Saturday, August 29, 2009

Velika Štanga, Slovenia

Welcome to the village of Velika Štanga (big post) in Slovenia. The village is perhaps 30 km east of the capital, Ljubljana, and is set in rolling, forested hills. We've been WWOOFing here for 8 days now out of a 10 day stay and wish we could stay longer!


This is the house. The family (Mateja, Sandi, Tim, Žan and Zala) live on the farm, along with two cats, one kitten, two dogs, a piglet, two ponies and two donkeys. They are pretty self-sufficient in food, at least in vegies.


Slovenia is >50% forested, which makes for a really nice landscape.


Chopping apples (after we first collected them from several paddocks)

The apple press (from 1957)

The finished product

Aside from tasks associated with apples, we've been weeding, dragging wood from the forest, cooking, cleaning, planting, fixing a washing machine and a bike, piglet catching (rugby tackles required) and afterwards building a piglet pen. There has also been some hoeing. We have introduced the family to the delights of apple crumble!

On our day off, we accompanied the family on an outing to a river.



Nice wee town!

Now some shots of the locals:


Piglet. Suggested name, Blue, from blue murder - the noise she makes when caught!


The family and Tara (an extra who stayed for a couple of days). We are roasting corn and cheese on the fire.

Žan with Fita

Mateja with Zala

Mmm, toasted cheese!

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Croatia

From Stockholm we flew to Dubrovnik for three glorious weeks of Croatian island-hopping, accompanied by the three musketeers: Andreas Baumgaetner, his girlfriend Hella, and Helen Bones. Here is our approximate route (red dots are where we camped).

Dubrovnik was (unsurprisingly) utterly beautiful. It was also mobbed by tourists and cruiseliner victims. We did the town walls walk in the cool of the evening.


Mostly though, we hung out at our campsite, which came with a pool and a beach. I even participated in an aquasize class! More giggles than exercise. We managed to swim at least once a day for our whole Croatian visit.


On Mljet we hitched across the island to the National Park, famous for its beautiful lakes (which of course we sampled). They were connected to the sea and very shallow, therefore very very salty!

We then moved to Korcula. This is a typical photo of what occupied us all and every evening: eating. The restaurants were (comparatively) cheap and by the end of the trip we had sampled the majority of the items available.


We were camping out in little campgrounds like this one. Here the beach is just 10m or so to left.

From Korcula we spent a day in Split. It is the site of Diocletian's rather large retirement palace (he was a Roman Emperor in the dying days of the Roman Empire). Since then every nook and cranny the palace has been coverted into a living space, including the walls. We found this statue of Gandalf.

We moved further north to Sibenik (opps, missed a dot on the map) and did a daytrip to the local National Park, famous for its waterfalls. The park included several kms of boardwalk over magical little streams and through forest. We got hit by a major thunderstorm which added to the excitment.

Our last stop was ugly island. Upon arrival we discovered that it was a misnomer as all the people were quite normal looking.Also, we had arrived just in time for the Assumption (no, not Mark guessing things again but the religous festival). We didn't get religi-fied but we did get to participate in a really big street party.

Here is a summary of some of the delicacies of Croatia:

Burek - Mark's new favourite lunch. Cheap and widely available, it is made from lasange-like pastry and salty cheese.

Black risotto made from squid ink.

Some more seafood. Being coastal, seafood is very popular.

Civapčiči. These are little meatball sausages with aubergine and pepper sauce.

Of course, it all has to be washed down with the local lager. This beer was advertised everywhere in English with the tagline 'difficult to tell, but tastes so well'. Hmmm tastes pretty good!

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Sweden

Well this update has been a while in coming. We hope to add another post about Croatia in the next few days.

Our main point in visiting Sweden was for Veronica's 30th (actually a combined 30th with her friend Aosa) on an island in the north of the country. We also managed to tack on some exploring around Stockholm.

What a spread! And this is just lunch. Spuds, bread, cheese, and more types of pickled herring than you can shake a stick at.




Some hijinks were had - thoughtfully explained to the non-Swedish speakers.


Obligatory photo with the blonde Swede


Bye!


Now we're in Stockholm. It's made of many islands and one of these, Gamla Stan, is the old town.


We happened to stumble across the massive Changing of the Guard ceremony at the palace


Then we were off sea kayaking at a place south of Stockholm that was recommended to us by Em and Chris. The Stockholm Archipelago is lots of fun to explore by kayak.

Our island! (Ant Island)

A lot of wild blueberries were picked in Sweden. We landed like vikings, raping and pillaging all the blueberries.


A lot of smiling boy caviar was also consumed (a bit much, really)

Bird shit island - where the birds have used their version of Agent Orange to defoliate the forest!
Coming in our next update, more photos of Sylvia and Mark enjoying themselves on the sunny, sandy and soporific Dalmatian Coast of Croatia!