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Five flavours: Day -2 Teaser preview
Soundtrack: “Spice Up Your Life”, The Spice Girls Five flavours to bind them all and in the humidity eat them. Sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter are calling me. Don Walker may have written, “Went back to South East Asia, I know the answer sure ain’t there,” but I don’t think he’d even been to Bali at the time he wrote “Khe Sanh”. Maybe he was asking the wrong question, because if he’d been wondering about where to go to find a handful of awesome flavours that make the backbone of amazing cuisine, then SE Asia is the place to be. Five. Don Walker, Phil Small, Steve Prestwich, Ian Moss,…
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Baltics24: Day 14 – Vilnius
Our last full day in Vilnius, and indeed the Baltic states. Eastern Europe has apparently just one castle built on an island in a lake, and that’s in Lithuania at Trakai, about 20km out of Vilnius. Having travelled through Scotland several times, including just last year, I’ve seen my fair share of castles in lakes, it’s basically mandatory there to have a castle, or the ruins of one, wherever an island exists in a lake/loch. Mandatory, Bonnie Prince Charlie said so. Eastern Europe, not mandatory, maybe the folks at Trakai did it and then paid everyone else not to, so they’d be unique, or maybe in the Grand Duchy of…
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Say it slowly tour Day 26: Sunshine on Pest / thoughts on easy and hard travel / Buda, Pest, and all that
Today the sun shines, and I might be able to see more of this place. I’m still pondering where there is any point to staying an extra day — I would like to see more of the place, but am not overly keen my my current digs. Will ponder some more. The Marco Polo Hostel is well promoted, and a member of Hostels International. It’s also a bit like a MacHostel, giving the basics but not much else. I realise that hostels are, by their very nature, the very very low end of the market. But if I look at the Birmingham backpackers, there were private shower cubicles with room…
