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By Kate, 26 March 2009 3:56 pm

Loch Ard Gorge, Great Ocean Road

I kept seeing postcards in Australia with pictures of things like the opera house and a few koalas right next to each other, under the heading, ‘Australia: land of contrast’, and they’re not kidding. It’s a strange place. In so many odd ways, Australia reminds me of the US, especially after living in the UK for so long. The massive six-lane highways full of automatic cars, the sheer size of everything, the buffet restaurants, the space. These things all scream America. It’s a young country with a some similar problems (the treatment of Aboriginal people in particular reminded me of the issues that Native Americans face in the US). However, as Oz is still part of the Commonwealth, British influence shines through here and there.

But the Aussie attitude is ever more laid back and the culture more eccentric than that of the UK or US (in a good way, naturally). Australia is truly its own place. It’s very far away from the rest of the world, both in distance and culture, and this seems almost immediately obvious upon arrival. You get the sense that you’re in a familiar place that’s been flipped on its head. Perhaps because it’s so hard to grasp that you’ve made it all the way to the other side of the planet and yet people are still carrying on as you might expect them to outside your own door. It seems right and wrong all at once.

Grapevines at the Wine Centre of South Australia

Australia, while absolutely massive, is largely uninhabitable. Humans have put things in place to make the land live-able, but they still have to battle it out with nature, who clearly is not interested in helping out on the ‘sustaining modern human life’ front. As my friend Lauren who lives in Sydney said, ‘We shouldn’t even be here.’ The country is in serious drought and has been for a long time. It is dry and hot and dry and apparently never rains (we saw otherwise, so hooray for the farmers!). This leads to, among other things, massive water shortages, to the point of the council sending every home a shower timer, and raging bushfires, as we’ve seen quite recently. There’s also the gaping hole in the ozone layer that hangs out just overhead, causing major sunburn in almost no time at all if you aren’t a good friend of a thick layer of sunblock. Despite all of this harshness, the land produces some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables and the nicest meat I’ve ever tasted, and the lifestyle in general is very outdoor-oriented.

And the size of the country itself is something almost too amazing to wrap your head around. On the second in a chain of four flights carrying us back home to the UK, I managed to bag a window seat in the exit row. From so many miles above the earth, I could see quite clearly the expanse of Australian outback we were flying over on the way to Singapore. I felt like this view really tied up the Aussie experience. I’m glad I got to see it from above. And let me tell you: It. Is. Enormous.

Kangaroo at Australia Zoo

I mean, I knew it was enormous, but… it’s HUGE. I’d been seeing nothing but red desert for ages and I assume, being that far above the earth, one can see pretty far. And it’s all just red nothingness. Even the air at the horizon is red. The sun was on its way down and the desert seemed to fade into a lighter orange, then yellow, then magically into blue as if there were no actual horizon and the desert was just part of the extensive empty sky. Occasionally there would be a sort of track in the dust below, but I had to wonder where these tracks were going to or coming from because I hadn’t seen anything remotely like a point A or B for at least an hour.

I spent 3 weeks in Australia seeing something completely new and different almost every single day, and I still haven’t seen the bulk of it. This just serves to remind me that the variety of experience I have had here tips the balance in terms of value for money in a holiday. It also reminds me how impossible it is to experience everything I’d like to in one lifetime. There are billions of books to read, recipes to try, songs to hear, places to see. I’ll never pack them all in, but hopefully I’ll be working my way through them at the optimum speed–slow enough to relish the experience but fast enough to see as much as possible.

It’s hard to sum up such an epic vacation. And it’s been a while since we went. We took the trip in September and October of 2008. We saved for nearly a year and were probably planning it for longer. It’s hard to get over such a significant chunk of leisure time, even six months later. Our itinerary was ambitious, but not so hectic that we’d need a vacation from our vacation. We started in Melbourne and drove the Great Ocean Road and the Limestone Coast to Adelaide. We flew to Sydney and then to Brisbane where we spent some time with Scott’s family. Then it was off to New Zealand for a week, which is an amazing country deserving about ten books’ worth of reflection on its own. We didn’t have nearly enough time there.

(I’ll be posting about each leg of our trip over the next few weeks. Once those posts are up, I’ll link them here.)

Australia (Part 2): Melbourne

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By Kate, 23 March 2009 1:39 pm

Tasty, tasty kiwi with a spife.

When we were in Australia and New Zealand, we renewed our love for kiwifruit (green AND gold, yum). Before we left Christchurch, we picked up a few kiwi spoons, or as I’ve discovered they’re called, spifes. Yes, spifes! Spoon+knife, obviously.

They’re nifty little tools for kiwi lovers, and we now use them all the time. Until Scott broke his (while eating a kiwi, no less). This was a sad, sad day, as we’re the sort of people to get very excited over something such as a spife. (When we discovered what I like to call the spforkn… well, we still haven’t shut up about it.)

As the spife is kind of a promotional thing for kiwis, you can’t easily buy them unless you want something unnecessarily fancy from some crazy kitchen gadget store. But we just wanted the green plastic happiness that helps us eat a kiwi. So I emailed Zespri (the kiwi people) and asked them how I could go about acquiring more of these tools.

It turns out the people at Zespri are awesome. They emailed me back almost immediately, asked me for my address, and said they’d send a few our way. I LOVE when companies have kickass customer service like that. I didn’t even buy anything from them and they were all over it (I mean, we buy kiwis all the time, but I didn’t buy anything directly from them). Plus it pretty much guarantees that I’ll talk them up for a lifetime.

So, bravo, Zespri! And thank you for the spifes. Ask and ye shall recieve indeed. They will be put to good use. Go eat some kiwifruit, everyone!

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By Kate, 8 March 2009 12:58 pm

Cliffs on South Ronaldsay.

Last weekend, I took Friday and Monday off and went to Orkney with my friend Ann as a sort of early birthday present to myself while the boys stayed in Edinburgh playing video games and drinking beer.

I am not a fan of flying. I am even less a fan of very small planes. But seeing as how pretty much no one in their right mind goes to a windy, cold, wet group of islands in the middle of the North Sea in winter, they don’t exactly send 747s on the daily runs to Kirkwall. So I spent an hour in a tiny, noisy Saab 340 being tossed around by said wind and convinced I would not make it to the ground in one piece. But in the end, as always, it was worth the terror.

We were staying in our friend Flossy’s house for the weekend. She’s teaching in Orkney for the year because she checked the ‘send me wherever you want’ box on the teacher training form. She was originally going to be around, but had to go off on a school underwater hockey trip (I didn’t know it was a sport either) to Manchester, so she just left us her key. Except she got to the ferry and realised she forgot to leave the key. We got a text saying she’d given it to a taxi driver to go hide near her door.

Immediately, we were thinking, ‘Great! Not only will the key be gone, but so will everything in the house.’ But this is where we got our first taste of island life. There were two taxis at the airport (out of about 3 on the entire island, or so I believe). When we gave the first one Flossy’s address, he turned to the other and said ‘Hey, isn’t that where you left that key this morning?’ Seriously. So the second driver told us exactly where he left it as though providing access to other peoples’ houses was something he was asked to do on a regular basis.

After settling in and deciphering the various maps left for us, we went for a wander into town. I think I might have frightened the girl at tourist information, if only because I asked her a question at a time of year when there aren’t many tourists around to ask questions. We explored the possibility of taking a ferry to one of the smaller islands, but eventually decided to rent a little red Ford Ka instead. There was a deal on where we got Friday afternoon to Monday morning for £64, so it would have been silly not to take it.

After lunch at the Albert Hotel (a haggis cheeseburger and a pint of Scapa Special), we stocked up on provisions at the local Tesco (Yes, even Orkney has a Tesco. I’m not sure if this is a good thing.) and went for a short drive to Stromness before heading home for some pizza and hot chocolate and an early night.

The next day, we set Radio 2 as our soundtrack for the weekend (starting with the Beatles singing ‘She Loves You’ in German) and ventured out into the cold, rainy wind in our little ladybug of a car to explore the western mainland of Orkney.

Maes Howe

Our first major stop was Maes Howe, ‘Orkney’s largest and finest chambered cairn’. At first we thought we’d be the only ones on the tour, but we were joined by two others in the end. You aren’t allowed to take pictures inside anymore, but we ended up getting a better view of everything than most probably do in the high season, if only because the barriers had been taken out to paint. We were able to get our noses right up to graffiti that’s thousands of years old.

Robert, our tour guide, was one of those people who is so happy to tell you what he knows about history and archaeology that he could probably make almost anything interesting out of sheer enthusiasm. He was also extremely good at running down the one-meter-high 14.5-meter-long passage into the tomb.

While the structure itself was pretty impressive, I’d be lying if I said the coolest part wasn’t the Viking graffiti. It’s all over the place and says things like “Haakon singlehanded bore treasures from this howe” and “Many a woman has come stooping in here no matter how pompous a person she was”. And, in the tradition of all graffiti, it’s uneven and runs off the sides of things and is mostly boasting (about axes and other such Viking things in this case). But it is strange to stand inside something so old that is essentially the center of a hill.

Ann and the Stenness standing stones.

Across the loch from Maes Howe, and our next stop, were the standing stones of Stenness followed by the Ring of Brodgar, which is apparently one of the biggest henged stone circles in the world. Way bigger than Stonehenge and, according to Robert, far more impressive. The stones at Stenness were fairly enormous, although there are only a few left. But Brodgar is huge. And the thing is, they’ll never really know what these things were used for. They can make educated guesses, and they may even be right, but I sort of think it’s cooler to wonder about it and come up with a bunch of options in your own head. And to be amazed at the fact that they managed to stand the things up.

The Ring of Brodgar. You have to be pretty far away to get it all in one frame.

There’s one stone at Brodgar they know was struck by lightning. The lightning blasted off a fairly significant chunk of the stone, which is lying next to the still standing bit. From this they’ve deduced that others may now be smaller than they originally were for the same reason. What we wanted to know was, were all these stones originally straight, square, and the same size? Because that would be even more impressive. But again, we’ll never really know.

Orkney makes a lot of money on things we’ll never really know. Our next stop was Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement that’s amazingly well-preserved. It’s easy to see that people lived there, but pretty much everything else they can say about it is guesswork. The steward on the site reckons that bringing people in from third world countries or tribal societies that don’t live life the way we do and getting them to have a look would probably give us better ideas of how spaces were used, but apparently no one has followed through on this thought. That’s too bad, because she’s probably right.

One of the houses at Skara Brae.

We were again pretty much alone on the site aside from the steward. She answered all our questions and pointed out the neolithic drain that led away from what were possibly the first indoor toilets. I figure if people were clever enough to build these houses and cluster them all together for protection and warmth and convenience and whathaveyou, they were sure to be clever enough to think of the indoor toilet. Againt hough, it’s very weird to look down on all these stone structures and think that people actually lived there so long ago we don’t really have the capacity to wrap our heads around the amount of time that’s passed since.

Skara Brae was just off a nice beach, which wasn’t actually there at the time people were living there. The water was much further out. We used the proximity to look for seals though. Finding them would be the aim of the rest of the afternoon. We failed miserably at that, but we saw a lot of nice beaches and another stone settlement we were able to walk through. And for some reason, Mr T was on Radio 2.

Back in Kirkwall, we did a bit of shopping before everything shut for the day. Many of the shops sell an odd combination of things (jewelery and winter coats? Body Shop products, knitwear, and homebrewing supplies?) and I can only assume this is because the town is too small to warrant many separate spaces for these sorts of things. We went back home for pasta then out to the bars for a taste of some island nightlife. We went to Helgis first where I had another Scapa Special and we watched Jo Brand do her Britney Spears dance on the Comic Relief dance show thing. It was a trendy sort of bar which Flossy said is usually quite touristy. Shortly after we arrived, a huge group of women dressed as if they had come from a wedding overtook the place. They got pretty loud, so we went off to try Torvhoug, which Flossy described as ‘Like a Glasgow wine bar’. They had crap beer on tap (no surprise) but real ale in bottles so I ordered an Orkney Blast. It was the kind of place where no one probably ever orders real ale, so the bartender took about 3 minutes to figure out how to enter it on the register. Seriously. The place soon filled up with a large group of drunk guys to counter the ladies night happening in the other bar. We sat in the back room where another group of girls was and the music was low enough that we could hear each others’ voices. The only real disappointment back there was the old school video game table console that didn’t work. After one drink, we went home for more hot chocolate and sleep.

The ladybug on our only day of sun.

Sunday the sun was out, amazingly enough. We drove all the way to the southern tip of South Ronaldsay on another seal mission. We didn’t see any. Visitorkney.com claims that there is an enormous seal colony there, but I would like to write them a letter that simply says ‘LIES!’. We had a walk on the cliffs anyway, and it was clear enough to see mainland Scotland in the distance.

Next, we drove out to the Tomb of the Eagles, which includes a bronze age dwelling AND another tomb. Orkney is crawling with the things. We were the only ones there. Kathleen, the daughter of the guy who found the stuff we were about to see, gave us about an hour-long personal history lesson. It was a little intense, but quite cool anyway because we got to hold some of the artefacts. Call me a cooking dork, but I was most impressed by some stones that looked like simple rocks, but were actually shaped and balanced to be held in your right hand and used a certain way, like for pounding stuff up. Kind of how a knife is balanced. It was just a rock, but it was pretty amazing. It’s also intriguing that most people were still right handed then. I wonder why.

The southern tip of South Ronaldsay. That's mainland Scotland behind me.

We walked out along the farm in borrowed wellies, squelching through the mud, and crawled into the tomb to have a look. Not as big as Maes Howe, but impressive nonetheless. especially since the site is run and maintained by the family that originally found it rather than by Historic Scotland. On the walk back along the cliffs, there was a sudden rainstorm, so we couldn’t exactly enjoy the view as the wind and rain was busy freezing our eyeballs. By the time we got back to the car though, the rain had stopped and there was a rainbow.

At that point it was about 2pm and we were really craving a proper Sunday roast. We drove back up to St Margaret’s Hope, the third largest town in Orkney, with our fingers crossed that there would be one little pub doing such lunches. Not surprisingly for low tourist season, it seemed we were out of luck. We found a little hotel pub which was full of locals huddled around the bar. The minute we opened the door they stopped talking and ALL turned around to look at us. Talk about awkward. I thinkt he barman felt a little bad for us, but we ate our food and got out of there pretty fast. The fish soup I had WAS quite good, at least.

Cows!

We were losing steam after all the walking around in bad weather, so we drove around a few other places on the east end of the mainland, still looking unsuccessfully for seals. We said hello to some cows then got back in the car just in time for a ridiculous rainstorm on the drive back to Kirkwall.

We hung around for the rest of the night, had a curry when Flossy got back and stayed up chatting for a while, the I read some more Bill Bryson and went to bed.

Monday morning, Flossy went to work, we dropped our rental car off, and we called a taxi to take us to the airport. And who should the driver be but the guy who originally hid the key outside. I’m not even kidding.

Our very small plane.

Saying the Kirkwall airport is tiny would be an understatement. There’s not much to do or see there aside from stare through the windows at the tiny plane you’re about to get on which is sitting next to an even tinier 8-seat plane that you are thankfully not about to get on. I tend to try to pamper myself in airports as much as I can since I hate to fly so much. If something awful were to happen on the flight, the last place I’d have wanted to be alive is in an airport. These days, you have to spend 2 or 3 hours before a flight milling around the places, so I figure if I spend some money on myself I can at least feel like I had a decent meal or something. That’s hard to do in Kirkwall, but I managed a nice bacon and egg roll and a cup of tea.

The flight back to Edinburgh didn’t get hairy until the descent. It was pretty windy and the plane got tossed around in every possible direction, making me thankful for the experience of being on bigger jets that aren’t quite so sensitive. When we walked off down the tiny ladder-steps, I could hear the dog they put on the flight barking like crazy from the hold. It was only a little west highland terrier who probably had no idea what was going on. Poor guy. It was bad enough with a window. I can’t imagine what it would be like without.

Anyway, seeing as how I did make it back in one piece with stories to tell and pictures to show, it was an excellent short break. I’d like to go back to Orkney in the summer, or maybe to Shetland instead, just to see it when there’s more going on.

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By Kate, 5 March 2009 1:17 pm

I made some red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting to bring into work for my birthday yesterday. I should have taken pictures, but I’m not yet used to this ‘recording stuff for the blog’ thing. It was a recipe from Bake by Rachel Allen. I’d never made red velvet cake from scratch before, so I was a little worried at first, especially because it’s kind of a crazy recipe with a lot of steps (and bowls), but they turned out well. And I ate two of them during the day before I even got a piece of the birthday cake Scott made me. It was his first ever from-scratch cake, Chocolate Stout Cake from Green & Blacks Chocolate Cookbook, one of my favorites (the book and the cake), and he did a flawless job.

We ate some before we went out for dinner, which may have been a bad plan, because dinner involved quite a bit of food. I didn’t know where we were going til we got there because I wanted a surprise, so all day I was wondering what kind of tasty stuff I was in for. We went to The Outsider on George IV Bridge.

According to reviews on The List, More than a few people have not been impressed with the service, but we had absolutely no problem. They had a weird policy of having to take outdoor coats to the coat room, but aside from that, our waitress was lovely and the rest of the staff I encountered were quite normal. But lets get to the important stuff.

They clunked a plate of bread and dipping oil down in front of us before we even had menus, which bodes well with me, especially in this country where you rarely ever get bread for free. I ordered a bottle of Australian shiraz, don’t remember what kind it was now but it was excellent.

The Outsider doesn’t do traditional starters. Instead they have various plates of skewers (or ‘Chunky Healthy Lines’). We got the monkfish with bacon, roasted tomato, and salsa, which also came with salad and a carroty-raisiny coleslaw type concoction in a pita. There were two enormous hunks of monkfish on my skewer and, because of the cake I’d already eaten, I was worried about getting through my main course. The fish was cooked perfectly, and I got extra tomatoes because Scott is not a fan.

For the main course, I ordered venison in juniper berries with barley and steamed greens. Scott got half a rabbit with prune and calvados sauce and parsnips. We also ordered a side dish of sweet potatoes in cumin-y spices and pumpkin seed to share, which was absolutely unnecessary given the size of the main dishes, but I ate some anyway because they were lovely.

My venison was perfect. The light in the place was too low for me to tell for sure, but I’m fairly sure it was nearly rare, because it melted in my mouth. I ate all the greens, per usual, and I would have eaten all the barley had I not been stuffed to capacity. Scott’s rabbit was a bit dry and the sauce was a little overwhelming for him. I tasted it. Not awful, but not the best rabbit I’ve ever tasted. Then again, I’ve only ever had it in a stew-type pie thing, so who knows what it’s meant to be like? Anyway, I definitely picked the better dish this time. Usually it’s the other way around. There was a pork belly confit on the menu that we both wished we could have tasted as well.

We had absolutely no room for dessert, so instead we went to the Bow Bar on Victoria Street for some whisky. They’ve got 145 malts! First I had a 16 year-old double matured Lagavulin, which was about £6. Nice, warm and rich. Scott had some Blair Athol whichw as a bit lighter. I’m no good at tasting notes when it comes to this stuff, but I know what I like, and what I like tends to be Islay malts. Peaty, strong and delicious. A lot of people can’t handle the stuff. That’s not meant as a boast, I’m just saying, for reference, that I like things that other people tend to think they could run their car on.

We had a pint each after that as we sat there staring at the wall of whisky, and Scott said ‘why didn’t you get a 25 year-old whisky for your 25th birthday’? We eyed a 25 year-old Laphroaig on the top shelf and decided to share it, because what the hell? It was £18, but worth it. I know grown men who have issues with Laphroaig 10 year because it’s like drinking smokey, alcoholic peat (so naturally, I love it), but this was really mellow. That extra 15 years really takes the edge off.

All in all, an awesome way to turn 25. And on top of it, Scott got me some nice balsamic vinegar, a salami flavored with white truffle, and some epic argyle knee socks. (I am a fan of long, crazy socks. Especially in the winter.)