A wedding & a final farewell

A key date that much of our trip pivoted around had finally arrived: the wedding of our good friends, Em & Jon, in Sweden. We would arrive in Stockholm on the Friday, attend the wedding on the Saturday, and spend Sunday night saying our goodbyes before flying back to London and out to Bangkok.

Many of our good friends would be at the wedding, including a couple who had moved to New York around the time we embarked on our travels, so the wedding promised to be a well-timed reunion.

We were taken by coach to the venue - a beautiful lakeside castle with various buildings that served as accommodation with areas set aside for dinner and dancing. There was even a sauna which got some use (interspersed with mad running jumps into the icy lake) at the end of the evening.

It was an absolutely stunning wedding, organised perfectly yet effortlessly by the bride and groom with myriad personal and fun touches. Jon is English so the Union Jack and Scandinavian cross flanked the castle on twin flagpoles. The table plan included photographs of all the guests with flags denoting their nationality. Menus were provided on personalised postcards, stamped with images of the guests, postmarked by country and written in the appropriate language. The food and wine were matched and were a blend of Swedish and British fare.

There were songs and laughter and wonderful speeches, culminating in the bride's surprise for the groom, a music video her brother had shot, starring Emma lip-syncing Take That's "Rule the World", invoking every love ballad cliche from sitting in a window gazing at a framed photo of Jon, through striding triumphantly along a deserted road, to spinning joyously in a field of daisies. Finally, they had "their song", a tongue-in-cheek gesture as Jon outwardly projects discerning taste in music but was outed by his new wife as harbouring a penchant for boy-band Take That and a secret man-crush on Gary Barlow.

Vic & Iain cutting fine figures

Who needs heels when there's a step nearby?

New-mum Mieghs back in her wedding dress

A mini reunion

NYC meets baby Vera

Must be looking at hypno-baby

Sunny & Matt: the original bromance

It was an emotional and bittersweet weekend culminating in a series of tearful goodbyes as we exited for the southern hemisphere.

Chavorca & Ibiza

What do you call a chav in a box? Innit. Most kiwis don't seem to understand this joke, but everyone who lives in the UK certainly does. And anyone who's visited Mallorca will know that in certain pockets (though I'm guessing not the ones Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones occupy) it should be known as Chavorca.

As we'd left it until the last minute and we were planning on spending five days in Mallorca avoiding carbs and alcohol, we'd booked a package holiday within 20 minutes drive from the airport for convenience - our rationale was: "How bad could it be?" and "Even if the food is really bad, it won't matter as we'll just eat less".

It turns out chavs aren't just made in the UK; Germany does a pretty good version of them too and in the summer they congregate at hotels throughout Arenal, just south of Palma. The flipside was that we spent the week doing exactly what we'd planned. The food was truly appalling so our diet went very well, there was a gym on site so we did plenty of working out and the hotel was hideous so we made a daily pilgrimage to a far-flung beach.

Chav-free Mallorca

I still wasn't feeling quite right and so decided it was time to investigate. In Spain, being pregnant is called embarazada, so I ventured down to the local farmacia, communicated my requirements in pidgin Spanish (German probably would have been fine, but instead of embarazada it would have been schwanger!) and bought a test. Two tests later and putting all potential language mix-ups aside, the results were virtually positivo: I was embarazada. Hurrah - so the detox was well-timed and would continue (for me at least) for quite some time.

Starting as he barely managed to go on

Our long weekend with friends in Ibiza was suddenly rendered a subdued tee-total affair for me. I'd always thought that the same deal applied to the first three months of pregnancy as being gay in the US military, but I was soon to discover that quite a few of my friends and associates don't subscribe to the unspoken "don't ask, don't tell" rule. In fact, for one individual (namely DJ Chutney from Putney) it was more "ask once, ask again, get drunk and keep on asking". Clearly me turning down a drink shook some friends to the very core of their beings.

My friend Sunny is a dentist and related a story about one of his patients who quit drinking. She came in for a check-up one day and he asked her how things were. A successful lawyer in her mid-forties, she told him she planned to give up booze. At her next appointment some months later, he asked her how it was going. "Oh," she said, "I'm drinking again." Sunny asked what had happened and she explained that she'd given it a good go, only to discover that if she wasn't drunk she hated her friends. They'd get pissed, talk about themselves and tell the same boring stories again and again until she realised she had to be drunk to endure their company.

For me? Agua con gas. Nothing to see here.

I've been to Ibiza a handful of times and it is always sublime - gorgeous weather, lazy days at the beach, long nights, good music, good food and good times. We'd rented a villa from a friend of a friend, which fell through at the last minute due to some issue with the plumbing - but we ended up with a very cool pad in Figueretes overlooking the bay to Playa d'en Bossa.

Into the blue

We headed straight to our favourite beach, secured our usual table and whiled away the day eating, drinking, swimming and indulging in our favourite past time: taking the piss out of Azom.

Ah! Comte

Blissed out on the White Island

All aglow at Cala Comte

That hat looks so much cooler flipped up like that

Dos cervezas

Nice seaweed chest hair

Unconscious belly-cupping has already begun

The days that followed were all spent in much the same vein at Sa Trinxa on Salinas and Blue Marlin on Cala Jondal and the evenings were spent in and around Dalt Vila at the usual haunts of Pastis, La Oliva and La Brasa.

Sunset at Blue Marlin

Who could resist?

One small discovery: I still love my friends when I'm sober, but when they are drunk their company would definitely be enhanced by a drink or two.

The sun goes down at Sa Trinxa

Midsummer in Sweden

Matt and I headed in separate directions from Bergamo with Ryanair: he was bound for his cousin's birthday-slash-farewell in London and I was dropping into Stockholm for my beautiful friend Emma's surprise hen party.

A midsummer wreath for the bride-to-be

Em's mum takes pole to the streets of Stockholm

The party had a midsummer theme, complete with a brunch of lovely Swedish food (oh how I love skagen - prawns and dill in mayo on toast), pole-dancing lessons and a party at a lakehouse where we gorged on seafood, drank schnapps, sang drinking songs, ate cheese, played midsummer games and capped off the evening with a sauna. Very civilised indeed. I was feeling slightly off-key all day so laid off the booze and took it pretty easy.

Schnapps o'clock

No lake house would be complete without a...

All set up for the wine and cheese tasting

Malin talks us through fermented grapes and milk

It was a wonderful celebration with so much thought and love in the planning and spirit of the day. The next day I flew to Mallorca via Barcelona to meet Matt for five days of detox before a hitting Ibiza for some debauchery with Sunny, Alex, Azom and Number1.

La Dolce Vita

Widely held as the best description of a hangover, I give you The Bonfire of the Vanities:

“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

“Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom. Sometimes he knew that whatever it had been, he couldn’t face it, and he would decide to turn away from it forever, and just then something, some stray detail, would send out a signal, and the beast would come popping to the surface on its own and show him its filthy snout.”

It wasn't that bad, but after four months of holidaying - which equates to four months of eating out three times a day and answering every question (dessert? drink? five-course lunch? fried breakfast?) with Why not? We're on holiday! - we decided that seven days in Italy would be spent detoxing. The injustice, we were entering the world's gastronomic epicentre only to deny ourselves all the wonderful booze, cheese and carbs on offer. 

We spent the first four days in Emilia Romagna, dining on scrambled eggs, espresso, Tagliata and grilled vegetables and drinking sparkling water. All were excellent, but really! 

We caught the high-speed train to Florence and joined the throngs of Americans clogging up every street and alleyway in the beautiful city. The Uffizi was closed for renovation and our plans to finally see Michelangelo's David - we'd only seen a replica at the V&A in London - were scuppered as the Accademia di Belle Arti is closed on Tuesdays. We ate gelato and wandered through the Boboli Gardens before boarding the bullet back to Bologna.

Firenze: serenity far above the madding crowds

The view from Boboli of Palazzo Pitti

Ponte Vecchio

Another replica David, but still no original

Not a bad beat

We were amused to read that renaissance artists such as Michelangelo sculpted small penises as they were deemed more "elegant".

Matt was eager for us to spend a few days on Como, our favourite spot in Italy since we'd first visited Bellagio in the summer of 2004. We went back a couple of years ago for my birthday and had a memorable meal of spaghetti vongole and rosato in Como town. I'd found an agriturismo online, which sounded perfect - overlooking the lake and surrounded by forest.

After a relatively quick drive on the autostrade and a few dead ends heading up a steep hill, we found ourselves on a near-vertical narrow dirt track hellbent on proving that our micro-rental was not up to the task. In the end, we gave up and turned back. There was no mention of access issues on their website, but even with a 4X4 only the most intrepid explorers could hope to reach the summit.

€70 a night for this billion-euro view

Hotel Glavjc in Torno

We drove on to Como town and found a hotel through the tourist office. After one night in a hideous modern hotel in the middle of an industrial subdivision half an hour south of the lake, we found a 70s monstrosity with billion-euro views clinging to the hillside between Como and Bellagio.

Lunch in Bellagio

We had lunch at the edge of the lake in Bellagio breaking our detox to drink rosato and eat pasta. It was glorious. Then we settled in at the Lido, a spot we'd discovered during our first visit to Bellagio. The owners of our campsite also owned the Lido, essentially a bar with a bunch of sun-loungers on sand beside the lake. It had been renovated since our last visit and was channeling Ibiza with its louche vibe, good music and white upholstered furniture.

Como's waters run deep at 400 metres to the bottom

Matt loves to swim and so was in and out of the lake as I lay on the sun-lounger contentedly reading a book. He asked me to swim with him so I ventured down to the jetty and furtively dipped a toe into the glacial water. It may have been August, but we were at altitude and Como is one of the deepest lakes in Europe so the water was far from warm. I backed up, telling Matt it was too cold for me. He blocked me and a relentless debate about whether I should or should not enter the water ensued.

It reached its pinnacle when Matt told me that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't get in, which seemed very melodramatic to me. Then he upped the stakes and said that if I did a running jump into the lake, he would never ask me to do anything again. I retorted that he was a liar and that I have never been paid out for any of the countless bets I've ever made with him before impulsively running and jumping into the lake.

Bellagio's Lido

I can confirm that it was indeed very cold. Afterwards, I sat, leaning back against Matt, perched at the bottom of an unused slide suspended over the lake's calm surface. It was a spectacularly beautiful day - the sun shone from a cloudless sky, refracting off the still silent lake - and we both gazed happily across it. Somehow in the next few minutes, after some debate about the merits of marriage and utter confusion on my part as to what we were talking about, Matt proposed and I accepted.

A toast to our hypocrisy!

A bottle of Mumm was uncorked and we found ourselves engaged.

Yes We Cannes

And so we found ourselves in Tiffany, a clapped out Renault convertible, on a starry, balmy night, listening to James Brown as we ascended the hills behind Cannes into Super Cannes, home to the sprawling gated holiday homes of the inconceivably rich – Arabs, Russians, entrepreneurs, those with money and a insatiable appetite for showing it off.

Cannes: beauty is only skin deep

After our brief visit to London we’d arranged to meet our old friend Angus (dubbed Gus – pronounced according to locale: Goose (or perhaps that should have been Goo?) for the duration of our time with him) for a bit of a jaunt around the south of France. He’d come across from New Zealand for a friend’s wedding in Germany and had dropped down to the Cote D’Azur to visit friends and await our arrival. Somehow and somewhat uncharacteristically, he’d ended up ensconced in Cannes, as far as I was aware, a town only good for one thing – the film festival.

The owner of Tiffany, a hugely flamboyant kiwi named John, was the lure. A self-styled film critic, festival groupie and worshipper of the rich and famous, John has been in and out of Cannes for the past ten years, blagging his way into parties with actors, porn stars and Russian gangsters, and as he happily admits, “having a fucking ball”. He gleefully and regularly recites the mantra that explains everything in this little bubble of ostentation: “You’re in Cannes, bitch!”

Angus has been friends with John for years, since they both lived in Wellington, and thus he'd based himself in Cannes for a few days before we arrived. He’d rented a fantastically cheap apartment smack bang in the middle of town where we were to stay with him for a couple of days before lurching out onto the peage in the defiantly shabby Tiffany.

Super, Mega, Giga?: too big for the frame anyway

Francine II: more my size but still out of my budget

We spent a couple of days exploring Cannes and Antibes, which involved mainly eating great food, drinking the palest Provencal roses, gaping at super-yachts and people watching.

Antibes: basking on the Cote D'Azur

Cannes is a money magnet. If you have money and want everyone to know it, you come to Cannes. It is like a huge stage and there is only ever one thing showing: Look At Me, Look At Me, Look At Me. Of course, all this money attracts not only the rich, but the feeders - the prostitutes, pimps and aspiring girlfriends/wives (I'd love there to have been a more equitable gender distribution of sleaze, but sadly reality did not comply), the drug dealers and a flotilla of support staff (yacht crews, estate managers, cleaners, drivers, au pairs, chefs and gardeners).

One night while we sat outside a bar we observed a man holding a succession of meetings with (presumably) clients. He would show them a series of images (revealed by Matt's well-honed spy skills to be pictures of attractive women) and then would make a call and a couple of said women would turn up for a drink. They would greet the guy, he'd introduce them to his client and then they would settle down at a neighbouring table. The men would confab while the women drank wine, smoked cigarettes, chatted to each other and pulled a few expert moves to showcase their sexiness – a sleeve would drop to reveal a shoulder, a slight lean forward would provide a glimpse of cleavage, etc.

Baoli: €190 bottle of Tanqueray anyone?

Throwing money to the wind and thinking “When in Cannes”, we hit Baoli, a nightclub on the waterfront for the rich and richer. I changed into the obligatory small black dress (that after one wash was transformed into a singlet) with very high heels and led the way into the club. Baoli is filled with predictably good-looking, expensively dressed, dull people. We secured a table by buying an overpriced bottle of Tanqueray and proceeded to get sloshed. We made friends with some Dutch kids at the adjacent table. They were very polite, in fact one apologised for sweating, explaining that it was because he had “taken an ecstasy tablet”.

Away we go: striking out into the wide blue yonder

With massive hangovers, under a wide blue sky, we loaded Tiffany and plunged into Provence. Amusingly, at the entrance to the peage stands an ill-conceived sculpture of a massive hand giving the peace sign. Those arriving in Cannes and approaching from the other side are presented instead with a giant up yours. Maybe the artist was cleverer than I thought.

We stopped for lunch in the seaside town of Cassis, making the amateur mistake of trying to find food after 2pm and settling for Caesar salads in the only portside eatery still serving food.

Cassis: pretty as a picture

Our destination was Aix-en-Provence. We loved Aix. It is simply beautiful. Gus was inspired and decided that we should go to a concert in a church where we would be uplifted. We were told by the tourism office that the following night a monastic choir from St Petersburg would be performing in one of the churches in the old town. We arrived, joining a full house of pensioners. It was a lovely church and the acoustics were amazing. Satisfied that we were suitably uplifted, we left at the first interval.

Aix: Edmonds cookbook style

Fountains: there are plenty of them

Every day there are incredible markets in Aix – trestle tables are laden with peaches, berries, melons, apricots, cheeses, oils, lavender, vegetables, charcuterie, herbs and honey. Apparently Provence alone has 2500 varieties of tomato. I bet every single one of them is delectable.

Tomatoes: two down, 2498 to go!

Food porn: there's plenty to whet the appetite in Aix

Cavaillon melons: a Provence institution in season

One evening Gus and I had an inexhaustible debate about marriage. Divorced some years ago, Gus is in favour of, declaring that every woman, in her heart of hearts, is dying to get married. Of course, I took great offense to this, both personally and on behalf of all women, and so a good-humoured but idiotic debate continued deep into the night. At the bottom of the first bottle, Gus touchingly said that it infuriates him that Matt and I are not married and appear to have no desire to become husband and wife when, he says, if anyone he knows should be married, it is us.

I patiently and somewhat patronisingly explained to him that we do not need marriage. Some years ago an atheist friend told me that he leaves religion to those who need it. After 14 years of enduring the perennial question of when Matt and I will be getting married, I’ve settled on a variation of this as my retort: “I leave marriage to those who need it” (my alternate explanation is that neither of us want to get fat).

When Gus spoke to his girlfriend in New Zealand the next morning, she agreed with my argument wholeheartedly. Later, on our daily jaunt into the Luberon, I announced that I had taken Gus’s arguments into consideration and had been turned. I told him that all morning I had been lying awake composing our guest list and pondering venues, dresses and flowers. I noticed Matt looked slightly pale.

Electric blue: the Provencal sky at dusk

The Luberon is so beautiful that weeks later its vistas are still haunting me. Apparently the mistral – the wind that blows south across Provence – is responsible for the deep cornflower blue sky that saturates everything beneath it with depth and intensity. In addition to the feeling that one has entered a technicolour world, everything in this world is impossibly pretty and tasteful. Every aquamarine wooden shutter is peeling paint so charmingly, every fountain is cloaked in moist green moss just so, and every town clings to its hillside with understated, louche grace.

Luberon: Provencal cliche complete with lavender

Lunch time in the Luberon: more rose anyone?

Shabby chic Provencal style

Gordes: breathe it in, baby!

As we darted around the Luberon, Angus divulged one of his fantasies – one that Matt and I decided could easily be brought to life. The scene: a shady patch under a tree on a sunny day beside a gently flowing river. Having just consumed an entire poulet roti (the ubiquitous rotisserie chickens that can be found roasting in marches across France, dripping their fat into vast piles of potatoes) and a bottle of rose, our protagonist snoozes contentedly.

The day that we left Aix for Avignon's smaller, lesser-known neighbour, Villeneuve-les-Avignon, we decided to enact Angus's Obelix-style flight of fancy. We located a village market en route but alas, it was closing. As we watched the locals rapidly dismantling their stalls, Angus fixed on a distant mirage: across the street and down a narrow alley a glimpse of a poulet roti stand was just visible. Tiffany launched across the divide and lurched up with a screech beside the few remaining chooks. Matt dashed out, procured three of them along with a kilo of potatoes. One pit stop at a supermarche and three bottles of €3 rose later and we were ready to eat.

Sur le pont d'Avignon

We found the perfect possie on the banks of the Rhone on a small island between Avignon and Villeneuve.

Spuds & chooks

Rose? Check. Poulet? Check. River? Check.

€3 rose goes down well

Mission accomplished

The next morning we decided to have an alcohol-free day exploring Avignon, a UNESCO world heritage site famed for its bridge (now more of a platform due to the end having being swept into the Rhone during a flood in 1668), its papal palace and its annual theatre festival. We visited Les Halles, the food market, and snagged some melon, bread, cheese, ham, tomatoes, Quiche Lorraine and orange juice for lunch on the right bank.

Walking a straight line in Avignon

Palais des Papes: Avignon's papal palace

That evening we settled down around the corner from our small family-run hotel in Villeneuve, at a Cave du Vin where I discovered their champagne was €34 a bottle, the perfect accompaniment to the baked goat's cheese with honey. We drank the three bottles they had in stock and moved on to rose – well, our day was sans booze, but as soon as the sun went down bacchanalia reigned.

The courtyard at Hotel de l'Atelier in Villeneuve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msQPHxTUgzI

It's a hard job, but...

Charcuterie is such a happy word

Villeneuve was the perfect base from which to hit some serious wine country. Angus is a bit partial to Chateauneuf-du-Pape so we spent the following day happily sampling wine throughout the village and surrounding vineyards.

Pick a vineyard, any vineyard

It's all in the stones

Chateauneuf-du-Pape: vine time

Chateauneuf is famous for its reds, but the roses, which account for a tiny fraction of production, were also excellent.

The menu

We found an excellent restaurant and had a delicious meal of: Salade Catalane Croustillante (salad in a crisp pastry basket with boiled egg and salt cod), Boeuf Bourguignon Ecrase de Pomme de Terre (I should have checked whether it was made with Burgundy or Chateauneuf-du-Pape), and the finale, Poire au Chocolat Facon Belle Helene (poached pear with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice-cream).

I believe we enjoyed this one very much indeed

Life through a lens (of sorts)

When is a salad not a salad?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msQPHxTUgzI

We concluded our tour of Chateau-neuf-du-Pape at Chateau Mont-Redon, where we sampled my favourite rose of the day, a 2010 Lirac, a bargain at €9.50 a bottle.

No label required

That night, as my dear friend Sanjay would say, a monkey poohed in all our mouths and the next morning we woke with glazed eyes and heavy heads. The time had come for Gus to return to New Zealand and we'd decided to move on to Italy, so we hurtled back to Cannes for a final (subdued) night before boarding the train for Genoa.

Bye bye Cote d'Azur

The sun goes down on Cannes