Return to Obermonkey

When I arrived in Austria I was pretty tired, pretty skinny and pretty ugly. Now after a 2 week diet of ham and cheese and cheese with ham and bread and cheese and ham with schnitzel and ham with cheese and cheese, I am starting to fill out again and get a bit lazy. Before you get the idea that Austrian food lacks variety I should point out that there are 734 different types of ham and 324 variants of cheeses. I have also made marked progress in recovering my alcohol tolerance with wine, beer, yagermeister and schnapps. I've been looked after well by Stevo and Stefie. It was just what I needed to recover and adjust to "normal" life slowly. I chilled out at Saltzburg "redbulls" footie match the day after I leanrt that England failed to qualify for euro 2008. Really upsetting, but I'm trying not to think about it too much. With the crisp cold air and the many Christmas markets the Austrian Alps is a good place to be a the Christmas period. I got whipped by my first Grampon. I'll explain. In Austria they have St Nicolas, very much like Father Christmas but looking a bit less like a coca-cola advertisement. He goes around being nice and blessing all the good children. He is accompanied by the Daemon like Grampons who dress all fury with big horns and ugly faces with cow bells attached to them. They go around scaring and whipping the bad children. It's very popular, so popular in fact that on one Saturday night in a local barn/disco at 1am over 10 of them descended from the rafters on ropes with accompanied light show to scare the crap out of the people. It was a good laugh. At the weekend I visited Stevos parents who have known me for about 12years. They had just got back from the US on a visit to see their daughter bella. They asked how my mum and dad where, which made us laugh and remember the time when my dad and Stevos dad nearly kicked it off on a competition of who was the "man of the village".
I also managed to get some snowboarding in. It was only one afternoon and conditions where a little icy, but I discovered I still had it going on after nearly 2 years absence.
I also started to think more about the 4-5 days left to ride and the condition of my bike. With some motivation from Rick and Moniek (the couple in Nepal who arranged the building of my bike) I decided to see about fixing her up. I found that to ship it to the UK would cost about 200euro but I'd have problems at customs if it arrived in a box. Also to ship it back to Nepal would cost me 2000 euro. The only other option had was to scrap her here in Austria, this I just could not do. After going through so much together and with so many promises made I did have a lot to be grateful for. I was lucky to find a mechanic through Stevos girlsfiends, uncle who happened to be just around the corner. He said he could fix it but with it being an Asian bike there was no way he could get the parts. Today I got confirmation that the parts needed are with UPS on their way over from Nepal. Hopefully the bike will be ready in a couple of weeks and with the weather permitting I'll fly back to Saltzburg and ride the rest of the way before I start by bumpy ride back into the reality of working.
My flight leaves at 15:10 today to arrive in London tonight. I'll be staying with my friend Roy in Convent Garden who happens to be having a Christmas party on the Friday. Hopefully then I'll get to spend the weekend with darling Lucy before I head up north to my mum and dads or to Bristol to see my brother and Sarah and Verity.
I know this entry is not quite as exciting as smoking opium with the Taliban or shooting AK47s in the Afghan mountains, but still I'm not home yet and who knows what will happen before I arrive in central London.
I do have a little advice for anyone thinking of strapping their laptop with bungee rope to their bike and shacking it around for 8-10hrs a day over a 3month period. Not a good idea. My hard disc crashed last week and I lost ALL my data. It was not a total disaster though for I'd uploaded all my pics to the Net and even the new snowboard video to google-videos which you can see below.