Good Morning Contiki

Super early start today. We had to meet in the courtyard of the contiki hotel at 6am, so we had our alarms set for 5am to shower, dress and pack. Ebony and Jorge were staying at our hotel, so we met in the lobby and walked up to the Royal National (Contiki hotel) together. We checked in, dropped our bags, and headed off with a couple of people to grab a quick breakfast. Jacinda and I bought a plain croissant and banana each, and ate on the walk back to the courtyard.
We chucked our bags on the bus, and found a seat. Jacinda has a tendency to get motion sickness, which means we needed to sit up the front. No complaints - we had the best views on the bus!
Tamara spoke a bit about Contiki, giving us the low-down on what the trip is all about. We made our way out of London and got a bit of a view of the gorgeous English countryside on our way to Dover. We saw the White Cliffs of Dover as we went through border control and boarded our ferry over to France. The ferry took around 90 minutes to cross the English Channel. We jumped back on the bus, and entered France. As we drove in, Tamara explained the refugee crisis - we passed the 'Jungle', which was a sea of tents of people who had fled their home countries and were hoping to be given refugee status in London, and begin a new life. It was quite confronting - you couldn't see the people but there were just so many tents...
We kept driving and did a round of speed dating - everyone on the isle seats moved around to get to know everyone else on the bus. This process took about 2 hours, there are 53 people on our tour! I finally made it back to my seat, and Tamara chatted to us a bit more about the optional extras in Amsterdam, before we had a pit stop for food and toilets. By this point we had passed through France and Belgium, and had just crossed the border into the Netherlands. The weather was so much nicer, sunny and it felt like it was about 26 degress - much warmer than London!
We jumped back on the bus and Tamara gave a spiel about Amsterdam, its history, and what fun things we'll be getting up to.
We drove for about another hour, with some wonderful singing by bus driver Jo, before finally reaching Amsterdam!
We arrived at our hostel and found our rooms, I'm sharing with Jacinda, Ebony and T. Best hostel rooms I've ever seen - we had our own bathroom, tv in the room, great mattresses on the bunk beds, only issue was the room was HOT. We closed the blinds and left the door open for a while to let some cool air from the corridor in. We showered and got ready for dinner at the hostel restaurant.
Dinner was nice enough, schnitzel, meatballs, pasta, salad and chips... An odd combination, but would have been better had it all been warmer, but you can't complain when it's free!
We were then taken on the coach into the heart of Amsterdam. We checked out some beautiful buildings around the canals, and then headed in to Red Light District... Needless to say, that was a real eye opener! We ended up at a bar called Baleiushi's, which was playing a real eclectic mix of R&B and rock, and had a very cool mural on the wall of the members of the 27 club, including the latest member, Amy Winehouse. We left there in search of fritz (Dutch fries), but it seemed everywhere had closed, so we settled for KFC. By this point our group had narrowed down to just Ebony, T and I, so we decided to walk up to the main street to grab a cab home. It was on this short walk we found about 4 open Fritz shops... Fail! We hopped in a cab and headed home, absolutely pooped!Read more