Introduction to Berlin

It was about seven degrees this morning when we decided to go out on the New Berlin walking tour. Our tour guide for today was Rachel – she was an American who has been living in Berlin for the past 4 years – she was both very knowledgeable about Berlin and presented our tour in a fun and high energy way. I thought the tour was excellent. We covered the main sites and the commentary was of a consistently high standard. It was funny, entertaining, full of facts and objective.

Our tour began at The famous Brandenburg Gate, the only remaining gate from Berlin’s 18th-century town wall. It’s topped by the Quadriga, a sculpture of a winged goddess of Victory steering a horse-drawn chariot and then moved on to the following sights:

Hotel Adlon - (Unter den Linden 77), a faithful reconstruction of the 1907 original and again the preferred shelter of stars, royals, and heads of state. Yes, this is the same hotel that Michael Jackson dangled his son from the balcony.

Reichstag - since 1999 home of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. the futuristic glass dome, added by British star architect Lord Norman Foster, as part of the building’s recent overhaul.

Just south of here on Ebertstrasse is the Holocaust Memorial, a football-field-size labyrinth of gray concrete blocks that is as accessible as it is disorienting. A free subterranean exhibit hauntingly documents the suffering of Jews during the Nazi period.

This was then followed by a visit to the former site of Hitler's Bunker - The Führerbunker - which is no longer in existence as they do not want groups of neo-nazi's or extremists filling the area, however last year the area was covered in rose petals to remember his death.

We then continued our walk onto The Berlin Wall. We passed some great graffiti and old buildings shot up with ammo and some pipes which drained water from a construction site because Berlin is on a swamp.

Once at the Berlin Wall I thought was going to be a lot smaller, however the remnants are approximately 50 to 100 metres. However, very subtly the wall is still there, they have two rows of small cobblestones on the roads to outline where it originally was.

From here we moved onto relive cold war history at Checkpoint Charlie and stopped for half an hour for some lunch at Aroma Cafe.

We then headed straight to lovely Gendarmenmarkt - considered Berlin’s most beautiful square and accented by two churches, and the Konzerthaus concert hall.

After this came Bebelplatz. This site is best known for the book burning ceremony held on May 10, 1933 by members of the S.A. ("brownshirts") and Nazi youth groups, on the instigation of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis burned around 20,000 books, including works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and many other authors. Within this square there is a glass memorial giving a view of empty bookcases, which commemorates the book burning. Furthermore, a line of Heinrich Heine is engraved, stating "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" (in English: "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people"). Students at Humboldt University hold a book sale in the square every year to mark the anniversary.

Then onto Neue Wache (The Guard House). Originally built as a guardhouse for the troops of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the building has been used as a war memorial since 1931. Inside there is an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz's sculpture Mother with her Dead Son. This sculpture is directly under the oculus, and so is exposed to the rain, snow and cold of the Berlin climate, symbolising the suffering of civilians during World War II.

Our last site of the day was the Berlin Cathedral and Altes Museum also known as Museum Island. The tour delved deeply into the history of Berlin and too much to write about all in one post. If you are ever in Berlin, I highly recommend in taking a free walking tour as we had such a great time and even met a girl from Prague who is going to meet up with us next week when we arrive.

The Berlin Anti-Pub Crawl

We finally managed to get out for a walk on our second day in Berlin and ended up checking out all the cool places in Prenzlauerberg. We snagged a beer form the local cafe and ended up having an awesome schnitzel for lunch from a bar around the way.

Since we'd been asleep for most of the previous day I figured it was time to kick it up a notch, so come 8pm we headed over to the 'Yesterday Bar' to meet up with the Anti-Pubcrawl guide.

'Yesterday Bar' itself was pretty awesome, it's apparently run by some old hippies and they had fantastic old music going, a foosball table (pretty common in Berlin), and decor that was directly out of the 70s. Lava lamps were all around, and the plush red seats we were sitting on were awesome. Couple that with the crazy papermache bees that were hanging from the roof and an animated... something... it was all pretty fab.

We started with a few beers here as other pub crawl people trickled in and we eventually got under way at about 10:30pm as the bartenders served us some delicious apple schnapps shots.

Our next stop was the 'Last Cathedral', which is a Goth Horror rock bar. Our tour leader told us that this club was part owned by Rammstein, and it was all pretty scarily decked out inside. It was a pity there wasn't more going on, but we did meet a resident of Hamburg (a Hamburger?). He practised his English on us and I tried out my terrible German out on him. We also had another tasty mango shot here.

We made our way to an indie bar next, we think it was called 'Dammit' or some such name but by this time the beers and shot were starting to catch up with us. There was an excellent band 'Gecko' playing when we got there so we had a sneaky 1 Euro shot of Jaegermeister and rocked out for a bit. Well, I did anyway, Sancha was trying very hard to keep her Jaegermeister down.

We had a quick respite from beer at our next stop at 'Druide Bar'. Sancha and I weren't in the mood for any absinthe, so we treated ourselves to their 2 for 1 cocktails.

A short wander up the street was to the next bar, and possibly my favourite, 'Dr Pong'. This is the original 'Dr Pong' bar and I can see why other places around the world have tried to emulate it. It was pretty friendly and I got to play a few rounds of around the world ping pong, as there's only a single ping pong table in the place. This involves going to the bar, paying a 5 Euro deposit for a paddle, and then joining the big circle around the ping pong table. You take one shot when it's your turn, then rotate around the table. If you screw up you're out, so the circle gets gradually smaller and smaller, and it's quite hectic when there are only three people left as they are frantically racing around the table. We got to see some fantastic ping pong finals here.

Since I was so busy trying to play ping pong and drinking at the same time I hadn't quite finished my beer when it came time to leave. It was at this point that I found out an awesome thing about Berlin (yet another). You can take your drink with you when you leave. Well, I'm assuming only drinks you've purchased in bottles, and nothing in the house supplied glasses.

We had a quick stopover at the kebab shop next door where we were treated to a shot of a terrible vodka, and a few participants bought a cheeky late night sandwich. After the horrible vodka I was quite glad I still had my beer for a chaser.

We then made our way via tram to the last bar, Cassiopeia, which was and old train depot before it was bombed out during WWII. Getting into this place was a bit of a mission as you end up walking through so much disused real estate it looked like our tour guide had taken us to somewhere for our organs to be harvested. This last club was pretty crazy with dance music playing upstairs and reggae playing downstairs. We met a couple of scary looking guys from Ghana here, who were really quite friendly.

Everyone was fading fast at this point and I think we were the last ones to leave at around 5 am. We kind of wrote off the whole next day since we were exhausted and had been up for about 24 hours by the time we managed to figure out how the trams worked and got ourselves home. We had such a fantastic time, but got so very few photos of all the awesome bars we visited because Sancha's camera went flat after the first bar.

The pictures below are pinched from flickr, so if you click on them they will go to the page for that photo and you can see the original photographers info.

All Aboard the Midnight Express

We departed our Hotel in Bangkok on 3rd May for the Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok's International Airport) at 7.30pm. Along the way to the airport, we drove past several army checkpoints, each time with a soldier shining a torch into the car to see whom was inside. We think this was mainly due to one of the roads to the airport being closed due to the red-shirt protesters claiming the road. We arrived at the airport at around 8pm for our 00:15am flight to Helsinki onto Berlin.

We checked in our luggage and then headed onto Customs it was here that I experienced one of my "dumb" moments. My carry-on bag was sent through the x-ray machine and was pulled aside to be searched. When asked "Show me your scissors", I replied with "No, I do not have any scissors". Then realising I had packed the First Aid in my carry on luggage (duh)and they had a freakin' x-ray machine (dammit). Having found the stray scissors and disposing of them we continued through. We then waited around for 3 hours for our flight to Helsinki.

Our flight to Helsinki took around 10 hours, once in Helsinki we had to go through customs again. I had sent my carry-on backpack through the x-ray machine again only to find 3 containers full of liquid - hand-cream, sunscreen and deodorant. Now without any liquids nor scissors I was on my way. (David was not impressed, he had continuously told me - "you can't have any liquids, nor sharp objects". oh well, its all drilled in now). (photo above shows me over the waiting in Helsinki Airport, I well and truly felt like a smelly backpacker at this stage, having been in the same clothes for the past 3 days!)

Eventually arriving in Berlin Tegel Airport there were no customs, we went straight through to catch our bus and then train to Prenzlaurberg, where we will be staying for ten days. We were both feeling pretty jetlagged when we arrived to our hostel at 12pm, but we managed to stay awake for a few beers and then ended up in bed by 6pm. Tomorrow, ready for a new journey.

Buddhist Temples and a River Cruise

Another early start on our last day in Thailand, up at 6am so we can get picked up by 7am to go on a tour of several temples close to the capital.

After a long drive (and a quick catch-up nap) our first stop was in Ayutthaya and the ruins of the old capital which contains an old Royal Palace and Wat Pra Si Sanphet. This city was destroyed by a Burmese invasion and the site was never used again because so many women and children died there. When the Burmese were attacking the city they had defeated the Thai army defending the city and many of the women and children fled to the Royal Palace to take shelter in the confirmation hall, and other large buildings. When the Burmese king came to capture the women and children to take them back as servants they refused to open the doors and the Burmese army burnt down the buildings.

A few of the larger buildings were rebuilt, or had extra mortar added over the years to keep them standing, and now the ruins of the palace is the only building left from the original capital.

We also saw a temple at the same site with an enormous golden Buddha, which was much larger than the one we saw in Bangkok.

We had about 20min to walk around the grounds before we had to meet our tour bus and depart, so we walked back to the front of the park to look at the elephants. As we got there we saw about 5 or so elephants, and one baby elephant being unloaded from a truck which was quite a sight. These elephants were also unfortunately chained up much the same as the previous ones we had seen. You could also have an elephant ride, buy a small basket of corn to feed the elephants or pay 40 Baht to get a picture with the baby elephant.

We then piled into the bus again to visit the Wat Yai Chaya Mongkol temple (The Great Temple of Auspicious Victory) which was built to celebrate a victory over a massive Burmese invasion in 1593. Many of the sites we visited seemed to be either destroyed by, or built to celebrate a victory over, the Burmese.

At this temple we walked the grounds and saw a reclining Buddha statue and a courtyard lined with many other smaller Buddha statues, some of which had been offered a small glass of water so they wouldn't get thirsty. You could also buy offerings of a flower, a candle, and an incense stick to make a wish at one of the halls.

Back into the bus once more we proceeded to the Bang Pa-In Royal Palace where it started to rain. Heavily. Lounging around in the front building we sampled some Mangosteen which is a delicious local fruit. It took some prodding but I finally convinced Sancha to try some, which she enjoyed as well. The fruit, not the prodding, that is.

Once the rain eased up we eventually got to wander the grounds and see a pavilion in the middle of the pond, the awesome hedge sculptures, the Chinese style royal palace, a lookout tower, and another royal palace which we weren't allowed to enter. Sancha passed on the lookout tower since she was royally over stairs by this point.

Onwards, and our last trip in the bus involved travelling back to a dock and our lunch cruise down the Chao Phraya River. This was probably the nicest part of our day, as we relaxed in the boat, had a nice buffet lunch, and saw all the various riverside buildings. These buildings ranged from giant new condominiums to some barely upright shanties that looked like they could collapse any second.

We were quite exhausted from the day once we were dropped back at our hotel, but we did end up having the nicest (and cheapest!) Thai meal we had during our stay at a restaurant down the road. This time it was a much more relaxed walk down the road as much of the military presence had eased up.

Ringside

After a day of lazing by the pool sipping cocktails, eating and planning our stay in Berlin we decided to head out to Ratchadamnoen Stadium in Bangkok for some Thai boxing (Muay Thai, the national sport of Thailand). For 2000 Baht ($80 or so each) we got to sit ringside. We felt rather "ripped off" as we not only didn't get any sweat dripped on us, we got no blood either!

As you enter the arena floodlights fill the floor revealing two men going through their spiritual 'Wai Khru' (a ceremony to thank their revered teachers, spirits, boxing ring and the sport itself).

Following the 'Wai Khru' ritual, they go straight into 'Ram Muay', a dance where each boxer demonstrates his skills and style. These pre-match ceremonies are believed to bring good luck, protection, respect, and a fair and honourable fight to the boxers. Once all the formalities are out of the way, it's time for action.

There were 7 matches all up, 4 -5 rounds each match depending on the boxers age and weight. Each round timed to 2-3 minutes with 2 minute breaks, so each match going for around 20 minutes.

The main event was Match 6 - in round 4 the match was stopped due to one opponent dislocating his knee. (We are seen above with the winner and his entourage of this event). They were all so polite in making sure their opponents were okay, it was a nicety that you don't see much in Australian sports.

It was an exhilarating experience - not only did we have the betting going on right behind us, we had the blaring sound of Thai classical instruments,and the passionate crowd all around us cheering on their favourite boxer.

Whilst waiting for a cab back to the Hotel we saw the king and his entourage drive past us. That was pretty sweet timing. Also it was here, that we encountered our first language issue with cab drivers in Thailand. Even though we had some letterhead from the Hotel, it was not in Thai, so most drivers had no idea where Suwarong Road was, even though it is situated right near Patpong Rd - about 6 drivers had no clue. It wasn't until a nice older Thai gentleman helped us out and hailed a cab for us and sent us on our way. He deserved a tip.

Overall, this was a great experience and recommend to all.

Hellfire Pass

Day 2
We started off the day with a much quieter breakfast without the several bus-loads of tourists that had joined us for dinner the previous night. Our first stop of the day was the Hellfire Pass Memorial Burma-Thailand Railway. This museum is actually run by the Australian Department of Veteran Affairs, and appears to be mostly funded by donations (there were a bunch of Australian 5 and 10 dollar notes in the donation box).

We took a tour of the museum, which was quite similar to the previous days museum at the Allied Prisoners Cemetery. The highlight of this museum is the Hellfire Pass cutting in the side of the mountain made by workers on the Death Railway. We descended down several stairs and ramps to the original railway that had been cut into the side of the mountain, and from there walked 300m to the Hellfire Pass cutting. Unfortunately our tour only allowed time to see the cutting and we didn't get to walk the entire 4km track.

After returning to the top of the stairs (with several stops for Sancha to rest on the way) we continued on by bus to our elephant ride. The farm where the elephants were kept was a little depressing, since we saw a mother and her baby elephant chained to a tree. Our ride took a long time since our mount (non-epic) kept stopping to snack on every bush, tree, and piece of scrub that was edible on the way.

After our ride we were able to purchase bananas to feed the elephant and tip the rider (driver? wrangler? What do they call them anyway?). We then got to explore the farm with one of the little girls who thought it was her job to lead Sancha around by the hand. After a little exploring we got to sit down to a pre-packed lunch prepared by the hotel. It was at this point I broke the cardinal rule of travelling in dodgy countries and ate cold food.

After lunch we got to travel down the river on a bamboo raft with the small farm girl, kitted out in a life jacket, jumping in the river all the way. This was our last activity for the day and we headed back to the hotel to wait for our tour bus to pick us up for the long drive back to Bangkok. Just before we were dropped off we got to drive past more protesters and see their barricades made out of long bamboo sticks and old tires, which is about 500m from our hotel.

Kanchanaburi Jungle

Day 1

Kanchanaburi (located about 129km north west of Bangkok) has been an unforgettable experience. On our first day we started off by heading to a World War II war cemetery and museum and the Bridge over the River Kwai. The museum was very interesting, it gave the history of the Death Railway and the brutal treatment the prisoners of war and civilians had to endure building it. More than 5,000 Commonwealth and 1,800 Dutch casualties are buried or commemorated in the cemetery. The prisoners that died here were very young. On average, they were all less than 25 years old. Many were 18 - 19.

Later that day we got to ride a train along the Death Railway to Nam-Tok station, the last terminal of the Thailand Nyanmar railway. We upgraded to first class (150 baht for two - $6.00) which consisted of "air-conditioning" (an overhead fan), and a small snack (a cup of tea and a cream puff). While the views were spectacular there was something a bit eerie about knowing how many people died while forced to build it. Definitely an interesting experience though.

From here we checked into the River Kwai Village Resort (which reminded me of the resort in "Dirty Dancing") for our overnight accommodation, had some lunch and then enjoyed a short long-tailed boat trip up stream the Kwai Noi River to explore the Kaeng Lawa Cave (it is the biggest cave in the Kanchanaburi province). After climbing up about 400 stairs in 40 degrees, I was dripping with sweat and exhausted when we arrived at the entry of the cave.

The cave houses stalactites and stalagmites in several chambers. There's also a lot of bats in the cave, and we managed to see a very rare cave scorpion too!

Then we returned back to the hotel for dinner and to watch some Burmese dancing. It was this night that I experienced my first bowel trouble. Luckily some Imodium fixed me up and I was able to experience day 2 without a hiccup.