Category: travel log

ceilidhing capers

December 8th, 2008 · · scotland, tim, travel log Comments Off

coast

We made up for a distinct lack of invites to scottish dances in our two years in the country by organising our own outing to the very entertaining regular Friday night Ceilidh in the ballroom of local institution Sloan’s.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we stepped things up a gear the following weekend and headed to Fife for a Charity Dance with the pro’s. Although a little outclassed, we had a great time staying with our friend Lynn’s family near St Andrew’s, and managed a quick visit to the home of Golf on the Sunday morning after the dance. Although we didn’t spot any royals wandering about (or manage any golf for that matter) Chhay did manage to fly her kite on the beach (cue Chariots of Fire music) and we had a good potter about the delightful town and harbour.
chhay flying the kite

venice

December 2nd, 2008 · · architecture, art, italy, tim, travel log Comments Off

out there

My new office kindly took us all to Venice for a weekend to witness the opening of the 11th Venice Architectural Biennale, in particular the opening party for the GHA designed Scottish Pavilion. I had nothing to do with it as it had all happened before I joined the practice but was kindly taken along for the ride, and Chhay joined us along with a solid contingent of WaG’s (and not forgetting the HaB’s too!)

I was excited to visit Venice for the first time despite the tourist mecca that it is renowned to be. The combination of lots of boats, windy lanes and Italian architecture is too close to my heart to ignore. Our explorations of the maze of alleyways was limited by torrential rain on the Saturday, which we spent tucked in another of my ideal urban ingredients – a tiny corner bar open to the street and plastic bag clad masses.

Sunday proved to be a little drier so we packed an architectural meg day, starting in the national pavilions in the Giardini before a hyperspeed tour of the architectural (or sculptural really) delights of the Arsenale, where the starchitects had come out to play – with swoopy, eye candy from the likes of Zaha and Frank.

Highlights were the Belgian pavilion filled only with tonnes of confetti in an exploration of emptiness, the indescribably beautiful pencil drawings on the walls of the Japanese pavilions and the mind numbing, literally disorientating saturation of ideas bursting out of the Italian pavilion.

Naturally a weekend was not even close to enough time to explore it all, and the next biennale may provide the perfect excuse to return in a few years time!

basque country

September 30th, 2008 · · tim, travel log Comments Off

foi gras

Apologies for the serious lack of posts – I have a tender due out in a couple of weeks and we have been quite busy.

Reaching back into the depths of August we had a fantastic week in the south of France to celebrate the 30th birthday of our friend (and early introducer to all things Glaswegian) Nathalie. It appears that much like kiddies parties which are all bouncy castles and hired entertainers, the requirements for 30ths are escalating somewhat – we met someone on the weekend who is hiring a Scotish castle for his!

biarritz harbour at sunset

In any case a dozen of us had a fantastic time in Nathalie’s parents village having rented an enormous house for the week. Our days centred on wine, cheese & ham with the occasional effort to get out of a hammock and check out the surrounding countryside, wineries, mountains or the Basque coast at St Jean-de-Luz and Biaritz for seafood and sunsets (above).

Even getting there was quite fun as we tested the limits of the Europe by rail approach with an epic 14 hour trip right through from Glasgow to almost the spanish border in one day on the way there, with a more lesiurely sleeper to Paris, a days traipsing about and an afternoon train home on the way back. A highly reccomended way to travel with minimal security, delicious picnics and free wi-fi (for the UK leg in any case) making for a much more dignified mode of transport (and in this case it was even cheaper than flying!).

london in the summertime

August 29th, 2008 · · architecture, art, food, sustainability, tim, travel log Comments Off

serpentine pavillionWe snuck down to London for the first time in over year at the end of July, to see friends, catch the tail end of the London Festival of Architecture, visit a few galleries and generally see London in summer for the first time.

It was a great weekend, we popped by the just opened Serpentine Pavillion by Frank Gehry (above), although we couldn’t get in because of a fancy pants party, as well spending a fantastic half a day in the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the awesomely brutalist Hayward Gallery. I suppose it was to be expected given our profession but the artists interpreting architecture lent itself to some absolutely brilliant pieces in my opinion – including a spooky dolls house city by Rachael Whiteread a surreal frozen explosion by the Cubans Los Carpinteros and the chance to paddle about on the roof of the gallery courtesy of Gelitin’s Normally, Proceeding and unrestricted without title (below)

sailing on the sky

We caught up with old friends and farewelled some too, there aren’t many Australians left it seems. We had time to more fully explore the east end of the city wandering about the hipster paradised of Hoxton & Shoreditch, getting our fill of vietnamese (as we can’t find any in Glasgow) and trying out the eco-friendly Waterhouse – which in it’s suitable obscure location served up excellent fare although I was skeptical about prawns flown in from Thailand irrespective of the sustainability of their production.

howe in glasgow

July 28th, 2008 · · food, glasgow, scotland, tim, travel log Comments Off

falkirk wheel

We are in the middle of a busy 6 weeks, and currently are broadbandless at home (not such a bad thing for a household that spends 8 hours a day in front of a screen anyway) so I’ve been a bit lax with the updating.

Reaching back into the end of June our friend Howe visited for a weekend from Copenhagen (via Saigon via Adelaide via Malaysia), unfortunately he lucked out with the weather so we ducked showers all weekend but still managed to catch a fair bit of stuff.

After a late night repast at favourite haunt Pintxos on the Friday night after he arrived we did our usual customised walking tour on the Saturday – including taking in the excellent Haptic exhibition at the Lighthouse, and dinner at Malaysian Chinese gem Rumours.

Sunday we made yet another attempt at getting to Pitlochry to visit Scotland’s smallest distillery, however a late start and some poor weather saw us turn back at Loch Tay. An overly long diversion took us to the Falkirk Wheel (above)for the first time – faintly disappointing in a typical Millenium Lottery Funding sort of way.

afloat on the bay of naples

June 27th, 2008 · · italy, tim, travel log Comments Off

For the second part of our Italian adventure we headed to a small island off the coast of Naples to pick up a charter yacht for a weeks sailing. Our aim was to sail to the Amalfi coast and explore the islands in the bay of Naples – Ischia, Capri and our base Procida.
Procida (below) itself is small un-touristy fishing and yachting enclave full of fantastic old buildings packed on to hillsides and a crazy system of narrow windy streets. It was a small mission to get there – including a thorough telling off from the Naples ticket inspectors for boarding a tram without a ticket, but delightful once we arrived.

Procida Harbour

Once we had settled on board Zippella (below) we headed out of the picturesque Marina di Chiaiolella to headed for neighbouring Ischia for the evening. A brisk breeze soon had a heeling nicely enjoying the sunshine and breeze on our faces as we made for the port of Sant’Angelo, however a couple of hours in, as the wind picked up and we beat towards port our rather tired looking mainsail tore, reminding Dugs and I of the somewhat haphazard nature of sailing!

Zippella

After several failed attempts at mooring (our anchoring technique took some time to rediscover) we puttered in to the village and had a fantastic seafood feast served by a crazy lady at a little restaurant situated on an isthmus looking back at the town.

We toddled back to the boat as the wind started to pick up, and headed to bed only to be woken around 2 o’clock in the morning by rain streaming in through the portholes, and our dinghy about to launch it self from the deck. A quick visual check through the gloom backed up by the GPS had our anchor dragging so we nosed in a little closer and tried to sleep, it was probably lucky our somnolence wasn’t too deep because our anchoring still wasn’t up to scratch and at 5 in the morning we had dragged another 500 m and were heading towards the beach! We adjusted again and had a fitful rest till morning proper.

With our broken sail we had to readjust our plans to try and get it repaired so dawdled back to our home port with a delightful stop for lunch and a swim in the harbour at Ischia Porto (below) just across from Procida.

taxi?

Once we were back in our base marina we had some bad news – it turned out our mainsail would take longer than expected to be repaired. We had time to explore the town around the marina and get a decent nights sleep before Claire headed off to make it back to work(!) while the rest of us decided to press on without our main. Thankfully we had following winds for the rest of our trip and hardly missed it.

We nosed out and set sail for Capri with another beautiful day for sailing. A bit of an oily swell and Dug’s somewhat amateur butchering of a fish we caught trawling had Chhay & I a little queasy, but by the time we rounded the spectacular looking Capri and settled into a bay on the southern side away from the 140 euro per night marina we were feeling better. We headed ashore and wandered up to Capri itself to lower the tone significantly. A 6 euro gelati soon had us scurrying back aboard to cook dinner for ourselves however.

The bathtub shape of our boat didn’t make for an easy anchorage and as a storm hit again in the small hours we found ourselves dragging once more, this time next to a rather severe looking cliff face! The next morning dawned hot and clear but as we made a quick dash towards our the Amalfi coast to at least get in sight of our initial destination the weather closed in. Having decided not to make landfall we spun around and headed back to Procida, thankfully the wind had turned with us and we could reach our way back at a healthy pace as the islands faded in and out with passing squalls. As we neared the southern tip of Procida the weather cleared and we crept into a delightful bay in the lee of a fort with precarious fishermen’s houses clinging to the sheer hills (below).

Marina di Corricella

With our anchor firmly set and the calmest waters we had experienced we popped in to the town and explored the back streets before settling in to a fantastic seafood feast right on the edge of the fishing harbour, with launches full of people arriving and stepping straight off the boat and to their table.

The final morning we puttered around the island and back to our marina before starting an epic (bus, ferry, tram, train, bus, flight) trip back (40 hours for Dugs) and another night in Rome for Chhay & I.

roma

June 24th, 2008 · · italy, tim, travel log Comments Off

pizzicheria

With the younger harland venturing offshore for the first time we caught up with him in Rome earlier this month, replacing a conference about the intricacies of radar with some more somnolent pursuits.We managed to actually enter very few of the main attractions, with the exception of the coleseum (below) and the roman forum, spending most of our time wandering & absorbing – a return visit to actually attempt to tackle some of the thousands of museums and churches dotted throughout the centro storico is defiinetly in order.

coleseum

Highlights for me as usual were the twisty back alleys, framing storybook views of old shops & apartment buildings. We skirted some of the classic pieces but generally tried to avoid the packed throngs surrounding them, limiting Chhay & my’s ability to re-enact Roman Holiday.

jewish ghettothe old Jewish ghetto (above) and Trastevere south of the tiber were my favourite areas, smaller in scale and slightly less frenetic but we could have wandered through the entire city for hours more than we did.

costa del solway and the garden of cosmic speculation

May 12th, 2008 · · architecture, art, scotland, travel log Comments Off

sandyhill bay

The lack of recent posts has been down to some decidedly summerlike weather (5 days without rain!) which has seen us in the garden and out at the allotment. Our seedlings are getting rather huge in the conservatory, although many of the ones that we planted out have been decimated by slugs! I finally added the roof to the greenhouse this weekend so with the addition of a door and an industrial load of gap filler we’ll be at lock up stage.

last weekend for the first of 2 may long weekends we headed south into the Dumfries region. We camped on the Solway Coast in one of those decidedly Brittish holiday parks, complete with green caravans, kids with buckets & spades and a decidedly underwhelming beach, although this one was much less garish than most and beautifully sited overlooking a little bay (above).

smugglers cove

We walked from our campsite along the coast to the delightful Rocklciffe & Kipford (more boats – you have to feel for poor Chhay, having to put up with me) , past little settlements and ultimate natural smugglers hideouts (above) carved into the cliffs. We also found time to explore the atmospheric ruined Sweetheart Abbey and the attendant cute little town of New Abbey (below).

sweetheart abbey from new abbey

On the Sunday we headed back past Dumfries (itself an interesting if a little sketchy regional centre with great winding lanes and beautiful red sandstone housing stock) to the reason for our trip – Charles Jencks own Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Open to the public on only one day a year it is an esoteric, sometimes humorous sculptural post modern landscape treat. Curving grass helixes (below), mirrored ponds, obscure sculptures tucked into hidden groves (bottom) as well as complex hydrological features make for a fascinating place for exploring and it was incredibly popular – packed with the funkier edge of the blue rinse set.

from the snail tower

While some of it was a little too post modern for my black skivvied taste, it is an amazing place, showing that there is more to the old critic than a few architecture tomes. As always more at our flickr
bluebells

ardnamurchan peninsula

May 1st, 2008 · · food, scotland, tim, travel log Comments Off

sound of mull
As Chhay & and I have somehow managed to keep each other entertained, annoyed or otherwise occupied for approximately the last eight years, we dumped our surrogate child Claire for a weekend on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

We had a pleasant drive up on the Friday night stopping at the very elegant Kilcamb Lodge for a somewhat surprisingly fancy supper.

We were based in Acharacle which was an unpreposessing town at the edge of the peninsula. The surrounding countryside however was absolutely magnificent. Quite depopulated with hidden coves and bays and the odd sandy beach to surprise.

There was even the wildlife promised by the tourist people – chhay spotted badgers, hawks and multitude of deer.

We trekked out to the very end of the peninsula – which also happens to be the westernmost mainland point on Great Britain, alsthough the islands sitting just offshore don’t give you a great sense of achievement. Having satifies our extremism we hopped on a ferry for an afternoon in the very picturesque Tobermory on the Isle of Mull.(below)

tobermory harbourOn our last day we did a big loop up to the gritty ‘gateway to the isles’, Mallaig – a proper fishing town, with a proper somewhat stinky harbour. The road up however was breathtaking – starting with beautiful harbours complete with ruined castles, and hidden yachts, follwed by clear aqua water backed by snow topped mountains, more beaches and views out to the small isles of Eigg, Rum and Rhu with the brooding presence of the Isle of Skye in the background.

the small isles

I spent most of my time over the whole weekend wildly speculating on boat purchases, as every turn revealed yet another brilliant opportuinity for sailing. I think a six month trip up the west coast of Scotland may be the fitting way to finish our time here so if anyone want to join in a couple of years just let me know!

i’m dreaming of a white easter

March 28th, 2008 · · scotland, tim, travel log Comments Off

moonlight over loch earn, originally uploaded by tim&chhay.
We spent easter in central Scotland, surrounded by snow capped mountains and lochs, as well as the occasional blizzard.We based ourselves at a cottage on Loch Earn – with a picturesque outlook and proceeded to eat our way through the weekend with occasional forays into the surrounding areas.As Chhay’s office only believes in Christ’s resurrection rather than his death, Claire & I pottered our way up to the house via B-roads, picking up Claire’s friends Jen & Marco fresh off the London train on the way.

killin, originally uploaded by tim&chhay.

Loch Tay, provided some spectacular scenery, and a rather snow bound attempt at canoing as Jen and Marco demonstrated their turning ability rather too well. Other highlights were the brooding Loch Lubnaig and the incredible countryside around Crieff.

As we meandered back on Monday we stopped of at the Lake on Monteith and caught the teeny ferry over to the abandoned Inchmahome Priory (below). A delightful picnic in the sun trap created by the atmospheric ruins capped off a fantastic weekend.

inchmahome priory, originally uploaded by tim&chhay.