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Still in our Lederhosen and Dirndl, reeking of alcohol, revelry and merriment, we staggered to our train and managed to get to Erlenbach. Expecting some time to freshen up (read: shower and change), we were instead treated to a surprise lunch with the whole family, grandparents, aunts and cousins galore.

Still, it was good to see everyone again, and they all forgave our post-Oktoberfest condition.

The rest of the week in Erlenbach was spent helping out my grandparents around the house, cooking, baking and doing things my 92 year old grandfather could no longer do with ease.

In between that we managed to squeeze in some of the wine harvest, as well as a tour of the local wine producing factory.

While Erlenbach was designated to be a rest period after Oktoberfest, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go out with my cousin Stefan and enjoy some cold ones in Heilbronn.

Friday morning saw us gather the rest of our gear and farewell my grandparents, hopefully not for the last time – stay healthy you old buggers!

Bright and early Thursday morning Jac and I grabbed our bags and started what turned out to be an epic 4 day binge. We hit Munich around 2pm, found our campsite and checked in. While paying 50 Euro (per person…) for a tent is a bit of a blow, it was softened by the unlimited beer and sangria. It became a regular thing to get a beer while waiting in line for breakfast, and most mornings before leaving the campsite at 9 I’d downed 4 cups of frothy goodness.

Check in completed, we changed into our outfits – prompting the 200 Americans who’d just rocked up to take countless photos because I was the first person they’d seen in Lederhosen – and headed to Oktoberfest itself.

We were meeting up with Cait, Alicia and Verena – all friends from Sydney – who had been going hard since the morning, celebrating Cait’s Brother’s birthday.

We quickly got into the spirit of things, devouring large chunks of roasted meat while consuming copious amounts of alcohol. A 1L stein of beer would set you back 9.20 Euro, a princely sum but well worth the cost. As it was, half the time you were standing on the table singing and jumping around, so when your beer ran out you would pay almost anything to keep on partying.

Friday night, after spending the day in the Disney Castle (Schloss Neuschwannstein, the white castle built by the mad King Ludwig),we went to catch up with Alex, an army mate from Sydney who was also in Oktoberfest. Turns out he’d started having heart palpitations and had landed himself in hospital – 3 days of almost no sleep and too much party will do that to you. We visited him on Saturday morning as he was being kept under observation for the entire weekend to ensure the beta blockers were doing their job. He pulled the pin after that, heading back to Norway to rest and recover a bit.

However, where he fell, we partied on. Saturday ended up being the most epic day of all, reaching double figures in the Steins count (10 steins makes me a drunk – and poor! – man) before taking a nap on the grass as a prelude to hitting the clubs. By this point we’d moved away from Oktoberfest itself in order to sober up a bit and get some non-ridiculously priced food, having a small alcoholic tea party on some grass near a supermarket. A princely dinner of kebabs later we headed off to the clubs.

The club started off quite poorly, but once we’d downed a bottle of vodka we’d smuggled in (lederhosen have many uses) and the music got good the night was on. In between trying to set up Cait with every random who came by, executing poorly choreographed dance moves, pointing at boobs, and undressing me, we even had time to witness a fight and a couple going at it on a bench!

All in all it was an epic 4 days, well worth the couple of hundred Euro.

Heidelberg was to be another fairly chilled out stop for us, and it delivered. An old university town, there were plenty of sightseeing and shopping opportunities. We checked out Schloss Heidelberg with its 200,000L keg, admired the view for a while before kicking back on the grass next to the Neckar river with some beverages and relaxing.

We spent a day walking through the hills surrounding Heidelberg, up to Tingstaetten, but for the most part it was some idle shopping (although we did buy our Oktoberfest clothes while here) and catching up with family.

We arrived in Germany bright eyed and bushy tailed, enduring the 12 hour flight from Kuala Lumpur without great difficulty.
We made our way to Karlsruhe, a small town in southwest Germany close to the French border. My cousin Marie and uncle Norbert picked us up from the station, taking us home to a breakfast of pretzels and delicious German bread – that’s one thing I’ll always miss about Germany, the bread. Australia ain’t got nothing on that.

After a quick run with Norbert to work off the jetlag somewhat – startling some deer in the process, gotta love country Germany – we feasted on some homemade Flammkuchen.

That done, we joined Marie in heading to a house party. 3 of her friends were celebrating their birthdays, 16^th and two 17^ths, and in partying style they were getting well and truly hammered. I’ve promised Marie I won’t share the gory details, but let’s just say it got messy and I had a ball of a time watching them all completely and utterly fail to hold their alcohol.

The morning after, while Marie lay around feeling sorry for herself, my aunt Monica, Jac and I ducked across to France to grab a glass of wine in Wissembourg, a small town near the Elzas.

We caught up with Verena (a local German who we’d met in Sydney) that night for some quiet beers in order to plan our Oktoberfest trip, then spent the remainder of our time in Karlsruhe wandering around and just enjoying the small town life.

Thanks to Marie, Moni and Norbert for putting us up and showing us a good time, had a blast!

We began our journey by undressing. As fast as possible. Reason being (minds out of the gutter people), was that KL was damn hot, and even more humid – 28 degrees and 90+% at 10pm – and jeans plus jumper wasn’t the most comfortable. Thankfully the bus ride from the airport had overpowering aircon, so while the driver hooned through town at well above the speed limit we had a chance to try to get acclimatised.
 The next day, after a refreshing sleep in an airconditioned room, we headed out to check out what KL has to offered. First up, Petaling Street, ‘Chinatown’.

We hit this a couple of times during our stay, during different times of the day. By far the best was in the afternoon, around 3ish. We’d swung by at around 10am on the way to the Bird Park and there wasn’t much happening, but by the time we came back it was totally changed. Stalls everywhere, people cooking on the street, hawkers going nuts, the entire road closed off as a throng of people moved through. The food was the best part of it for me, the main places for trinkets (whores will have theirs…) were Central Market and Little India, both of which we wandered through perusing the wares. Can’t go on enough about the
food though, everything was delicious, and the first time I’d eaten frog or sting ray. Cheap and amazing, loved it.

On our way to the bird park we also came across the National Mosque, an architectural tribute to Islam, which we learnt was official religion of Malaysia.

As Jac was (and remains) of the female persuasion, she put on a burqa, and in the interests of solidarity (and the fact that I was wearing shorts and a singlet) I chucked one on also. While I must say I can rock most clothing, not sure if I can really pull this off…

The bird park wasn’t anything extremely special, but it is the largest open air aviary in the world, so I can tick that box.

One big thing about KL is the shopping, so Jac and I hit up Bukkit Bintng (the shopping district, with malls bloody everywhere) on most afternoons for a bit of a change. However, every time we went there (afternoon) it’d start pissing down and we’d get caught in a downpour, dry season my ass. To avoid getting thoroughly soaked we’d find a pub and drink till the rain went away.
The shopping district itself was pretty epic, it’s not every day you see a 12 story shopping mall with a roller coaster running throughout.

Speaking of pubs however, check out the Sky Lounge, a pool bar near the top of a hotel in the centre of town. 
This place shits all over the Ivy, and no ridiculous cover charge – in fact, no cover charge at all. And the view was fantastic, the western part of the city to one side…

…with the Petronas Towers on the other. Stunning.

After some cruisy drinks at Sky Lounge we made our way back to the hostel only to be caught in Malaysia Day celebrations as we got close. Thousands of people kicking back on the streets, revving their engines, doing tricks on bikes, honking horns etc. Pretty crazy.
 
 
 
 

A quick 5 hour sleep later and we were on our way to go abseiling in the jungle somewhere. Through a waterfall. Madness.

We’d organised it on my bro’s advice, hitting up Open Sky Adventures for a day trip packed full of awesome and win. The guys themselves were really cool, extremely friendly and made everything as easy as possible for us – even drove us to an outdoors store to grab some travel towels on the way back, good 20 min out of their way!

We did hit up the Batu Caves, a nice getaway from the urban sprawl that is KL, but we hadn’t left enough time (3 hours) to do the dark-cave tour, so wasn’t a huge amount you could do beyond tease the monkeys – which I had a great time doing, which prompted some Japanese tourists to get countless group shots with the crazy monkey-teasing aussie…random

The KL adventure ended with, sadly, some angst with Malaysian Airways. Although we’d booked tickets months in advance and had checked in nigh on 4 hours before the flight itself, apparently we didn’t have seats – they’d overbooked the flight. Despite being offered a princely sum of 600 ringit (~$200 AUD) to take the ‘next available flight’ (note the sarcasm), I decided to crack the shits. 5 hours sleep on a 26 hour day reduces my tolerance for crap somewhat.  A couple of managers later, we had our seats. I immediately crashed out and slept for 8 hours of the 12 our flight was, reducing the discomfort – and improving my mood – tremendously.

…but I’m back travelling! So decided to start documenting the random crap I get up to in my journeys.

This time however, it’s (unfortunately) not  a massive stint, just a briefer visit to some family in Germany, tying in a quick stint in Kuala Lumpur and some minor backpacking in Italy along the way.
In addition to that, I’m going with Jacynta, which will make things interesting – first time travelling with a girl, and my girlfriend to boot.
Annnnnd it’s her first time travelling. And overseas. This could be interesting…

After working hard for 10 days harvesting grapes, doing some much needed physical activity (other than drinking) and more importantly restocking my spending money, I headed to Dublin for a much needed break. Stoked with the promise of warmer weather and heading back into nightlife and sightseeing – as opposed to sub-zero temperatures and physical labour – I was somewhat shocked when on landing I was greeted with cold dreary drizzle. Little was I to know (well, I WOULD know if I’d actually researched it a bit, but meh) that this would be the norm for the 6 days I was here.

Weather aside though, Dublin was pretty awesome. I was staying with girls I’d met on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, a bunch of yanks studying for a semester in Ireland. While I’d only met 4 on the tour, there were about 14 girls studying in Dublin and living together amongst two houses.  This meant that whenever we went out – often – I would go clubbing with an assload (heh) of girls. Entry into clubs was ridiculously easy, and guys buying the girls drinks would unknowingly be paying for my night out, as most of the drinks were passed directly to me.

I did another free walking tour while I was there, but sadlyDublin doesn’t have too much going for it sightseeing wise. The main attraction for Dublin is the nightlife, and that definitely lived up to its reputation. Best club I went to was a club playing only mashups, with various renowned mashup artists – Girl Talk and Super Mas Bros I think – performing live throughout the week. Shame I have no idea what club that was, things got a bit hazy..
Unfortunately, Dublin also has a reputation for being bloody expensive, and that held true too. 8 Euro for a pint of Guinness kinda hurts the pocket.

Speaking of Guinness though, the Guinness factory is located in Dublin, and I couldn’t miss out on that. Probably the highlight of Dublin for sightseeing, it has a full history of the beer, from production right through to various advertising campaigns – and of course samples!

While Dublin is a nice enough place, it was the people I was with and the friends I made that was best part about it, and I was loathe to leave them all to head to my final travel destination before finishing my journey. Bidding them all farewell, I headed to Seoul for the last 3 days of my trip.

So, back to countryside Germany, Erlenbach again. I’d be spending 10 days working in the hills (literally) cutting grapes to make various sorts of wine. One thing I didn’t quite count on – how miserable the weather would be.

Most days it drizzled. Those it didn’t, it poured, or in the one case snowed – briefly, before turning to sleet. Oh, and the temperature never really got above 10 celcius, the average being 5-6.

Getting up at 6:30 to be out there working by 7:30, knocking off in the afternoon…long, exhausting days. I’d done various wine harvests before, on my family’s vineyard, but this was slightly more intense.

Not only working longer hours, the method was quite different too. Being a large producer of wine, the Kerner family (same guys who made the oil) had much more machinery to speed things up. Tractors galore (loved driving them around, mad fun), massive trailers capable of taking tons of grapes, huge tubs to be mechanically lifted onto trailers instead of the old fashioned way of climbing up a ladder and dumping grapes in – all of it made the experience quite new and exciting.

For example, manhandling 300kg tubs of grapes down a frost covered grass hill with an angle of 35 degrees, trying not to lose control and have it slide away, wreaking havoc through the vineyards. Then, once the tub is emptied, slogging back up that hill dragging it back up to be filled again. Fun times.

We harvested Riesling (white), Trollinger (light red) and Lemberger (stronger red), and all had specific types of rot that could and couldn’t be harvested. A crash course in grape rot later from the boss, with a helpful eye out from coworkers, and havesting went smoothly.

Inbetween working like madmen, we’d be getting fed massive lunches of pretty much meat and bread. Now, not just ham and bread, oh no. I’m talking roasts, snags, chunks of bacon as thick as your hand dripping hot fat, served with crusty farmers bread and fresh butter and cheeses. It was amazing. And out there in the cold, on the hills, you used all that energy, easily.

The people involved in the harvest were great, absolute champions. All been doing it for years, all country folk, really had a blast doing it all. The Kerner family (distant relatives) knew our family well, and there was scarely a day when I didn’t go home without a bottle of wine, some grapes of even a live chicken as a gift.

Yep, a chicken. As my grandparents are old, I got to prepare a live chicken from scratch – that was interesting. Watching a chicken run around like a, well, headless chicken, was quite a sight. Made a damn good soup though.

Speaking of running, that’s another thing I did once I’d knocked off for the day. 1-2 hour runs nightly, up and down the various vineyards, gave me some truly spectacular views of the sun setting through the hills. Unfortunately, once the sun had set the temp quickly dropped below 0 and I’d often come back with frost in my beard. On that note, running in a singlet, 2 tshirts, a jumper and a jacket kinda sucks – and I was still cold!

Also got the chance to meet up with my cousin Stefan and check out an Audi 100 year anniversary car show, which was pretty awesome. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) there wasn’t any big festivities going on like last time I was here, because after Scotland I needed a bit of a detox.

The tine I spent harvesting were quite a significant change from my travels so far – obviously, I was working not partying – but 10 days was enough. Time to start the last leg of my journey – to Ireland and partying I go!

Although having lived in Stuttgart (Stuggi) for some time back when I first travelled, I had little recollection of the layout of the city, let alone it’s public transport. Thankfully Matze, an old mate from 2005 (first Eurotrip) was there to pick me up from the airport.

Exhausted as I was from Scotland, I had difficulties speaking English let alone German, but after 12 hours sleep we reacquainted ourselves. That evening I also went and saw the family I’d stayed with, the next day an old workmate. Stuggi has a lot of old friends, and I tried to make the most of my time there by catching up with them all.

Thursday night, after only 2 days in Stuttgart, I journeyed on to Rohrbach to catch up with yet another old friend (sensing a trend?). Only this time, first time for the trip, my tactic of winging it went horribly horribly wrong, and I spent the night in an equipment shelter on a sports ground with a cat to keep me warm. Oops.

Next morning I hightailed it to Heidelberg and a warm bed, fleeing to the safety of family. Last adventure for a while, because next 10 days is Weinlese (wine harvest) time!

Today I lose my last and longest travelling companion, Mr. Richards. He sits next to me on our return trip to London from Scotland, like me struggling to remain awake/concious – probably listening to The Horses by Daryl Braithwaite (I swear it’s his theme song).

After his snap decision to partake in the Europe adventure only weeks before the departure date, things have been pretty hectic and always fun. I think we only spent 3 days, if that, apart – that’s not bad for nigh on 5 months of travelling.

We’ve learnt a lot about each other while travelling – for one he doesn’t appreciate a drunk me falling on him while he sleeps, and that he can drink for days on end, especially if on a boat – as well as sharing some truly awesome experiences.

I’ll miss you dude, be good to catch up in November when I get back.