http://www.indiegogo.com/Daughters-of-the-Curved-Moon

The post is here: http://gambu-sherpa-nepal.blogspot.com/2010/10/trekking-abc-in-summer.html

The incredible bit was due to the great group of friends I was with and the fact that Stockholm is full of delicious restaurants, beautiful women, and is set on picturesque islands and peninsulas, separated by canals, lakes, and the open sea.

As for expensive, I would guess that a serious cocaine habit would be much cheaper than Stockholm, and we were even staying in youth hostels to keep the price down! Money flowed out of our wallets at an incredible rate, and returning to London made us feel wealthy, as many things in London were about half the price.

I took a few pictures I was really happy with. Click for full size.

It’s also a poignant reminder how small people were back then, and how different their lives were. Where Tamar keeps her Piano, the original farmer, his family, and their cow would have spent the winter.

Kinga and I rented a Streetcar (huge fans of the on-demand car sharing scheme, there’s one 3 doors down from my house), and headed North. This trip had lots of additional concerns, not the least that this was our first trip as a ‘couple’. Could we stand each other, or even the other’s driving styles? Luckily we survived intact (unlike my skull when it hit another door-frame), and even joked about our secret concerns once we returned.

We woke up the first morning to 3 inches of snow, which was beautiful! And difficult – we had to shovel a lot of snow and then drive cars up an angled, snow-covered mud track. Two hours and a bit of burned rubber, the cars were out and I celebrated by leaving the keys in the ignition and the window down. Being Yorkshire, a kind neighbor rolled up the windows and dropped off the keys.

Once we got the car out, our days turned to frolicking! Kinga wore her cute wellies (which Tamar disdained for farm work but appreciated the fashion statement), and we all went for a walk through . . . field and fen? What is it you walk through?

While Tamar had lit the fire on the first night, the second night we went out for dinner, got back a bit late, and it wasn’t really worth lighting the fire. So we made our hot-water bottles, headed up stairs, and simply couldn’t stop laughing as we joked about how completely frozen we were. I’ve been camping in 0 degree Fahrenheit weather before, but you know what you are in for. Here we were with a bed and electricity and a hot shower, and our room temperature was hovering around freezing. In the morning I was surprised my water glass wasn’t frozen.

But I think trips like that make you appreciate the modern creature comforts even more. How else can you appreciate turning up the thermostat if you’ve always had one?

I’ll finish off with my favorite picture from the trip, two horses drinking from a trough. It was completely frozen when they approached us, hoping for sugar cubes or carrots. Finding nothing, they pushed through and broke the ice, and drank what must have been very cold water! In the background is Robin Hoods Bay, the same view you see when looking out Tamar’s kitchen door.

It was my first trip to Africa, and was also the setting for some of my favorite movies, including Star Wars and The English Patient. And while we think of Tunisia as North Africa, it is incredibly close to Sicily and Italy geographically, and at one time culturually. I visited the amphitheatre of El Djem (also called El Jem), an amazing structure that seated 35,000, double the town’s current population. Perhaps the most impressive thing there was the cleanest public bathroom I have ever seen in my travels, and a necessary one at the time, but I digress. Here are a few photos:

The amphitheatre rises up out of a painfully ordinary small town, amazingly incongruous with its local surroundings.

The amphitheatre was largely intact until the 17th century, when the it was disasembled for building materials in local projects. You can see the back here, and in the other image the town in the background.

If you remember watching the movie Gladiator, the slaves and gladiators alike were in underground passages directly below the amphitheatre until their 15 minutes of fame. In the Roman Collosieum, you can’t get down to those passages and rooms where the animals lived, but you can in El Jem. Here’s the corridor, with rooms along the side. The light above comes from a metal grate, but originally it would have been a wooden platform, with a rudimentary elavator on each side.

What little I know of photography I learned by reading KenRockwell.com. He speaks highly about shooting at night, or at dusk or dawn, and the difference in results is amazing. Here are two of essentially the same shot, but one at 5 pm, and one at 8 pm. The colors of the sky and the stone are so different! I’ve uploaded about a dozen photos, see them here.

I spent yesterday and this morning at Bailey farm, a lovingly ramshackle collection of functional stone farm buildings and the central modern house, overlooking a pasture-and-woodland valley.

Last night I helped out in the vegetable garden, albeit briefly, and did a very good job of eating the cheese, roast duck, and apple-blackberry crumble that was served for dinner. The farm is owned by Mary and Tom, and Mary is Mary Quicke of Quicke’s Cheddar, and is one of the places foodies might consider a heavenly afterlife.

If you’ve ever gone to Whole Foods in America and purchased Borough Market Cheddar, it was made by either Mary or her employees labour. I was given a tour of the dairy this morning, and it was like being in those TV documentaries about how Cheese is made. Except I was really in it, wearing a blue hair-net and smock and shoe-covers, and smelling the curds and whey and tasting the cheese half-way through the process (when it was at squeaky-cheese stage). I saw the fields her own cattle graze, the pipes the milk flows through, the vats it is whatevered in (still not too sure about the exact mechanics) and then cut, pressed, washed, and cheddared (which is a noun and a verb).

We walked through the storage rooms where it is aged and dried in cheesecloth, which is called cheesecloth for a good reason. And then I bought a few kilos for my relatives who live nearby.

I returned to the farm-house to pick up my stuff and connect to the outside world through the internet, but as I sit here writing I feel once again in awe of the magnificent countryside. I’ve spent a lot of time hiking through France, but think I’ll have to return to the West Country (the South-west of England) for my next hike. It might lack the fearful chasms of the Alps, but it possesses a peaceful, simple splendor that’s hard to ignore.

Hanging out with Diana normally just involves a passing mention of cheese, or even her pulling out a couple parchment-paper wrapped treasures that I’m always happy to eat. But lately she’s gone further, and has been working in various parts of England making cheddar cheese. We met up for a 4 day vacation in the heart of Cheddar-country.

We stayed in Wells, the smallest city (meaning it has to have a Cathedral) in England, drove around the amazing countryside, and even hiked the rim of Cheddar Gorge. The gorge, just above the town of Cheddar, is so steep you forget you’re in England. You only get an idea of the vertical drop when you see the car in this picture, just visible by Diana’s knee.

After hiking Cheddar Gorge, and avoiding the painfully touristy caves and cheese shop (no real Cheddar available) we hit the other attraction Somerset is famous for – the cider.

American readers will be thinking of cloudy apple juice, but in England cider means the alcoholic fermented pressing of cider apples. And it’s often really, really good. I confess, English beer doesn’t do it for me. You drink enough Deschutes Brewery (Oregon) or Dog Fish Head (Maryland) and you don’t want any more bland, tacky English pints. But the cider in the UK blows away most of what we have in the states, and I should know, as a good friend is involved with a traditional cider maker in Oregon, Wandering Aengus Ciderworks.

So we hunted down what turned out to be an amazing, local cider maker. And I do mean local. His guests included some die-hard cider drinkers. Patrons simply show up, takes a glass, fill it up from one of two barrels (dry or sweet) and proceed to get drunk. Payment is at your discretion, and left with farmer Wilkins or somewhere on the table. It doesn’t get better than this.

Here’s farmer Wilkins filling up a barrel of cider. And yes, that’s a giant hose pumping cider.

And what do you do when you pump it? This is a man who, by his own reckoning, used to drink 20 pints a day of his own cider in his younger years, and is proud he ‘never got the shakes in the morning’. Well, you test it. Test it again, even if you just tested it. And then drink the rest.

An impressive man. And while I’m not sure he’s into facebook, it’s certainly into him. His Facebook fan club has over a thousand followers!

We spent most of the time in Bend, Oregon, which is where I would imagine Hunter S. Thompson living now, instead of his Aspen, Colorado hide-away. The change in the landscape is stark as you drive from big-city Portland, through the densest of moss-covered mountain forests, into the high desert of sagebrush. We skiied on an extinct volcano, and hiked on lava flows. This was definately not Kansas, or New Jersey for that matter.

The first photo is the brilliant morning sun hitting mist in the trees.

The rest of the photos are at my Picasa Web Albums.

The party was one of the typical Euro-style parties I love. 3 languages, a dozen people, half insane, all fun. A good time all around. Their chalk board is worth a mention.

UPDATE, March 9, 2009: Apparently, Konrad is so popular there is a facebook club devoted to him. Apperently, I am not alone in my strange feelings towards this special rabbit.