G’day all and welcome to the Midlife Crisis Odyssey Podcast, where not all who wander are lost, but some of us definitely are. Whakatane is a little beachside town in the Bay of Plenty on New Zealand’s North Island. It’s known as the ‘Kiwi Capital of the World’, so I started walking the nearby forests tracks at night searching for kiwis. After many hours of walking in the freezing darkness, I decided that my fifth night of searching would be…
When I was a kid, we had a copy of a book called ‘Where Did I Come From’ in the TV room bookcase. From memory it was square in format, and had fun cartoon illustrations. I don’t remember Mum or Dad ever having the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation with me, nor my sister Vicki bursting through the door of my bedroom to tell me that Mum or Dad just had that discussion with her. Maybe they bought a copy…
TREKKING THE TARNS After a few dramas travelling from Plovdiv to the small town of Sapareva Banya, I was pleased to plonk my bags down in my accommodation for the night. Plovdiv to Sapareva Banya isn’t so far as the Bulgarian hooded crow flies, however the direct bus I had planned to catch turned out not to exist, so it was a two train and one bus dogleg via Sofia instead. I arrived just on dusk, and was a little…
It’s great to be back in Turkey. It feels comfortable and familiar after my visit last year, and here in the coastal town of Canakkale there’s a nice beachside holiday vibe. I was walking through one of the local parks the other day, and noticed something a little unusual on one of the paths. Looking very much like a tortoise, I assumed it was a kid’s toy. The tortoise looking thing then started moving in a very tortoise like manner,…
I remember as a kid hearing about the Dead Sea, and how you could lie back in it and read a newspaper as your body is so buoyant in the super-salty water. Those who have been along on my odyssey for a while may remember I had a swim in Siwa Lake, Egypt, where the water is so salty the newspaper trick would definitely have worked. Now in Jordan, I had the opportunity for a float in the Dead Sea,…
‘The car has Jordan plates on it, and by law as a visitor you are only supposed to drive a vehicle with tourist plates. So if the police stop you, tell them you work for the Australian Embassy.’ It was really a matter of ‘when’ the police stop you in Jordan rather than ‘if’, so after this advice from the manager of the hire car joint I left with some trepidation. I was out of luck trying to hire a…
When I was in Malta I was amazed to see how many eucalypts and wattles had been planted on the little island nation (see Australians Abroad). This was on top of seeing Aussie gums in New Zealand (which was not so surprising), Turkey (which was) and Greece (which was too). Since leaving Malta I have visited Italy and Tunisia, and have found eucalypts there as well. I’m in Spain at the moment, and once again seeing gums and wattles all…
Malta I hadn’t been in Malta long before I started to notice the odd Eucalypt here and there. Soon after I realised they are possibly the most common tree on the island. Don’t get me wrong – it was nice and comforting and homely to see them, but I did wonder why so many had been planted. Apparently, when the Knights of St John turned up in Malta in the 1500s, they started cutting down the native pines to build…
I was keen to have a look at Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum, but on the day I turned up it was closed for a public holiday. I decided to walk along the outside of the Palace walls and down to the waterfront parklands below. The Palace overlooks the point where The Golden Horn and Bosphorus waterways meet, and is a flurry of spray and activity as ferries plough back and forth. As I walked past a statue of Ataturk, the…
Although far less conspicuous than the omnipresent cat, there are actually quite a few stray dogs in Istanbul. They all seem to be large, rangy things who spend their entire lives asleep. They quite contentedly fall asleep all over the place, including on busy pedestrian thoroughfares. Natural selection seems to have favoured larger dogs, which makes sense, but interestingly they also seem to be quite placid in nature. When you have to spend your life bumming scraps of kebab from…