Eurotrip - Featuring The Heff

Well hallow thar!

I do apologise for the delayed posting of the blog. We’ve had a lack of opportunity, and when I was faced with a possible chance to post something, I didn’t have anything written up. My blogging has been awfully slack as of late, and because of that, I have to write up about two weeks worth of blog.

Moving on from the Turks, we visited Bulgaria. At the border, we were stopped for a about 2 hours, and we had to pull out all our luggage from underneath and stand beside our bags. A chap would walk around the bags, and when he saw a suspicious person, he would shove his hands in the bag and feel around. I have no idea how we would find anything using that method. If that’s how the border control works in Eastern Europe, it would be too easy to smuggle. I expected some dogs to come through and have a sniff, or even just a more extensive search. Having shaved off my beard, I no longer look like a drug dealer, so the customs man didn’t go near my bag, but another fella on the tour who didn’t go for the shave (the only lad who didn‘t get a shave), had his bag felt up. I think on the way home, I’ll have a shave before I get to the airport, then I won’t get bomb tested like on the way in to London.

After making it through, we went through ages of driving. Through Eastern Europe, we’ve spent a frigg load of time on the coach. Some people are really starting to feel it and are sick of it. I don’t know why they get so sick of it, those bastards can sleep with no problem. There are two or three of us that really struggle with the idea of sleeping on the coach. I’ve had a few small naps, which last a whole 5-10 minutes which suck more arse than just staying awake. I can’t continue whinging though, because the further north we go through the East, the more beautiful the scenery is becoming, so there is always something magical to look at.



I don’t know if I’ve already mentioned this story, but I’ll throw it in anyway. When Benjamin and myself were in Scotland, he broke the fly on his jeans. After a small search, we discovered that to get it repaired was far too expensive. He could have had a rather good night out for the price of that zip repair, so he didn’t bother. Instead, he decided that he was going to go out and buy a button and some cotton and sew a button in place of the zip and just cut a hole in the opposite side of the button. No offence to the old chump, but I highly doubt his ability to pull off a procedure like that. I went along with it anyway. Before we could get to a sewing shop, Ben found a button on the ground that looked like it might fit his requirements. Throughout our stay in Scotland, he found a couple more. Whilst in England, he found even more, and had built up a collection of about 6-7 buttons. All of these buttons are just found on the streets. Sure enough, we visited France, and there were a few more buttons lying around, and Big Ben discovered a passion deep within to find a button in each country he visited. Therefore, he now has buttons from Scotland, England, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Monaco, Macedonia and Turkey. Our entire tour is now on the search for buttons every time we get to a new country now. It’s gone beyond an obsession now. Unfortunately, because Ben didn’t realise his passion for buttons until France, he wasn’t able to keep track of where each button came from, so he’s just got a big fat bag of multi-coloured, multi-sized, multi-holed buttons. Tara took us for a walking tour through Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. Throughout this entire walking tour, we were looking for buttons, and because of it, I missed half of the friggan attractions. Ben’s compulsion has infected all of us.

Each time we get to a new country, Tara has us draw on a piece of paper five things that we know about the country, followed by Tara telling us what the country is famous for, who we may know from that country and a brief overview of the history. After Bulgaria, the coach drove us through the beautiful country of Macedonia. When asked what I know about Macedonia, I had a complete mind-blank. I’d heard of it, but with a population of only two million, I’d like to think I can be forgiven for not knowing anything about it. Again, we were stopped on the border for ages, and everyone had to pee. Luckily for us, there was a public road-side toilet about 2 minutes after the border…Or is it really that lucky? If you know anything about public road-side toilets, you’ll know they aren’t exactly immaculate. In Macedonia, where you have a hole in the floor as a toilet that doesn’t flush, this dirtiness escalates by about 50. On first glimpse, it I had the impression that those who had used this thing haven’t bothered aiming for the hole and have just shat wherever seemed convenient for them. On a closer inspection, I came to the conclusion that the poop scattered on the walls, urinals and floor were actually put there on purpose. In my life, I’ve never smelt anything worse. Walking in at first with a shirt over my nose worked very well for the first minute, and then the little faeces particles penetrated my shirt, and I could smell it through the shirt. After taking the shirt of my face for a couple seconds to smell how bad it really was, I found myself struggling to keep my stomach in my throat. Everything was brown.

In the city of Skopje, we stopped for lunch, and the first thing we saw was a young local kid asking for some coin. When we didn’t deliver, he challenged us all to a boxing match. When we took a photo, he told us that photo’s were 10 Euro. Crafty little bugger, but not crafty enough to get anything out of us. A loaf of bread, two bottles of wine, some cream cheese, a bottle of water and two bananas set me back about AUD$5


Our campsite for Macedonia was pissing down rain when we arrived. So far on the 27 we’ve been on the tour, we haven’t had to endure a whole lot of rain, maybe a wee sprinkle on the odd occasion, but nothing like in Macedonia. Located about 50 metres down a path was a massive, wavy, freezing lake, and so naturally, Benjamin, two other insane girls and myself went and jumped in. Our lungs shrunk to about a quarter of the size and we couldn’t breathe. After spending a whole 45 seconds in the water (Long enough for a digital camera to be pulled out of it’s case, turned on, and have a really crap and an ok picture taken) my lips were blue, so we all ran back to the luke-warm showers. Just for your information, 2L plastic bottles on wine don’t go down very well with 50kg girls.

Our next stop through the Eastern Europe block brought us to one of my top highlights for the trip. Having not known anything of Albania, it was a pretty big hit driving into. To put it bluntly, I’ll say that the place is an absolute hole. It’s appearance suggests that WWII is still at large, not only based on the visual poverty and destruction, but by the general depression you can see on everyone’s face and the general shit mood and atmosphere of it. We stopped for about an hour for lunch in a city called Elbasan, the 3rd largest city in Albania. Unfortunately my camera had cracked the poopies at me that day so I wasn’t able to take as many snaps as I would have liked. Finding lunch was a bitch too. The closest thing to food we could find was a cake shop and a “Kebab” shop which sold dodgy looking sausages that would have me questioning why some dogs were missing their legs. By far, Elbasan would be the poorest city in condition, wealth and atmosphere I’ve experienced and this has inspired me to start thinking about further travels down the line, in countries probably not normally suited for tourists. While walking around, looking at the many children waiting for a coin from the rich Australians, it occurred to me how much I love Australia. These children won’t ever get to see outside of their country, and if they do, it will probably be illegally. Tara was telling us that a lot of Albanian men get out of the country to go to Greece or Italy or something to find a work and send money back home because of the crappy economy.

In complete contrast to the absolute scum that was Elbasan, the scenery that followed was among the most gorgeous I’ve seen in my life. People constantly tell me that Australia is the most beautiful country in the world, most of them European. I think if they ventured out to the Eastern countries on their own continent, they’d find something magical a lot closer to home. For all of the creepy and slimy men, rubbish on the streets, food poisoning and everything that comes to mind when the Eastern block is mentioned, the country side most definitely evens the balance.

We managed to score a night at a resort on the beach. Even for an Albanian resort, we felt like the Kings and Queens of Contiki compared to where we’re usually sleeping. Despite everyone needing jumpers and being windier than skydiving, a bottle of wine is all the persuasion I needed to sprint down to the broken glass filled beach with one of the Canadians. I managed to find a 2L bottle of nasty Merlot for about AUD$4 and further managed to consume the bottle that night. Needless to say, I was a walking mess. Ben managed to slink away from me un-noticed the entire evening, but I heard stories…For starters, our curly mop-head felt sick and seeing as he can’t throw up on his own, tried shoving his fingers down his throat. Unfortunately for Ben, he has managed to build up a tolerance to the reflex that makes him spew, so when that failed, he grabbed Derek the Canadian’s fingers and forced them down. What else happened that night, neither of us know, but he did end up sleeping in a ball on the floor beside his bed, because he’s under the impression that if he gets too comfortable, he snores and he didn’t want to awake his room-mates. I don’t recall ever saying we were ever normal people.

To make our way to Dubrovnik, we hit up more of the coastal side of Europe, our coach drove us along the shores of Montenegro (Where all the Hollywood stars go for holidays). As everything is only cliff-face to water, there we no beaches. All the cliff sides were made up of massive hotels, casino’s and resorts a little more upper-class than the one we spent a night in.