Trains are not the only form of transport in Germany that can debilitate the unwitting foreigner; bicycles in that country have been specifically engineered to cause the utmost misery. What’s worse, the mysterious workings of footpath etiquette are something I was never able to get a handle on.

Being a born and bred Aussie (where people drive on the PROPER side of the road), I’m naturally inclined to veer to the left on footpaths, escalators and various other walkways. Living in Konstanz, in the south of the country near Switzerland, I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to reversing this trend, to mixed results.

I found that difficulties tended to arise when it came to shared footpaths – one side for bikes, one for humans. This is truly an invitation for broken limbs and disfiguring facial wounds. Eventually I discovered that there were various scattered and extremely well-hidden points throughout the city where special blue signs delineated one side of the path for bikes, the other for pedestrians.

This would have been all well and good if it were a uniform pattern throughout the city: no sooner had the thought crossed my mind that I just may have caught on at last, when I heard the ominous warning tinkle of an approaching bicycle (and boy, do Germans like to tinkle their bells!).

To this day, the sound of a bicycle bell never fails to fill me with trepidation, because I know that I must step to one side, but which side?

One foot wrong and I could end up splayed catastrophically over the handlebars of some surprised Sunday pedaller, or worse, in an icy ditch somewhere, utterly forgotten, until my perfectly preserved carcass is extracted at some point in the distant future by beings who will probe my crevices and extract my brain by way of my nasal passages…

Some time after the bib-and-brace incident it struck me as time to head back to the relative shelter of my favourite place in the whole world. What’s that, you ask? Paris? Bermuda? Some sort of island paradiso?

No. It’s Germany. Land of wurst, lederhosen and excessive compound nouns. (It’s a long story – one I’m sure I’ve time for one of these days.)

But let’s start with the trek there. As a general rule, trains in Germany are exorbitantly expensive, but in the name of true egalitarianism they’ve come up with a special ticket that allows people under the age of 26 to ride the trains on the weekend for a much cheaper price. Called the “schoenes Wochenende” ticket (meaning ‘beautiful weekend’ – how ironic), this effectively means you can ride the regional trains anywhere in the country between Friday and Sunday for a hugely reduced rate.

In practice, though, ‘regional’ train is a synonym for those trains that travel everywhere at a speed of 15kms or less and tend to stop at every possible station along the way. For my sister and I making our way from Berlin to Konstanz, my one-time home away from home, this entailed a fourteen-and-a-half-hour journey with eleven different connections (if you count as our final connection us collapsing into a taxi at midnight when we finally made it back to Konstanz).

For a somewhat public transport-ly challenged traveler like myself, the amount of things that can go wrong on a trip like this are simply countless. Falling asleep and missing your stop, unprecedented platform changes that no-one bothers to warn you about, cancelled trains and those that mysteriously just never show up, dying of the inevitable boredom, throwing yourself onto the tracks when you discover that your turkey baguette has gone soggy, or getting stuck, as we did, in a carriage with Gunther the African prophet who warns of the forthcoming implosion of the earth while flogging second-hand nailcare products.

Tell you what – trips like that can really put you off being a cheapskate.

I’ve started off on the skiing in Italy lark so I might as well finish the story where I left off. With my crotch up somewhere around my jaw, I think it was.

I was with my usual sidekick in travel, dear Kylie. Everything was perfect (besides said wedge, naturally): the snow was downy, the air crisp, the mountains more than high enough for debilitating injury. We set forth bravely on what appeared to be a gentle incline but rapidly turned into a veritable cliff, resulting in much wild flailing and hysterical shrieking, and cries of our planned emergency call, ‘Aussie Down!’

Somehow I managed a relatively calculated crash into a bank off to the left, which I lurched over and found to my eternal gratitude that I’d landed safely on the edge of the beginners’ run. Looking back for Kylz, the sight left me weeping with gales of laughter.

Ever the adventurer, she was skidding backwards down the black run, picking up ever more pace, shrieking and clinging for dear life to her stocks (though an ice pick might have been a more appropriate tool of the moment). It was long minutes before she was able to tumble over the run to the safety of the embankment. There, she turned to face the small crowd of Italians who had gathered to observe our ordeal with a kind of languid amusement, thrust her stocks skyward, and, teetering dramatically on the precipice, cried ‘Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you have come?!!!’

At this brash Yank stepped out of the crown and declared - ‘Oh, it’s ok! She’s Aussie - they bounce! Finally, she collapsed in a heap next to me, where we lay gasping in the thin Alpine air and pondering our fragile existence.

I’ve spent some time banging on about China lately, so I think we’ll chuck a left here and head on back to Europe. Campo Imperatora in Italy, to be exact. I’m not sure what compels me to say it but I feel it’s important the world should know that I once stood at the top of the Italian Alps in a bright purple and green striped bib and brace with flared trousers and the crotch up somewhere around my belly button.

The thing with being small when situations arise in which one is forced to wear someone else’s clothes – which crop up surprisingly often in the course of life on the road – is that you always end up in the kids’ gear. Now, I realise this is better than being decked out in nothing but a birthday suit, but it does lead to an infinite number of wedgies.

We were going skiing at Campo Imperatora – or trying to – and found ourselves being kitting out with hire gear at a seemingly abandoned and slightly out-of-the-way shack. My dear friend Kylie, unwisely or otherwise, requested ‘piu economico’ – the cheapest gear. The saleswoman sized me up and declared proudly, ‘Si, perfetto, for you I have just the thing!’

One purple and lime green bib and brace later, I waddled out of the change room to find Kylie buried under a massive hard helmet. It seemed the saleswoman ran two businesses from her shack. Unclear as to whether we’d come for the skiing or the coal mining, she’d decked us out in kits for both. Just to be on the safe side.

Rickshaws have been banned in lots of places in China but if you still want a daily dose of potentially lethal transport you can catch a taxi for a pittance.

 In many cities you can circumnavigate downtown and surrounding areas a good dozen times for no more than a couple of euros, and if you’ve got a sunburned bum you might opt to just leave a pound of flesh as payment – but besides the vinyl seats, Chinese taxis are lethal in any number of other ways.

Contrary to what careful observation may lead you to believe, there are in fact painted lanes on most roads here, but these seem to be more of a gentle suggestion than something strictly adhered to. On any given road you’ll find at least ten lanes of traffic, all of them rakishly veering around on haphazard courses, interspersed with various wheeled contraptions that could have passed for bikes in the sixteenth century and tractors laden with several dozen hangers-on and associated livestock.

The drivers, too, are encumbered by their foot-long thumbnails, which indicate that they don’t engage in manual labour – it appears that getting out and pushing when your engine falls out or your tyres go bung doesn’t fall into this category. All of them have ID cards plastered inside the front window with photographs that look uncannily identical and all suspiciously like Jacky Chan, and indeed there’s a certain uniformity to the way none of them quite grasp that we don’t understand Cantonese, or at least seem perfectly at ease with chatting away endlessly to quizzically mute passengers.

Finally, the roads will be especially gratifying to anyone who likes circumnavigating the city and its outlying areas a dozen times before arriving two hours late to their destination.

Questions of edibility continued to rise throughout our trip to China. If you’ve got a hankering for cuttlefish or just a hunk of hammerhead, there’s no better – or fresher, if I can add with a shudder – place to get it than Qing Ping market in Guangzhou, about an hour from Hong Kong.

Qing Ping is famous for being an exceptionally gory festival of lopped-off chicken heads, live snakes and a choice selection of other reptiles in various stages of life and death. The stores are packed tightly next to each other, permeated by a stench quite unmatched by anything I’ve smelt before, even after being left to my own devices in well-stocked kitchen.

Colourful plastic containers full to the brim with murky water and live tortoises line the pavements, while sacks of dried swordfish and sharks’ fins spill over the tables. We are invited by enthusiastic merchants to nibble on various unidentified dried goods which prove inedible to the untrained tongue.

Lots of the market has been shut down in recent years, for one or more reasons. Some cite cruelty to animals, others think that one too many tourist puked on the merchants’ shoes. It’s a shame, in a way. Cops stand on the street corners, monitoring what goes in and out. You’ve got to leave your crocodiles at home unless you want to force entry.

We’d like to stay longer but can’t – curiosity gives way to nausea. Hot and smelly, that’s what it is.

Cheesecake I’ve discussed. I’ve not banged on about my other love yet - cobblestones - bcause someone’s gone and done it for me. Europe Trotter: I’m with you re. the cobblestones affair - I live smack bang in the centre of one such ‘old town’, Maastricht. It’s major claim to fame is being the oldest city in the

Netherlands, which, as you can imagine, means it predates bitumen by quite some time. Cobblestones are all the rage here so bootmakers do a roaring trade on patching up bung heels….

<http://www.europetrotter.org/2007/10/07/nothing-screams-%e2%80%9ceuropean-old-town%e2%80%9d-like-cobblestones/>

Since we’re still getting to know each other, I’ll start with a topic that’s dear to my heart – you know, so you can get a sense of who I am.

Cheesecake.

I have dedicated much of the past three years to the hunt for cheesecake all across the European continent, so when I stumbled across it on my first day in China without so much as encountering its ersatz counterpart, flan, seemed to good to be true.

And of course, it was.

We were lunching on West Street in the southern city of

Guilin, which is known for its funny knobbly mountains. We’d just stumbled across the first menu I’d seen in years that offered cheesecake, and, not wanting to destroy the magic of anticipation, I started with a banana yoghurt milkshake.

Looking back, this was probably quite the error of judgment in a country that doesn’t do dairy. Whether it was the milk or the yoghurt or even the bananas that were off escaped me – if pressed I’d guess it to be a fatal combination of all three – but this was officially the first menu item that I’ve ever returned in a restaurant, and I stuck to my guns though the cow stationed just outside the back door gazed in at me mournfully for the rest of the meal.

Not that it lasted long – round two, a Caesar salad (even I couldn’t possibly mess this one up, I huffed, though I must admit Wilken raised an eyebrow at this). It consisted of a bowl of soggy lettuce swimming in a liberal application of what could have been mayonnaise but was suspiciously brownish. Closer examination turned up three croutons, all mushed, pulpy and altogether inedible.

Wilken, meanwhile, had bravely ordered a meat dish, and let me just say this: Never, ever serve a German a limp schnitzel. Things will not end pretty.

We never did get around to the cheesecake.

Weather’s shoddy, so there’s no chance to get outside. No choice but to stay in and live through my laptop. Write it all down, I should, so’s I don’t forget anything.

Should have started at the start, though. A new blog. Got to write about travel every day. Like a dear diary, but much more technologically advanced: self-indulgent digital documentation at its finest. Will try to keep it interesting.

I live in Maastricht, seventeen paces from the oldest pub in the Netherlands. (For more riveting information like this About Me, see the About Me section.) And that’s seventeen stillettoed-boots- on-cobblestones paces, which is effectively next door but one.

Beyond that is the town square, called the Vrijthof. This translates to ‘cemetery’.(I realise I could have come up with a most excellent quip as to why it’s called so, but I’ve gone and spoilt the moment now.)

Down the lane on the other side is the markt. That means – well, you can probably figure that one out yourself.

How quaint, you say – a market!

Let me stop you right there. This one’s a fish market. That means fishy eyeballs underfoot and the stench of guts in the air till midweek. The man in the middle stall on the west side, the one who wears a grubby white apron and a Viking helmet, sometimes throws me a live one as I pass by on Saturday mornings (and no, that’s not a figure of speech).

Blast. I should have come up with comical yet plausible explanation for the Viking garb. But that’s the thing. I live seventeen paces from the oldest pub in the Netherlands, between a graveyard and a fish market, yet it all seems perfectly explicable.

That’s Holland for you.