The simple life in Italy

One thing you can’t say about Cinque Terre these days is that it’s off the beaten track but that doesn’t mean it’s not an astonishingly beautiful part of the world.

For the uninitiated, Cinque Terre is a set of five villages on the North West coast of Italy, from south to north, Riomaggiori, Manarolo, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso. These are tiny villages with maybe as many as 2000 residents each nestled into incredibly steep valleys hard against the ocean and with dry stone terrace gardens, some of which predate the pyramids covering the 450m high hills. These terraces have traditionally been used for household and small scale trading gardens mostly planted with fruit, citrus, veggies, olives and grapes.

These villages are steeped in the traditions of the small town – everyone knows everyone, people sit on park benches until late into the evening talking and laughing and most of all, they move at a slower pace of life.

When fumbling for some change at a little supermarket and trying to hurry so as to not hold up the person behind me, the shop keeper kept saying calma, calma and making the universal gesture for ‘take your time’ or ‘whats the rush?’. Wonderful.

I do wonder, though, if that way of life is at risk from the tourism that’s flooding the area. It seems like everyone we spoke to had been to Cinque Terre or had a close family member who had been there. Many of these terraced gardens near the villages have clearly been abandoned in the last few years and are now completely overgrown with blackberries and ivy. When walking through the mountains (ok, hills but they felt like mountains) between villages, we saw more terraces that had been abandoned (judging by the trees growing in them) more like 20 – 50 years ago.

Its quite sad in a way to see these ancient dry stone walls and terraces that have been built with care, skill and effort (and I suspect a lot of collaboration between residents of the village) being progressively reclaimed by the bush. Most of the walls are still standing, they have just been overgrown. What was carefully tended garden is now regrowth forest.

There is also a message there about the inherent frailty of the constructions of the human edifice. The things we build, just like us, eventually get reclaimed by the land. While we have a large program of works for our own garden, including the construction of terraces, walls and productive plantings, which we will build with skill, care and effort, one day someone will drive a bulldozer through it. The lasting difference that garden makes will be in how it improves our life and how we can spread that difference and the message of the things that matter to us to other people. In short, the lasting changes to the world come not just from the things we build (and even less the things we tear down) but in how we improve the lives of other people.

I suspect the challenges facing agriculture are universal – in the modern world of technology and instant gratification it is hard to get young people interested in working in agriculture. With modern transport infrastructure, growing produce locally isn’t necessary (I still think it’s good for other reasons though) and the enormous physical effort involved in working these terraces makes it uncompetitive for locals to grow produce in these hills, carry it on their backs (300 vertical meters or more) down the incredibly steep paths, to the village for sale at the market.

I also wonder if the tourist trade is pushing land, housing and retail prices up making it increasingly difficult for people who are not in the tourist trade to survive living the traditional lifestyle there.

I don’t think this is happening to all the villages at the same rate. Corniglia is the least accessible of the five villages. The ferry that runs between the villages can’t stop at Corniglia and the train stops in the next valley. Unlike Vernazza and Riomaggiori, you don’t walk through a tunnel to get from the village to the train station, you walk up the (you guessed it) really steep hill. Twenty flights of stairs does seem to act as a barrier to the tourist trade. Because of this, I think Corniglia has the most traditional lifestyle of the 5 Terre but even then, you can see the difference between the new, young or tourist oriented residents and the older, traditional locals.

The local people and different tiers of government and regional management are working to preserve the way of life of the villages in spite of the pressures of international tourism. Posters in each town talk about the cultural value of farming and wine production to the local area. Most of the wine sold in the shops was local, which is great, but there are only a handful of different wineries.

I recognise that many traditional things are left behind for the better, trains instead of carts, communication technology, sanitation, food availability etc. all make our lives more secure, safe healthy and enjoyable; but as I sit here with my glass of local wine and slice of focaccia, watching the sunset over the ocean for the third day in a row I find myself hoping that society as a whole does not let these advantages strangle the old pleasures, lifestyles and professions in favour in favour of the new.

For the love of kitchens!

We are now staying in an apartment with a kitchenette and I feel calm and happy. I had been counting down the days until we next had a kitchen.

Let me take a moment to describe some of my meals in Manchester, Liverpool, and the Isle of Man.

Everybody knows the UK is all about pub food and big, hot breakfasts. This isn’t too bad on day one, when you are looking for a pub meal, the options on the menu were classic pub; beef and stout pie, burger (they don’t put salad on them here – wtf?) fish and chips etc… (not a lot for the vegetarians). But in these areas we found that the pub food didn’t live up to our expectations. Our wedges with cheese and bacon consisted of were few burnt chunks of potato swimming in a bowl of half melted cheese, the pies and fish were just OK and my mashed potato tasted distinctly of Deb potato powder.

And the vegetables… the poor vegetables made me want to cry. They are boiled until pale, bland and devoid of anything resembling structural integrity. The ‘caramelised’ onions may as well have been steamed for two hours then covered with vegetable oil and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I have wished that some of the crunch and caramalisation from the chips would jump onto the vegetables and I hoped that everything would taste better if they were on the same fork-full. But unfortunately that plan only resulted in the vegetables falling through the fork and splashing into the gravy moat surrounding my meal. I was desperately missing green things, fresh things, properly cooked broccoli.

So you might be thinking ‘try something else then’. Well we did, Italian and Chinese food and when I say that ‘margherita’ equals American style cheese pizza and ‘Vegetable Chow Mein’ equals deep fried noodles covered with simultaneously burnt and soggy bamboo shoots you can imagine how I felt.

The breakfasts were the classic English breakfast, a novelty on day one but by day three your arteries have developed a nervous tick and you find yourself working out how to politely explain to the host that you are really just in the mood for cereal.

By the time we reached the Yorkshire Dales we were desperate not to have another meal like those ones, we were preparing to buy cereal for dinner to eat in our room. But when we arrived we found there was no corner shop and that the rooms did not have bar fridges, so with the thought of dry cereal for three days straight we reluctantly went downstairs to the town’s only pub.

Well, as we walked past the blackboard one of the bar staff was busily changing the menu based on the chef’s specials for the day and with a little glimmer of hope we ordered. This time the mashed potatoes were beautiful, creamy and lightly seasoned with seeded mustard, the gravy was perfect and the meat tender, there were also delicious vegetarian meals.

We were reluctant to leave again and indeed when we in the middle of Dublin there was very little that wasn’t a pub and the pub we eventually decided on charged us an exorbitant amount of money for something that looked a lot like cat food and wasn’t nice at all, served with a side of soggy chips. (Although the other places we visited in Ireland did have much better food.)

This has lead us to an interesting idea that pub food in the UK gets better the further away you are from a city. We have no idea why this might happen, or why pubs in a town of about 50 people surrounded by fields are able to get a better range of quality exotic ingredients than one in the centre of a city with over a million people but that’s our observation.

Getting back to our little kitchenette in Cork, we went to the English Market and bought wild samphire, surprisingly local buffalo mozzarella, smoked tomato, sage and black pepper sausages, and two bottles of wine for less than some of the pub lunches. Using our little mobile pantry of pasta, oil, garlic and condiments we made (though I say it myself) an absolutely amazing dinner.

P.S. We did decide to head out to dinner in Cork on the last night because we found a menu with options and prices that caught our eye, it was affordable and beautiful food. If you are in Cork go to the Market Lane restaurant and bar, you won’t be sorry you did.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is principally known for the TT race and motorbikes in general – indeed the first thing I was asked about when telling of the plans for the trip was about the TT. To answer your questions right off the bat, yes, we went round most of the TT track (on a bus, it’s just the main road around the north of the island…), yes the roads are incredible (or try here), yes we think the racers are even bigger lunatics than before and no, I am not in the least bit inclined to get on a motorbike for a lap of the island.

The thing you may not realise is that the Isle is both a company and personal tax haven and, unlike the UK, there is no death duty. The consequences of this are a little unusual. For example, there are banks everywhere – many of them big multinational banks that don’t even have an office in Sydney.

Inequality of wealth is also very visible. While the average house looks, well, average and often quite run down there are lots of houses of the super-rich; sitting on the train we went past one house which looked like a renovated castle complete with a personal boating lake and private small railway that could be used by the owner to take friends around the property. One of the locals pointed out another house to us (we originally thought it must be a hotel) which the owner built to accommodate their grandfather clock collection, reportedly the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Walk through any of the harbour side suburbs of Sydney and you will see more expensive cars than you will here, but you will, from time to time, spot a very expensive Aston Martin.

But in contrast with this most people on the Isle seem to be struggling. Every street we walked down had at least one house for sale, and streets with rows of for sale signs were not uncommon a lot of which are run down looking townhouses and apartments. There were piles and piles of thick magazines and newspapers on real-estate available at the airport. Usually the most optimistic of publications, they were talking about the huge number of properties available, that many houses had been on the market for a long time, and that sellers should consider lowering their high expectations. The average asking price for a typical 2 bedroom terraced house was around 250,000 GBP, quite a bit higher than similar houses near coastal areas of England.

This wasn't the only time we saw four houses in a row for sale

The main source of employment for the locals is tourism, mostly from the UK mainland and tourism generally has been declining steadily over more than the past ten years, particularly as longer distance holidays have become so accessible for people living on the UK mainland. The jobs market used to be bolstered by the banking sector but this has also declined since the GFC. Yet the tourism campaign of the Isle is still clearly focused on British tourists – apart from the TT. Therefore they are trying to sell the British a lot of what they already have, history, rolling hills, old-world trains, and unpredictable weather.

If marketed properly the Isle could have a lot of appeal to international travellers, with its many beautiful port towns, rolling green hills that finish in tall cliffs which dive into the ocean, friendly people, ruined castles, steam trains, old lighthouses, and many hikes, bike rides and kayaking to suit different experience levels.

All in all, we enjoyed our time on the Isle of Man. The people are lovely, scenery beautiful and the roads amazing. We just hope the available food improves.

Rolling hills: check, stone walls: check, sheep: check.

We've been otherwise engaged

We know this blog has been a bit quiet for about 3 weeks, at first we were just spending some time writing other blogs then we got engaged which distracted us a bit while we used the places that had WIFI to Skype with family. Here’s a couple of posts we (mostly) prepared earlier!

Summer in Helsinki

Helsinki is a beautiful city, it is clean and the people are friendly. Every green space, no matter how small, is perfectly manicured and many are planted out with riots of colourful flowers. We have been told that some of this friendliness grows with the summer sun, and we were there at the peak of Helsinki’s good weather.

Sometimes in Australia we take good weather and long days for granted, but not the Finns. They embrace summer to the point where every little green space is filled with people picnicking, sunbaking, running, playing, cycling, or just relaxing and watching the world go by. It seemed like the whole city had taken the day off to enjoy the sun, we passed by a ‘beach’ which was an inlet less than the size of a tennis court with murky water and very full of slime-like seaweed but despite this every inch of it was full of people swimming in apparent blissful enjoyment. When the temperatures for January look like this you can see why.

The streets of Helsinki are really interesting. Every street corner has pedestrian crossings on all four roads, there are on-road and off-road cycle lanes everywhere, and who gets the right of way isn’t determined by size. Cars, bikes and pedestrians really are on an equal footing.

The contrast with Manchester and Liverpool is really striking. While both English cities have lovely areas the overwhelming feeling as you enter them is that they are industrial cities that have grown up. Any street art, or building decoration is, well, not quite lipstick on a pig, but you get the idea. The streets are also spotless – I didn’t notice how little chewing gum there was in the streets until we got to Manchester, where it’s everywhere. We saw ordinary people picking up rubbish on the streets as they went past.

It is striking how the buildings in Helsinki have been adapted to the weather conditions. They have tall, steeply pitched rooves with snow fences along the bottom to protect pedestrians (and I just discovered that they also keep snow on the roof to help insulate the building). The windows have an outer single glazed window, then a foot of space – sometimes with little displays of ornaments - then an inner double glazed window. The apartment doors are double doors, with space in the middle for leaving boots to dry. Most doorways have grates or grills outside and big doormats inside to catch snow and water from shoes and boots. For all this, the buildings are, by and large, beautiful. Clean, colourful and immaculately maintained facades are just about everywhere.

Packed

All of our personal things and furniture are now packed into a not very neat area of about 9 square meters. The last few weeks before we left were a mess, one which engulfed the lounge and dining rooms until we both got to a point of packing anything into any available box to get it out of the way.

In hindsight, some useful things to have done when packing include labelling boxes, having boxes for particular rooms such as ‘bathroom things’, sorting through our things to get rid of things we don’t need any more, and putting boxes we will need on arriving home at the front of the storage area. These aren’t revelations and they were in the back of our minds but somehow in the mess and stress it just didn’t happen like that.

We are now in Finland (more on that later) and the planning, stress and lack of sleep of the last few weeks has definitely been worth it. Next year we will go through everything in the house and give away or get rid of those things we don’t need and finish off all the little things that were left undone.

In short, if you need to pack up your house, start very, very early!

Welcome

Hello and welcome

We will use this travel blog to write things we find interesting and that we hope you will find interesting too. It is not intended as a blow-by-blow account of where we stayed, what we paid, and what we did (you will have to buy us a drink to get that), rather what we learned, thought, experienced and found entertaining.

The first tidbits
The word tidings is thought to come from the old English word tiden meaning 'to happen'. The word tidbit means either 'a small morsel of food' or 'a small piece of news or interesting information, such as gossip'. Small morsels of food won't come through this blog, but keep your eye on the post if we know your address. We have chosen the American spelling instead of the English 'titbit' in the hope it will make our blog easier to find because 'tidbit' is more commonly used in Australia.

Looking forward to your company,
The aimless commentators