Postscript to previous post: at least when you hitchhike – for the most part anyway – someone else is doing the driving. This takes the onus off you (me) and your (my) shocking map-reading skills.

Maps and I just aren’t friendly; that’s the long and the short of it. It took me years to catch on that measuring distances in thumbs is highly inaccurate, and I still have to hold the map in the direction I’m going or else I get well dizzy.

Much of my travelling in Europe was done with my friend Kylie, who, even more so than me, was born with a distinct and particularly debilitating lack of sense of direction, mechanics and logic (her words). Naturally, our plans rarely unfolded along the predicted lines. We would take turns being MapGirl, with our knickers outside of our pants, map-cape fluttering in the wind, (mis)guiding the both of us on our quest.

 
Once, trying to find our way to Montmarte in Paris, MapGirl (Kylie, on this particular day) suddenly stopped dead just as we’d half-crossed a major highway, blustery wind tossing her hair and the map wildly.

‘Kylz, where do we go now?!’ I called, warily eyeing the 12 lanes of oncoming traffic waiting at the lights to our left.

‘We’re in…Stalingrad!’ she yelled back.

‘Erm,’ I said. ‘Stalingrad’s in Russia, mate!’ The 12 lanes of oncoming traffic started revving their engines. ‘I believe it fell to the Germans some time during World War II!’

‘I’m serious!’ she shouted. ‘There’s a suburb called Stalingrad! We’re here -’ (she stabs a finger at the map in her trusty Lonely Planet) ‘and we need to get -’ (flips about 65 pages over) ‘- here!’

Needless to say, we barely avoided getting peeled off the street with giant spatulas, but MapGirl soon retired and went back to a) Australia; and b) wearing her undies the regular way.

The ghost town phenomenon is something I’m well familiar with in the Netherlands. On Sunday, everything bloody well shuts down. On Monday, you jump out of bed all sprightly-like thinking you can catch up on that lost weekend shopping, only to find…the shops don’t open till well past midday. Now there’s a social state for you: no reason NOT to have a sleep-in…

I don’t have hundred pound biceps or biker tattoos – in fact, I only have very small and rather pathetic tattoo in the shape of a star, and drawn up to full height I look quite like a tall dwarf with malnutrition – so hitchhiking is something I’ve tended to steer well clear of. As I don’t travel with a car though (who am I kidding – I don’t have a car), or a bike or a scooter or one of those most excellent vespas, there have been times when it’s seemed like a viable option.

Well, okay. There was one time, during that week in Croatia.

The village was well up in the hills of Hvar Island and had only just been hooked up for electricity, so public transport and supermarkets were considerably out of the question.

We were keen on cooking our host, English Mark, a bang-up dinner to thank him for the hospitality, so we hiked to the nearest town to buy groceries but, as predicted, were altogether too buggered to make it back.

‘Don’t worry,’ English Mark had said. ‘I guarantee you’ll get a ride in less than 11 cars’ time.’

On account of it being the kind of deserted road where one car comes past every three days on average, we decided against hanging about to find out. Ever so slowly we trudged along in the beating sun, half delirious for seven long, uphill kilometres, rationing our half-bottle of lukewarm water and picturing the crows swooping in to shred our parched carcasses when we finally succumbed (okay, so it all sounds a bit melodramatic, but we were actually seeing mirages by this time. Later we were told it was the hottest day on Hvar since records began).

Oh. I’ve just realised this wasn’t a hitchhiking story at all. We never did get picked up.

Elsewhere, then. What about Croatia? Now there’s a top spot.

I once spent three nights in a house that had no number in a street with no name in a village on the Croatian island of Hvar that water and electricity only reached in 2001.

Hvar began its inhabited life as a haven for medieval pirates before being taken over by the Venetians in the thirteenth century, and not much has happened since.

There are 23 residents in the village of Rudine, and our host English Mark, a newfound friend of whom we are guests by virtue of being fellow English speakers, is by and large the only foreigner. The streets are unpaved and the houses made of crumbling stone, but the people are most embracing, although the village kids do have the alarming tendency to play in the dirt with guns that may or may not be toys, and local music tends to consist of romantic little ditties primarily concerned with lopping off the head of a Serb and offering it to your girl as a birthday present.

There’s no hot water (not that it’s really missed, because the heat is so oppressive), and certainly no chance of radio or telly, but by the same token there’s also no need to lock the doors at night, or set an alarm for the morning (the village rooster takes care of that).

Every evening at hourly junctures there’s an elderly village woman dropping by to see if there’s anything she can clean or cook for ‘Mister England’, who’s currently in the process of cultivating a work-related ulcer or two while tying up a property deal in Sarajevo (‘I’m sure it’s a beaut deal, Mr Tjyhgvgrybncjkvbic, and legal-ish, it’s just that I’ve never really known anyone before who owned a minefield…’).

Maybe I warmed to the place because of the way English Mark had fashioned his hedge into the shape of Roger Rabbit and the village kids loved it even though they’d never seen the cartoon. Or maybe it was just the place itself that got under my skin.

I’ve rattled on about Germany for a bit now so I’ll just wrap it up neatly with something alcohol-related and be done with it.

One day on a vodka mission to my local supermarket in Konstanz the check-out chick, a cantankerous middle-aged woman with pink hair, doggedly refused to sell it to me until I produced some form of suitable identification.

It transpired that neither my university student card nor my Australian driving license were satisfactory, despite both having my birthdate as well as photos. Though all the details were identical, she with the pink hair refused to believe that the two photos were of the same person.

At this point three other checkout chicks stopped to observe and throw in their two cents’ worth. This was during peak hour trolley traffic in the supermarket, with queues longer than the aisles and everyone in the mood for a bit of controversy.

Before I knew what was happening my ID cards were being passed about amongst ‘helpful’ locals, and roughly translated the following heated discussion ensued: ‘Well, that picture, the grumpy-looking one, that’s definitely her. But the other one looks a bit like Kermit the Frog.’ ‘Mm you’re right, it’s obviously a fake card’. ‘Give over! Look at those goggly eyes, is definitely her.’

This carried on for a good ten minutes with Pink Hair steadfastly insisting that should I wish to purchase alcohol here I’d have to return with my passport (imagine: ‘Lettuce? Check. Toilet paper? Check. Cheap wine? Check. Passport? Bugger.’).

Eventually I left empty-handed, having learned a valuable lesson about life in Germany. You can’t even get drunk without the appropriate paperwork.

Like the Tim-Tam guzzling, ‘crikey’ spouting Aussie, national stereotypes are likely to be a recurring theme here. For you Poms, the work’s been done for me in this article “Worst stereotypes of England” 

Open to England: Good call about not everyone speaking the Queen’s English. I teach English in the Netherlands and I can’t tell you the number of times students have asked if I’m going to teach them my personal (and evidently lowly) brand of Aussie English, or ‘proper English’ - still waiting for a definition on that one…!

As I mentioned in my previous post, the good old Aussie tim tam has a curious effect on some. Phase 1 is usually mild interest. Phase 2 is borderline obsession. Phase 3 is - well - this:

Beer and drunken monkeys might be Germany’s thing, but for Aussies on the road, you can’t go past a Tim Tam.

It was late 2005, I was far from home, and for almost a year I hadn’t eaten a Tim Tam. Things were getting desperate.

(Tim Tams, for those of you not in the know, are Australian chocolate bars with a sort of wafer filling that are the bane of dieting girls everywhere.)

I was living in Konstanz, in the south of Germany, with three friends from downunder. One night, we were paid an unexpected visit by a good friend and fellow southern-hemispherian, Kiwi Jimmy. He’d just returned from a visit home and he’d brought us a gift.

Well, our greedy eyes lit up all at once as we hungrily eyed the parcel he clutched to his chest. He yanked the precious cargo from its bag and -

- ‘TIM TAMS!’ we all screeched in unison, falling over ourselves to paw at the priceless gift and empty the thing in one fell swoop. Kiwi Jimmy was thrown back against the door in the mad chaos of the moment, and sustained a minor flesh wound to the back of his carefully cultivated Hasselhof ‘do.

But the most violent and dangerous part of the evening came when, having rationed out two Tim-Tams each and devoured them like a pack of ravenous dogs, we all at once spied the near-empty packet half hidden by a shoe, torn and dishevelled from over-handling, and realised with an untimely mixture of greed and trepidation that but a sole finger of chocolate goodness remained.

Kiwi Jimmy shifted nervously from his precarious position near the edge of the bed: ‘Uh…according to my calculations, there’s only one Tim-Tam left, and we’re five people…should we get a knife?’

But his faltering proposition had already been drowned out by the riotous scramble of four half-crazed Aussie girls for the last taste of home…

I’ve stumbled across a matter that takes me right back: it’s to do with chip-butties. If you’re not a bloody Pommie, or related to one, or familiar with their odd chip habits, you’re really missing out.

I’m a born and bred Aussie but my folks are die-hard Brits, so I grew up on a diet of chip-butties. And while the other kids at school cajoled me out of pronouncing words like ‘vitamin’ and ‘beetroot’ the Brit way, chip-butties are something I’ll always hang onto….!!

Footpath etiquette aside, Germany has some bang-on spots. Take Munich, for example.

Ever wondered what would happen if you got a native Irishman to give you a meticulous run-down of 800 years of Munich’s history? It goes a little something like this: “So you see, the old Rathaus is newer than the new Rathaus and the new Rathaus is older than the old Rathaus” (something about the old Rathaus having to be rebuilt after the war due to Allied bombing).

Around the corner from the old/new Rathaus in Munich is the Altehof, or old palace (which actually is old), where King Ludwig was kidnapped by a monkey several hundred years ago. No, really. He was sleeping in his crib - he was of course a baby at the time - when a monkey tossed him over its shoulder and swung out the window to the balcony, from which he jumped onto a small tower jutting out of the palace wall, still clutching the future king (goodness knows what a monkey was doing roaming the palace. Evidently it was the done thing at the time).

So the good people below had to figure out a way to coax the monkey down. Given that bananas weren’t invented yet, and being Bavarians, they did what they do best - fetched the beer. Eventually, when the monkey was drunk enough and tottering around on the tower, little Ludwig fell from his grasp into the waiting arms of the people below.

Only in Germany.