While we were waiting for the waitress to take our order, I noticed a small group of chatting policemen in riot gear. Earlier at the airport we had heard rumours of a baggage handlers strike so we wondered if there if was some sort of demonstration or protest happening today. A few minutes later there was the sound of remarkably tuneful male singing, a football chant perhaps, but sadly the waitress had no idea what event was passing through the picturesque square where we were having a late lunch.

Just as I was finishing my cappuccino (Budapest has excellent coffee), the singing turned to shouting, followed by banging, and then suddenly the people who had been idling in the middle of the square were running, like a tide heading for the beach, towards the same corner past the policemen who were buckling on their helmets and making their way in the opposite direction.

With the trouble at the other end of the square, no one on the café’s idyllic terrace looked perturbed so we continued to enjoy our lunch. There were some more bangs from the centre of the square, and then another wave of people, this time in uniform black t-shirts, ran past our café towards the same exit to the square as the original wave of bystanders—it looked like the police had broken things up. Thinking the incident over, we were about to return to our previous conversation when the people in front of us started to hold their noses, seconds later we could also smell bleach, and people started to move towards the café’s interior. As my nose started to tingle and run, it became obvious this was not an over-zealous cleaner, but some chemical the police had used to disperse the troublemakers, and there was a full-scale dash for the inside. Fortunately the effects were dispensed with by a good nose blow, and by the time we stepped outside again 15 minutes later, the air was clear again and the café’s terrace refilling.

I’ve been very lucky this year to take two business trips, one to India and a second to the beautiful city of Budapest. The office I was visiting is a just outside central Budapest which gives me the opportunity to see the “real” city; although my initial attempt to interact with the public transport system was something of a failure, in part due to some “creative” route-finding by one of my colleagues, but also because this Gordian route involved the metro as well as a tram and I didn’t know the Hungarian word for “transfer ticket”…

Budapest really is a city of two “halves” being originally two settlements called “Buda” and “Pest”. Buda has an impressive castle (completely rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII) which completely dominates the river skyline, but also a warren of quaint streets made for strolling. Also on the Buda side of the river is the amazing Gellert Spa: a rambling complex of 19th Century corridors leading outside to sun-drenched terraces, or inside to intricately decorated thermal pools which reminded me of the Roman Spa in Bath. Given its evident attractiveness to tourists, it was surprisingly reasonably priced too.

Not to be outdone in the impressive buildings league, Pest features a Basillica, which would not look out of place in Rome, set within a very picturesque square. Lovers of European cafés with “atmosphere” will enjoy Café Montmartre with its great location in the shadow of the church.

Reaching the Statue Park involved another public transport adventure, but it was bizarrely fascinating and definitely not to be missed.

Finally my trip was rounded off with some wine-tasting organised by my team. Hungarian wine is very good…

This week I spent a pleasant few days in the Roman City of Eboracum, (Jorvik to the Vikings and York to its present inhabitants). Modern day York is famous for its well preserved Viking heritage and religious eminence (being the seat of the second most important Bishop in the land), but I also found it to be a charming, compact and well organised city centre with a superb range of shopping all within easy walking distance of its centre. [Photos.]

Sadly we were only able to view the York Minster from the outside due to closure for a degree ceremony (pesky students having precedence over tourists—disgraceful!!!!) but the Old Town Walls provided some beautiful views. The Jorvik Viking Centre was thankfully not swamped with small children (the queue is apparently two hours during school holidays) and despite its main attraction being a ride through a re-creation of Jorvik c.875AD, it was informative and delightfully lacking in gimmicks.

With a couple of hours to kill before catching a train, the National Railway Museum seemed worth a look since it was the very exceptional price of “free” and surprisingly it turned out to be rather good: the exhibition on how rail changed society will interest social historians while those with a mechanical bent will be impressed by the gleaming machines that broke land speed records in their day.

The Rough Guide recommends afternoon tea as one of the essential London experiences and The Athenaeum Hotel is a lovely venue. After selecting our choice of tea leaves from the extensive menu, we were served posh finger sandwiches and then warm scones with gorgeous jam. After the scones it was time to select some cake from the trolley and then in case we weren’t already full, there were crumpets and tea cakes to finish. Definitely recommended.

• Café Gerbeaud: This Grand European café is the perfect place to watch the world go by while enjoying mouth-wateringly delicious cake and excellent coffee.
• Menza: Sublime traditional Hungarian food is served in a popular restaurant with chic retro decor. The house wine is recommended too.
• Rézkakas, 1053 Budapest, Veres Paine u.3: Traditional setting with live “gypsy” band. Classy service and excellent traditional Hungarian food and wine. Lots of locals dining which is always a good sign.
• Vapiano: Traditional Hungarian food is a very balanced diet of protein and carbohydrate, so if you’re feeling like something a bit different this “pasta and pizza” place is superb. You order your food at a counter where they cook it fresh in front of you. Fantastic salads make wonderful complements to your main, or by themselves as a light meal.
• Tom George, V. Október 6 utca 8: A wide variety of “international” food is on offer, and the steak I had was melt-in-the-mouth good.

Breakfast, Brunch and Light Lunch

• Fuzzy’s Grub, 96 Tooley St: This café’s speciality is a large flat bread roll/bap filled with succulent roast meat, roast potato, yorkshire pudding and vegetables, complemented with a delicious red-onion marmalade. Also does full English breakfast and impressive looking salads.
• The Greencoat Boy, Artillery Row: Their “Big Ben” burger is perfect hangover food.
• C’est Ici, nr Baron’s Court Tube: French-style snacks and sandwiches.

More Substantial Meals

• Kazan, 93-94 Wilton Road: Delicious Turkish food served in stylish atmospheric surroundings.
• Tas: Reasonably-priced Turkish restaurant with several branches across London.
• Café Pacifico/La Perla, Covent Garden: Mexican diner occupying two locations on either side of Covent Garden.
• Fabrizio’s, 30 Saint Cross St, Farringdon: Sublime authentic Italian where they make their own bread and pasta on the premises each day.
• Buen Ayre, Broadway Market, E8 4QJ: Awesome Argentine steakhouse; leave your vegetarian friends at home.

Bandipur National Park is about three hours drive south of Bangalore and was recommended to me by some colleagues as being a good two-day break from the hustle and bustle of the city. I arrived around lunchtime and was shown to my cabin which was (as expected) fairly basic, but beautifully decorated. After lunch I had two hours to chill out before starting our safari, and although there were no activities at the resort, it was a quiet and peaceful spot to read, or just take a lazy afternoon nap—perhaps not on the “private terrace” though!

At 4:30pm we set off in a jeep for our pre-dusk safari, seeing lush unspoilt landscapes, spotted deer, huge Gaur, and the principal attraction, elephants.

The next morning was an early 6:30am start for a “trek” into the park. The itinerary had been rather sketchy about what this trek entailed, and it turned out to be quite a length hike up a medium-sized hill—not too difficult but rather more than my breakfast-less body wanted to deal with. The views from the top were almost worth the effort, but our guide then spotted a leopard sunning itself on a rock on the other side of the valley—initially no more than a yellow and black blur even through binoculars, but as we descended the hill, it became quite visible, to the point where when he eventually stood up and sauntered off, his movements were visible to the naked eye. Quite an experience and definitely worth missing breakfast for… Browse all photos.

Clearly my previous month-long business trip to Bangalore cannot have been too psychologically scarring since I was quite happy to volunteer to return for another three week stint. Sadly there has been little excitement to blog about in this trip—having too much work on is hardly thrilling material to write about—and this time I am staying at a different apartment complex that has an on site buttery service which does delicious (and safe!) food removing my most pressing need to venture into Bangalore proper. Very dull, but then I think I did see Bangalore’s highlights on my last visit!

Today, I did take an auto-rickshaw to the office and remembered how exhilarating it is to be in one of these as it nimbly weaves its way in and out of traffic much more efficiently than a car can. Definitely more exciting than dozing in the back of an air-conditioned car trying to make polite conversation with the driver! The open-cab design even means there’s a pleasant (of sorts, there were a lot exhaust fumes on the roads I took today) breeze to keep the passenger cool. I have to say though, while rickshaws are brilliant for shooting around small back streets, or slow moving roads, the dual carriageway that takes me to work has some pretty large traffic (well, the trucks are pretty small by British standards, but comparative to an auto!) that likes to zoom when there’s a clear bit of space, and suddenly only having a bit of thin plastic between you and the other traffic doesn’t feel very safe… Using autos makes every journey an adventure, but I think I will be taking a car again tomorrow.

When a country gets as much sun as Australia does, it becomes very easy to take gorgeous-looking photographs such as these from our seven day tour of Western Australia. In fact, the sun was so incredibly strong that a lot of the photos were really over exposed and had to be corrected.

While I have previously acclaimed Australia’s beautiful coastal landscape, I remember thinking at the time that the inland scenery was rather hard to describe—the sun blasted continuous scrub of short trees/bushes can hardly be called “pretty”, but there is some eerily attractive about the ostentatious rocky landscape [1][2]. Looking back, I realise I almost certainly also find the views more enjoyable now that I no longer have to deal with that most intense sun beating down on me, or the highly persistent flies.

Something that I remember was very pretty was the intense blue of the sky set against the red of the earth, although at sunset it was the sky that was beautifully red (and in Perth too.)

Finally, the best bit about tour was definitely the people we met and made friends with on our bus. Rosie, not content with all the fish she saw underwater, also decided to make some new animal friends.

Sydney has many famous beauty spots (photos), but I think my favourite has to Balmoral Beach. Sydney is famous for its beaches, but this one has something the others don’t: an Edwardian Bathing Pavilion which has been converted to a classy café serving excellent coffee and quite possibly the best breakfast in Sydney—and for a city that does breakfast like Sydney does, that takes some doing!

I’m still sorting through the remainder of my photos; more will be posted soon.

North-western Australia is pretty remote: we saw our last traffic light 3 days ago, and driving at night becomes a battle of the wills between the driver and the members of the local wildlife who regard mini-buses as objects of curiosity and wonder… Since I’m not driving, it’s all great stuff!

Today we have reached the zenith of our trip north: the town of Exmouth, located about an hour’s drive north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and close to the Ningaloo Reef. It’s very different to the East coast of the country which has a lot of rainforests: here the landscape is defined by the vivid red soil, with scatterings of short scrubby bushes, and “rain days” number just five a year. Sadly, today was one of those days! We still managed to get in our snorkeling though—apparently fish don’t mind the rain—and the water was still its famous brilliant turquoise colour, but the views of the beaches were not as stunningly beautiful as they would have been on a sunny day.

Snorkeling was good fun: Rosie’s enthusiasm to spending as much time in the water as possible (preferably observing fish!) meant I saw a great many varieties from pretty many-coloured coral-eating parrot fish to evil looking black catfish, and even a shark (which thankfully sped away in the opposite direction as soon as I turned around to find Rosie to save me!).

Tomorrow we head south again: it will take two long days on the bus to reach Perth and actual coffee shops (“civilisation”) again.

After Sydney’s impressive harbour and beautiful beaches, it would easy to be disappointed with Melbourne which has few obvious tourist attractions. However, while Sydney is a stunning supermodel, Melbourne is a multi-layered “onion” of a city, each new exploratory trip reveals new layers: hidden gems of classy shops, chic food markets, interesting cafés, and funky bars. (In the case of the funky bars, “hidden” is literally true: back alleys lead to bars with bizarre but cool school science lab themes, and un-marked entrance ways hide bar staff who hold encyclopedic cocktail menus in their heads.)

If one does tire of the eating and drinking in the city, then a one or two-day trip down the Great Ocean Road provides beautiful coastline scenery. Alternatively, a day trip to the Yarra Valley provides a good excuse to taste some fine Australian wine while admiring the view from the shade of a converted barn or farmhouse.

It would be easy to compare Melbourne to London: for example the Queen Victoria markets are similar to Borough market, and the converted Treasury bar is a bit like the Bank of England pub, and so on. Melbourne felt a little more compact though: while Melbourne has huge sprawling suburbs, the central area where all the action is, did seem a lot smaller than London’s disparate “villages”. Either way, it’s definitely a great place for people who like cities and city-breaks.

I have been in Australia 6 days now, and I really have been too busy to blog! I have taken a great number of photos though, so perhaps I will be able to provide a photo-based retrospective, instead of the running commentary of my last trip.

Anyway, the story so far is that Sydney was just how I remembered it: gorgeously beautiful vistas, excellent coffee, and full of restaurants serving tasty food that was at the same time both comfortingly familiar and slightly different from “the usual” fare. I had forgotten how huge Sydney is though, but since this was my second visit I felt much more able to take life at an easy pace and only revisit those sights I felt warranted a second visit—although there are still too many highlights to list here!

One thing that definitely made this visit more enjoyable was that the flights we took (leaving the UK in the evening and arriving first thing in the morning) were a lot more palatable than departing in the morning and arriving in the evening which left my body clock about 12 hours out of sync with reality. In theory we “lost” a whole day to flying, but it did mean we spent more time sleeping on the very boring plane journey, and were able to start enjoying our holiday as soon as we arrived!