top.  If I’ve learnt anything, its that tour guides generally over-hype thigns and the chips certainly didn’t meet my high expectations.  Just some more empty carbs to add to the diet.

Off on the road to the St. Goar in the Rhine Valley in Germany.  I was looking forward to it, since the Sommerfeld name is obviously German, but I didn’t know what the Rhine Valley was like.  As we were coming down the hill, it was evident that it’d be the best place to have MX trails or downhill MTB.  The hills were so good, perfect dirt, nice temperature (in summer) and a great view.  St Goar itself is right on the fast-flowing river and has so far been the best looking place we’ve stayed.  If we missed the bus and had to stay there I certainly wouldn’t have complained.  The Rhine Valley is known for it’s wine, even though I would have thought Germany and Beer go together much better, but we tried it out with a really cool wine tasting experience in a cave under the town of St. Goar that is quite moist and really cold to keep their sweet white wines at a perfect temperature.  So after some sampling of the wines we were about ready to go to bed until someone decided to turn the hotel into our own nightclub and we partied on into the night.  It was a good end to St. Goar, if I can visit somewhere again, it would be there.

The drive to Munich was quiet, with most of the bus of 50 sporting some cracking headaches and electing to sleep for much of the trip.  When we were coming closer to Munich, there were fields with some type of plant growing on angles that you thought were grapes or perhaps tomatoes.  It turns out they were ‘Hops’ which are used in beer.  I brew my own beer and like to think I experiment and come up with some good tasting beers using different types of hops from around the world, so it was interesting to see how they are grown alongside the barley.  In Munich we did a pushbike tour around the city.  On the downside the pushies were So. Cal cruiser style, with not much chance of any stunts, on the plus side, I tried my best to wheelie them and jump them off any object I could throughout town.  There were plenty of tree roots that made for good lips and I was on my way to bunny hopping over small fences and being a general goose on them.  After we were well and truly dehydrated from riding around Munich we finished the night with a traditional drink or two in a German Beer hall ‘Hofbrauhaus’.  Well, the beer steins that are synonymous with Germany were going down wayyy too easy, and the Pretzels that were bigger than your head were just salty enough to make you want to keep drinking.  It really is a vicious cycle and only able to get off by going to bed.  I won’t incriminate myself as to how many steins went down with the big group of us, but lets just say we helped out the 20,000 litres of beer that flow through the taps of Hofbrauhaus every single day.  At 6,90Euro each, they are making one hell of a profit one would think!  I also had to try the German sausages which are a big thing, so Rach and I had a platter of different sausages on a bed of sauerkraut.  Unbelievable, those Germans know how to live.

After waking up worse for wear for the second day in a row, we headed to Austria where we had to go over the Bavarian Alps.  I didn’t see most of it while I was cowering in the corner of the bus, trying to avoid natural sunlight as much as possible.  And I was one of the good ones haha.  So far the story sounds like we were massive boozeheads, but we weren’t really.  Just the German stops revolved a lot about trying their way of life, and they just happened to be hardened drinkers.  We stayed at Hopfgarten in Austria, a tiny town that is mainly a ski-resort area, but in summer time looks unreal in the mountains.  The plus side, when there’s no snow like now, it is perfect for mountain biking – they use the all the chair lifts for skiining to get the MTB riders up to the top of the hill and you find your way back down.  The only problem was the country is shut on Sundays and we couldn’t hire a bike.  Damn.

From Austria we headed for Venice in Italy.  Venice was one of the cities I wanted to visit, it just seems weird that a city is floating.  I didn’t really research how or why Venice is like it is, I figured the tour guide would tell us.  Turns out they just built it from the marshes by sinking wooden pylons and building on top of it over hundreds of years.  Not a city that existed and then sunk under the ocean or anything.  Some spots are getting progressively wetter, with the main part of Venice having water seep through at high-tide.  So if this global warming thing is for real, in 50 years there won’t be much of the streets in Venice because it laps the streets with water at the moment. Rach and I walked all around Venice and crossing the little bridges that link all the islands of buildings together.  We essentially wanted to get ourselves lost so we could meet the real people of Venice, not where all the tourists go.  We did that when we started following signs to a Piazzo.  We didnt’ know where it would lead to, and what it was.   After 2 hours of walking and wishing it was over, we found it.  It was a bloody car park.  After all that we found a car park.  On the other hand we found a tiny bridge that seemingly went to nowhere.  It led straight into a building, where most would lead to another street.  It was actually a restaurant, and it wasn’t a touristy one, it was a legitimate Venetian eatery.  It just added to the authenticity of the city, because essentially, it was just a tourist destintation and I was over looking at different things you could buy, that each shop had.  It was like going to the Royal Show back home... you were just buying trinket crap that would just gather dust and buy pretty ordinary dagwood dogs.  The restaurant was awesome, we had a 3-course meal for a fraction of what everyone else paid and the food was a lot better.  So score one for us getting lost and finding that.

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