Tony Wheeler 2010 Sat, 10 Jul 2010 07:38:14 -0800 Friday 3 September   – At midnight I'll be at London's Sloane Square in Chelsea to join several hundred other cyclists to ride down to Brighton on the south coast of England. Tuesday 28 September – 630 pm – I'll be talking about the new edition of Lonely Planet's The Travel Book at Waterstones Bookshop, Broad St, Oxford, England. September I've got appearances in Spain and Italy lined up, more details to follow. Thursday 4 November – At 1030 am I'll be speaking at the Adventure & Backpacker Industry Conference in Sydney and at 630 pm I'll be involved in the awards presentation. Saturday 20-Sunday 21 November – I'll be at the Australian Society of Travel Writers in Sydney annual conference.  Round Ko Samui Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:26:11 -0800 I’ve got a number of Robert Powell paintings hanging in my house, like this one of Preah Khan dancers at Angkor Wat which hangs over my bed. So a visit to Robert’s house on the Thai island of Ko Samui was a good excuse for a stopover between Melbourne and London in July. I’ve already blogged about my encounter with a bird song contest while I was driving around the island. Other stops included a visit to Wat Kunaram, where a head monk’s naturally mummified (‘underdecomposed’ the sign says) body, complete with stylish sunglasses, sits in a glass showcase. And to Hin Ta and Hin Yai, Grandpa and Grandma rocks. Grandpa is very phallic, Grandma the female equivalent. They’re nice natural rock formations, but like so much of Ko Samui reached via an obstacle course of tat and rubbish. Much of the island really is an unattractive mess Recent additions to the island’s tourist attractions include Wat Plai Laem’s 18-armed seated figure of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercyand a similarly sized fat Chinese Buddha. These two recent kitsch attractions were financed by the Bangkok Airways boss, who clearly has philanthropic instincts, even if they aren’t combined with good taste. London-Paris by bicycle â?? Part 2 Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:45:32 -0800 Day 1 of my London-Paris bike ride took me from London down to Seaford on the south coast of England. Day 2 was the short ride to Newhaven followed by the ferry to Dieppe and a 50km cruise along the wonderful Avenue Verte cycle track to Forge les Eaux. Click here for the Day 1 story. It’s not an early morning start the next day, the village clock is chiming 9am as I pedal out of Forge les Eaux and it’s a good job I enjoyed my petit dejeuner because for the rest of the day I come up against the great summer problem in France. In August everything shuts down and the whole country goes on vacation. Ideas of sitting in a pleasant village café at lunchtime go out the window, nothing is open, not a corner shop, not a patisserie, nothing. Lunch is the bar of chocolate I bought in a supermarket back in England. Still the riding is fine, pleasant back country roads, very little traffic, perhaps as many passing cyclists as cars, pretty little villages popping up as regular as clockwork.  The village of St Germer de Fly has a wonderful looking church but at 1pm I roll into St Crépin Ibouvilliers, where I’d thought about stopping for the night. Too early, too short a ride (63km) and the village is too dead. Wisely I carry on, if I’d stopped today would have been too short and tomorrow too long. But can I find anywhere to stay, village after village is not only slumbering through summer, but also lacking any accommodation? Grisy at 83km has a restaurant, but by then I’m too late for lunch although a Coca Cola sugar rush certainly helps my legs keep going. So I pedal another 33km to Poissy, a Parisian outer suburb where I find a business-like Ibis Hotel and pack away Italian food and a half bottle of red. Henonville, another pretty, but shut-down-for-August village â?º On Day 4 I’m checking my map, only 5km down the track, when a French cyclist comes by and suggests I follow him on his morning ride to work. So I have a traffic free cruise down a maze of back alleys and picturesque short cuts to the edge of the city. I just have a final climb and then the drop down to Pont Suresnes bridge (my third Seine crossing for the morning) and through the Bois de Boulogne (lots of cyclists out training) and there I am with the Eiffel Tower just across the river. I lived in Paris for a year in 1986 so I ride by the flat we rented on Rue St Paul in the Marais district. The flat where Doors singer Jim Morrison died was just 100metres away. My current bicycle, my old apartment â?¼ One of my favourite local cafes, L'Ebouillanté on rue des Barres, still turns out great bricks – a North African dish rather like a savoury crepe and I sat there in the sunshine feeling very pleased with life. L'Ebouillanté with the picturesque church of St Gervais in the background. â?¼ Finally there’s the short ride to the Gare du Nord railway station, get on the 513 pm Eurostar and at 626 pm I’m back in London with just a 7km ride home. Click here for the story on costs and distances: In Bruges Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:46:53 -0800 Markt – The Market Square – in the centre of medieval Bruges. London’s a great city, but there are lots of other great cities it’s easy to get to from London. Last week I hopped on my bicycle and spent three days riding to Paris. And Maureen and I have also hopped on Eurostar and zipped across to Bruges, Belgium’s perfectly preserved medieval city. â?²  The weather wasn’t always perfect during our three days in Bruges, but that certainly didn’t stop us (or anybody else) from exploring the city. Like this boatload of umbrella-toting tourists out for their €6.70 (US$8.50) canal cruise, it’s one of the city’s ‘must dos’. â?² The canals are even more beautiful at night. Markt is dominated by the towering Belfort and clambering up the 366 steps to the top is another Bruges essential. The view is superb in all directions and this was one of the key locations in the 2008 movie In Bruges. You find yourself wandering around the town quoting memorable lines (of which there were many) from the film. â?²  Or reading them. There was some repair work underway at the top of the Belfort and visitors had used the plywood partitioning as a handy place to graffiti their favourite In Bruges quotes. Another Bruges ‘must see’ is the beautiful Madonna & Child statue by Michelangelo in the Onze-Lievevrouwekerk church. It dates from 1504 and is the only such work to have left Italy during the artist’s lifetime. â?? The riverside used to be lined by windmills, a handful of them still remain. â?¼ The Melbourne Solar System - extended version Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:38:12 -0800 The Melbourne Solar System has extended by a few light years to Proxima Centauri. The new model of Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. â?? Joggers pass the Sun in St Kilda. â?¼ Helping to put together the Melbourne Solar System, a one to one billion scale model of the Solar System was one of my favourite projects in recent years. You can start on the bayside in St Kilda (Melbourne’s backpacker central) and head out past Mercury (58metres), Venus (108metres), Earth (150metres) and Mars (227metres), the four inner planets, and then continue to the outer ones, finally reaching lonely Pluto 5.9km away and two suburbs along the bay. Now the model has been extended by 4.2 light years. Which is 40 trillion km or, at our one to one billion scale, about 40,000km. Start at the model of the sun, make a complete circuit of the earth, passing over the south and north pole, and 40,000km later you’ll find yourself right back where you started, with a model of the nearest star to our own star, the Sun. The Dig Tree Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:53:27 -0800 Back in 1991 Maureen and I, with our daughter Tashi (10 years old at the time) and our son Kieran (aged 8), set out to drive from Melbourne to Cooper Creek near the town of Innamincka in South Australia. We were following the track of the Burke & Wills expedition, easily Australia’s most famous – and most disastrous – journey of exploration. Along the way I read Alan Moorehead’s classic Cooper’s Creek about the ill-starred journey. I’ve just finished reading Sarah Murgatroyd’s The Dig Tree, which tells the tale with a more modern outlook, including looking at the expedition’s interaction with the Aboriginals they encountered along the route. The ‘Dig Tree’ still stands beside Cooper Creek, I took this photo in 1991. Click here for more Sweden Mon, 09 Aug 2010 02:13:15 -0800 Maureen and I made a quick trip to Sweden, staying with friends with a summer house outside Stockholm near the town of Nyköping. The Baltic Sea coast north and south of Stockholm is a maze of island, 24,000 of them in the Stockholm Archipelago. So what do you do on a Swedish summer break? Well we went out and cruised around some of the islands, cycled back country roads, spotted deer and red squirrels (but never a moose) and had dinner in Oaxen Krog, one of the 50 best restaurants in the world. Oh, and we paid a visit to Trosa, a laid back little port town which somehow hasn’t made it into the guidebooks yet. The Swedes like it, summer residents include Abba’s Benny Andersson. London-Paris by bicycle â?? Part 1 Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:01:18 -0800 I’ve bought a new bicycle (a Specialized Sirrus, flat bar road bike, 30 speed, some carbon fibre, very nice) so why not break it in by riding to Paris? The idea that I could just roll out of my front door and end up at the Eiffel Tower was too good to miss. Cycling on the Avenue Verte bicycle track in France Plus there’s the Franco-British Cycle Plan, a scheme to put together a bicycle route following cycle tracks or minor roads all the way between the two capitals. So with the excellent Cycling Country Lanes & Byways (Sussex & South Surrey) map in my pocket and some additional research I left home at 620 am on Tuesday, crossed Westminster Bridge past Big Ben at 650 and followed the National Cycle Network Route 4 along the Thames to Greenwich. Except there were absolutely no Route 4 signs and no Route 21 signs to tell me it was time to turn south. I floundered around south-east London for far too long (at one point a bicycle track sign pointed toward Catford (which was on my route) only to be followed by another bicycle track sign to Catford pointing in completely the opposite direction. My bike, my lunch at a Route 21 trackside pub Finally I abandoned the route, plotted my own back road route and eventually intercepted Route 21. Most of the rest of the way it was pretty well signposted and the 23km Cuckoo Trail, following a disused railway line, was a delight. The Sussex Downs (which seemed to be up more than down) weren’t so nice and the weather wasn’t very special. I arrive at Seaford around 530pm, I’ve covered 149km and I really need that beer. Next morning it’s just 6km along the coast to Newhaven and the 930am LD Lines ferry whisks me across to Dieppe in four hours. I pedal off the ferry and almost immediately find a sign for the Avenue Verte (Green Way) cycle route. About 10km from Dieppe at Arques-la-Bataille I join the Avenue Verte cycle track and for nearly 50km follow this delightful track along another old railway route. There’s a river nearby, pretty little villages by the route, lots of old railway buildings, a real chateau and absolutely no traffic at all, apart from other cyclist, in-line skaters and walkers. Still I’m glad to get to Forges-les-Eaux for the night and a meal to remind me that the French can do really good food when they put their mind to it. Up in the clouds (or down to earth) Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:23:23 -0800 Two books on flying and airlines – I’ve just read Aloft, a collection of pieces by William Langewiesche which originally appeared in Atlantic Monthly or Vanity Fair. They include several of his classic analyses of aviation disasters – including the Colombia space shuttle – and musings on flying and weather. I posted recently on his book Fly by Wire, on the US Airways landing in the Hudson River. At the other extreme I zipped through Plane Speaking, accurately subtitled ‘The Wit & Wisdom of Michael O’Leary'. He’s the much loved or much hated, depending on your view, CEO of low cost carrier Ryanair. Here’s an airline spokesperson ready not to just throw political correctness out the window, but to positively eject it: • Nobody wants to sit beside a really fat bugger on board. We have been frankly astonished at the number of customers who don’t only want to tax fat people but torture them. Some of his comments make eminent sense to me: • Air marshals are a complete waste of time. I can’t think of anything that would reduce security more than having a guy on board with a gun. Too true, I don’t want to fly any airline with a gunman (or woman) on board. So I avoid US airlines wherever possible. I flew Ryanair to Sweden a couple of weeks ago and they were fine, although they can certainly be loose with the truth – it’s no trick to be good at not losing bags when you work so hard at discouraging passengers from ever checking a bag and never move a  bag from one flight to another. • When we used air-bridges we found that they were the 4th largest cause of delays. If it’s raining passengers will just walk a little faster. • Ryanair will never fly the Atlantic route because one cannot get there in a Boeing 737, unless one has a very strong tail wind or passengers who can swim the last hour of the flight. • Three dumb bastards decided they’re not going to go to the gate on time. It takes us twice as long to get their bags out of the hold. They should be strung up. • Anyone who thinks Ryanair flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things. • We don’t have the widest seats and you’re not getting any free food on board. Bugger off. • Our customer service is about the most well-defined in the world. We guarantee to give you the lowest airfare. You get a safe flight. You normally get an on-time flight. That’s the package. We don’t and won’t give you anything more on top of that. We care for our customers in the most fundamental way possible, we don’t screw them every time we fly them. Did you get that service? Yes, you did? Fine. Shut up and go away. • Do we carry rich people on our flights? Yes, I flew on one this morning and I’m very rich. Boris Biking in London Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:54:08 -0800 I’ve been Boris Biking around London. The Barclays Cycle Hire scheme (to use its correct name) launched on 30 July. With 5000 bicycles scattered around 315 docking stations – when it opened – it’s the second biggest bicycle share system in the world. The Paris Velib programme is way ahead, with 20,000 bicycles and 1639 stations. Boris Johnson is London’s colourful mayor and a keen cyclist. For the first month Boris Bikes are only available to registered users with a key, from 30 August anybody can front up, swipe a credit card and ride off. I paid £3 for my key: Day 1 – Tuesday 3 August – I picked up a Boris Bike in Kensington and after a couple of hundred metres discovered a station which would have been closer. I dropped my bike off near Sloane Square in Chelsea (after a bit of a search for a station) 19 minutes later. Half an hour later I got another bike and 14 minutes later dropped it off near Victoria train station. Another half hour later I picked up another bike and 20 minutes later dropped it beside the Kensington High St tube station. The front wheel was squeaking and I swapped it for another bike for a final 5 minute ride. So four bikes, 58 minutes riding, total cost £1. As long as you drop your bike within 30 minutes there’s no additional charge beyond the one day fee of £1. You can’t, I discovered, immediately swap one bike for another, however, you have to wait 5 minutes. Day 2 – Wednesday 4 August – Picked up a bike in Earls Court and in 24 minutes rode it to Victoria Train Station again. Cost for the day again £1. Day 3 – Thursday 5 August – Started from Kensington again and headed off through Hyde Park and Mayfair and into Soho. Where I suddenly realised my free half hour was nearly up and I needed to quickly dump the bike and get another. And couldn’t find a bike station. Eventually I gave up and kept the bike for 49 minutes, dropping it near Covent Garden (had trouble finding a station there too). Bought some maps and books in Stanfords, looked in a couple of other bookshops and then picked up a bike in Soho Square and 19 minutes later dropped it in Mayfair, near a Waterstones bookshop. Finally a 22 minute ride through Hyde Park, a supermarket stop and a 12 minute ride home. So I was riding for 1 hour and 42 minutes and it cost me £2, the £1 day charge as before and another £1 because I’d gone beyond 30 minutes on my first ride. Go beyond 1 hour and the cost jumps to £4, keep a bike for 24 hours and it’s going to cost you £50. Don’t do it, jump on, ride to where you’re going and drop it. If the trip is going to last more than 30 minutes, split it up. I’ve enjoyed Boris Biking. The bikes are sturdy (they need to be) so they’re pretty weighty, but they have 3 speed gears and move along OK. They have lights if you’re riding at night. They’re made in Montreal. At the moment everybody is interested in them, so you have plenty of conversations with interested onlookers and Boris Bikers are still at the ‘wave to each other’ stage. I’ve tried the free bike schemes in Paris – the Velib – and in Melbourne, Australia – the Melbourne Bike Share. Hello Dubai Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:04:02 -0800 ‘Skiing, Sand and Shopping in the World’s Weirdest City’ is the subtitle and it’s a good summation. I’m overdue for another visit to Dubai, I’ve not been back for a few years, but I’ve been there quite a few times since my first visit in 1999. I’ve been intrigued by Dubai ever since reading Jonathan Raban’s Arabia Through the Looking Glass (now simply titled Arabia) with its picture of 1980 Dubai, although Wilfred Thesiger touched on Dubai even earlier. Nobody seems ambivalent about Dubai, it inspires love or hate and often, it seems, in pretty equal measures. Personally? Well it horrifies me when you look at ‘The World,’ some reports insist it’s the end of the world and that it’s subsiding back beneath sea level. Or when you pass a golf course with green grass in a desert due to the water desalination plants working overtime. Or when you even think about an indoor ski slope, when the temperature outside is often the wrong side of 40ºC. An abra, the ferries which â?º shuttle across The Creek between Bur Dubai and Deira On the other hand you’ve got to be impressed by the sheer audacity of the creation, you can go to the museum and contemplate that you can trace almost the entire history of the city-state in aerial photographs. It’s that new. And Emirates, the Dubai Airline, seems to know no limits. Take the double-decker Airbus A380, Qantas have ordered 20, Singapore Airlines 19, Lufthansa 15, Air France and British Airways 12 each, no US airline has ordered even one. And Emirates? 90. Today you can get from almost any major city on earth to almost any other major city on earth with just one stop. In Dubai. Joe Bennett’s delightful book may not teach you anything unexpectedly new about the place, but he clearly enjoys it while also managing to avoid putting on those rose-tinted spectacles. He contrives to run into everybody, including those hard working citizens of the subcontinent, who keep the whole mirage in the desert going down at hard working, low paid, sweaty ground level. He even manages to join in an impromptu cricket match on the last page. Travel Blogs Sun, 01 Aug 2010 03:08:44 -0800 These days everybody’s doing one, but I reckon I did one of the first travel blogs. Back in 1994 the Wheeler family travelled from San Francisco to Boston in a 1959 Cadillac – big tails fins, a cigarette lighter for every seat and no brakes to speak of. We did that eastbound trip on a southerly route, a few months later we came back and did the trip westbound sticking further to the north. And we did a blog ... Here's a list of my travel blogs on this site: August 2010 - From our base in London Maureen and I made a trip to Sweden. Then I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled from London to Paris in three days. July 2010 - Northern Australia this time, Flying over the Kimberley, then back to Melbourne to have a look at an addition of 'my' Solar System. Finally a visit to the island of Ko Samui in Thailand. June 2010 - I was in Macau and Hong Kong plus I had a local trip in Australia. May 2010 - We did a circuit of Western Australia's Southwest, starting with Albany and then checking out the Big Trees. April 2010 - Brazil - first of all at Fernando de Noronha Island and then at Salvador and Sao Paulo. March 2010 - I started the month with some thoughts about public transport smart cards and after the Chile earthquake recalled my visit to Robinson Crusoe Island, Then we travelled around Burma and I took a trip down the Irrawaddy on the Road to Mandalay, reported from Monywa, revisited Mandalay, dropped in at Pindaya, trekked down to Inle Lake and checked the cats of the lake. There's more on Burma under Observations and Lists.   January 2010 - Maureen I took a trip along Melbourne's Yarra River, then we went to Bruny Island in Tasmania. December 2009 - my New England travels took me to Jack Kerouac's birthplace, Lowell, Massachusetts. November 2009 - I was in Galway and Inishmor in Ireland, Udine and Trieste in Italy, Ljubljlana in Slovenia and in New England in the USA. October 2009 - I blogged about New York's hip Meat Packing District and also about the current international fad for big Ferris Wheels, I'd just ridden the London one. September 2009 - Maureen and I were in Australia's Kimberley region and I wrote about Threats to the Kimberley, Flying Across the Kimberley and staying at the Kimberley Coastal Camp. July & August 2009 - I spent three weeks kicking around Alaska for LPTV - travelling to Alaska, taking the train to Whittier, then crossing Prince William Sound to Valdez and on to McCarthy, up on to the Root Glacier, a stay in Kennecott & McCarthy, north to Nome, out to the Kenai Peninsula and finally a visit to Kodiak Island. July 2009 - A short visit to Budapest and a tale of Budapest subway fare evasion. June 2009 - Heading for the Faroe Islands to soak up some midnight sun I visited Gjógv and Mykines and I've posted a photo album from my trip. May 2009 - I travelled around Costa Rica and reported on Monteverde, Arenal National Park. Montezuma and Quepos & Manuel Antonio. April 2009 - Shooting a commercial in Rome. March 2009 - Riding the Tour d'AFrique bicycle ride through Tanzania and Malawi - part one and then part two. February 2009 - A film shoot in Laos: 100 Waterfalls, Sainyaburi Elephant Festival and Back to Luang Prabang January 2009 - Kangaroo Island and Pretty Beach House in Australia December 2008 - Getting Ready to Cycle Africa October 2008 - Space Tourism October 2008 - Newfoundland, Canada September 2008 - St Pierre & Miquelon September 2008 - The Melbourne Solar System August 2008 - Byron Bay to Coolangatta June 2008 - Lennon & McCartney childhood homes June 2008 - Walking in Tuscany May 2008 - The Orient Express April 2008 - Colombia March-April 2008 - Haiti March 2008 - South Beach, Miami February 2008 - Travelling Taiwan January 2008 - Australia Day in the Wimmera Region January 2008 - Maria Island, Tasmania, Australia January 2008 - Namena Marine Protected Area, Fiji December 2007 - Visits to Pakistan October 2007 - Georgia (the ex-Soviet one) August 2007 - Mongolia - travels with Chinggis Khaan July 2007 - Tanzania & Kilimanjaro May-June 2007 - Blogging the USA May 2007 - Australia - Kakadu - Crocodiles, Birds, Rock Art May 2007 - Australia - Ningaloo Reef - Swimming with the Whale Sharks February 2007 - Africa - Plymouth-Banjul Challenge December 2006-January 2007 - Tasmania - The Overland Track September 2006 - England -Coast-to-Coast Walk May 2006 - Afghanistan May 2006 - Albania April 2006 - Iraq April 2005 - Singapore to Shanghai March 2006 - Pakistan March 2006 - England - Mini Production February 2006 - Lonely Planet's 'bourse' in Paris January 2006 - Australia - The Great Ocean Walk January 2006 - Australia - France to Victoria, Cyprus to Melbourne December 2005 - To the Outer Reaches of the Solar System November 2005 - Africa - Cape Town to Casablanca October 2005 - Japan - National Museum of Ethnology February 2005 - Oman 1994 - USA - Coast to Coast by Cadillac A Bird Song Contest Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:41:38 -0800 Driving along the west coast of the Thai island of Ko Samui I came upon a bird singing contest. There’s a rectangular area with four clothesline-like wires run down it. Hung from the wires are bird cages, in groups of 4 by 4, so 16 in a group. There were 7 groups in all (so 112 bird cages) plus perhaps 20 or 30 more either non-starters, held in reserve or something! The birds are all red-whiskered bulbul (nok krong hua juck) and just as I arrive the covers are swept off the cages and the contest starts. At a whistle sound they all start to sing, their owners (all male) listening intently. After 30 seconds the whistle is blown again and a marker-pen-toting scorer moves in to each group of 16 and marks the some of the red cards hanging beneath the cages. The whistle blows again and another scoring period commences. What’s it all about? How do you score them? With 100+ birds all chirping away together how do you separate one from the other? I’ve no idea, but it was fascinating. Click here for a link to a paper on dove cooing contests in Thailand, which also mentions the red-whiskered bulbul. Aerial Views - Melbourne to Singapore Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:13:50 -0800 I’ve quoted that Joan Didion line before, that ‘the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.’ And flying Melbourne-Singapore in a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 a couple of weeks ago I was reminded how true that can be. Crossing Australia there was this magical view of salt lakes near the Northern Territory-Western Australia border. A few hours later there were some magical views of Bali and then, as we tracked across the eastern end of the island of Java a string of volcanoes, I think this one might have been Gunung Raung. Recently I’ve had wonderful views flying over the wild and remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Or click for some of my favourite ‘views out the window’ in 2008 and in 2009.   Expensive Bad Taste - US car thieves & Arab bling Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:22:42 -0800 What’s the most commonly stolen car? Usually older cars (easier to steal) and popular cars (more of them to steal). So in the US Hondas and Toyotas get stolen most often, in the UK it’s an assortment of Fords and Vauxhalls, in Australia Holdens and Fords. But a recent US report revealed what new cars get stolen most frequently on a percentage basis and the answer is car thieves like flash and bling. US car makers may go bankrupt because not enough Americans buy their cars, but thieves certainly like them, eight out of the 10 ‘most stolen’ cars were American. Topping the list was the car I’ve already nominated as the ugliest thing on four wheels, the original axle-of-evil, the Cadillac Escalade. Own an Escalade and you’re three to five times more likely to find an empty space where your wheels should be, or 13 times more likely than if you’d bought a Volvo S80 (the least frequently stolen car in the USA). The Hummer, the original ugly-mobile, is also right up there in the steal-this-car stakes. â?? The 'axle-of-evil' Meanwhile in the UK the bad taste car story is Middle Eastern super cars in the fashionable Knightsbridge district – home to the Harrods department store. Wealthy young Arab men have their Lamborghinis flown to London for the summer at a cost of around £10,000 (US$15,500). The handling agent which bring them in reckons they’ve flown 15 cars to London for the summer of 2010. And not ordinary super cars, the Abu Dhabi bling-mobile dealer says the average one million dirham (US$270,000) super car buyer spends another half a million dirham (US$135,000) tricking it up. The end result can be something like this Mercedes SLR and Bugatti Veyron I noted in Mayfair, looking like they’d been entirely chromeplated and proving you can spend an awful lot of money to end up with what the Brits would call a ‘chav-mobile,’ in Australia the owner would be a bogan.