This summer my family and I spent a week in a house on the edge of the Lysefjord on the south western coast of Norway. My mother and I had spent an entire headache-inducing Saturday scouring the internet and fretting over the choices, eventually selecting a hutte, rather riskily, for the view. More specifically, we chose it because the view could be admired from some rather comfortable looking leather sofas in the lounge - out through the cathedral-esque windows. My father, whom we’d been trying to enthuse to take up the fishing opportunties, said: “It doesn’t look very close to the water”. Winning him over was not made any easier by the fact that the descriptions were in Norwegian and there was reference to 4,444 “trappen” which sounded suspiciously like the Afrikaans word for stairs. We later found out that the 4,444 stairs were in fact a nearby tourist attraction. Needless to say they did not make it onto the site-seeing agenda.Norway: Up the fjord... without a paddle.
This summer my family and I spent a week in a house on the edge of the Lysefjord on the south western coast of Norway. My mother and I had spent an entire headache-inducing Saturday scouring the internet and fretting over the choices, eventually selecting a hutte, rather riskily, for the view. More specifically, we chose it because the view could be admired from some rather comfortable looking leather sofas in the lounge - out through the cathedral-esque windows. My father, whom we’d been trying to enthuse to take up the fishing opportunties, said: “It doesn’t look very close to the water”. Winning him over was not made any easier by the fact that the descriptions were in Norwegian and there was reference to 4,444 “trappen” which sounded suspiciously like the Afrikaans word for stairs. We later found out that the 4,444 stairs were in fact a nearby tourist attraction. Needless to say they did not make it onto the site-seeing agenda.
Vietnam
Our introduction to the Vietnamese traffic system was a harsh one – a taxi from the airport to our Hanoi city centre concrete block hotel. Despite its precocious entrance they had won our enduring recommendations within five minutes by checking us into a used room. Nice.
After an extended nap we spent a happy-ish afternoon pottering around the sweaty city.
It took us a good 10 minutes to cross the first road we came to. The traffic is absolutely incredible - a continuous stream of mopeds going in all directions at once with absolutely no apparent system for indicating. The resultant sensory confusion is exacerbated by the continuous din of blaring hooters. The only way to get avoid wasting days waiting on pavements is to hold hands, close your eyes and walk really slowly so that they just go around you.
After an extended nap we spent a happy-ish afternoon pottering around the sweaty city.
It took us a good 10 minutes to cross the first road we came to. The traffic is absolutely incredible - a continuous stream of mopeds going in all directions at once with absolutely no apparent system for indicating. The resultant sensory confusion is exacerbated by the continuous din of blaring hooters. The only way to get avoid wasting days waiting on pavements is to hold hands, close your eyes and walk really slowly so that they just go around you.
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