The Best Place In The World...

This place came as an absolutely beautiful surprise as the second to last stop on our summer travels. Ellie (travel bud) and I arrived in Nice one early morning in August. Nice was errrm Nice but we were not there to stay, but merely to wait 8 hours until we could catch one of only two coaches a day to the beautiful mountainous national park Mercantour. After a long day of waisting time Ellie and I finally jumped on the coach costing only €2 from Nice station. We had booked to stay with a lovely French couple on AirBnb a few months before leaving to go travelling, so apart from an address we had overlooked what kind of place we were to be staying at. We honestly assumed that we were going to be staying just outside of Nice, however the directions we were given by email a few days before arriving in Nice told us to stay on the coach for almost two hours (thank god we bought snacks). The coach slowly edged its way out of the city through the traffic and then went past the airport and through the rather industrial looking suburb area of the city. Ahead of us we could see mountains approaching and to our relief the coach kept going through a passage way that took us deeper and deeper into the valley. After a slightly treacherous coach journey edging along a crumbling cliff side road we were dropped off at a small bus stop next to a river which was sandwiched between mountains. One of our hosts was waiting for us with a van (probably the only occasion when getting into a stranger's van is acceptable). It was another 15 minute drive until we were up the mountain. From here we had to walk 10 minutes to get to where we were staying. It. Was. Heaven. Nestled 9,000ft up in the mountains were two idillic converted shepherd's barns. There was also a sauna, small pool and amazing garden all overlooking the rolling mountains on the other side of the valley.

We were staying in the area during their "festival" season; meaning that every weekend one of the surrounding villages would host some sort of party or gathering. Lucky for us we arrived on party day, so accompanied by our amazing host (and adoptive French mother) we got to experience community at it's finest. The party was in a small village on the opposite mountain to ours and for one night only they were hosting a disco. Everybody knew everybody and being two young British girls we were quite the hub of attention. Everyone was so friendly even though we spoke no French and they could speak little English.

As you can imagine, our days were spent hiking and enjoying the beautiful sunshine and scenery and in the evenings we would be savouring the fantastic homemade homegrown meals from our hosts. They even made their own wine and liqueurs. 

Whilst we were staying in Mercantour; several people had mentioned that there was a shepherd who lived another 5000ft or so up the mountain that we "just had to meet"! Taking this great advice we climbed further up the mountain on our final day to go and meet this famous shepherd. After walking for an hour we spotted his house, he was however nowhere to be seen. We decided to take a break and have some lunch (that our new French mother had packed us). As we ate our lunch we began to hear the sound of a flute or whistle. Like something from a movie we turned around and saw the shepherd sitting 100 meters behind us with his whistle and his two dogs. We immediately stood up and walked up to him. He was Awesome! We had both pictured a somewhat more rugged shepherd wearing a flannel shirt, however the guy standing in front of us was the complete opposite. Ripped jeans, Doc Martens, long brown hair shaved on one side, sharks tooth earring, no shirt, tan, abs...! ... (honestly i'm going to stop drooling over this guy, he was HOT but he lives up a mountain in France...literal heart break). We tried to get a selfie with him but as we couldn't say selfie in French and if it's at all possible he spoke less English than we do French we had to just settle for the brain sort of memories. He invited us to join him again that evening for coffee after he was done being a hot shepherd for the day but sadly we had to decline as we had to catch the bus back to Nice that evening in time for the train to our next stop.

I was reluctant to share this post at all as Mercantour really was heaven and it would be sad for it to ever get touristy. So just keep it on the dl.

H x

Croatia - Part 2: The worst time of my life

This is a cautionary tale about how the best weekend of your life can turn into the worst. Even though what I am about to tell you was dangerous and horrendously frightening it will still never stop me travelling and I hope it won't put you off exploring either. Hopefully this will just make everyone aware of possibly one of the worst scenarios that can happen whilst travelling. I have learnt a lot from this experience and even though what happened completely sucked, I feel significantly wiser from it all.

So here we go:

After the festival finished Ellie and I hopped on the over night train back up to Zagreb to start our journey down to Greece to climb Mount Olympus. The south of Croatia is a bit of a dead end for transport, so to get anywhere else in Europe by train you have to travel back to Zagreb; the capital of Croatia. Ellie and I were in the sleeping section of the train with three other guys (whom we had coincidentally met on the train to the festival a few days earlier.) Our train room was 6 beds so there was a bed spare. The other guys told us that their stop was a few hours before Zagreb so they would be waking up at around 4am. The train departed at 10pm-ish and after a couple hours of chatting we all fell asleep. At 4am their alarm went off. I woke them up as I was the first one to hear their alarm (I am a very light sleeper, especially on a noisy train). This is where it all goes a bit tits up. The next thing I knew I was being woken up by Ellie telling me that we were at Zagreb already and... that she couldn't find her phone. I had completely blanked out and couldn't even remember falling asleep after the others left the train. I looked over to my bag which was on my bed by my feet and the zip was open. It didn't take me long to realise that ALL of my money had gone. The thing I found very peculiar was that as I said before I am a very light sleeper; the guys phone alarm woke me up, so I would have surely heard if someone had come into our room. After frantically double checking all of our luggage for Ellie's phone and my money we decided to approach the more-than-shady train guard, who simply shrugged at us and walked away. We got off the train not knowing what to do and just sat on the platform for half an hour. After the adrenaline of what was happening wore off we both started to notice that neither of us were feeling too great. I was feeling very groggy and confused, with a sore throat; most certainly as if we had been drugged... I mean what else would explain not waking up to the noise of someone going through all our bags in a tiny train room...

(I would just like to mention that the other guys in our train room had nothing to do with this. A few hours after everything happened I wrote an angry facebook status about what had happened to us and very soon after that I got a phone call from one of our train buddies; making sure we were ok and reassuring us that they had nothing to do with the robbing. We are good pals now and will hopefully see them at the festival next year :D)

Our train was sat at the platform for quite some while so it gave me a chance to go and ask the train guard for help again. As I walked along the platform towards him, he saw me and quickly scurried onto the train away from my reach. Honestly WTF? I'm not saying he was responsible for what happened (we will never know who did this) but really he wasn't exactly making any effort to not seem dodgy. It really gets worse from here: Luckily the thieves hadn't taken my phone (possibly because it's an old iPhone model and it is covered in scratches) so we were able to call home for help. Everyone told us to go straight to the police so we found the train station manager who could speak English and he called the police to the station. After being questioned by the police we were told to go to the police station to file an official report. After dragging our 18kilo rucksacks across town to the police station we were asked to sit in a room with some police officer and explain what had happened to him. He was wearing jeans and a scruffy t-shirt... not a very reassuring look for a police officer. Whilst he was typing up something on his computer Ellie said to me something along the lines of; "oh i'm so bummed I lost my phone and all the photos from the festival"! The police man clearly overheard, to which he replied jokingly "oh i'm sure they'll be on the internet in a couple of days". Not really the right thing to say whilst we were still distraught about what was happening to us. After the delightful visit to he police station we found ourselves back at the train station. We were meant to be getting back on another train which would then lead to another two overnight trains until we reached Greece. Nonetheless that was NOT happening. We were sat at the station for around 5 hours until we decided that the best thing to do would be to get to the airport to see if we could book a cheap last minute flight to Greece instead. We withdrew some money from a cash machine and jumped into a taxi to the airport. Once we got there we went straight to the booking desk. The cheapest flight they could offer us to Greece was around €500 each!!! That was our great plan ruined. Quite ironically the cheapest flight we could get our hands on was a flight to.... wait for it..... ENGLAND!!! Completely soul destroying but we had no other option. We took some time to think about whether it was worth returning to England or not. We also thought now was the time to access our rather forgotten about emergency money which was well hidden in a small compartment in Ellie's rucksack. This was when we made the heart crushing discovery that...dun dun dun.. the mother f***ers had found and stole this too. At this point I was just so done with it all that I said I could put the flights back to England on my debit card and suffer the financial consequences later on. Whilst we were both booking the tickets at the desk I received a call from the British Embassy who my Grandparents had kindly rang to try and help us out. Whilst talking on the phone to the kind Embassy lady I completely broke down in tears, which also set Ellie off. Suddenly we were surrounded by several lovely women working at the airport. (Our tears obviously appealed to their womanly nature). They booked us on to the plane back to England (which was in the evening the next day). They gave us water and chocolate and told us there were bed/seat things upstairs which we could camp out on until the next day. We went upstairs and prepared ourselves mentally for the 28 hour wait at the airport for our flight. The kindness kept coming after this. It was no longer than about 20 minutes until one of the nice ladies approached us and told us that she had managed to upgrade us to the earlier flight which was only 10 hours away (much better than 28). A couple of hours after that another employee came up and gave us a pack of wafer biscuits and then a giant box of drinks and snacks another hour or so after that. He then came back upstairs one last time at around 10pm and gave us a pizza that he had ordered for us. All of this kindness really helped in restoring our faith in humanity.

So all in all Ellie and I lost around £800 in cash, one iPhone and about £500 in bookings which we couldn't attend due to our untimely return home. (Luckily 2 weeks later we were able to fly out to Italy to continue our trip).

Also after doctors visits and researching similar cases on the internet we can confirm that we were actually gassed on the train.

Croatia is still beautiful despite what happened...

Airport donations ^

This website is good to have a quick read over, for similar travel stories and advice.

H x

Croatia - Part 1: The best time of my life

I do not even know where to begin. Even thinking about my time in Split right now brings a massive grin to my face. My sister from another mister Ellie and I arrived in Split, Croatia at 6am on a Thursday morning after an 18 hour over night train journey from Austria on our summer travels. We honestly weren't overly impressed with our first glances of the area. This is a great lesson of "never judge a book by its cover", as in no time at all Split was our new favourite place on earth. I have never felt so happy and free in my life before. We were in Croatia for the soul purpose of attending Ultra Europe music festival.  It also coincided with my 20th Birthday which was an added bonus. Within half an hour of being in Croatia we had already made awesome friends and were buzzing for the weekend ahead. We got to UltraCamp which was about 40 minutes away from the festival stadium, put up our tent and headed back into town to explore (and buy alcohol - €2 for a 3 litre bottle of wine). Split is a walled medieval city with tiny restaurants and ice cream stalls around every corner. It was actually here that I saw my future husband. I have no clue what his name is but Ellie and I clocked him whilst we were sat in a street side restaurant eating lunch. Nice boy with circle raybans, wherever you are in the world, I fink u fiiine.  UltraCamp was positioned beach side; very convenient for immersing yourself in the sparkling fresh sea water whilst you are dealing with your maahoosive hangover from the night before. We got ourselves into a very satisfying routine that I personally could have continued on for several more months (until permanent liver damage): Start drinking at 6pm, leave the campsite at 10pm, skank the night away at the festival until 6am, get back at 7am, sleep until midday, get up and chill by the sea until 3pm, go back to the tent and shower block to freshen up and apply a new layer of festival face paint and then DO IT ALL AGAIN! This general freedom has changed me for life, because I am really having a hard time getting back into a responsible routine again, but by no means is this ever a reason not to return. Earlybird tickets already purchased for next July uhhh CHECK! (P.S. next year the closing day of the festival falls on my 21st Birthday, maybe I can get Steve Aoki to cake me on ma burrday). As this weekend I wasn't really up to my usual photo taking routine I have had to pinch a few photos from my new found festival family member's Facebooks. 

I have heard mixed reviews about the festival in general. A few people have said the organisation of the wristbands and festival entry could have been better and that the security wasn't on top form. Honestly I don't actually remember entering the stadium at all on any of the days (blame the €2 wine), but if anything stood out to me as being dodgy I would be the first person to complain. Everyone working at the festival was kind and helpful, not to mention the fact that this tiny town was suddenly bombarded with over 150,000 drunken festival goers for only the second year; of course there are going to be a few hiccups. I felt completely safe at all times (even when involving myself in a pretty violent mosh-pit), unlike many British festivals I have attended. I also learnt a great lesson about being polite to festival security. They have a tough job of keeping everyone at the festival secure, but if you are nice enough to them (and tell them it's your Birthday) they will give you, for example, a backstage pass to meet Nicky Romero and Above and Beyond ;)

Hey Nicky.

From attending this festival Ellie and I gained amazing memories, experiences and friends from all over the world. If you enjoy completely letting your worries go for one insane weekend of Trance, house and EDM then I would stop what you are doing right now and go and get your tickets here a.s.a.p! 

Enjoy some Above & Beyond Anjunabeatyness to give you that Croatia feeling. 

H x

A lot of rain in Sardinia

Life tip (i'm full of these): Make friends with people from everywhere. Then you get lots of invites to people's houses all over the globe. My trip to Sardinia was to visit a friend who I went to college with. I stayed in Sardinia for a week of diving, eating food and being rained on. Italy was experiencing a freak mega storm that worked its way from South to North and unfortunately Sardinia being an island didn't exempt it from being affected by the storm. The first half of the week we spent sun bathing, swimming and making the most of my friend's underwater camera. Then for 2 days we were stuck inside watching the rain pour into the sea. After the storm unfortunately the sea was so stirred up that the beautiful blue water had turned brown and stayed that way for the rest of the week.

Even though the sea had been ruined by the storm, we still had the pretty little towns to explore.

Underwater camera skills. The water was clear and sparkling.

...Then the storm hit. Yep that is just rainwater pouring into the sea.

The silver lining in the storm was that after it had passed we were treated to the most beautiful sunsets. No filters on any of these photos, just mother nature doing her work.

H x