My Second Skyrian Summer - Photo Journal

I decided to articulate this post mainly through photographs, because this wasn't a day trip to Prague but an entire month of my life, and I think in this case fewer words and more pictures will say it better.

At the end of May last year, pretty much as soon as my exams were done, I took a plane to Athens to meet my best buddy Karen.

The two of us stayed the night in a hostel, had a good old fashioned Greek kebab, took a look around the Acropolis and then hopped on a bus to Kymi, and a ferry to Skyros.

You may remember that I had visited Skyros Island Horse Trust the previous year for a couple of weeks. Now I was returning for a month, and bringing horse-crazy Karen with me.

We bought the most delicious, succulent cherries I have ever eaten at the port, and ate them on the journey as the sun set over the Aegean. 

This time there were new characters at the farm: Hara (above), a rescued dog, and Heidi (below) - a goat.

Some animals had been lost, too. Roughly sixteen cats come to the farm to be fed by morning and night, but they weren't exactly the same cats I had met the year before. Leon, the friendly dog, had also died. Hara looks very similar to him and was found abandoned on a beach; it's possible she is his pup.

We settled into the routine quickly enough. Mucking out, feeding, watering, three times a day (for almost 40 horses - no mean feat), and various other jobs as and when, including building a fence, clearing out the stables, and moving horses from field to field.

Taking Ifestos and Nefeli out for a bite of grass among the neighbour's grapevines became one of the highlights of our day.

As were our evening training sessions and lessons in horsemanship with Amanda.

It wasn't horses 24-7, however (well, not quite). One day we collected as many plums as we could from the orchard, boiled them up and made an exquisite crumble for dessert. In my day to day life, crumble is an unremarkable thing. In Skyros, where I can't afford to be picky with my food and snack all day and every meal is the best and most satisfying thing I've ever eaten, that crumble was heaven.

Our days and evenings off in the village were some of the best. Above is a rally against the construction of a huge wind farm on the island (see my article) for which the village turned out in full force. Karen and I ate chicken souvlaki that evening (and never looked back).

Over the month I made real progress with Orfeas, the pony I have adopted. On the final evening I led him out of the paddock where he has lived since he was weaned (again, no mean feat, and with the help of Stathis!) and walked him around in the field. I hardly recognised the pony who used to flinch from being touched when I met him in 2012.

My favourite night on the farm does require some words to articulate, because it was dark. I snapped this photo of the full moon coming up. That night, plans for a dinner on the rooftop terrace went awry, and we were all feeling fairly grumpy. But Julietta made us each a plate for dinner: olives, bread with rosemary oil, tomatoes, cheese. It was the most wonderful, simple meal I've eaten. The four of us - Karen, Amanda, Julietta, and me - talked and drank wine (except for Julietta, of course), and Amanda began telling us how amazing it is to be with horses in the dark when everything is so still and quiet. So we went out into the fields and sat down with the horses and even lay down beside some as they dozed. They came over and snuffed at us, pawed at us, eventually just chilled out with us as though we were part of the herd. It was the most extraordinary evening.

A few days before we left, a ferry tour group came to visit the farm. Karen and I put the skills we had learned to use, along with Julietta, and demonstrated natural horsemanship for the audience. It was the culmination of everything we'd learned, and a fitting end to our time at the farm. That night, I lay out in the stallions' field under the stars until about 2 o'clock while the horses chewed above me and dropped hay on my head, and knew that I would be coming back to Skyros for the rest of my life. 

I would like to dedicate this post to Dimos Kypraios, a true friend and a wonderful man, who died later that summer saving Julietta's life.

For more information about Skyros Island Horse Trust, visit www.skyrosislandhorsetrust.com.

The Kimberley with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy

In my second summer of 2013 (that is, the southern hemisphere summer - and the first dual-summer year of my life!) I was lucky enough to get the chance to visit Mornington Widlife Conservancy, where the privately funded conservation charity, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, is working to preserve Australia's unique wildlife. I was particularly lucky in getting the opportunity to see a side of the operations that many tourists wouldn't usually be able to see.

Before this Christmas the longest flight I'd ever been on was the four-hour flight from Edinburgh to Athens. Now, having flown around the globe to reach Australia, the four hours from Melbourne to Broome seemed like nothing. Barely time to open your book!

Once we'd landed in Broome it was necessary for us to take a chartered plane to the remote Mornington Conservancy, where the roads and runway are red earth, and colossal termite hills the size of cows rise up above the grass in all directions. I'd never seen anything like it.

Zoom in. That thing that looks like a hut? It's a termite mound

On the runway I met the head researcher, Dr Sarah Legge, and the head of operations, Swanie. Then, over the next hours and days, I met a stream of incredible, dedicated scientists, ops and admin staff. Hours' travel from a town, living in flood-territory huts on stilts where a door left open may well mean a python sharing your bed, these extraordinary people are conducting research, making pizzas and raising children.

It was the oppressive 40 degree heat making my heart race, but I'd fallen in love with Mornington.

Bustards, spotted on day one. Australia's second-largest flightless bird

On our first afternoon we swam in Fitzroy Gorge, where the answer to 'are there crocs here?' was 'we've never seen them here'. A few of us swam to the far shore (I took a rubber ring... I've never been a strong swimmer) where we climbed up onto the rocks and saw Aboriginal rock art on the overhang. Despite being thousands of years old, the handprints were still vivid. I know I'm employing a fair bit of hyperbole here but the sunset was spectacular.

My photography skills can't do it justice at all

When I mentioned my interest in working in conservation Sarah was more than happy to invite everyone to take a closer look at the work they're doing. First, we were invited on a 'cat chase'. Exactly what it sounds.

Feral cats are causing huge problems for native mammals in Australia, each cat consuming roughly five of them per day. That adds up to a lot of mammals. At Mornington, Hugh McGregor is conducting his PhD research on the cats, and has tagged a number of them to track their movements. He needed to re-catch one of them to replace its tracker, and we were invited along for the ride. 

When we set off it was about five o'clock and still by no means cool; on the first day I'd had something of a panic attack about my body's ability to cope with the heat, but I'd adjusted to an extent when we set off walking at a fast pace into the bush.

Pretty soon we were fighting our way through some tall and (really, bloody) sharp spinifex. And we were getting no closer to the cat. After about twenty minutes we had to stop; one of the dogs, a Spaniel not quite made for the heat, had over-exhausted herself by running full pelt and covering about five times as much ground as we had. She lay down and stayed down while water was dribbled into her mouth. Our party had to split in two: those who would go after the cat - at a run - and those who'd stay with Sarah and Sally. 

I ran for about a hundred yards before I realised I was making the wrong decision. I was barely coping with the heat at a fast walk; I knew my limits. Lachy and I turned back and found Sarah. Once Sally had almost recovered, Sarah picked her up and strode through the spinifex carrying her while me and Lachy struggled along in her wake. 

Sally was restored by plenty of water and a dip in the river, and the second group returned one cat later. They had caught the cat and done the necessary maintenance without the need for even a sedative. Exhausted, we were back to camp just in time for stone-fired pizza. 

For our second lesson in applied conservation we were up at 4 o'clock the following morning to check on quoll traps (Hugh having stayed up with the traps all night following the cat chase!). The northern quoll is one of Australia's native marsupials, and their population is monitored at Mornington through trapping nights, during which the quolls are monitored in minute detail, including being tagged and weighed. 

Quoll-weighing

With Hugh monitoring the traps overnight some quolls had already been caught and released. Luckily, when we arrived, two of the traps were occupied! We were privileged to see some of Australia's native nocturnal mammals up close, and they were promptly released afterwards, shooting off before any of us could manage to snap a picture. Hence the lack of a picture. Feel free to Google.

The days we spent at Mornington were the highlight of my Australian Christmas holiday (and that's really saying something). Our daily adventures included helicoptering in to a campfire breakfast atop Fitzroy Bluff - undoubtedly the most spectacular breakfast of my life - to rock-hopping up a dry riverbed to a billabong below a dry waterfall, where water monitors shared the pool with us and a spirit (or a strange wind) stirred up trouble around the teapot.

Your typical Aussie breakfast...

The most memorable moment of the trip, however, is undoubtedly when our al fresco dinner on top of a hill took an unusual turn.

It was the rainy season during our trip, and we watched as some unbelievable rainstorms swept across the savannah. Lightning lit up the bluffs like the Battle of Helm's Deep was taking place beyond. And then one came rolling over us...

As we prepared for dinner, our hearts were stopped as lightning struck about a hundred metres from our dinner spot. The younger members of the group were shocked into tears, while one person worried his eyes had been damaged as he'd watched the bolt strike. I saw it from the corner of my eye and it certainly made me jump.

A few minutes later, someone noticed, a hundred metres or so away:

A bush fire had started.

Realising that the wind was blowing towards us, and with the fire rapidly expanding, the staff raced down the hill shouting to us to stay where we were, breaking off tree limbs as they went. Within ten minutes they had beaten the bushfire out.

Just your standard day working in conservation in the Kimberley!

The Travels of my Summer Journal

Early in 2013 I bought a blank unlined notebook from Paperchase for a fiver with the intention of using it for a creative writing project. After realising I wasn't creative enough to pull it off, I decided to dedicate the notebook to my summer travels, and wrote the title - Summer 2013, as you see above - on the blank cover.

In June the notebook travelled with me to Skyros, where I doodled horses all over the cover, practised a bit of Greek writing, and drew a couple of cats too. Oh, and Hara the dog, as you see just below the title. One evening my great friend, 10-year-old Julietta, asked me what my favourite number was (12)  and my favourite animal (do you even have to ask?) and drew this lovely design for me.

When the journal and I visited Romania, it became my lesson-planning brain-exploding outlet for confusion and frustration with the fact that I wasn't enjoying teaching. But there were good days too. As you see.

And above all, I used it to record day-to-day happenings, at first only items of particular interest (see below - ate my first chicken kebab), but with some increasing detail as time went on.

The journal ends abruptly on the 10th of August - the day I left it on the train. We got on at Lyon, and when I stepped off at Grenoble my journal was lying hopefully under the seat I'd been sitting in.

I despaired.

I called all the lost property offices along the train line, and after a few days I was prepared to give up hope. I wasn't getting anywhere. Then I received this email, entitled 'travel book forgotten in the train'.

¡ Hi !
Last sunday with my wife we took the train Bordeaux-Vintimille in the station of Marseille, and we found a notebook forgotten on a seat. Inside there is your mail adress. Is it yours ? If it is, we can send you by the post. 
Friendly,
[anonymized, of course].

The most amazing thing about my saviours is that my email address was only on the page where I'd written down my bank details. To be safe, I changed them all at once, but they had had my notebook for a few days I believe before they found the means to contact me, and all they did was let me know they had it.

Restores your faith in humanity, doesn't it?

So they posted it to the airbnb flat we would be renting the following week in Como.

Unfortunately, it arrived the day we left for France.

Fortunately, our kind Italian landlord made regular trips to the UK, and the next time he came over, he brought my package and posted it locally. When the notebook made it to Cumbria, I'd returned to Scotland for university. At last, when I returned home for Christmas, I was reunited with my journal, which officially travelled more extensively than I did in summer 2013.

2013 in Review and Plans for 2014

2013 was really my first adventurous year. In summary:

• In January I hitchhiked from Stirling to Prague - by car, lorry, ferry, foot and finally train. 
• During the spring semester I spent two weekends hiking around the Scottish Highlands and Trossachs
• In June I volunteered in Skyros again, via Athens
• In July I flew to Romania (via Italy..!) and taught for a month in the east
• From the end of July I visited (with an Interrail Pass) Cluj-Napoca, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bordeaux, Lyon and Grenoble
• At the end of August I lived in an airbnb flat in Como for a week before spending a week (respectively) with one family in Sardinia (brief stop in Milan) and another in Chef-Boutonne.
• After working hard during the Christmas semester (earning, not studying, of course) I flew to Australia via Beijing, and spent Christmas in Melbourne and New Year at Point Lonsdale. 

And the highlights include but are not limited to:

• Finally fulfilling a childhood dream - visiting the Spanish Riding School in Vienna
• Learning to drive a horse-drawn cart in Romania
• Lying out in the field with the horses under a full moon in Skyros
• Enjoying the music of Grail in the Old Town Square, Prague
• Reaching the summit of 'Le Dent' in the Alps
• And finishing off the year by swimming with seals and dolphins in Australia.

Grail in full swing

There were low points too...

• Stubbing my toe so many times while wearing sandals that the nail turned black
• Cooking overnight in a Budapest bedroom without air conditioning
• And worst of all, learning of the death of a close friend.

The bad experiences, however, couldn't outweigh the value that travelling has held for me over the past year. And that's why I'm planning for another big adventure in 2014.

Plan #0.5: Improve this blog
As you can already see, I've given the blog a bit of a makeover, and in 2014 I hope to improve my travel writing skills and develop the blog further.

Plan #1: Driving tour of Scotland

In the second part of the university's spring vacation, Lachy and I are planning an epic voyage by car around the Highlands and Islands. Definite stops will include Inversnaid, Tomintoul and the Isle of Skye.

Plan #2: Purchase ticket to Iceland (complete)

On August 19th I will be flying from Edinburgh over to Reykjavik to spend a few days in and around the capital before heading to the far north to volunteer on a dairy farm with many horses, where I'll also be lucky enough to be taking part in the biggest Icelandic horse roundup in the country. If I can get a few days off, I wouldn't mind attending Iceland Airwaves, either; a big music festival in Reykjavik.

Plan #3: Return to Skyros (part two)

Sometime in October I will head back to my favourite Greek island to spend six weeks or so working with the world's greatest breed of tiny pony. And for the first time, I'll be working in weather my body can understand, and I might actually be quite productive!

Plan #4: Christmas in Cumbria and Hogmanay

Since the last Christmas season was spent with another family in another hemisphere, I promised my parents (well, my mum) that this year I'd be at home. And I am determined to attend Hogmanay for my birthday this year, something I've always wanted to do but - despite living so close to Edinburgh for so long - I've never done it yet.

Plan #5: (technically, this one is for 2015) Move to Australia

That's right. Lachy is transferring and I'm moving to Melbourne with him. Much adventure awaits. Much excitement, much excitement indeed. 

Hello Melbourne.