Dehli Airport

No queue for immigration, you just get stuck in!

Safely arrived in Dehli airport after an uneventful flight. Kingfisher Airlines are lovely to fly with!

Waiting on our connection to Kathmandu. I’ll update when I can.

Bloody drivers

I stayed until 5pm at the hospital tonight, so it was dark and rush hour as I cycled home. These two things do not make for a safe trip. Two cars tried to cut me up and a bus pulled out in front of me at a junction, despite the fact I’m lit up like a Christmas tree. The first car was a little red Nissan Micra. I was waiting in a queue of traffic at a set of lights, I couldn’t really cut past it because I was turning left and there’s no cyclist’s box for me to jump into at the junction. So instead I waited like a good little cyclist in the traffic. This Micra decides to speed down the turn right only lane and obviously thinks the softest target for trying to cut back into the left lane is the cyclist. Well it ain’t this cyclist mate. He pulls up beside me, puts on his indicator and tries to just push me out the way. Err, no. I may be smaller but I’m equally ballsy, so I just cycle ahead and force him to stop or run me over. He manages to get in behind me though, so I take the opportunity while we wait for the lights to change again to turn around and very deliberately give him the finger. That was enjoyable.

The next guy was trying to overtake me on an open stretch of road, which I didn’t have a problem with, only the council have just installed a new road island for the school near by. It doesn’t have it’s full reflective signs and crossing light on it yet, just some cones, so the guy didn’t see it. I knew it was coming up though, so I put myself in a safe road position and made sure I knew where this guy was and where he was likely to go. He made his move to try and come past me at just the wrong time and found himself faced with the island. Credit to him, he slowed down and pulled back in behind me rather than try and speed up and force me into the curb. He got a wave of thanks for being sensible rather than the finger, I’m nice cyclist. Although I wasn’t feeling so charitable after I had my first run in with a bus in ages.

I was cycling along the main road, with clear right of way. The road is well lit and, as I have previously stated, I’m lit up like a Christmas tree. The bus made a move to pull out, fair enough he maybe hadn’t seen me, so I looked directly at the driver and made eye contact. Right, he’s definitely seen me, the bus slows momentarily, I carry on. Then, the pure cheek of it! He pulls away again! I know he’s seen me, he knows there’s no way he’s getting out in front of me, I’m less than 10 meters away. But still he goes. I almost have to come to a complete stop or I would have cycled into the side of the bus. I was not a happy chap. I made expansive gestures at the bus, but nothing rude because I knew the driver wouldn’t be looking, it was just other passengers who could see me. If the bus had stopped to let anyone on or off I would have been tempted to cycle up to his door and tell the bus driver exactly what I thought of him, perhaps luckily he didn’t, and I reached home without further incident.

Driving Pleasure

I’m not a car nut by any stretch of the imagination. I see driving as a means of getting from point A to point B. Of course I can appreciate a good car, but by and large it’s from a distance.

However, having spent the last 2 weeks or so pottering about in town, never driving above 35mph, I did enjoy heading home today. A nice open country road, no one else around. I might have contravened a few speed laws, but never in an unsafe way. Nothing excessive, I didn’t quite get to 80mph. But it was such a lovely afternoon, a bit of sun, a bit of cloud, nice and dry on the roads, it was difficult not to. There’s a good mix of long straights and sweeping curves.

It was fun.

Orkney: Day 1

Sunday 7^th June

I got up at a very leisurely time, around 10am. Naturally, I hadn’t done any packing yet, but that was okay because the ferry didn’t leave until 5pm. The bus left at about quarter past three however. Since I knew I would be moving home the day I got back, I made an effort to put all my stuff in to logical piles as I packed, instead of just shoving the stuff I wasn’t taking with me back in to the cupboard. At lunchtime I had a Subway sandwich and went to reception to find out about returning my key to the bike shed. The porter told me to go and speak to hall management. They were both very nice and monumentally unhelpful. I was under the impression that the £10 had been a deposit for the key which I would get back once I returned said key. The hall secretary and general manager were both very insistent that it had simply been a payment for the key, since they change the lock every year they didn’t really care if I gave the key back or not. We had a little discussion on the exact implications of the form I signed and what I had been told on move-in weekend. The end result was they kept my tenner and I walked away unimpressed. Although it was only £10, it was the principle of the thing. If I had been told that it was a payment and not a deposit then fine. If everything else had been exemplary, i.e. my room had been clean on time (or clean at all sometimes); if the food had been edible more often; if the fire alarm hadn’t gone off three times in one night because of a “faulty sensor”, then I might have been more inclined to let it slide. But they weren’t budging and I didn’t have time to be hanging around. I was so distracted I forgot to check my post!

I finished off my packing with time to spare, I even had a minute to go up to Mary’s room and fix her laptop. I squeezed all my clothes for the 3/4 days away into a day bag, it was that or take my huge 65+10 litre expedition rucksack. As it turned out that wouldn’t have looked too out of place against what the girls took, but then they are girls.

I met Liz outside Johnston at 3 and we walked over to the bus stop, Natalie and Catriona were already on board coming down from Hillhead Halls. Miraculously the bus was on time and we got in to town without incident. Since I hadn’t been able to get any travel sickness meds the day before when I’d been out with dad I offered to go across to Boots and get some while everyone else went straight down to the ferry terminal. We had plenty of time, you know how I loath being early, but we couldn’t risk catching the later bus in case it was late. Natalie asked me to get her some diabetic chocolate while I was there as we guessed such things would be less than abundant up north.

One successful shopping trip later I arrived at the terminal just a little behind the others. No messing about, we may be an hour early but we might as well wait on board. Getting on to the ferry I had only one word; “wow”. It was very posh looking, all brass and wood (on the inside that is, they had modernised the exterior somewhat from the days of wooden hulls and masts). We had a little kerfuffle finding the right place to sit. It was all imagined of course, there are times I dislike our ‘Britishness’, we were trying to find the ‘right’ place to sit, in fact you could just go anywhere! Eventually we settled on a nice four seat table with a sea view on the starboard side.

Right, only 7 hours to kill.

We played cards for a remarkable large number of these hours. Irish snap, spoons and president were a few of the favourites. We also played some geeky medic games. Medical pictionary was good fun, although I maintain it is impossible to ‘draw’ von Willebrand factor within 2 minutes, I cheated and wrote ‘vWF’ after all my insane scribblings failed. They got as close as “tissue factor pathway inhibitor” though. We also wrote anatomical terms on bits of paper, sellotaped them to our foreheads and had to guess what we were with yes/no questions. “3^rd Metatarsal of the Right Lower Limb” caused some difficulty, although not as much as Tragus, which had us all throwing up our hands in exasperation. At least Liz could remember the name, I’d never heard of it before!

To be fair, the time passed very quickly. We arrived in Kirkwall bang on time at 11pm. After stomping our feet in the Orcadian cold for 5 minutes, the taxi turned up to take us to the hostel. And a nice wee hostel it was too. Called the Peedie Hostel, because it is next to the Peedie Sea, the only complaint I have is the extractor fan in the toilet sounds like a 747 taking off.

A good night’s sleep was had by all and it set us up nicely for day 2.

Bug Bites and Pharmacists

I have a whole bunch of bug bites on my legs. I don’t know when or how they appeared, but they’ve been there for what seems like longer than normal. They reminded me of when I was in Bratislava, capital city of Slovakia. We were staying in a slightly dodgy hostel. Not the worse on we stayed in that trip, but not the Ritz by any means.

And there were bed bugs.

And they loved me.

They had a feast on both my arms. I’m sure there are pictures somewhere, but I can’t find then. My forearms looked like they had been carpeted in red lumps. The bites were so densely packed that we weren’t even sure if they were bites or some kind or rash.

Being in Slovakia, we didn’t really know where to go to find out. So I did something that I’ve never had to do before or since that day; I asked a pharmacist!

Now I know they are highly trained professionals with a great deal of knowledge, but still, would you really want to go and see them about your minor health complaint? In this country? Because there are plans in place to do just that. Maybe you would rather be able to walk into a chemist and see a pharmacist straight away than wait for a doctor’s appointment, but me? I think I’d rather wait.

Back to the story in hand; we found a pharmacy. Actually we found several, but they were all closed except one. We had just had an early dinner out to celebrate the end of our trip as only the five of us, since two more would be joining us in Berlin. So it wasn’t really surprising that most places were closed.

After standing in line for a goodly long time, I managed to speak to a member of staff… who presently directed me towards her English speaking colleague, so I had to wait for her to finish with the previous customer.

The long and short of it is she didn’t actually know whether I had a rash or simply a helluva lot of bug bites, but she offered me anti-histamine tablets anyway. They whould help regardless of the cause.

Trouble was, I didn’t have any money for them. It seems a little strange now, since we still had 5 days left in a different city before we flew home, but I remember that we had spent the last of our Slovak koruna (we just called them “SK” to make life easier, that’s what is stamped on the coins) on our meal out, trying to get rid of them really since we didn’t have enough left to exchange and they weren’t going to be much good to us in Berlin. We had fun counting the bill out at that restaurant I can tell you, but that’s a story for another time.

If it had been serious we could have taken more money out and claimed it back on the travel insurance (maybe!). It was really just because it was so damn itchy. But it made me realise something.

“This is what it’s like to get sick in America.” And many other countries too, but the fact remains it is perfectly possible to die from a 100% treatable disease, like Diabetes Mellitus, in the world’s largest super power.

Sure we moan and complain about the NHS, for all kinds of different reasons. (I get uncharacteristically worked up when I hear people complaining about having to wait 6 hours in A&E, well if you go in with a stubbed toe what do you expect. Go and see your GP.) But I can say for certain that if we didn’t have a National Health Service, we would have a great deal more to complain about.