London Life, Thanks for the Memories

Perhaps a little late to be reminiscing about our life in London - now sitting at 1 year and 10 months since departing; but better now than never! London - one last tribute, here it is.
Also hoping that this post sparks off a better run of consistent blogging, as we have dropped off a bit. Distracted about plans to revamp this site to be more responsive and search engine friendly; unfortunately the core element - the writing content then dwindled away. Stay tuned for the revamp - it will happen. It was a new year's resolution after-all and those are never made to be broken!

Paris 2015, One Last Visit

There are feelings of nostalgia that come through when flicking through travel photos almost 18 months after the trip. On this occasion, we rediscovered some unpublished photos from our last trip to Paris in July 2015. This was perhaps our 8th visit to the French capital and a place that will forever hold happy memories in our hearts. This was also the month that Olie's family came to visit and we played 'tour guide' in London and in Paris at the iconic sites. So this is it. Recapping the last night in Paris. Au Revoir.

Budva and Kotor, Montenegro

Montenegro was the last country on our tour of the Balkans. Translating to 'Black Mountain'', the country shares a common history with nearby Serbia of being conquered by different empires over the centuries, due to its geographic location as the crossroads of 'East and West'. Our interest in visiting this country was the UNESCO listed Bay of Kotor. In order to reach this site, we flew from Belgrade to the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica and booked a private transfer to the coastal (party) town of Budva. In the height of summer, this town was buzzing with super-yachts and electronic music pounding the centuries old fortress walls.

Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade - the capital city of Serbia, sits at the confluence of two rivers: Sava and Danube. Strategically, this location has been at the cross-roads of East and West; the site of wars between armies of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires and more recently the conflict that dominated the Balkan region during the early 1990s.

Our interest in history pulled us towards visiting this city and devoting three nights to sightseeing with little background research.
Overall we were enriched by the experience and place Belgrade on our list of recommendations -full of meat eaters where English is widely spoken and easy to navigate our way around.

Mostar, Bosnia

Mostar, famous for the bridge - Stari Most that was destroyed and rebuilt during our lifetime, was a place we wanted to visit for reasons other than ticking off another country. We wanted to see the locals dive off the bridge; reflect on the significance of the city as a cross-roads between cultures fueled by geo-political and religious tensions; and also learn more about war that had occurred during the 1990's.
We visited Mostar as an overnight trip that split (mind the pun) our days in Split. Easy to travel to, we recommend the journey and if we had more time, perhaps an onward trip to Sarajevo.

Hvar Island, Croatia

Hvar is an Croatian island a short ferry ride away from Split. Recommended by friends, it promised a mixture of historic sightseeing and small restaurants serving fresh seafood meals. Happy to escape from the package-tour packed streets of Split, we had plans to catch the ferry into Hvar city and then book ourselves onto a speedboat transfer to the Paklinski islands for a few hours of sunbaking.
Due to time constraints, we didn't manage to visit Stari Grad on the north side of the island, UNESCO listed and one of the oldest towns in Europe, first settled by Greeks in 384BC.

Split, Croatia

At some point in the 4th century AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian decided to build a retirement palace and chose the seaside settlement of Salona (former name for Split) as the location. This massive building brought fame to the area and the UNESCO listed ruins drew our attention to visiting the city.
Our itinerary had us staying for four days, filled with sightseeing, island hopping and an overnight trip to Mostar, Bosnia - covered in a separate blog post. We arrived around mid-August, taking the overnight ferry from the other side of the Adriatic in Ancona, Italy.

Ancona, Italy

Visiting the industrial port city of Ancona in Italy was not a result of having it on any kind of travel bucket list. It was simply to fulfill a transport connection - a ferry ride across the Adriatic Sea to the UNESCO Heritage harbour town of Split, Croatia. Leaving Italy for the last time made us nostalgic. One of the downsides of writing blog posts almost 12 months after the travel date is that the sentimental feelings sweep back. However as this post will attest, our memories of Ancona were of relief (at making it on-board the ferry) rather than a trip filled with amazing historical sites, delicious food and wine.

Republic of San Marino

Setting ourselves the target to visit (together) a total of 70 countries by Christmas 2015 took a little bit of planning. It was during Christmas 2014 when we found ourselves with plenty of spare time on a cruise ship, that we took inventory of the countries visited (approximately 40) and decided that 30 more would be achievable. So that led us to pick some micro-countries as 'easy wins' and the proximity of the Republic of San Marino to our Italian destinations and onward travel to the Balkan states meant that we could afford a day's detour.

Rimini, Italy

Winter in Melbourne is thankfully not as harsh as in the Northern Hemisphere. Today's Saturday activities kicked off with a boxing class at the local gym and then a few hours playing tourist in Melbourne's Docklands and St Kilda Beach. Both activities parallel with the subject of this blog - a throwback to August 2015 when we visited the seaside resort of Rimini on route to the dockside port of Ancona.
Rimini sits on the east coast of Italy where it meets the Adriatic Sea. Famous for kilometres of beach and thousands of umbrellas, it is the playground of locals and tourists enjoying the long hours of Mediterranean Summer sunshine.

Ravenna, Italy - Part 2

Mosaic is a style of artwork where images are created by assembling pieces of coloured glass or stone. In our previous visit to Jordan, we had visited a mosaic factory and witnessed the labour intensive task of individually cutting and gluing pieces of material to create beautiful masterpieces. Our visit to Ravenna was driven by a desire to see the UNESCO listed Byzantine era mosaics. For conservation reasons, we were not allowed to photograph some artworks, but the memories of their colour, scale and beauty will stay with us for ever.

Ravenna, Italy - Part 1

Ravenna is a city in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. It is a city perfect for history-culture nerds like ourselves. Ravenna's claim to fame sits with its past life as the capital city of the Western Roman Empire, capital of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths; then part of the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of the Lombards.
Like many other cities that have been swapped over by different ruling cultures, the city is rich in monuments.For its size, it has an amazing 8 UNESCO listed sites - of which we managed to see 7 in a single day.

Bologna, Italy

Whilst we lived in London, finding the inspiration (and time) to blog was driven by the need to record down all the memories of cultural sites visited that were so intriguingly different to what we had grown up with in Melbourne.
But now at the cusp of our 5 month anniversary of returning to Australia, although we have only managed a handful of posts in this time-frame - a resurrection of this hobby is now underway and (fingers crossed) we will complete the full set of posts on our 5 month holiday before 2016 ends. This next post leans heavily to one of our favourite travel pastimes - eating cured meats and drinking wine.

Trondheim, Norway - Part 2

Keeping up to date with blog posts about our most recent travels is proving to be a challenge. But now that we have 'settled' back into a routine in Melbourne, there will be more priority placed on re-living the holiday and also eventually blogging about culture, food and travels locally in Australia. This post covers Day 3 to Day 5 where our time was spent relaxing with family, exploring Trondheim and finalizing details of the African and Asian parts of our trip.

Trondheim, Norway - Part 1

When we started our '5in5months' adventure in August 2015, there was an optimistic goal of writing a blog post every day of the trip. This meant that for 130+ consecutive days, we would need to think of something interesting to write than just food pics and comments about our hotel room. That initiative was soon abandoned and instead 'eventually' we will write more detailed recap posts with tips and stories that will be more useful to our readers. Kicking off the first blog post, we set the scene - a Thursday morning in August and we are off to Gatwick Airport. Sounds simple enough, except of all days, there was a Tube Strike.

Huasquila, Ecuador

Photo Blog of our trip to Huasquila Amazon Lodge, Ecuador. 

Duration: 2 nights

Private transfer from Quito to Huasquila. Our driver picked us up in the morning for a 3.5hr drive to the lodge situated at the edge of the Amazon. The roads were very winding and in were damaged in some parts due to floods and rock debris falling from the side of the mountain.

Quito, Ecuador 2016

Photo Blog of our trip to Ecuador

Duration: 4 nights

Places visited: 

- Quito city 

- Quito Old town 

5in5Months PreTrip Planning

After almost four years away from our family and friends in Australia, we have made the decision to head back home. But before we touch down in Melbourne, there is room for one "Big Trip". 

Our plans are to touch down in countries across the 5 continents (Antarctica was sadly outside our budget) in 5 months of travelling. 

As we travel, we will be using the following hashtags #OlieMeiTravels or #5in5months on social media: Twitter, Instagram and our Facebook page to record our travel adventures.

This first post includes the mini pre-trip updates that we previously posted onto a separate page.
Enjoy!