Back in Dubai

2008-04-24

Summary

- Dubai

- Beachfront restaurant dinner

- Jumeirah Beach Hotel pool, spa and hot tub

 

We arrived back in Dubai, but this time it was much hotter than when we’d been there 3 months ago. The temperature was hovering around the high 30s and low 40s. It was lucky I was on the ball when we arrived at Dubai airport as the counter where we were to get our Emirates welcome pack was BEFORE passport control. The documentation we’d received from Peregrine said that we were to go through customs and passport control and then collect our welcome pack. We went through passport control and over to the transfers desk where we had to wait about 10 or 15 minutes. Then we were lead out to the road where we were picked up by the transfer cars. The cars were outstanding, easily the best transfers we’ve had, and these ones were free! The car had all leather interior and was very spacious. We were transferred to our hotel at Jumeirah Beach. It took much less time to get there than I’d expected.

 

Upon arrival at Jumeirah Beach Hotel we were greeted with an orange juice and a damp warm towel. This is more like it! For those of you who don’t know where Jumeirah Beach Hotel is, it is right opposite the Burj Al Arab (the world renowned 7 star hotel shaped like a sail). We had decided to spoil ourselves after having been roughing it for 3 months, hence the splurge on Jumeirah Beach Hotel. We checked in and had to give a 3000 Dhs deposit on the room, which would be refunded upon check out. Bloody hell, that’s like $1000…. hefty deposit! We were escorted up to our room, which happened to be right at the far end of the hotel. We weren’t carrying any big bags this time, so it wasn’t such a big deal. We were on the 11th floor, so about halfway up (25 floors in total). We were given a map, but with all the facilities marked and 12 restaurants to choose from, it was a little overwhelming. The rooms were nice, but I had kinda expected even better for the price we were paying. The facilities at the hotel were top notch, but a spa bath in the rooms would have been nice and perhaps free broadband access rather than $5 an hour (comparing it to what I could have had back home for a third of the price). Having said that the bed was soooo comfortable; it was like a big marshmallow, it just swallowed you up. There was a complimentary fruit bowl in our room, as well as complimentary water, mouth wash, sunscreen, rubber ducky, slippers, beach bag and a whole bunch of other usual complimentaries. We just chilled out for a while and looked through the hotel directory/info in our room. Facilities included several pools, private beaches, giant chess & checkers boards, table tennis, playgrounds, complimentary access to Wild Wadi Water Park, 12 restaurants, sports centre with gym, hot tub & jacuzzi, steam room, sauna, water sports (additional cost), tennis courts (additional cost) and massage (additional cost).

 

We looked at all the places to eat and narrowed the list significantly based on the dress code of each restaurant. Having been travelling grass roots style for 3 months, the best I could achieve was a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. It was obvious we needed to go shopping for something more formal! Not only for dining, but our stay at Jumeirah Beach Hotel gives us complimentary visits to the Burj Al Arab (which would normally cost a fair whack and requires booking in advance… sometimes even months in advance) which has a formal dress code. So we went for a wander to have a look around the place and to have a look at the menu options available. When I went down to the restaurants/facilities area, I was told I was not allowed to bring a camera through; ‘no professional cameras allowed’. I gave a confused look and said “but I’m staying in this hotel”, to which they replied “oh sorry sir, that’s fine”. This was to be the first of many times when staff assumed we weren’t staying there.

 

We ate at the Beachfront restaurant which was down near the sports centre. This was the ‘health’ restaurant, being situated just outside the gym. Pretty much everything on the menu was organic and there were a variety of fresh juices to choose from. We watched the Burj Al Arab ‘light show’ as we ate our dinner; it is illuminated by coloured spot lights which change their colours after intervals of about half an hour. We had a look through the shops at the hotel, but all were pretty horrendously priced. We got changed and shot up to the sports centre to use the spa. There were two hot tubs with temperatures varying by 2 degrees and a jacuzzi which was hotter still. The steam room has a timetable, alternating between men and women. Only one sex may use the steam room at a time, hence the timetable. We got another complimentary bottle of water from the spa as well. After relaxing in the spa, we headed up and watched some tellie before going to sleep in the big marshmallow bed.

 

 

2008-04-25

Summary

- Buffet breakfast at Latitude – much better than breadfast

- Shopping at Mall of the Emirates

- Souk Madinat Jumeirah

- Café Havana dinner

- Jumeirah beach Hotel pool, spa and hot tub

 

On Friday morning we slept in til about 10am before making our way down to the Arabian Adventures counter to ask about a peculiarity we’d noticed in our welcome pack we’d recieved at the airport. Our booking for the next hotel, K-Porte Inn, showed that only a single room had been booked, not a double room. We asked the AA woman to confirm what was happening and whether it was an error in the documentation. She called K-Porte Inn who told her that a single room was all that had been booked, so we’d have to pay the difference to get a double room. Grrrr, anyway we had to go get some breakfast before the buffet closed.

 

We for our buffet breakfast. The breakfast was included, just as well since it was about 140 Dhs otherwise (almost $50). There were two places to choose from for the buffet breakfast; Beachcombers and Latitude. We just went to Latitude since it was the closer one. The buffet breakfast was awesome; much better than breadfast back in Egypt & Jordan! Our only problem was that the buffet closed at 11am, so we had to eat as fast as possible as we only had 20 minutes I skipped anything that required too much waiting, so unfortunately missed out on the made-on-the-spot crepes and eggs/omelettes since they had a line up. The crepes looked good too. But there was plenty of other food to choose from, raning from bacon, sausages, baked beans, fruit, yoghurt, pastries, stir fry, cereal, breads (no thanks!), toast, pancakes, pikelets, salads, juices, and that’s just the ones I can remember! In fact there was 4 or 5 different food rooms/sections/categories.

 

After filling up to the brim at breakfast, we headed off to the Mall of the Emirates to do some shopping. We’d just missed the 11am free shuttle service, so had to wait for the noon service. We jumped on the shuttle and it took about 10 minutes to get to the mall. Brand names, brand names, brand names… that’s pretty much what Mall of the Emirates is all about. Looks like this could be an expensive day, but we really did need to get something formal to wear. We passed by Ski Dubai and had a look inside. Ski Dubai is that nuts ski slope you’ve probably seen in powerpoint slides emailed around. It’s a massive enclosed ski slope with ski lift and all, as well as random ice sculptures, and it’s in the middle of the desert pretty much. We continued looking through clothing stores, with nightmarish price tags flashing by my eyes… $800 pairs of jeans and $400 t-shirts. It was at about this point when I started looking for the big red ‘Sale’ signs. Score, I found one, 75% off! Had a look through and it was mostly suits. I hadn’t planned to go that formal so continued on and found the sort of shop I was looking for, more like a Roger David style of shop. Found the shirt I wanted and a pair of slacks that looked all right, but neither of them had my size.

 

Found no other shops with appropriate clothes at appropriate prices, so back to the 75% off shop. I found a suit that I quite liked on a manikin, so asked the salesman to try it on. He asked my size to which I replied that I had no idea… I’ve only bought a suit once and that was for year 12 formal! Turns out the suit I liked only came in larger sizes, so he came back with a somewhat similar suit for me to try. Tried it on and it was a tad too big, so he got a smaller size. Decided it was all right, but I didn’t like the style as much as the manikin’s suit. So I looked around the store for something that caught my eye. Most of the ones I pulled off the rack the guy would say straight away that it wouldn’t fit cos ____ (fill in the blank). For example it only came in sizes for people with long arms or short arms etc.

 

I finally came across one that was a regular fit that I liked. Mind you it still wasn’t up to the standards of my manikin choice, but nevertheless a step in the right direction from the previous suit I tried on. So I tried it on, then found a green shirt I liked to try on with it. The shirt was however in packaging and the salesman didn’t want to open the packaging so I could try it on. So he found one in yellow instead… tried it, wrong size, got the right size. Then I had a look at ties in the mean time and picked out one with some green and browns (suit was brown). Picked one out and told the guy I’d take the suit and the green shirt in the appropriate size. ‘We don’t have the green shirt in that size’. Right… not sure that I like the yellow one as much. So I started looking at shoes; I wanted brown shoes, but the brown ones were usually too much of a reddish tone. The shoes here were a bit too pimpish for my liking, long pointy shoes that made me look like a clown and usually squashed my toes cos they narrowed too fast for my wide feet. I went and found the salesman and told him I was trying to find some shoes to which he replied that I was a difficult customer. I tell you if I hadn’t have been so desperate to get some more formal clothes, that would have been the point where I walked out of the store and purchased nothing. Sorry for taking my time before dropping $1000 on a Pierre Cardin suit! Oh and sorry for not knowing my size… isn’t that your job to be able to tell my size! Tosser! He made no move to come with me to help me pick out some appropriate shoes for my foot shape and suit colour, so I thought stuff this. Grabbed the suit, yellow shirt and the tie (which happened to have green, yellow and brown so went fine with the yellow shirt too) and went to the register. Suddenly the salesman was available to help… his commission was important but not his customer service… tosser! All up the purchase was equivalent to about $600, baring in mind that that was at 75% off… so full price would have been around $2500!

 

My next task was to find some shoes. We tried a shoe shop that was reasonably priced, but nothing appealed in the right colour and style with the right size. Meanwhile I found a CK wallet I liked, so got that. While Skye was looking at dresses in Zara, I found some shoes in the men’s section (I didn’t expect there to be men’s stuff in a shop called Zara but anyway) that were all right, tried them on, they’ll do. I lose patience for shopping very quickly. Gave them to Skye with my credit card for her to go up and start the transaction while I put my sneakers back on. I went up and signed my C/C slip then off we went. I later discovered that there was now a hole in the side of the shoe where the magnetic tag had been attached to the shoe to stop theft (triggers an alarm when leaving store). The magnetic tag had just been hole-punched through the shoe! I didn’t get a boxed pair, but a display pair with a hole in them and a few scuff marks already on them. Since I wasn’t there watching when it went in the bag I didn’t know I was not getting a new boxed pair… *sigh*. Skye hadn’t found anything she was really impressed with and had seen a couple of nice dresses in a catalogue in our room for a shop nearby to our hotel, so we jumped back on the shuttle back to Jumeirah Beach Hotel at about 4pm.

 

Back at Jumeirah Beach Hotel, we were told that the golf carts zipping around would take us to Souk Madinat Jumeirah, which is where Skye wanted to get a dress from. As soon as we approached a stopped golf cart it zipped off and other golf carts just drove past us while we waited at the ‘golf cart stop’, so we thought bugger this we’ll just walk. A security guard stopped us along the way and asked us where we were going (we were walking along the beachfront) and we told him we were going to the souk and that we were staying at Jumeriah Beach Hotel. He gave this suspicious smile as though I was lying and then asked with an attitude “yeah?… what room number” in a stupid cocky tone as though he’d asked me a question I couldn’t answer. So I told him the room number and he asked for my last name, which I gave him. We went through, but I was quite disappointed in the way we’d been treated thus far. Sure we’re generally younger than everyone else staying here, but that doesn’t imply we should be treated with any less respect. I found it very disrespectful the way the security guard had spoken to us as though we didn’t belong there. Sure he’s got a job to do, but no need to be an ass about it! The next security guard had less of an attitude problem and asked why we were walking instead of being on a golf cart to which we said that none of the golf carts had stopped for us. She said we could wait there for a cart, which we did for a few minutes but none came so we continued walking.

 

We arrived at Souk Madinat Jumeirah, which was pretty much a fake souk. It was designed to look like the ‘real’ souk of Dubai, but it was all indoors (like a shopping mall style) and contained fancier (and more expensive) products. There weren’t many clothing stores to look at and when we found the one with the dress Skye liked from the catalogue, Ouanass, they did not have ANY of their pictured dresses from the catalogue. None of the dresses there really came close to the appeal of the catalogued dresses. So we left empty handed and walked back to Jumeirah Beach Hotel. Now we had to go back to the Mall of the Emirates to get a dress! We got back on the shuttle at 6pm which took us to the mall, and then since it was now dinner time, we ate at Café Havana. Once again, a great meal from Café Havana; off to the dress shops… yay….! :s I went off looking at men’s stores as I didn’t want to hang around in the dress shops… incredibly boring. Picked myself up a shirt and jacket. The shops were packed at this time, obviously it’s the ‘in’ thing to do in the evening… go shopping. Skye ended up finding a dress she didn’t mind in Zara, so got that. Although she noticed one of the straps was broken, but it was the only one in her size. When she asked at the desk if she could get any discount because the strap was broken, they refused. Skye bought it anyway since we just wanted to be done with wasting away time shopping. Needless to say after my experience with the shoes from Zara and Skye’s experience with the dress, I would not recommend shopping at Zara… I certainly wouldn’t be going back there in a hurry! When Skye came out of Zara, we went looking for some shoes for her. She found some pimped purple shoes which was a very radical choice for her, and then I was more than happy to get the hell out of there! Shuttled back to the hotel at around 9pm. We’d blown the whole day on shopping! I was not happy!

 

After dropping the shopping off at our room, we headed down to the pool for a quick dip. There was nobody else in the pool at all, so we had it all to ourselves; including two lifeguards. We headed back over to the sports centre where we got in the spa/hot tub. I had a chat to the staff member there as I was getting out of the spa and he was telling me about all the different celebrities that they get coming through staying at Jumeirah Beach Hotel. After going back to our room and getting changed we went down and sat on the beach for a while and took some photos of the changing lights on the Burj Al Arab. Then we went back to the room to watch some tellie and go to sleep in the big marshmallow bed.

 

 

2008-04-26

Summary

- Buffet breakfast at Beachcombers

- Wild Wadi Water Park

- Beach

- Burj Al Arab

- La Parrilla Argentinean restaurant

 

On Saturday morning we got up at about 9:30am and decided to check out the hotel’s other buffet breakfast restaurant; Beachcombers. Beachcombers was much less busy and crowded, so was definitely a better choice. The service was also much better, which probably comes hand in hand with the fact that there were less customers to serve. I began by indulging in a chocolate filled crepe (I had the guy put chocolate sauce over the crepe before folding it up and putting it on my plate. YUM! Although perhaps not the best way to start the morning as I did feel a little ill afterwards. We had plenty of time this morning so didn’t have to rush our breakfast; cereals, pastries, fresh fruit, yoghurt, omelettes, crepes, juice. We walked away quite content and full; we gave the waiting staff more of a tip than usual as we were so impressed with their service.

 

We headed over to Wild Wadi Water Park after breakfast. The park opens at 11am, but people staying in the Jumeirah complex are given exclusive access from 10am to 11am. One of the staff members asked about Skye’s shirt (which says ‘Tanzania’ on the front). He was from Kenya and asked if we’d been to Kenya as well as Tanzania. Anyway, we got into the water park around 10:15am or so. I went in the wave pool while I waited for Skye to change into her bikini (I was already wearing boardies so didn’t need to change), then we headed over to the water slides. Wild Wadi is one of the most technically advanced water parks. You actually start at the bottom of the water slide, so it was a nice change not to have to climb up hundreds of stairs to the top of the slide. There are single tubes or double tubes available for you to use (you can’t go on them without sitting in a tube). Water jets shoot up the water slide, pushing the tube (along with you) up with it. When one water slide ends others begin, such that you end up in a small pool of water which is linked to the starts of other slides; so you never actually leave the tube, you just float over to the start of the next slide you want to go on. There are two different starting points, one which takes you through about 3 sets of slides and another that takes you through 4 or 5 sets of slides. We’d started at the 3-setter until we discovered the other one had more sets of slides, so then used that as our starting point each time. Started with the double tubes, but then went single. I liked the single tube much better as you could make it spin around as you went along the slide and were often going backwards through the slide. I almost fell off at one point as you get thrown around a lot more on the single tube. One of the end slides is a tube which is literally pitch black so you have no idea what’s coming up and which way the slide is going to turn. The slides were a lot of fun and we enjoyed the short queues while they lasted. Shortly after 11am though, we found ourselves lining up for 10 to 15 minutes, which wasn’t so much fun so we left. There was plenty of other slides; speed slides and what not; but we didn’t bother with any of them cos we wanted to spend some time on the beach.

 

The beach was only accessible to those staying at the Jumeirah complex; i.e. it was a private beach. When we entered the beach area a staff member escorted us to the beach chairs we wanted to sit at and then re-arranged them asking what direction we wanted them facing and whether we wanted a shade umbrella or not. There was also waiters walking around the beach taking chair-side orders and they’d bring the food/drink out to you when it was ready! The water was surprisingly warmer than I thought it’d be. The area of ocean we swam in was that between the Burj Al Arab (famous sail shaped classy hotel) and the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, so we took a few photos of ourselves swimming in front of the Burj Al Arab

 

After a few hours we went back up to our room to shower and get changed into our new clothes so we could visit the Burj Al Arab. We also picked out a restaurant to go to that night and booked it in. We waited for a golf cart and had several whiz past us. After about 10 minutes we finally got on one which turned out not to be going to the Burj Al Arab. I still have no idea how you’re supposed to be able to tell where it goes… Anyway we got off at a stop in the right direction and waited for another cart to take us to the Burj Al Arab. The first thing you notice is the cars parked out the front of it; Mercedes, Ferraris, Maseradis, Lamborghinis… you name it, it was there. When we went inside there were escalators leading up to and down from the first floor with massive fish aquarium either side; by massive I mean that the whole wall was an aquarium! Between the two escalators was a large water feature shooting water around in timed patterns. Another water feature, a large fountain, was located at the top of the escalators. There were mosaics on the floor and massive chadeliers and exquisite décor. Looking up you could see straight up to the top of the building with each floor being painted in a different bright solid colour. The curved part of the hotel is in fact a sail similar to the style used on sail-shading areas in parks and backyards for example. We went in one of the elevators to check out what the floors looked like. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be going in the elevators, but we did anyway. When we got off the elevator there was a lady seated at a desk who asked if she could help us, and we were quickly told that it was a private floor so we were not permitted there. Back into the elevator we went up to the top to check out the bar. The bar was open for high tea, but only to those with a reservation; apparently you have to book well in advance, as in weeks to months in advance. So we went all the way back down and then hung out in the lobby area, soaking up the class of the place. Didn’t spot any celebrities, but a couple of supermodels came in (presumably they were anyway).

 

We went and waited out the front for a golf cart. Meanwhile a helicopter came and landed on the helicopter pad near the top of the Burj Al Arab. The golf carts were filling very quickly as there was a large Asian crowd who were also waiting for them. We had to wait until the 4^th or 5^th cart before we got a spot on one. The problem was that it took us in the wrong direction, to some other hotel near the Souk Madinat Jumeirah. Once again, wrong cart! Nevermind, we got off and took some snaps along the beach of the Burj Al Arab from a different angle (from the SW side instead of the SE side we’d seen previously) and got a life guard to take a photo of us with it in the background. We didn’t really fit the part walking along the beach in a suit/dress. We got back on a golf cart and ensured it was going to the right place this time. The guy was very friendly and chatty and he stopped at a spot closer to the Burj Al Arab and offered to take a photo of us. He snapped away about 5 or 6 shots moving around to get the composition he wanted; best effort I’ve seen from someone else using my camera to take a picture of me, I was quite impressed! We got some other people to take shots us of inside the Burj Al Arab earlier, but upon looking at the shots later it looks like they missed the focus on 90% of the shots we had taken (i.e. we were out of focus) The driver continued along and took us back to our hotel where we rewarded him handsomely for his quality hospitality Then we went up to the room and chilled out for a while before dinner.

 

We had dinner at what was recommended to be the fanciest of the 13 or so restaurants offered within the Jumeirah Beach Hotel complex; La Parrilla, an Argentinean restaurant. La Parrilla was on the top floor of the hotel, level 24 or 25… I forget which it was. We ordered our meals and drinks and then the entertainment started. They had a pianist and couple who were performing dances in the middle of the restaurant, presumably Argentinean dances and often included drums or these balls on a string which would be hit against the floor. I managed to spill olive oil on my suit jacket the first time I’d worn the damn thing! After dinner we went and chilled out in our hotel room, packing up some of our stuff ready for the next day.

 

 

2008-04-27

Summary

- Buffet breakfast at Beachcombers

- K-Porte Inn (not Comfort Inn!)

- Sundowner tour

 

On Sunday morning we had breakfast at Beachcombers again. The service was not quite as good as last time, yet at times there was over service, such as when we went to get some more food our still half-full glasses of juice were cleared from the table before we got back. Nevermind, it was still better than the service at Latitude Back to our rooms we had to pack all our stuff ready to leave

 

We called up the concierge to take our bags downstairs for us and then waited. After about 10 or 15 minutes I decided to go down and start checking out, while Skye waited in the room with our bags for the concierge. There was a bit of a queue at the check-out, but it only took about 10 minutes or so. I told the lady we were still waiting for our bags to come down and she said she’d make sure that the concierge hadn’t forgotten about it. Then I waited. Skye eventually came down and said the concierge had come to collect the bags; apparently there were over 100 people checking out today! We had to wait another 15 minutes or so until the bags made it to the lobby; all up it was about an hour for the bags to get down, perhaps we should have just carried them down ourselves.

 

We jumped in a taxi (always plenty out the front of the Jumeirah Beach Hotel) and left our luxury hotel behind. The taxi driver didn’t know where K-Porte Inn was so called up some guy and I assume was asking him in Arabic for directions. About 20 minutes later we arrived at our destination… or so we thought. We got out of the taxi and I saw the sign for the hotel ‘Comfort Inn’. “No no no, K-porte Inn, not Comfort Inn”. “Yea yea, this is the one, they same place” the taxi driver insisted. Though they sound the same, I hadn’t just told the taxi driver the location, I had given him a piece of paper with ‘K-Porte Inn’ written on it, so it wasn’t a communication problem there. I wasn’t convinced that they were the same place, so when the bellman came out I asked him, pointing to the paper, “Is this K-Porte Inn?”. He shook his head and pointed at the sign saying “No, this is Comfort Inn”. He probably thought that was a pretty stupid question, I know I thought it was. Nevertheless it was enough to prove to the taxi driver that he hadn’t taken us to the right place. He asked the bellman for directions and took us a few minutes through side streets to K-Porte Inn.

 

Neither the taxi driver, nor anyone at K-Porte Inn gave us ANY assistance with our luggage. I filled out the necessary details/forms to check in., and then we waited about 15 minutes until the room was ready. After taking all of our stuff into the room, we headed out to do some shopping. Whilst in Dubai 3 months ago we had stayed in Bur Dubai, on the west of Dubai Creek. This time we were in Deira, on the east side of Dubai Creek, which is much busier. There is a lot more traffic and ‘hustle and bustle’ in Deira. Being a Sunday however, most of the local shops were closed. On the map there was a large shopping centre which didn’t appear too far away so we started walking there. After about 30 minutes we were only just over halfway there and it was a 40 degree day so we decided to throw in the towel. We got a taxi, which probably took longer than it would have taken to walk back since there was just so much traffic! We went back up to our room feeling very hot and bothered, and frustrated.

 

At around 4pm we were picked up from the hotel for our Sundowner tour we’d booked with Arabian Adventures. We were the first pick ups for the 4WD vehicle, which had to make a further 2 stops to pick up another 3 people. On arrival in the desert we stopped at the meeting point for all the vehicles doing this particular tour; there would have been about 20 vehicles all up, so obviously a popular tour. From here we drove through the dunes, with the driver thrashing his 4WD wherever possible trying to get as much air and slide around as much as possible; just the way I like it We stopped off at a camel farm, where there were… well… camels to point out the obvious. Skye and I kept our distance since we know that camels do bite and these were ‘wild’ camels in the sense that they are not trained at all. Off to kane it through the dunes for a while longer, meanwhile one of the other vehicles got bogged in the sand. Later we stopped again; watching the sun set behind the dunes. Onward again to the ‘camp’ in the middle of the desert.

 

The ‘camp’ consisted of big marquee tents set up with carpet rugs lined over the sand under the marquees, and cushions to sit on at long low tables. There were camel rides available but Skye and I couldn’t be bothered lining up for it, since we’d already had a camel ride… lining up for 20 minutes to have a 1 minute camel ride hardly seemed worth it. We got some drinks from the bar and waited for dinner to be served. I spoke with a nice Indian family who was sitting at the same table as us; they were on holiday staying in their holiday home in Jumeirah (i.e. they’re obviously loaded!). There was another couple who I think were American; the guy had got a silhouette shot of me taking a shot of Skye on the dunes while the sun was setting; it was a really cool shot actually. He said he’d email it to me, but alas it never eventuated (I think it’s safe to say that at the time of writing this… 6 months later… I don’t think it’s going to be coming!). After dinner, a belly dancer performed on the centre carpet; pulling several people from the crowd to join her. While I was talking to the Indian family, Skye went off and got a Henna tattoo done on her foot. As the night neared to an end, I went and smoked some sheesha before we got back in the 4WDs and headed back.

Journeying Jordan

2008-04-17

Summary

- Aqaba

We cruised along for about 1.5 hours and then the boat stopped. We waited to get off; there was no movement of the people around us. We sat there waiting for 15 minutes or so before somebody from our group asked a member of the crew (one of the few ppl on board who spoke English) when we could get off. The reply was ‘in 15 minutes’. Meanwhile David had gone back for the passports, but was told we’d get them back after getting off the boat. Once again a lot of people on the group started getting pissed off saying they weren’t getting off the boat without their passports. Anyway, after about 30 mins there was some movement in the seats around us, so we got up to get off the boat. We went down to the cargo area and grabbed our bags, then went out to meet our Jordanian tour leader. We then had to take our bags to some room where we waited about 15 minutes for our passports and then took our bags through a security checkpoint. Then onto the bus, we were taken to our hotel in Aqaba. It was then that we realised that the timezone had changed and we had lost an hour (i.e. went forward one hour).

We got to the hotel just after 11:30pm. We got our keycard for the room, yes they use keycards here, not keys; a big technological jump from Egypt. We went up to our room, but the keycard didn’t work in our door, so back down to reception to get the keycard fixed. While we were down there somebody was asking for a twin room instead of the double room they had, so I said we’d swap as we had a twin room but wanted a double (even though our travel agent ensured us that all our bookings had been changed to double rooms). The rooms were very nice, it was very luxurious after coming from Egypt. We went for a walk to find at ATM to get some JD since all I had was 6 JD. Then we walked to a nearby café, Tche Tche Café, for dinner. The food was great and came out nice and warm; a very nice change. Jordan seems to be a lot cleaner and more organised than Egypt. We got back to our room shortly after 1am and went to bed. I woke up during the night and spent a couple of hours in the loo; perhaps it was too soon for me to start having spicy foods after my stomach upset. Oh yeah, the butt washer here is hilarious, we didn’t actually use it, but tried turning it on and the water shoots out at an incredible speed, hitting us in the face and splashing all over the ceiling… we weren’t expecting it to shoot that high!

 

2008-04-18

Summary

- Wadi Rum

- Petra

On Friday morning we didn’t have anything that needed to be done until 11am, which is when we had the pre-departure meeting, so we slept in til 9:30, had breakfast and then got our stuff all packed and organised. We left at noon and headed to Wadi Rum (the desert). The sand here was a pinkish sort of colour, although in some areas you could actually see the transition to a lighter yellowy sand or a darker brownish sand. There were massive rock formations scattered throughout the desert. We watched a short information video on a projector before having lunch. After lunch, we headed out on a desert drive in open 4WDs. We drove out to a canyon and had a look at the old paintings on the surfaces of the rocks. The landscape was incredible here. I was hoping to see an Ibex or Oryx (they have a different type of Oryx here to the ones we saw previously), but no luck; no animals whatsoever.
We left Wadi Rum and headed towards Petra, stopping off for a pano photo opportunity just before sunset. We arrived at our Petra hotel just after 7pm and went up to our rooms. Down for dinner at about 8pm, which was an open buffet; once again a lot of the food was cold, so I stuck to the safer options… which was mainly bread. After dinner I chilled out, watching some TV before going to bed.

2008-04-19

Summary

- Petra Archaeological Park

- Al Khazneh (The Treasury)

- Monastery

- Royal tombs

- High Sacrifice

On Saturday morning, we left at 9am to go to the Petra Archaeological Park. There was an optional horse ride, but it was only for like 500 metres so nobody could be bothered with it; we walked instead. We walked past heaps of Nabataean tombs in the rock formations. We also saw the water channel that had been carved into the side of the canyon, which was used to carry water… obviously. We continued until we reached the treasury, which was used as the holy grail temple in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade. It was really cool to see that, that was the main reason I’d wanted to go to Jordan. In fact I didn’t really know anything else about Jordan before arriving here. We continued on, walking past the senate ruins, and stopped off for a buffet lunch; same deal… most of the food was cold.
After lunch we had free time to explore whatever we wanted, with the 4 choices being the church, the royal tombs, the high sacrifice and the monastery. We were told that if we did the monastery, which involved going up 800 steps, we wouldn’t have time to do the others. The monastery was supposed to be pretty impressive and I thought we could do more than just the monastery since we had 4.5 hours until we had to be back at the bus, so Skye and I headed up the 800 stairs to the monastery. The views along the way of the valley/canyon was awesome. You were able to get a donkey up to the monastery, but at a price of 25 JD each way ($75 for both ways)… no thanks. Besides I wasn’t sure that it sounded so safe sitting on a donkey that’s going up and down stairs. We reached the top and the monastery was a similar style to the treasury, though it was bigger yet less decorated. We had a bit of a break at the monastery before beginning the descent. I ended up behind a donkey with no rider; I don’t think he was actually supposed to be going back down the stairs but I followed close behind him as he cleared the way nicely We’d kept up a good pace both coming up and coming down, only taking about 1.5 hours all up, leaving us with another 3 hours. Back at the bottom of the stairs, we topped up with water and had a bit of a break before heading towards the church. We decided to skip the church as it didn’t sound as impressive as the other 2 remaining options, so we detoured towards the royal tombs.

Everything here is quite a distance apart; it took about 30 mins to get from the base of the monastery stairs to the base of the royal tombs stairs. The royal tombs were pretty cool; the rock faces they were carved into had many different layers of colours in the rock. I have never seen such colourful rocks as what I’ve seen today; blues, purples, pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, brown, greys; it looked really cool. Form the royal tombs we went back down and got some more water; it was a bloody hot day so we’d been working up a hell of a sweat and were going through our water very quickly. We still had about 2 hours left and had been told it’d take about an hour to walk back through the canyons to the bus. I was game to tackle the 400 steps up to the high sacrifice (I thought the guide had said 400, but Skye thought it was 600) , but it took some convincing to get Skye to come. We walked to the base of the high sacrifice steps and after about 10 minutes of steps we went over the crest of a mound and saw the mountain of steps ahead of us. At this point Skye said I could go up if I wanted to but she was going back. We had about 1.5 hours before we had to be back at the bus, so I knew if I kept going I’d have to keep up the pace to make it up and back down in time to reach the bus. So I trudged on, pumping up the stairs. Just when I thought I was at the place of sacrifice (there was a metal bench there), I discovered the steps just kept on going (I was only about halfway up at that point). In hindsight, perhaps Skye was right and it was 600 steps, as it was more than half as far as the monastery was. When I finally reached the top, the view was pretty spectacular so it had been worth the climb. There was a bunch of locals up the top dancing around in the high sacrifice ‘pit’. I enjoyed the panoramic view for a few minutes before starting the descent.

I met Skye at the bottom and we had about 50 minutes to get back to the bus. We walked back through the canyons; our pace slowing towards the end as we were so exhausted. We made it back to the carpark at about 5:20pm, with 10 minutes to spare. My feet were kaning, so sitting down on the uncomfortable bench was still bliss. We got on the bus at 5:30 and headed back to the hotel. Skye and I decided to go for a swim in the hotel’s indoor swimming pool. It was freezing. I had my feet in for about 5 seconds and they were already numb. The water was not refreshingly cold, it was icy cold. Obviously it has no heating and gets no sunlight; I didn’t actually see anyone get in the pool the whole time we were there; it was so cold it was un-swimable (yes I know that’s not a word!). So we headed back up to our room and I emptied out our bags and began repacking them for easier carrying for the rest of the tour. I watched some TV and then went down for dinner. Buffet dinner, cold food as usual. Even the chicken dish… I was standing there when they brought the chicken and mushroom tray out and put it on the serving table, and I was the second person to scoop food from the tray and it was stone cold. How is anything going to be hot if it’s already cold when they first put it on the buffet table?! Skye wasn’t feeling very well tonight so went to bed early; TD strikes again. I watched some TV and then went downstairs to use the internet for a while to check emails and update blog. When I went to bed I had trouble sleeping; I thought I’d be out like a light after today’s effort.

 

2008-04-20

Summary

- Al Karak Crusader Castle

- Dana village

- Madaba

- Mount Nebo

- Amman

- Pasta Riso

Sunday morning we went down for breadfast; I’m getting really sick of eating bread now. Our bags had been taken from reception and put on another bus, even though we told the bellboy we were in Bus A (we weren’t 100% sure they were on another bus at the time though). We departed at 9am and headed to Crusader Castle. The castle was built about 1000 years ago. The view from the castle is great since the castle was built on the top of a hill. There were catapult balls lying around the castle and Islamic writings/carvings on the walls. We left Crusader Castle and headed to Dana village. The view from here was pretty good, but not as great as some of the other views we’ve had. Nobody could be bothered walking through the village so we headed off towards Madaba. We had a lunch stop along the way at about 1:30pm.

We reached Madaba, but it was decided that we wouldn’t stop off at St George’s Church, but would instead go to Mount Nebo; Moses’ place of death. There was a commemorative pillar for the pope’s visit to Mount Nebo in the year 2000. The view would have been great form the lookout there, but the haze limited how far we could actually see. We continued on our way, stopping off at a mosaic workshop. None of us bought anything as we knew it was a rip-off as the tour guide would get commission from our purchases. A mosaic table of about 80cm diameter was priced at 1700JD! When we arrived in Amman, we checked in at Shepherd Hotel. This hotel was quite a drop standards from the previous 2 hotels we’d stayed at in Jordan. It reminded me quite a bit of King Hotel in Cairo :S We had a twin, but swapped with Dru and Andy as they had a double room and obviously didn’t want one. The double bed was very small, obviously not a queen or a king, and it had a single bed’s sheet on it… great. Our twin room had an air-con, but our new double room only had a swivel fan which made an irritating clicking sound when we turned it on.

We all went to an Italian restaurant down the road, Pasta Riso, and I shared a very cheesy supreme pizza with Andy and Dru. It ended up costing only 2.5JD each for our meals and drinks, bargain! Especially considering yesterday the very ordinary lunch had cost me 11JD and hadn’t filled me up at all. After dinner we were totally stuffed full of cheese. We went back to the hotel for a while before heading out to an Amman club. I had a few beers and smoked some shisha, as did Skye (well not beers, she had cocktails). We tried 3 different flavours of shisha: strawberry, mixed fruit and grape (in the order of how much I liked each one). We headed back to our hotel just after 11pm since we had to be up to leave at 8am for Jerash tomorrow. The sisters, Bonnie and Onnie, had an awesome large room, decked out with a three-seater couch and 2 double-seater couches, as well as real curtains (ones that actually block out light) and nice decor. Looks like we bombed out at this hotel. This brought up hotel discussions; looks like we got the shitty rooms at King Hotel as well, after Dru said his room had 2 balconies. We never even had 1 balcony from the 3 times we’d stayed there. Anyway, we went to bed shortly after to play tug-of-war over the single sheet throughout the night.

 

2008-04-21

Summary

- Jerash

- Dead Sea

- Tche Tche Cafe

On Monday morning we headed off to Jerash. At Jerash there was heaps of ruins, but I couldn’t tell you much about them as I really couldn’t be bothered listening to the tour guide’s monotone voice today. There was a amphitheatre there as long as the remains of a temple or library. Plenty of pillars there and a large mosaic on the floor of one of the ruins. Some local girls asked to have their photo taken with me; this seems to be a common thing in Egypt and Jordan. Dru gets a lot of attention since he is so tall, and when he wears around a Lakers singlet everyone thinks he’s a basketballer. When we left Jerash, a school bus filled with school girl’s went passed our bus. It was hilarious, they were all hanging out the windows screaming at us; we were celebrities.

We went straight from Jerash to the Dead Sea. We’d been contemplating not doing the Dead Sea as it cost 60JD (US$90), which seemed like a bit of a rip-off! We could have done it on our own for less than 30JD, 15JD to get into the resort and a 40JD taxi split between its occupants! The ride to the Dead Sea took about 2 hours. We got to the Dead Sea at about 1ish and went straight to the resort for the buffet lunch. There were a crapload of Frenchies, all trying to push in at the buffet queue… piss off Frenchie, the back of the line’s back there! Lunch was not too bad, but again a few of the dishes were cold, though some were warm which was an improvement. There were plenty of desserts to try as well

After lunch we went swimming in the Dead Sea… or should I say floating, not swimming. We knew we’d float, but nothing quite prepares you for the experience. The amount of buoyancy you get is incredible. I think it is impossible to drown in this water! At times I could not touch the bottom, not because it was so deep, but because I was so buoyant I could not sink enough for my feet to touch the ground. Getting sea water in your mouth is VERY salty and when you get it in your eyes…. ouch! Some tubby pink bellied fat guy splashed around in the water, sending some of it into my eyes… thanks a lot… why don’t you go get a bit more sunburnt you twat! We then covered ourselves in Dead Sea mud, which is supposed to be good for your skin… supposedly. After covering ourselves in mud, we washed off and floated around for a while, before showering with the oldies in bikinis and speedos! We made our way up to the resort pool for a swim. There was a water slide there which was very slow, but I did my best to get a decent run up and swing off the bar to get some speed down the slide. Dru, Andy and I mucked around on the water slide for most of our remaining time at the resort.
At 5pm we got back on the bus and left the Dead Sea. We stopped off at some shop that sells Dead Sea products, but Skye and I didn’t buy anything, all a bit pricey for us. On our way back to the hotel, we passed by Tche Tche Cafe at Abdoun Circle and we told the others about the good meals we’d had at Tche Tche Cafe in Aqaba and their awesome milkshakes. This was enough to win everyone over, so we caught taxis to the Tche Tche Cafe after we’d gotten back to our hotel. The taxi meter read 800 exactly, so we paid 8JD and got out. We later realised that it was actually 800 piastres, which is not even 1JD! (1 JD is divided into 1000 piastres). The taxi driver must have thought it was Christmas! He didn’t say anything to let us know it only cost 1JD… cheeky bugger. Anyway, lesson learnt. I think everyone except David had a Ferrero Rocher milkshake and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it. Arguably the best tasting milkshake I have ever had! Dru, Andy and I smoked some shisha while we were there as well; Tche Tche Special was the flavour. It was really nice, topped the other 4 flavours I’d tried previously; very fruity. In the toilets downstairs, all four walls were mirrors. It looked so cool as you could see your reflection from so many angles and over and over again (each reflection was reflected again resulting in a long line of never-ending reflections). There was also music playing and a little TV screen. I had to mention this as most of the toilets we’ve seen on this tour are really dirty and gross, so it was a nice change at the Tche Tche Cafe toilet. We caught a cab back to the hotel and this time paid 1JD! We hung out in Bonnie and Onnie’s pimped out room for a while before heading to bed.

 

2008-04-22

Summary

- Roman Theatre

- Citadel

- Grand Hussein Mosque

- Tche Tche Cafe

On Tuesday our Geckos tour had officially finished, so we planned to meet up with a few others form our group to visit some tourist sites around Amman. I was woken up about 8am by Dru knocking on our door; he wanted to use my laptop for the Internet to check his flight details, so I went downstairs with him and fired it up. After breadfast and getting ready, we caught a couple of taxis to the Roman Theatre. This was a large amphitheatre, with the Odeon nearby; a smaller amphitheatre. There were 2 small museums at the Roman Theatre, which we also visited. It only cost 1JD for entry into the Roman Theatre and 2 museums. We went to some nearby markets afterwards where we watched a guy making designs with different colours of sand he was filling into glass bottles. We would have bought some, along with a few other things, but the price wasn’t right.

We caught another taxi to the citadel. The girls couldn’t be bothered going in, so waited while David and I went up to the ruins. Nothing overly exciting, a mosque and a big cistern… along with lots of ruins, but the view from up there was great. It was only 2JD to get in at the citadel. We caught another taxi to the Grand Hussein Mosque, which turned out being right near the Roman Theatre we’d been to earlier. David sat in front, so I hadn’t noticed that the taxi driver hadn’t reset the meter. When we stopped at the mosque he said ‘5 Dinar’. To which I replied ‘1 Dinar’… he said ‘Okay 3 Dinar’. ‘No 1 Dinar, we know how much it should be, you’re only getting 1 Dinar’ at which point I handed him 1 JD and got out of the taxi. There were people praying inside the mosque, so we weren’t sure if we were allowed in there, and even if I’d been allowed I don’t think that the girls would have been allowed in there. We looked for somewhere to eat Down Town, but found nowhere with any English menus, so just ended up getting snacks. We looked at some souvenir shops; the only thing I found that I wanted was overpriced, but Skye bought a few things. We got in a taxi to go back to the hotel. This time I was in the front seat and asked him to start the meter, to which he replied it was broken and then said 3 Dinars. ‘1 Dinar’ we replied, he just shook his head so we told him to stop the taxi and we got out. As we got out he muttered some crap about the next time we’re in Down Town he won’t help us out… how the hell did he help us out this time?! He just tried to rip us off… we don’t want to see him again anyway so I’m glad that he’d avoid us if he saw us again! We got in another taxi about 10 seconds later, who started up the meter and it cost us 1 JD, although we gave him 1.5 JD. Traffic was busy near the Shepherd Hotel as school had just finished (I think this was about 2:30-3:00ish).

We ended up having lunch at the Shepherd Hotel’s restaurant. I had a turkey sandwich and it was very nice, much better than the stale bread we get for breadfast there each morning. After lunch, I had a shower and then bummed around. We were both very tired, so just lazed around watching TV and using the laptop. We went back to Tche Tche Cafe with Bonnie, Onnie and Jen. Another Ferrero Rocher milkshake…. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! We made sure everyone went down and checked out the toilets We caught a taxi back and decided we’d try to squeeze the 5 of us into the taxi; 4 of us in the backseat. The taxi driver was hilarious, his reaction when the 4 of us got in and then he’s going ‘sleep sleep’ to Bonnie so she’d lie her head down across us so that the police couldn’t see we had 4 in the backseat. He was asking if Bonnie and Onnie were from China and then asked us; we said we were all from China and he was laughing. He kept asking us and then Jen said she was French to which he started talking to her in French, so then we were all saying the only French words we knew like ‘wei’ and ‘merci’. Then I said I was Greek, to which he rattled off something in Greek. When we got to 2nd Circle, he made Bonnie ‘sleep’ again so the police at the circle wouldn’t see her. We ended up tipping him as he was a blast.

When we got back to the hotel, I think the girls were probably busy packing their bags as they were leaving tomorrow morning, so we just chilled out in our room watching TV before going to bed.

 

2008-04-23

Summary

- Lazy day

- Pasta Riso

- Tche Tche Cafe

On Wednesday we got up about 8:45am and must’ve just missed the girls leaving (I think they left around 8:30), but they’d left a goodbye note under our door Today was pretty much a chill out day. We couldn’t be bothered doing much so we just sat around watching tv for most of the day. We walked down to Pasta Riso for lunch and caught a taxi out to Tche Tche Café again for dinner and a Ferrero Rocher milkshake . Other than that it was just packing up our stuff ready for tomorrow’s flight.

 

2008-04-24

Summary

- Flight back to Dubai

On Thursday morning, we got up early for breadfast before our pickup at 8:30am. We got to Amman airport and checked in, went through security etc. Our flight was on time, departing at 11:15am. Lunch on the plane was not overly exciting… a mini hot dog and some cheese biscuits and that was about it…

Pic update

Finally got around to getting the South Africa pics up (wordpress recently changed their whole layout and made it harder to upload pics)

Pics are here

Egypt Encompassed (ok I’m stealing tour names now, but it has such a good ring to it :P)

2008-04-12

Summary

- Cairo

- Mosque of Ahmed Ibn Tulun and Gayer Anderson Museum

- Citadel

- Hearing-impaired KFC

- Hard Rock Cafe

The train ride took about 13 to 14 hours; I didn’t manage much sleep this time. Upon arriving in Cairo at about 10:30 or so, we went straight to the hotel and checked in. We had decided on a quick T-shirt design on the plane for an Egypt tour t-shirt, which we sent off to get made. There was no towels in our room, so we phoned reception and asked for some to be brought up. A bunch of us had decided to go to the mosque and citadel this afternoon, so at noon we met the others in reception and got a taxi. The mosque was huge; upon entering we had to have canvas slippers placed over our shoes. There was hardly anyone else there which was good. We climbed up one of the towers there. At the top of the tower a few of us went out onto the ridge/ledge; the wind was quite strong up there so that got the adrenaline pumping. There was a good view of the city up there. We went next door to the museum, which was quite interesting. It was not so much like your typical museum, it was a house with different rooms set-out as they would have been back in the day. This included Persian rooms, Chinese rooms, Islamic rooms, etc.

We got back in the taxi and went to the citadel where there were thousands of tourists and buses. We decided that we wouldn’t go inside and instead just took some photos of it from outside. Back in the taxi, we headed back to the hotel, then went for a walk to get some lunch. We ate at KFC; when I went up and placed my order they pointed to a sign at the counter which stated that all employees were hearing impaired. That made things interesting in trying to order; I pointed to the wrapstar up on the menu board behind them, but didn’t know quite how to ask for the combo. After pointing at the chips and drink I figure they got the idea. None of them spoke either, so it was just a bunch of pointing and sign language. There was a dude with a big video camera filming for something, possibly doing a story on the place; he was interviewing some guy out the front and then filming inside. We might end up on some Egyptian news or TV show.

After eating lunch we went back to the hotel and negotiated another papyrus painting with the hotel store owner, Hasan. We still had no towels in our room; others also had no towels and some of them made about 10 calls to reception and still had no towels. We headed off for dinner at Pizza Hut. Along the walk the plans somehow changed to dinner at Hard Rock Cafe, which I knew would end up being pretty pricey… it sure was. We caught a taxi to Hard Rock Cafe and ordered our meals, which were around 100 LE each (not bad once you convert, but expensive compared to other Egyptian restaurants). After dinner I haggled a taxi; they all wanted 20 LE, but I knew we could get one for 10 LE. After the 3^rd or 4^th guy I got one to agree to 10 LE. When we got back to the hotel, our T-shirts were ready; I have to say they are quite tacky in comparison to the other 2 tour tshirts we’ve bought on our last 2 tours, and were obviously rushed. I think a few people stayed up for drinks with Nate as he was finishing the tour (he only booked the Nile segment), but we went straight to bed since we had to be up at 6am. I don’t have the energy to stay up late being social and miss out on some decent hours of sleep, especially after a crap slep on the train; 3 months of touring has drained me also.

 

2008-04-13

Summary

- Alexandria

- Alexandria National Museum

- Catacombs

- Fort

After breakfast at 6am on Sunday and fare-welling Alli and Bec who had finished the Nile tour with us now, we got on the minibus to take us to Alexandria. My guts weren’t doing too well today, possibly some dodgy food yesterday or something… Two months in east and southern Africa caused no major troubles, and if anything we’ve become more anal about our own hygiene and food choices, yet we are still becoming frequently ill in Egypt; obviously the food and hygiene standards in Egypt are really lacking. The drive took about 3.5 hours until we reached Alexandria. The city seems to be cleaner and fancier than Cairo. Rather than checking into the hotel, we did our sight-seeing first. Our first stop was at the Alexandria National Museum. Unlike the Egyptian Museum, we were allowed to take photos inside here as long as we didn’t use the flash. The museum was much smaller and more organised. There were 3 floors and ‘the tomb’ in the basement. The top 2 floors contained Greaco Roman statues and artefacts, while the bottom floor had the traditional Egyptian pharaoh artefacts. It was interesting to see how the Greeks and Romans influenced the statues. For example Isis, goddess of love and beauty, was traditionally a slim figure; however Romans did not consider a slim figure beautiful, but rather poor, and so later statues of Isis were influenced by the Romans to be a plumper rounder figure. There were also statues of Alexander, whose statues took on quite a feminine look. There was a section dedicated to the orthodox religion, with crosses, books and religious symbolism. In ‘the tomb’ there were original Egyptian artefacts that had been found in Egyptian tombs and there was also a mummy along with inner and outer coffins, and a sarcophagus.

Leaving the museum, we went to the Kom… Catacombs. The catacomb was discovered when a donkey fell down the ventilation shaft (after its use, the catacomb entrance had been covered over). The catacomb was built in the style of the Roman catacombs, but has a lot of Egyptian content. The entrance to the catacomb consisted of a spiral staircase of 91 steps (I counted just to check). Interestingly the steps are slightly sloped downwards and the steps nearer to the top are smaller than those at the bottom; making for an easier climb back up the stairs. The catacomb was originally built for 3 burials. The dead bodies were passed down a shaft central to the spiral staircase, then were passed along the ’slide’ tunnel at the bottom of the catacomb. The floor above had a ‘picnic’ area, where the relatives of the dead would come to share food together. The cups and cutlery used were not taken back into the land of the living, so were instead smashed. Over time the ‘picnic’ room contained a great deal of broken pottery; hence the name of the catacomb ‘ ‘ which means broken pottery. The carvings in the wall were much deeper than usual hieroglyphics, more like a statue carved into the wall to suit the Greek/Roman style. The Egyptian gods were pictured in Greek robes and often elements were missing or incorrect. For example the statue of the wife of the tomb owner has her right foot forward, meaning she has no direction; it should be her left foot forward. The catacomb then turned into a business, with more holes chiselled out of the walls to fit more bodies. When they ran out of space they dug sideways and dug straight into another tomb leaving them with plenty more space; over 400 burials in total. None of the bodies remain today as they were stolen by grave robbers to remove ear rings, amulets, rings, gold teeth, etc. These items were not removed inside the catacomb itself as it would have been pitch black, stinky and spooky down there; hence they stole the whole body and searched it once they were back on the surface.

From the catacombs, the bus took us to a fort where Alexander’s lighthouse once stood; one of the wonders of the old world. This was alongside the Mediterranean Sea. We didn’t bother going inside the fort. Next we were to go to the library, having unique structures around it, however the traffic was very heavy so we skipped the library and went straight to the hotel, arriving a little before 4pm. We took our gear up to the rooms and then went back downstairs to get some lunch. We walked down to a local vendor and bought a shawerma each which we ate back at the hotel. Our room was quite nice, but our balcony view was of a brick wall… very exciting. Skye and I did our laundry (others who had paid to have it done at the King Hotel in Cairo got most of it back dirtier than it’d started) and then had a snooze until about 7:30. We got ready to go out for dinner at 8; having to share a towel after showering since there was only one towel in the room. We caught a taxi to a nearby shopping centre and went downstairs to the food court for dinner. Having a dodgy belly, I just had spaghetti bolognaise and some garlic bread. I had to pry Skye away from the ‘Chocolate Only’ store. After dinner, we went back to our room and I went to bed feeling pretty unwell. The others in the group drank some rocket fuel they’d picked up for 18 LE (supposedly vodka, but vodka usually costs a couple of thousand LE’s).

 

2008-04-14

Summary

- Library

- Al Alamein Military Museum

- Al Alamein Cemetery

On Monday morning we went down for breakfast; would you like some bread with your bread… all they had was different kinds of breads and pastries. Fine by me today as that’s all I planned on eating; I wouldn’t trust my guts with any dairy yet. We headed off, stopping off at the library since we’d missed it the day before. We checked out the huge solar disc there and other various sculptures around the library. I somehow forgot my camera today, leaving it in the hotel room. Leaving the library, we went to the Al Alamein Military Museum; about 1.5 hours drive away. The museum was all right, but nothing special. They had a bunch of photos and dressed up manikins and a display of the guns and tanks found from WW II. By this stage it was approaching 1pm, so we stopped off for ‘lunch’… ok we stopped off at a deli for snacks. We went to the Al Alamein Cemetery where they had an Australian Memorial for the soldiers who had died in the war. The cemetery had hundreds of tombstones set in rows. Then we headed back to Alexandria. Hardly worth the 175 LE we’d paid (it was an optional extra activity) in my opinion, I think that was also the general opinion of the rest of the group. We had also decided not to go out to the oasis the following day, which would cost 480 LE per person. While it would be cool to see an oasis in the desert, I’m not sure it’s worth the 480 LE and the 4 hours of travelling time, especially combined with the 3.5 hours of travelling time back to Cairo first.

We got back to Alexandria at about 3pm, so had some real lunch; more shawermas. Probably not a good choice on my part; it didn’t help my upset guts. We chilled out in Dru and Kate’s room for a while. When we got back to our room, housekeeping had been and only left one towel again, but had left two hand towels…. what the?! While we talking about how retarded that was, there was a knock on the door; housekeeping asking if everything was fine. Well actually no, we’d like another towel, although it wasn’t a simple task to explain that we wanted another big towel… not another hand towel! She came back about 10 minutes later (at least they actually bring the towels when you ask for them here!) with a towel and then stood there waiting for a tip. I just said ‘thank you…..bye’, I wasn’t going to tip her for not getting it right in the first place (We already tip for the housekeeping anyway). Isn’t it obvious that we need two towels… or am I asking a bit much there…? After she’d gone we realized that they’d taken the empty toilet roll, but hadn’t replaced it so we had no toilet rolls in the bathroom.

We were supposed to have dinner at some fancy restaurant like 30 mins away by taxi, but none of us could be bothered going so far for dinner and paying so much, so we ended up just going back to the same food court we’d been to last night. Everyone changed their mind about going to the oasis tomorrow, as did we, since there wasn’t really any other good sites in or around Cairo that we hadn’t seen so there was nothing else to do as such if we didn’t go to the oasis. I was contemplating a chill day, especially since my stomach still hadn’t settled, but decided we’re only here once so might as well do something. I have already decided I am going back to Africa, but not back to Egypt. We didn’t leave for dinner until about 8:15pm (the meal times here are all out of whack; always later than usual). After our amusement ride in another crazy taxi, we headed down to the food court to get stared at again; sorry for being a white tourist! I had spaghetti bolognaise again; something boring and bland and relatively safe that might stay in my stomach for more than an hour… it’s pretty hard to stuff up the cooking and preparation of spag. bog., but there’s always the cooking hygiene to battle with over here). As you can probably tell by the nature of my writing, I’m getting a bit fed up with my travels in Egypt. Dru and I are gonna peak if we don’t have toilet paper and towels in our rooms back at Cairo tomorrow. Some of the girls went to the shops afterwards and Skye and I couldn’t be bothered waiting around, so we caught a taxi back to the hotel since it was almost 10:30pm and we had to be up at 6am tomorrow. We got the best taxi back, it was all pimped up; neons, mirrors, a metallic skull drink holder, all sorts of meters and dials… it was awesome. And he was cranking hip-hop music, even better. I had to tell him how awesome his taxi was before we got out When we got back to our room we packed up most of our stuff before going to bed.

 

2008-04-15

Summary

- Cairo

- Arabian Nights

- Wadi El Rayan (oasis)

- Valley of the Whales

On Tuesday morning we were up at 6am, packed everything up and had breakfast… or should I say BREADfast and then we headed off at 7am. Mohamed decided that we wouldn’t go to the hotel in Cairo but instead meet the 4WDs to take us to the oasis on the outskirts of Cairo and have the mini-bus driver take our bags to the hotel. This was designed to gain an hour of time as it was half hour to the hotel and half hour back to that point. However, when we arrived at the point we had to wait half an hour for the 4WDs to show up anyway, and not going to the hotel meant there was not that toilet stop. I had been holding on for about an hour and I told Mohammed that if he didn’t get me to a toilet soon I was gonna fill my pants. The rest of the bus found my TD troubles quite amusing and tried to encourage me to do my business amongst the bushes on the median-strip. I held on; the 4WDs came and they stood around arguing about something for 15 minutes… maybe it wasn’t an argument; Arabic always sounds like an argument. We finally took off and pulled over at a petrol station a few minutes down the road… ah relief! We continued on our way; I ended up in the back of the 4WD sitting sideways. It was a hot day so it was bloody hot back there as the air-con only really cooled the front of the 4WD. We stopped off after almost an hour for lunch at Arabian Nights. We were welcomed by a band of 6 with drums and horns. The hotel was all an outdoor setting with a beautiful pool area and dining area with music playing. We asked about the cost of rooms there and it was only US$150 for a suite for 4 people, quite a good price for the quality of the place I thought, yet we were the only ones in the whole palce except for the staff… odd. We sat in the dining area along side the pool, but as it was so hot (even under the shade of the umbrellas) we went down to a carpeted area under a grass canopy. It was surprisingly much cooler under there, so we lounged around on the cushions on the floor as we waited for lunch. With my edgy stomach, I went for pasta again; spaghetti bolognaise. It looked and tasted great, but there was obviously a lot of pepper and/or spice added as it was quite hot, hence I thought it best not to eat much of it as spicy food was the last thing I needed right now.

After lunch there was some trouble with the bill, with the total money collected being 70 LE short. I’m not sure how or what they stuffed up as they collected payments from each person individually for their meals and drinks. Anyway, we left Arabian Nights and headed on our way to El Rayan. We drove for about another 1.5-2 hours before arriving alongside the waterfalls. The body of water was much larger than I’d anticipated, a huge lake where you couldn’t see from one end to the other. There were heaps of locals there jumping off the waterfalls. We went down to the water for a swim. The first spot we went to had garbage littered along the water’s edge so we walked up a bit further. The water was still pretty manky there; very sludgy under your feet and the water was green in colour, presumably algae. It was so bloody hot though, so going in the water was the only way to cool off. Not quite the crystal clear oasis water I’d imagined… We had lots of local dickheads who would come along and stare at us, particularly at the girls. Even when you stare back at them and give them a wtf look, they don’t stop staring… weirdos. I had to use the toilet there, which was really bad; absolutely reeked and there were flies everywhere, not to mention all the mess on the floor, walls and doors.

We left the oasis and went to the Valley of the Whales. This area used to be underwater and there are fossils that have been found here of whales with legs. These fossils are apparently one of the best places in the world for supporting the theory of evolution. We saw a few of the fossils there, but it was a 3km trail to see them all which would have taken a couple of hours, which we didn’t have. The landscape there was great too; golden rock formations littering the desert sand. We left the fossils and later stopped off by some large rocks for some photos. After about 10 minutes a sand storm picked up so we jumped back in the 4WDs and headed on our way. The sun went down as we drove; there has not been a spectacular sunset in Egypt yet due to all the dust/smog in the air. We went back to Arabian Nights for dinner as we’d liked it there earlier. Shane challenged me to a game of large chess; the metre high wooden chess pieces on a big chess board type of chess. I beat Shane and then beat Mohammed, but when I played against our 4WD driver he was just too good for me. A few people went in the pool for a charge of 20 LE, since we weren’t actually staying at the hotel. I ordered Spaghetti Napolitana with no spice, which was much better. All was well until we were paying our bills. It was a 30-45 minute process. The guy collecting the money spoke very little English; he couldn’t even tell us how much our bill was in English. We were overcharged by about 20 LE (the bill was 75 LE), so asked to see the menu again. Anyway, a couple of others were arguing about their bills also and some people were being asked to pay a bill they’d already paid, while others were still waiting for change; it was all just very unorganized. The guy came up to us again later and asked for us to pay and we asked how much and he looked at our bill and this time it was 70 LE. Mohamed translated our Arabic bill for us and they were charging us 20 LE each for our 15 LE meals. Skye and I, as well as Mohamed, asked for a menu on several occasions, but it never came so we just gave them 60 LE and walked off (15 LE for both meals, 3 drinks at 5 LE each, then their 10% and 12% taxes it should have come to 55 LE). It was only 20 LE they were trying to overcharge us, which is only like $4, but that’s not the point…. it’s the ethics of the thing and I’m sick of being ripped off.

The drive back to the hotel met fairly heavy traffic in Cairo, so we didn’t get to King Hotel until 11pm in Cairo. We then had to wait around for our room key from reception, which was another 15 minute process… how hard can it be? We were all getting pretty pissed off by this stage cos we were tired and wanted to go to bed to get some sleep before our 5:30am start tomorrow to leave at 6am. We finally got our room key, collected our luggage and went up to our room… ONE TOWEL… ffs. We both wanted a quick shower so we had to share the towel… but the shower was one of those nozzle showers on a hose that you can take off the hook on the wall if you want… except this shower’s hose wasn’t even long enough to reach the hook on the wall so you had to hold it while showering and the hose was so short it only came up to just above waist height… pathetic. I’s had a gut-full, so I made good use of the comments card that was sitting in our room. The only positive thing I had to say about King Hotel was the waiter there was really good. The bellman was also good, but I didn’t have room to add that in after all the negative comments.

 

2008-04-16

Summary

- Sinai

- Saint Katherine

- Mt. Sinai

Wake-up call at 5:30am… arghh, sick of early mornings! We went downstairs for 6am and waited for everyone else to come down. Shane had now finished his part of the tour (Nile and Alexandria), so we saw him off. We had two new starters this morning who would be joining us for the rest of the tour. Off we went in the mini-bus for our long drive to Sinai. Hopefully they’ve found those 2 terrorists they were searching for in the Sinai area, according to the smart traveler (DFAT) update on 8^th April 2008. We stopped off at about 8am for a loo stop and snacks for anyone, then went through the tunnel underneath the channel. We had now left the Africa part of Egypt and were entering the Asia part. We stopped off for lunch at about 10am. My stomach seemed to be settling, although by the sounds of it everyone else’s seems to be firing up, so I decided to order rice and some veggies. The ‘veggies’ consisted of a chopped up potato, which was cold. The rice was also cold.

We continued on our way after lunch, passing through several security checkpoints along the way, and arrived in St Katherine just after 1pm. We waited around for our room keys and then lugged all our gear into the rooms. We were originally supposed to be in a 6-person hostel room, but we ended up in 3-person rooms instead. Since there was 11 of us, there were 3 groups of 3 people and 1 group of 2. Being the only couple we got the room between the two of us. The rooms were pretty average and the bathrooms were really dirty. We got towels, but they were half the size of a normal towel. The shower didn’t drain properly so we had to keep turning the water off throughout our showers. We didn’t get into our rooms until after 1:30pm and only had until 2pm to get ready for the Mt Sinai climb. I don’t think I ended up forgetting anything; I changed into pants, strapped my ankle, put thick socks on and hiking shoes, wore a lighter coloured t-shirt so I wouldn’t get too hot, and then packed 2 litres of water, tripod, camera, polariser, shutter release, jacket, beanie, and head torch.

We took the bus to the base of the mountains, arriving just before 2:30pm. All but 2 people from our group were doing the hike. We walked by St Katherine Monastery before the walk got steeper. The guide set off at quite a fast pace, and after only a few minutes most of us were falling behind, but he did not slow down. For the first 15 minutes a guy followed us with a camel; if you don’t want to climb the mountain or can go no further, you can get on a camel that will take you to the top… well not the top but to the base of the 700 steps that lead to the top. He must have figured we looked like a determined bunch and given up trying to sell a camel ride. Every 20 minutes or so we’d pass another hut/cafeteria where we’d rest for a few minutes before continuing. After about 1.5 hours we reached the base of the 700 steps. By this stage you’re so knackered the pace has slowed right down. We continued until reaching the last cafeterias before the peak of Mt Sinai at about 4:30pm. We sat around there for about 40 mins or so; I bought a Mars bar from the cafeteria. Then onwards up the last 100 steps; after sitting around the lactic acid had built up so my legs were kaning and each step was such an effort. We got to the top of Mt Sinai, where Moses was said to have received the 10 commandments from God. There was a film crew up there filming by the church/chapel at the top. We watched as the sun got lower and after about 30 mins it started to set. When I setup my tripod, before I’d taken a single shot, the head snapped off. I was pretty ticked off that I’d lugged it up the mountain and it’d broken before I’d even used it. A German guy at the top had a multi-purpose tool so I used the pliers to dismantle the tripod further, making it usable. The wind was very strong at the top of the mountain, having a really chilly bite to it. We watched and snapped the sunset. Right after the sun disappeared from view we had to start descending the mountain so that we could tackle the stairs while there was still light. Bit of a shame really as the best shots are generally taken after sunset. The light gradually faded and we relied on our head torches to see where we were going. Going down the mountain took less than half the time it took to go up; not taking any rest stops along the descent.

We got back to the hostel after 8pm and went straight to the dining hall for dinner. It was a buffet dinner and what’s new the food was cold. I barely ate anything but bread, I figured that was the safest option. The veg was stone cold, casserole stone cold, some of the rice was edible but generally it came in warm and cool pockets. There was a cat and a kitten walking around the dining room floor hanging around our feet… very hygienic! The staff knew the cats were there but did nothing about them. We bought a water there, which cost twice the price of what it’d normally cost in Egypt. We packed away most of our gear, having emptied my small backpack to take up the mountain, and then Skye went to bed while I went down and had a quick smoke of some apple sheesha, before heading to bed myself.

I don’t think I mentioned previously that we were originally meant to climb Mt Sinai for sunrise tomorrow, but this would mean we’d have to get up at about 1am and when we got back down we’d pretty much be going straight to the port to catch the hydrofoil to Jordan, so would not have time to sleep during the day. We opted to do the sunset climb today instead, which meant we had to leave Cairo by 6am this morning to reach St Katherine in time to hike up Mt Sinai for sunset.

 

2008-04-17

Summary

- Monastery

- Boat from Nuweiba to Aqaba

We had breadfast in the dining room, which was once again littered with cats and kittens, before heading to the St Katherine Monastery at 9am. The monastery was packed with tourists. When we finally got inside we had a look at the Burning Bush and the well that was used, and then went inside the church. I had brought my external flash along on my camera, but as it turns out you can’t use the flash inside the church anyway, so I didn’t use the flash at all. However, as I went into the church I noticed that the flash diffuser off the end was missing. The place was packed so I just had to go with the flow of the crowd. When we got back out I retraced my steps in the monastery, but couldn’t find it. The crowd had dispersed from the Burning Bush so I went up and touched it. I think it is said that if you touch the Burning Bush you will be blessed. We left the monastery and Mohamed was feeling pretty ill, although I can’t say I’m surprised after seeing him put his bread down on a filthy table before picking it up and eating it the yesterday at lunch. As we walked back to the bus I saw some mangled plastic rubbish in the dirt… hang on, that’s the flash diffuser; hardly recognizable, but it was definitely mine. It had obviously been trampled by the crowds so it was all out of shape and covered in dust. I nabbed it up off the floor, brushed it off and bent it kinda back into shape… it’ll still do its job. Maybe that Burning Bush paid off. We went back to the hostel and cleared out our gear, packing it on the bus. We had our last look at Egyptian souvenirs in the markets as we were interested in getting a small Tutankhamon statue, however the price the guy was asking was too high and he wasn’t willing to budge enough. The guy selling the glass perfume bottles was a prick, he was so rude when I said I wasn’t coming into his shop cos I wasn’t interested in glass bottles; I’d never buy anything from him and I’d recommend nobody else buy his glass perfume bottles at St Katherine hostel. We left St Katherine at around 11:30am.

We arrived at the Nuweiba sea port at about 1pm and sat in the bus waiting for Mohamed to sort things out. It looked like things weren’t go so well with a lot of shouting and arm waving. I think we couldn’t get on the 2:00 hydrofoil. At about 2:00 we were told to go through the security, which we did and then had our departure stamps stamped in our passports before waiting for the boat. We were told by Mohamed (before he left us, as he does not leave Egypt so does not come on the boat) it’d be about 1.5 hours, so we waited, and waited. There was nothing to do at the terminal but wait. There was a single canteen selling crisps, chocolate bars and drinks; so there was nowhere we could get anything for lunch. 1.5 hours went by and we waited, another 1.5 hours went by and we waited. The uncomfortable seats in the terminal combined with my hunger had me getting quite restless and impatient.

Somewhere between 6 and 6:30, there was some movement and we made our way out to the buses, piling our luggage on the bus and climbing onboard. The bus only drove a few minutes, then we had to get off and put our backpacks back on. The luggage is quite heavy with all our souvenirs, so it sucks picking up bags and putting them down all the time; I’m probably carrying over well over 30kg with both backpacks combined (carry-on camera backpack and checked big backpack); no luggage trollies here. We loaded our bags onto the boat (which was not a hydrofoil, so obviously the hydrofoil left at like 2pm then and we must have got thrown onto a slow boat) and went onboard. We saw a booth saying passport stamps, so David and I lined up there. When David got to the front he was told he needed to collect all the passports from the group and bring them back all together. I had read that this would happen in the pre-departure notes for the tour. So David collected everyone’s passport and took them back. A couple of the people on the tour were yelling at him and abusing him; I can’t quite understand what that was all about, they knew the procedure. Most of them were all worrying about their passports, but I can’t say I was bothered by it at all; this was what was always done on the tours. We had never been told by our Egypt tour leader (Mohamed) about the passport procedure on board (which probably would have put more people’s minds at ease), nor were we told that there was nowhere to get lunch at the port terminal. The boat did not start moving for like an hour. There was a canteen on board, so we got some chocolate bars and a lunch box consisting of 2 burgers, a bag of crisps and a can of Marinda; at least it was something resembling a meal since breakfast was at 8am this morning… like 11 hours earlier. All the locals on the boat were unbelievable, leaning forwards in their seats to look down the row at any female tourist, Skye included. Even when you look back at them and shrug and give them a ‘what?!’ gesture they just keep staring. Blondes get it really bad in Egypt, and the more skin that’s revealed the more attention you will get. Skye told me that she gets hassled a lot more, with comments yelled at her, when she’s walking with the other girls compared to when she walks with me. I exchanged my remaining Egyptian Pounds to Jordanian Dinars, though I only had 50 LE left so I’d worked out the costs pretty well. This converted to only 6 JD. This is the first time that we have used a currency that is stronger than the USD.

Nile Adventure

2008-04-02

Summary

- Arrival in Cairo

- Check-in at hotel

- Snooze, then shop

We managed to snooze for a while on our flight, arriving in Cairo at about 6am; watching the sun rising from the plane. Our experience at the airport is the swiftest we’ve ever encountered. We’d booked an arrival transfer and found the guy there waiting for us in the terminal. He sent us to the bank to collect our visas, which cost us US$15 instead of the US$50 we’d been told; I dunno if there was some dodgy deals going on, but I wasn’t going to ask. We zipped through passport control, then waited a few minutes for our bags, and then the guy rushed us outside to a waiting vehicle which took us to our hotel. Check in time was not until 1 or 2pm so we figured we had a long wait ahead of us just like in Dubai. To our surprise we checked in around 7:30am. Back to badays in the toilets and the lifts here don’t have automatic doors, you have to open the door outwards yourself… can’t say I’ve ever seen lifts like that before. We went up to our room and had a nap for a few hours.

When we got up, we went to the hotel restaurant for lunch and then went to look for a bank to get the US money we needed for local payment for our tour; we couldn’t find a bank. We went back to our hotel and asked for a map and directions. The shop owner for the hotel’s shop raked us in and told us to look in his shop. We ended up in there for over an hour, but he was really good; going through all the stories that are depicted in the papyrus paintings he had. The papyrus paper is made from the same papyrus we’d seen in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The papyrus I had eaten was the root. The top is stripped and then cut into thin strips; these strips are crispy and crack when bent, but when the water and sugar is squeezes out of them (via the use of a hammer and/or rolling pin) they become flexible and durable. The papyrus is then soaked in water for 6 days (or 12 days to obtain brown papyrus paper) and is then meshed together horizontally and vertically and then placed in a press. Anyway, we picked out favourites and of course Skye had different favourites to myself. The shop owner insisted that he gives the best price, but we’d heard that one before. We said we’d go away and think about it and decided after going to the museum tomorrow.

By this time we figured the bank was closed, so we went to an ATM to get some local dosh, then picked up some stuff from the supermarket. We had dinner at the hotel restaurant, not having scoped out somewhere else to eat yet. Then we went back to our rooms to watch TV… yes TV! And then slept in beds… yes BEDS! And enjoyed our nice cold drinks from the fridge… yes the FRIDGE! Now we’re living the life of luxury

 

2008-04-03

Summary

- Egyptian Museum

- Papyrus purchasing

On Thursday morning we headed down for breakfast at the hotel restaurant and then walked to the bank at the Sheraton hotel. We encountered a few of the guys we’d read about who claim they’ve met you before or claim they know your tour leader or whatever and try to get you to go to their shop so they can rip you off. We weren’t having a bar of it. This guy followed us all the way form our hotel for about 15 mins until we’d almost reached the Sheraton where he told us we should come and look at his shop on our way back after I insisted that I was going to the Sheraton now and not to his shop. When we left the Sheraton we decided to go a different way to avoid the annoying guy. Another guy approached us claiming he’d met us in the Sheraton hotel reception, I just laughed and shook my head at him “No you didn’t see me mate… and you don’t know me”; knowing too well that I was never in the Sheraton reception, he’d just assumed we were staying at the Sheraton when he saw us come out. They use a common line of saying that you walk like an Egyptian… whatever that’s supposed to mean… I assume their way of trying to be funny. So anyway, we got to a point where I thought the hotel was left and Skye thought right; we went right. Right was wrong, left was right; so we ended up going around in a circle and the originally annoying guy ran into us again with an ‘ayyyy, lucky a found you guys again, you come and look at my shop now’. I made it clear we were not going to his shop and insisted to him that we weren’t lost. I found our way back in the end after finding a familiar building from earlier.

We decided to walk to the Egyptian Museum as it wasn’t a really long way and this gave us a chance to check things out as we went. The museum was not at all marked as being a museum, but we figured we were at the right place due to the number of tourists everywhere. We had lunch at the shop there before buying tickets for 50 LE and entering the museum. The place was HUGE, two stories and over 100 halls filled with historical Egyptian gear. We started with the Old Kingdom, then through to the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom. The captions started off pretty good, but got slacker and slacker until there were basically no more captions at all. We’d started the first floor quite slow, but after going upstairs and seeing how much was still left, we had to start rushing to make sure we got to see it all. Skye’s favourite was the dung beetle (scarab beetle) coffins. The Egyptians believed that the gods would come to earth in the form of animals, which would be marked by a symbol such as a triangle on their forehead or the key of life on their tongue. These animals that were believed to be gods were mummified and/or placed into coffins and also some animals were mummified as a sacrificial offering to the gods. Mummified animals in the museum included cats, dogs, birds, crocs and cows. There was heaps in the museum so I’m not going to go into it all here. One of the main attractions of the museum (apart from the royal mummies, which cost an extra 100 LE to see) was the Tutankhaman section, which had all the artefacts that were found it his tomb. His burial mask was made of solid gold weighing 12kg. His inner and outer coffins were also solid gold, covered in markings; mainly feathers of the gods. He had so many amulets, necklaces, bracelets, rings, etc… it was insane. Apparently he wasn’t a very old, powerful and popular king either, so it’s hard to imagine what some of the other kings’ tombs looked like (as yet no other tombs have been found containing as much as Tutankhaman’s tomb as thieves had stolen all the treasures from them).

We spent about 3.5 hours in the museum, which still wasn’t really enough; we hadn’t looked at the second floor properly. We walked back to our hotel and kept our promise; we went into the hotel shop and decided we’d buy two papyrus paintings; the judgement and the offering. Then we walked to a different supermarket in search of more backup dvds (I still hadn’t caught up with backups, I had been so far behind). We found some dvds and upon leaving the supermarket who was waiting outside… that same annoying guy, although this time he didn’t really hassle us about his shop again so was no longer annoying. We asked him if there were any good restaurants nearby. He recommended a couple, we found one of them but continued looking around. We ended up eating at the Tout Express; having Sherwamens (sp?) which are pretty much like yiros. We took the long way back to the hotel after going down the wrong street at one point.

 

2008-04-04

Summary

- Saqqara & Imhotep

- Memphis: Mit-Rahina

- Dahshur

- Buffet Lunch

- Papyrus factory

- Pre-departure meeting

On Friday morning, after breakfast, we didn’t want to sit around bored so we asked reception about going out to see Memphis, Saqqara and Dahshur. They ordered a taxi for us for 200 LE (Egyptian pounds… about $40) and said it’d be there in about 10 minutes; an hour later it arrived. We went to Saqqara first, which was just over an hour’s drive. The entrance fee was 50 LE each… this was going to add up to an expensive day at this rate! When we entered a temple (I think it was a temple?) a guy asked to see our ticket, we showed him and he said ‘ok, I will show you around to the left first, then you come through here’. We followed him around and he showed us some hieroglyphics (ancient Egyptian writing) carved in the stone of the tombs. We entered one of the tombs, which had a huge false door inside amongst a load of hieroglyphics (we found out the following day from a real tour guide that the buried deceased’s soul/spirit is able to penetrate and pass through these false doors). Some other guy came into the tomb and start yelling at the guy we’d been following. We didn’t really know what was going on, but figured something dodgy was going on. From what we figured the guy leading us around wasn’t supposed to be doing so and he’d been busted by this other guy, obviously some sort of official. Anyway, when we came out the guy was back over to us and asking for a tip. I gave him 1 LE to which he scoffed and gave it back, so I gave him US$1 instead, to which he replied ‘not enough’. The same official then came back and told me not to pay the guy and then yelled some more Arabic, so we just walked off. We were looking at the step pyramid when the guy came back over again, I just gave him 10 LE as I walked off so that he’d piss off. We didn’t really know what we were looking at or where we were supposed to go, it was all a bit unorganized. There was graffiti over the stones, not surprising with the lack of organisation and the allowance of anyone to walk anywhere. We spent about an hour there and then left, not having learnt much, just having looked at a big 6-step pyramid and some ruins of what I thought was probably a temple.

We went onto Memphis, where we paid 30 LE each for entry. There were several statues of King Ramses II; huge statues and there was a large sphinx also (not as large as the most well known sphinx of Egypt). From here we went onto Dahshur, which was 30 LE each plus 5 LE for the taxi. There were 2 pyramids; one was off in the distance, the black pyramid, and we walked partway up the other pyramid to enter it. The ‘stairs’ lead down a 45 degree corridor that was about a metre high and a metre wide… not for the claustrophobic. The tunnel/passage continued this way for at least 100m, a good few minutes. At the bottom, inside the tomb (inside the pyramid), the ceilings were at least 20 to 30 metres high with a step fashion such that the highest point of the ceiling was in the centre of the room. There were 3 rooms like this, connected via metre by metre holes. The air down there was pretty stale and manky, and it was bloody hot down there. We climbed back up the steep corridor and were absolutely knackered when we came back out. When climbing down and up you had to hunch forward a long way and have your knees bent, hence the reason it was such hard work.

We headed off and I asked if we could stop off somewhere for lunch. The taxi driver took us to a buffet lunch which cost us 50 LE each (it turns out the official price is usually 35 LE each, but the driver gets a commission for taking us there, hence the increased price). He then took us to a papyrus factory, where we were stunned at the prices. The woman working there, who had given us a demonstration of how the papyrus is used to make the paper, was pretty pissed off with us when we left empty handed … as was the taxi driver no doubt; he missed out on his commission The taxi driver asked why we hadn’t bought anything; we told him we found one we liked but it was too expensive (500 LE). He asked how much we’d expected to pay and I said 100 LE… he shook his head and so I said to him that the shop at our hotel was around that price. Shortly afterwards he was on the phone, and I thought he may have been ringing the hotel shop about the papyrus. He suggested to us that when we get back to the hotel, we should look at the papyrus in the shop there.

When we arrived back at the hotel, the taxi driver came in with us; I paid him the 200 LE and gave him a 20 LE tip, then went over to the elevators. He looked a bit lost, but he then left. I poked my head around the corner and the shop owner was laughing at me. I went over and he told me what had happened. The taxi driver had called him and said he was bringing a couple in to look at papyrus and wanted commission for anything we bought. The shop owner said that when we had arrived the taxi driver had said ‘talk to them’ (in Arabic obviously so we couldn’t understand) and the shop owner had shaken his head. The taxi driver repeated ‘talk to them, talk to them’ and he kept saying no, then said that we’d already bought from him. Hehehe, the taxi driver must have been cut up They’re all dodgy bastards over here, looking to rip you off.

At 7:30pm we went down for our pre-departure meeting, the first one we’ve actually been present for! The meeting went for like 2 hours; the tour leader took down all our details and then went through the itinerary and various optional activities available. There are actually 3 different tour groups; 1 group only does the Nile, the other does the Nile & Alexandria, and the other does the Nile, Alexandria & Jordan; so we all start together and then people will drop out as their tour finishes. Of 13 ppl, 9 are doing the full tour.  A big bug interrupted the meeting and Skye and I found it funny the way everyone reacted. We weren’t bothered by it at all after having encountered hundreds of the buggers in Africa, but the others, especially the girls, were freaking out. Andrew, one of the guys on our tour, caught it in his hand and it bit/stung him… that wasn’t the best idea! It ended up being pancaked on the tour leader’s map, which he was very distraught about. After the meeting, most of us hadn’t eaten, so had dinner in the hotel restaurant. When Skye and I had finished eating we went back to our rooms to get all our gear packed up ready for the following day, before going to bed.

 

2008-04-05

Summary

- Pyramids

- Sphinx

- Overnight recliner train

On Saturday morning, we had breakfast before heading off to the pyramids. One of the girls from our tour stayed behind as she was already sick. There are 13 in the group; all are Aussies except for 1 who is American. We are the only couple again on this tour. The pyramids come into view amongst the busy city. The city goes right up about 1km (maximum) from the pyramids. The first pyramid, the largest pyramid has had a small portion collapse at the very peak. From a distance, the stone blocks don’t look very big, but up close they are huge! Each block weighs about 1 ton! We went inside one of the Queen’s pyramids (much smaller pyramids), which was the same 45 degree metre passage as Dahshur, except this one only went for about 20 metres. It is actually quite boring in the tombs as all you see is a stone room. All of the treasures have been cleared out for the museum, except the case where they’d been stolen by thieves first. We saw many more hieroglyphics and this is where the guide explained the function of the false doors for allowing the soul to pass through. A lot of info we were told really makes movies like The Mummy and Stargate make more sense. Everyone took a whole bunch of photos before we moved onto the sphinx. There are guys on camels everywhere asking you to take their photo, then they expect to be paid for it. I didn’t want a photo of any of them… with their Ray Ban sunnies and caps on… hardly fits the part!

The sphinx is very much deteriorated; the lower parts have been reconstructed and I imagine the face may have had some work done also. We also looked in the Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple; made of granite and limestone. There is a Pizza Hut just over 100m from the sphinx! Skye and I are getting the hang of avoiding the hawkers, whereas a lot of the others were getting hassled by them. The guide then took us to a papyrus factory, but nobody in the group bought anything there; I think everyone’s already bought their papyrus souvenirs. We went to some take away place for lunch, which was absolutely packed so took over half an hour… it would have been quicker to dine in somewhere! Then we headed back to the hotel. We had the option of continuing to the Egyptian Museum, which would have been good to have a guide to explain things… but since we’d just been we weren’t going to pay to go again. We had coped all right with the museum as we’d visited the Egypt exhibition in Adelaide last year when they shipped a bunch of artefacts over for a few months; that gave the general gist of things.

We went back to the hotel and got our rooms all packed up and ready to go, then had a snooze for an hour or so before going down for dinner. After dinner, we grabbed our bags from our rooms and got on a bus that took us to the train station. At about 10:30pm the train came and picked us up. My seat did not really decline much, although some seemed to recline back to about 45 degrees… Luck of the draw I think; at least we weren’t too close to the toilet this time. The luggage was stored overhead; the guy 2 seats in front of me had a whole (20kg or so) backpack fall off of the shelf and land on his head… ouch. The lights on the train do not go off, so a face mask was a necessity (unless you can sleep in brightness). The toilet was pretty gross, but being a guy it was still usable for me.

 

2008-04-06

Summary

- Luxor

- Karnak Temple

I managed a few hours of sleep before the sun came up, I’m sure Skye slept more than me. We arrived in Luxor at around 10ish. Apparently someone in the carriage behind us had their passport, wallet and a whole bunch of other stuff stolen from their luggage. We hopped on another bus which took us to our hotel. After waiting in reception for about a half hour, we checked in to our rooms. We didn’t have long to chill, as we headed off for lunch early in the afternoon. I did manage to squeeze in a shower before we left for lunch. A lot of the guys had pigeon, but I was feeling like some veg as most of the meals here come without veg, so I ordered the only thing on the menu that mentioned vegetables; grilled chicken with fresh vegetables… plus the choice of rice or fries… I chose rice. My meal came… it was two small pieces of chicken, rice and fries. The ‘fresh vegetables’ consisted of one slice of cucumber, one slice of tomato and a few pieces of uncooked cabbage… not quite what I was hoping for! Skye went with her usual margarita pizza; always a safe option really.

After lunch we rode via horse carriage to the ? Temple (the horses were quite skinny). The temple was lined with small sphinxes (by small I mean human-sized) that had a lion’s body with a ram’s head (the lion symbolising power and the ram symbolising fertility). As usual there was hieroglyphics over all the walls. One wall was quite… interesting; showing an Egyptian guy with a bona…. yes that’s right, I do mean an erection. I couldn’t hear everything the tour guide said but it was something about this Egyptian guy spanking the monkey until he had 9 nights of sexual pleasure from all the women. Apparently this guy pops up in a lot of the hieroglyphics around Egypt. There are tons of pillars in the temple; once holding up a stone roof, however there is no longer a stone roof. These pillars were made from jagged rocks, which were then smoothed down to make a circular pillar. It took 8 of us joining hands to fit around the base of the pillar, and the pillars would have been about 20 metres high… pretty impressive. You could still see the original colours that had been used on the pillars and other areas of the temple. The obelisks were also impressive, made out of a single piece of granite and placed vertically, rising around 15-20m towards the sky. There were more huge statues within the temple, and plenty of smaller ones about 5 metres high. Most of the statues show signs of deterioration or have rock segments missing/broken off. Skye stacked it at one point; giving herself a nasty bruise on her knee and a graze on her foot. Another girl on our tour managed to fracture a toe when she misjudged one of the steps.

Leaving the temple, we rode via horse carriage again before briefly walking through the streets of Luxor exploring the city. Once back at the hotel, we chilled for an hour (Skye had a shower) before going out for dinner, crossing the Nile via motorised felucca. There was a bit of a sand storm going on outside, so the air was thick with dust/sand. We ate a set menu, consisting of some traditional Egyptian dishes. TD finally caught up with me tonight; I thought it may happen in Egypt as Matt from our previous tour had said that when he’d done the Egypt tour, every single person ended up getting ill. I must admit we had gotten a bit lax towards the end of the last tour, so it was time to harden up again on being on the cautious side. When we got back to the hotel, everyone went to bed ready for the very early morning.

 

2008-04-07

Summary

- Hot air balloon cancelled

- Valley of the Kings; donkey ride

- Nile cruise

We got up at 3:45am on Monday as we had booked a hot air balloon ride for sunrise (11 of the 13 on our tour had also paid for this option). We left the hotel at 4:30am to the docks, where we boarded a motorised felucca and waited… waited and waited… there were about 60 or so people there waiting.. for the last 2 people, who arrived just before 5:15am. We crossed the Nile then transferred into vans, which drove us to the hot air balloon spot. On arrival, none of the balloons were setup; the sun had already risen… not that the sun was seen visible through the thick smog/fog/dust… whatever you claim that it is. We waited, and waited; apparently we were waiting for a weather report from the Luxor tower. The balloons organisers tried to entertain us with a piece of rope; used as a skipping rope (managing 1 participant) then for tug of war (managing 0 participants)…. Dude it’s before 6am… I don’t think anyone can be bothered! Just after 6am, the balloon ride was called off… what a waste of a morning. We were taken back to the booking office and waited… and waited… until our tour leader arrived just before 7:30am.

We headed to our donkey start point, where we were matched up with our donkeys to ride into the Valley of the Kings. It was quite different to riding a horse in that your feet just dangle; there is no thingamy-bob to slip your feet into. We went with another tour group at the same time; both the tour leaders rode quad bikes while we rode the donkeys. The other tour leader was trying to show off and race past and ended up clipping one of the girls from our tour then hit the donkey of another girl on the other tour, knocking her off the donkey. Nothing but a few bruises, but it could’ve been worse! The donkey ride went for about an hour. My donkey, I named him Speedy Gonzales (sp?), liked to be at the front of the pack; whenever another donkey came up beside him, he’d speed up to keep in front. In the last 15 mins he gunned it, leaving the rest of the donkeys out of sight.

When I’d stopped at the gate and waited for the rest of the donkeys to catch up, we dismounted; my inner legs like jelly. My donkey was mounted by another randy donkey; these are all male donkeys… We walked the rest of the way into the Valley of the Kings. We visited three tombs; the first one was IMO the best one. Deep in the tombs, the original colours were all still present in the hieroglyphics and Egyptian carvings. Leaving the Valley of the Kings I picked up 3 small statues for 100 LE; I thought I’d done well until I found out from our tour leader that I should’ve paid only 20 LE…. nevermind.

We got the bus from the Valley of the Kings to a riverboat on the Nile. The boat has four decks; the top one being the bar/dance area, the third being rooms and the restaurant; and the bottom two being more rooms and the reception on the bottom floor. Our room was on the third deck of the boat. The boat cruised along the Nile for the day until we reached the lock. I hung out on the sun deck having a yarn with the rest of the group while Skye had a snooze in our room. At the lock the river steps up about 5 metres, so the boat goes in the lock which fills up with water lifting the boat to the right level to continue. When we arrived at the lock, there were heaps of small row boats swarming the cruise ships trying to sell stuff. They would throw things up to onto the cruise ships for people to look at; and then you’d either throw it back or throw them down the money for it. Skye and I bought a galabeya (robe) each for the galabeya party the following night. We had dinner and then chilled for a while before going to bed.

 

2008-04-08

Summary

 

- Edfu temple

- Komombo temple

On Tuesday morning, breakfast was at 7am and then we headed off to Edfu temple; the cruise boat had docked at Edfu. Edfu temple was built during the Greco Roman period, so is different from the original Egyptian temples. Same deal though really; big statues, lots of hieroglyphics and big ass columns. The roof on the temple was still present, although had been blackened from the fires that had been used within the temple (for warmth and for cooking).

We went back to the cruise ship at 10:30am and chilled until lunch, then I had a nap after lunch. The boat cruised down the Nile to Komombo Temple. Upon reaching Komombo Temple a about 5pm, we got off the boat and entered the temple. There was no roof on the temple and a lot of the walls were collapsed. The temple was much smaller than Edfu, but still impressive. We watched as the sun set and then I went down to the markets and bought a hat.

We got back on the cruise ship and Skye was quite unwell, throwing up. I went down for dinner at 8pm, while Skye was laying down in bed. After dinner I checked on Skye and then changed into my galabaya and went to the bar for the party. The party is only us and the other group from the donkey trek; the other groups (all Europeans) were not part of the party. A few people from the other group didn’t participate, but everyone from our group got dressed up. I had a few beers; Stellas, they didn’t have any local brews on board. Skye came down for a while a little later on. I hit the dance floor for a while for a few Arabic tunes as well as some old familiars. We went back to our room at about 3am, while some of the others got off the cruise boat and went into the town.

 

2008-04-09

Summary

- Aswan

- Sunset camel ride

We skipped breakfast Wednesday morning, sleeping in til just after 10am, although Skye snoozed for longer after I got up. We chilled on the sundeck until lunch time, when we chowed down as we were bloody starving by that stage. The boat docked at Aswan; we bummed around for the rest of the arvo until 5pm when we caught a motorboat across the Nile to go on a camel ride in the desert. Skye and I both had lazy camels that kept stopping along the way. The camels were quite a nut-cracker for the males in the group. The sun set as we rode the camels. After dismounting; there were no falls fortunately; we caught the motorboat back to the cruise ship and packed up our gear ready for checking out in the early hours of the morning. We went down for dinner at 8pm and then finished packing everything up and settled our drinks tab/bill. Then off to bed for an early night, although there was a Nubian show on in the main room of the boat involving drums, so we basically lied there listening to that until it finished.

 

2008-04-10

Summary

- Abu Simbel

- Crap lunch at Nile Hotel

- Nubian dinner

Our wake-up call on Thursday morning was at 3:30am. We cleared our stuff out of the room and got our passports from the safe deposit boxes before catching a bus at 4am, which took us to where the police convoy started. The only way to get to Abu Simbel by road is with a police convoy (there is an option to fly but it costs more than twice as much). The bus ride to Abu Simbel took about 3 hours; the sun rising along the way. We went down to the Abu Simbel temple. The 4 statues of Ramses II were huge. There was a line of baboon statues above it and beside Ramses’s legs were statues of his wives and daughters… 38 wives I think it was that he had and about 120 children. We entered the temple, which was in very good condition; most of the pictures graffiti-free and still maintaining the original colouration. In the end room of the temple sat 4 statues; 3 gods and 1 of Ramses II. Two days a year; in Feb and in Oct; the morning light shines all the way through the temple onto the forehead of the Ramses II statue, while the rest of the temple remains in the dark. My camera cops a pounding in these temples with all of the pushy tourists. In this end room, one of the many pushy French tourists knocked a button on my camera making a sound, so I looked down at the camera to figure out what had happened and some dude comes running over yelling at me ‘no photos, no photos’ and tries to grab my camera. I yanked it from him and told him I hadn’t taken a photo, I’d just knocked a button and showed him the last photo (which was taken outside the temple).

We went onto the next temple, which was the smaller temple for the queen. After going through both temples we waited around until we were supposed to meet our tour guide again; I took a few snaps of the exteriors of the temples at this point since the crowds had cleared a lot since when we’d first got there. When I went to the toilet, paying a pound to get in, there were more females in the male’s toilets than males… I thought I’d gone in the wrong one at first. We headed off on the bus for the 3 hour ride back to Aswan. Along the way, you could see plenty of mirages. I was surprised how much they actually do look like a body of water; even reflecting the mountains in the background. We passed by the High Dam, one of the world’s largest dams. When we got to our Aswan hotel, Nile Hotel, we checked in and had lunch at the hotel restaurant. The lunch was quite frankly crap. Most of the food was cold and my chicken schnitzel was very poor quality, still containing bone and really crappy chicken. When we went back upstairs, I found that the toilet had leaked all over my camera bag, which I left locked up in the bathroom. After removing everything from my bag to let it dry out, I updated my daily happenings and backed up my photos, while Skye had a nap.

We went out for dinner in a Nubian home, visiting a Nubian school along the way, where our tour leader Mohamed gave us a history lesson on Egypt. We had dinner sitting on carpets and cushions in an open concrete room. After dinner we headed back to our hotel where most of the group hung out for a few hours in Mohamed’s room. I wasn’t feeling brilliant though, so I went to bed early.

 

2008-04-11

Summary

- Bazaar / markets

- Nubian restaurant

We slept in on Friday morning until about 9:30am. We went downstairs for breakfast at the hotel restaurant… which didn’t improve since lunch time yesterday… breakfast was only a hard boiled egg, some bread and a small pancake. We decided that we would definitely not be eating lunch and dinner at the Nile Hotel today! We went for a walk through the Bazaars and markets; I’m actually starting to enjoy stirring up the store owners. I started telling them I was from China when they ask where I’m from. One guy laughed at me and asked again and I said China again and then he stopped laughing and wasn’t sure whether I was serious or not; it was pretty funny, one of those had to be there moments I think. So many of them have big signs here that say ‘no hassle’, yet the shop owners are calling out to you ‘come and look in my shop, no hassling, come and look inside’… errr isn’t that hassling already?… Anyway Skye haggled her way to a 10 LE purchase, and we headed back to the hotel. We caught a motorboat across the Nile to El Dokka Restaurant (or something like that anyway) for lunch. Lunch was expensive, but the food was quite good for a change. I had a Nubian cocktail (technically a mocktail though as they didn’t serve alcohol there), which was a mix of guava, mango and strawberry juice; quite tasty.

Back to the hotel, the others headed off on a felucca cruise. Skye and I had been umm-ing and arr-ing about whether to go as we’ve been on so many felucca cruises already; but when I asked Mohammed whether there was a canopy or any shade on the felucca and he said no, then we decided we’d give it a pass as it was bloody hot outside! Instead we chilled out in the air conditioned hotel room.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant again as it had already been paid for. After dinner we finished packing up our gear and then got the bus to the train station for the overnight recliner train back to Cairo. Nate and Skye both got seats that reclined all the way back to lying position, but they both ended up with people sitting behind them anyway so couldn’t recline the seats all of the way.

Botswana to Zambia

2008-03-26

Summary

- Okavango Delta campsite

- Mokoros deeper into Okavango Delta

- Game walk

- Cold shower

On Wednesday morning, we had brekky, then loaded out day packs onto the motorboats before jumping onboard ourselves; after signing another customary indemnity form like we get every other day. The motorboats took us through the Okavango channels for about an hour or so before we arrived at our drop-off point. We unloaded our gear and then loaded it onto the trucks that were waiting for us. The trucks took us to our Okavango campsite where the tents were already set up for us… brilliant We settled into our tents, getting out our sleeping bags etc, then we had an early lunch at about 11am. I wasn’t very hungry at this stage so didn’t have much for lunch as was the case with everyone else I think; the camp dogs must have ended up with the leftovers… yes there’s always camp dogs… it’s not a campsite unless there’s camp dogs!

Just after noon we headed off via truck to the mokoros (dug-out canoes) on the river bank at Xao. We noted that we were sitting right on top of the petrol container in the truck… the truck which had every part jiggling along the way with a speedo that didn’t work… in serious need of some maintenance. After signing another indemnity form we paired up and got a poler each before getting onto the mokoros. The poler stands at the rear of the mokoro and funnily enough… he holds a long wooden pole. The poler pushes the pole to the bottom of the river bed and pushes the mokoro along. We cruised through the reeds, spotting crickets and tiny frogs along the way; barely the size of a fingernail. We saw a bunch of monkeys in some trees making a lot of racket. This portion of the trip is definitely not for those who hate creepy crawlies; pushing through the reeds, we got covered in all sorts of spiders, bugs, seeds, and plant matter. We poled for about an hour and a half before stopping on an island.

We went for a short game walk on the island with the head polers (Tom and King George), although spotted no game. We found tracks and/or droppings of hippos, elephants, kudus, buffalo, and zebra. We checked out a sausage tree and tried some amarula from an amarula tree; a fruit used to make a popular alcoholic drink that tastes somewhat like Kahlua. Amarula is mixed with peppermint liqueur to make a Springbok shot (Amarula is the ingredient I couldn’t remember the name of in a previous post). By this point it was very hot, being about 2:30pm-3pm. We got back on the mokoros and poled back the way we’d come, except this time in much more heat and directly into the sun… my poor little nose got scorched! The leathery mats we were sitting on got extremely hot in the sun. Just before arriving back at our starting point, another group poled passed us in the other direction. It would have been much better going out at that time (about 4pm) when the heat was starting to die down and they would have had the sunset on the way back. Anyway, everyone was very hot and bothered after the pole back, so there was a bit of a rush to get on the truck that had a canopy over the seats. Skye and I ended up on the other uncovered truck, so continued to cook.

When we got back to the campsite Skye and I went and had showers, having finally figured out which one was mens and which was womens (was not written in English: Banna [mens] and Basadi [ladies]). No hot water in the shower; I’d grown accustomed to having hot showers again after leaving Tanzania. The cold shower was very refreshing anyway. We had dinner and chilled for a while before going to bed. The tents, even though they were setup for us, were not as good as the ones we normally have; smaller and more of a tarp material…. i.e. cheaper.

 

2008-03-27

Summary

- Seronga village walk

- Houseboat

- Bird watching

- South African Monopoly

After brekky on Thursday morning, we loaded our gear onto one truck and hopped onto another. The gear truck took our gear to the houseboat, while the us truck took us to Seronga village. We walked through the village learning about the ways of the Setswana people. We visited a local bakery, butcher, the interior of a round hut home, a doctor’s clinic, a kindergarten, a school, a store and a bar. Okay the last one was just so the alcos could get their booze and cigarettes. Most of the huts are mud huts with a thatched grass roof, thought there are some variations such as those using empty cans along with mud to build their hut walls or using straw/grass instead of mud. The kindergarten had the kids singing songs to us again. The school ‘visit’ was more of a drop- off-your-gifts-and-leave type visit. Everyone off-loaded their pens, pencils and other stationary to the school and kindergarten.

We walked to the point where we’d been dropped off by the motorboats the previous day. From here the motorboats took us to the houseboat. The two bathrooms at the front of the houseboat on the 2^nd floor had glass doors, so no chance of privacy for anyone showering or going to the loo in there. The other 3 bathrooms were adequately privatised though. JL (my nickname for John Lee) caught a catfish alongside the houseboat, which would have been close to a metre long (the catfish, not the houseboat… duh), before letting it go again. We also saw a tigerfish below the surface while watching from the houseboat. If you don’t know what a tigerfish is, google it and look at the teeth on those babies. If JL’s warning of crocs and hippos frequenting the river isn’t enough to keep you from swimming, sighting a tigerfish sure is! After lunch, we chilled for the early arvo. I nabbed up an FHM from the magazine pile, which was dubbed a ‘porno’… whatever! Nevertheless, the FHMs certainly did the rounds, with the girls reading through them as well… so hardly a porno people! There was an article in there about the “tree-man”, google it or youtube it and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

At 3pm we had the choice of 2 activities: fishing or bird watching. Skye and I had decided to do bird watching, whereas most of the group had chosen fishing. When the time came, Skye didn’t want to come anymore as it was so hot. About 8 ppl stayed behind on the houseboat and chilled while about 8 went fishing, which left 2 of us on the bird watching motorboat; David and myself… the 2 camera geeks Our guide/boat driver was ‘Silence’. Anyway, we spotted a bird or 2 shoot past, but not much to start with. The first decent sighting we had was actually of a croc. He didn’t hang around for long, a few seconds tops before diving into the water and disappearing from sight. Ok, so there are certainly crocs in these waters! We learnt a bit about the plants from Silence; including water chestnuts, papyrus, and day and night lilies. The day lily has smooth-edged circular lily pads and white flowers that are open during the day, whereas the night lily has jagged edged lily pads and yellow flowers that open during the night. We tried a papyrus root after pulling it from the river and cracking/peeling it open. It has a fibrous yet fluffy texture to it. Interestingly the papyrus and reeds are actually floating; they do not actually reach the bottom of the river. The river scenery was stunning, with the whole landscape being reflected in the river’s surface. We spotted a variety of birds including bee-eaters, jacanas, a darter, a hamerkop, an ibis and some sort of stork I think. We managed to spot a jacana with several babies running around on the lily pads. Silence gunned it a few times, which cooled things down considerably with the rush of wind; it was fun gliding sideways through the bends of the Okavango channels.

We got back to the houseboat about 6ish and watched as the sun set. The mozzies were REALLY bad, this is the most mozzies we’ve encountered. In the dining section even with the mosquito nets down, there were heaps of the little bastards buzzing around the table. At one stage there was a bat in the dining section as well. After dinner we cracked out the board games (after Skye and some of the others had played a hand of cheat/bullshit) and fired up a game of Monopoly. It was South African Monopoly so money was in Rand and all the properties and airports (not railway stations) were South African places. I was off to a dismal start, but managed to pick up Clifton (the Mayfair of South African monopoly). Anyway, by about 10pm everyone was tired and had had enough, so we packed it away and went to bed.

 

2008-03-28

Summary

- Namibia border crossing

- Swamp Stop

On Friday morning we had breakfast before loading our gear onto the motorboats and riding them back to the Sepupa campsite. Along the way we saw a hippo, for a whole second before it popped its head back beneath the surface, and a couple of crocs on the river banks, as well as a bunch of different birds flying overhead including an African fish eagle. When we jumped off the motorboats back at Sepupa, I spotted a snake in the water about a foot long; hippos, crocs, tigerfish and snakes… there’s no way you’d get me swimming in that river! Back on the truck we headed across the border back into Namibia. We spent pretty much the whole day on the truck, stopping off at a supermarket just before reaching our campsite to pick up some food/drink supplies.

We didn’t reach our Katimo Mulilo campsite, Swamp Stop, until quite late in the afternoon. There was building materials all over the place, with a lot of renovations going on. We set up our tents and there was no water at the time, so we watched as the sunset and then had dinner. After dinner the water was back on so I had a shower, before we chilled around the campfire; toasting a few marshmallows.

 

2008-03-29

Summary

- Botswana border crossing

- Kasane

- Chobe National Park; Sable, roan antelope, and so many elephants, baboons and hippos

On Saturday we had to cross back across the border into Botswana again. At the border crossing there was an abundance of baobab trees, a personal favourite of mine; these trees have massive rounded trunks and lots of characters. Being at a border crossing though, we were not allowed to photograph the trees unfortunately. We drove through Chobe National Park along the way and saw some elephants on the side of the road. We later saw sable and roan antelope, which we hadn’t seen previously (and I’d been really wanting to see a sable). When we reached the town of Kasane, we stopped off at the shops. The ATM line was huge, so I went to find an internet cafe while Skye lined up with the others from our group (as I didn’t need anymore money). It took me until the 4^th internet cafe until I found a wireless connection and that was a 10 minute walk away from where I started. By the time I checked Skye and my emails and updated the blog, and then walked back the others had gone from the ATM and the truck wasn’t there; there was still 15 mins until we were supposed to leave town. So I went to the supermarket to pick up some fruit and water, as well as some DVDs for backups. The supermarket was packed, so I lined up by the desk on the edge where the blank DVDs were in a cabinet. When I finally got to the front and asked the lady for a box of blank DVDs, she had to go find someone with a key to unlock the cabinet. When she got back about 5 mins later and unlocked the cabinet and I pointed out which ones I wanted, she asked how many I wanted. They were boxes of 10 so I just said 1 box and she replies “you want the whole box?!”…. “errrr, yes”. Apparently the norm is to buy one or two dvds, so she didn’t know how much she was supposed to charge me for a whole box… so she disappeared again. In the end she just charged me for buying 10 single DVDs, which was a bit more expensive than usual but I didn’t mind anyway. By this stage it was 10-15 mins after the truck was supposed to leave town. When I got out there, the truck was still there so I didn’t have a 3km walk ahead of me to the campsite luckily.

We arrived at Thebe River Safaris Lodge and setup our tents. 14 of our tour group booked on an optional afternoon game drive. We did our laundry, as did most of the others, and then had lunch. At 3pm we were ready for the game drive, but it turns out we weren’t leaving until 3:30pm. After waiting around we got on the open safari truck and drove into Chobe National Park. Clear skies; it was good safari weather! We saw some hornbills, like ‘Zazu’ in the Lion King, and hamerkops in the trees. We saw a couple of groups of elephants along the way, with a couple of bulls wrestling one another; one trumpeting as it stormed away. Then we came across a massive hoard of baboons. We sat watching the baboons for quite a while; there was so many of them and they were so active it was hard to know where to look; there were lots of young/baby baboons as well. We drove down to the river side where an elephant was down drinking from the river. We continued on, driving right alongside the river. At one point we were driving across an incline of about 30-35 degrees where everyone had to sit on the high side of the truck to make sure it didn’t roll. Just along the river a bit further, we saw hippos in the river. The hippos were not sitting there in the water with their heads poking up, like the hippos we’d seen in the Serengeti. These ones were wrestling with one another, much less boring than hippos usually are. There were heaps of small safari boats out on the river, which is what the guide told us we would be in for the sunset cruise the following night. We continued along the riverside, and an elephant came down to the riverside… followed by another few, followed by another few. There was several elephants (about 6 or 7) drinking from the river, including some very young ones.

We stayed for quite a while watching the elephants until the guide said we’d better turn back as the sun was starting to set and the park closes after sunset. We drove back past the hippos playing in the river, an elephant ran out in front of the truck, kicking up dust in front of the setting sun. We really had no choice but to stop and watch. Then another few elephants came out, then another few, and another few. There were more than 10 elephants right alongside the truck; drinking from the river, splashing their trunks in the water, throwing dust and/or mud over themselves. One of the elephants went into the water for a swim, then several others followed. The youngsters were wrestling one another in the water, there was also a very small baby elephant that was no more than a week old. The sun got lower and lower, so we were forced to edge around the elephants and continue on our way. We were stopped again by a bustard crossing the road. We watched the sunset as the truck made its way back to the gate. Closing time was 6:30pm and we made it there at about 6:32… just scraping through in time.

When we got back to the camp we heard that there had been some conflict between David and Skye (the other Skye) and David had walked off. I burnt off a DVD for Harley and Kathy to backup their photos and then we had dinner. I had a cold shower and backed up my own stuff before going to bed ready for another early morning. Shortly after going to bed I heard what sounded like an elephant trumpeting (in amongst the usual hippo sounds that could be heard throughout the night). I later heard 2 shots fired; whether they were related to the elephant or not, I have no idea.

 

2008-03-30

Summary

- Early morning Chobe game drive

- Kasane closed

- Sunset cruise

We were up before 5:30am on Sunday ready for the morning game drive. The same truck as we’d had the day before picked us up. I’d hoped we’d be split into smaller 4WD vehicles; which are faster, more manoeuvrable, quieter and smaller (less likely to scare off game), and generally give better viewing (with less people on board, there’s less people in the way); but we ended up in the same truck as the previous day. This morning’s game drive was targeting the big cats. We saw a spitting cobra dead on the side of the road (road kill) before entering the park. The start of the game drive was slow as the gates had only just opened so there was about 10 vehicles, so when the front one stopped and blocked the road, all other trucks had to stop as well with only the first few trucks being able to actually see the game. In the park we saw some kudu, impala, baboons again, jackals, and a variety of birds. We were often overtaken by the smaller 4WD vehicles; like I said the smaller vehicles are faster. We saw plenty of leopard and lion tracks in the dirt. Another truck in front of us turned around after hearing of a leopard siting, but our driver didn’t think the leopard would hang around long enough for us to get there and see it and he was convinced he knew where the lions were. We continued on, but saw no sign of lions, nor any sign of leopards.

We got back to camp just after 9:30am and had breakfast just after 10am. At 11am the crew was going into the town to stock up on supplies so anyone who wanted to go into town could get a ride with them. I had something I wanted to post, but being a Sunday the post office would be closed, so I wasn’t going to go. I figured I could go in and use an internet place and Skye could get some money out. When we got there pretty much everything was closed. No wireless internet available at the couple of internet cafes open (which were full) and Skye had left her passport locked up so wouldn’t be able to exchange money. We walked around then waited by the truck bored until they got back at 12:45.

Back at the campsite I played a game of scrabble (and got absolutely kaned) while Skye snoozed in the tent. I’d heard we were being picked up for the sunset cruise at 3:30pm, but the guy came at 3:10pm while I was in the loo, so I just about got left behind by the time I’d come out, grabbed my stuff and gone over to the pickup truck. We drove to the riverside and to our dismay we weren’t on the little safari boats we’d seen the day before… no we were on a huge boat; like a floating pontoon. We had to wait about 15 mins for another Geckos group of 24 to arrive, so then there was about 50 of us on this boat. The boat was so slow, with the safari boats whizzing past. We got to see kudu and impala drinking from the river as well as seeing a few crocs along the riverside. The boat went out towards the middle of the river where there was a pod of hippos. They weren’t as active as the ones we’d seen yesterday, generally just sitting there… not even a yawn. Out of nowhere, a bull hippo launched itself out of the water about a metre or so from the boat’s edge; about two thirds of its body must’ve breached the water! At this point I had my camera down in front of my stomach as I was just watching the pod of hippos; I managed to react in time to fire off a few shots, but unfortunately I was at full zoom so all I got was a close-up of hippo skin and splashing water; a shame, it would have made an awesome shot. I still can’t believe that the hippo got so far out of the water; I had no idea they could do that! The boat then started heading back as the sun set. We were a bit disappointed that we never got to see any elephants drinking from the river from front on (we’d seen them from behind/side last night), but like I said this big ass boat was just so slow it hadn’t reached the same point on the riverside that we’d gone to yesterday (where the herds of elephants were drinking); only the safari boats had reached that far.

When we got back to the campsite, we had dinner and then roasted marshmallows again; at least this time there were more/better sticks to use. Then off to bed for another early morning.

 

2008-03-31

Summary

- Zambia border crossing dramas

- Waterfront campsite

- Victoria Falls

- Markets

On Monday morning we had to be up before 5:30am again in order to try to beat the rush to the border. The border crossing between Botswana and Zambia is a river crossing undertaken by a ferry; 2 ferries to be precise however 1 was broken down. The other Geckos truck (the same group that had joined us on the boat cruise) had left at 4:30am or something! It wasn’t until we reached the border that we really understood the need for the early start; there were trucks lined up for kilometres! Thankfully since the Geckos truck is legally classified as a bus (although the crew doesn’t like to admit that it’s called a bus, they hate being called bus drivers) we were able to pass by the trucks to depart Botswana. There was then a queue for the ferry, which only started running at 7am. John-Lee managed to convince the guys at the ferry that we were with the other Geckos truck, so we drove down the queue and cut in where the other truck was and jumped out (the truck/bus cannot have any passengers when loaded onto the ferry). This caused a lot of uproar from the other drivers who were waiting to get onto the ferry. I think most of the arguing came from the truck drivers who were queued, however the Geckos BUS was not a truck, so they had nothing to argue against; there is a car/bus line and a truck line. There were guys threatening to lie in the road to prevent the Geckos BUS from getting onto the ferry. We took the opportunity to say bus as often as possible as we knew that John-Lee hated it being called a bus, but in this case he had to call it a bus. I felt sorry for Vincent, our driver, who was copping different instructions from different people as to where he needed to park and wait with the truck. We all hopped onto the ferry (except for Vincent) and crossed over the river hoping that the Geckos BUS would come on the next crossing. Note that it takes about 15-20 minutes for the ferry to load up and cross the river and unload, so a round trip rakes around 40 minutes. We queued and paid for our Zambia visas and then waited for the truck. I had to use the toilets there, which required payment of 10 Pula ($2) when there was no toilet paper and no water from the tap… exactly what am I paying for then?! Sure enough on the next ferry crossing, the Geckos BUS came and after waiting for the papers and everything to be approved for the vehicle, we left… by this stage I think it was approaching 10am.

We arrived at our Waterfront campsite where we decided to upgrade to a room; alas there were no rooms available, so we went back to setup the tents. The Geckos bus had gotten stuck in the dirt, where it’d given way… the rear right wheel now stuck in a ditch. It was then that we were informed that the tour did not end tomorrow, but the day after. The itineraries we had did not match John-Lee’s; ours said the tour finished tomorrow morning, so that’s when our flight out was booked for. Anyway, everyone else went off to the auditorium to watch the dvd on activities available; activities that could be done tomorrow, hence why we didn’t go as we were leaving tomorrow. Instead we finished putting up our tent… this would be our last time putting up the ‘Springbok’ tent. We had lunch at 11:30, then I prepared myself for the visit to Victoria Falls; just as well too. I put my camera in a plastic bag, and also did the same with my phone in my pocket. We then watched as Vincent manoeuvred the truck back out of the campsite; I must say I was very impressed with his performance… the camp really isn’t designed well for trucks.

We got to Victoria Falls just after 1pm; it was US$10 entry into the falls. The power of the falls was amazing; I had expected to get wet, but what I was expecting was nothing compared to what we experienced. The mist from the waterfall was thrown into the air, falling down on like rain. When crossing the bridge the ‘rain’ was at its strongest, I was absolutely drenched from head to toe. It was hard to actually see the falls; most of the time all you saw was white… just as if you were in the clouds. Every now and then the mist/water would partially clear for a few seconds giving a brief glimpse of the falls. My clothes were still drying the following morning!

We spent over an hour and a half at the falls before going to the markets just alongside the falls. We were supposed to leave at 3pm, but after going to one market stall I realised we wouldn’t get very far by 3pm as you can’t just look through a stall; the stall owner will pick up everything and tell you what it is and try to pass it to you to look at; so I told John-Lee we’d get a taxi back. We spent over an hour at the markets; trading some of our clothes as well as spending our money for souvenirs. I am glad I bought a few painting in Tanzania as the paintings I have seen here are in my opinion not as good. We caught a taxi back to the campsite.

When we got back everybody had left on a sunset cruise along the Upper Zambezi; US$45 for a meal and open bar on the boat. The fact that we were leaving tomorrow so wouldn’t be drinking much and that we didn’t have much US$ left, we’d decided we weren’t going on the cruise anyway. With nobody around our tents, the vervet monkeys had moved in. They were all around the tents, tearing open the garbage bag, trying to eat charcoal and rummaging through anything they found. One of the monkeys had lost a hand, only a bone stub remained. I shooed them off before they took all of the charcoal. We went down for dinner at the restaurant and enjoyed a nice meal. The guys got back from the cruise about 7ish, with Mark ralfing through the bar after having too much on the cruise; I think he had some potent drinks given to him to celebrate his upcoming birthday. After dinner we packed up most of our stuff and wrapped all our souvenirs to try to prevent any breakages.

 

 

2008-04-01

Summary

- Pack up

- Taxi to Livingstone airport; SAA flight late

- No ATMs in Johannesburg airport

- Flight to Cairo on EgyptAir

On Tuesday morning we had breakfast with most of the others form our group at 8am (with those who weren’t on activities already). We got our tour t-shirts and then packed up all our gear and took down our tent for the last time. We hung around chatting for a while until our taxi came at 11:30am. We farewelled everyone who was still left around, then got the taxi to Livingstone airport. We checked in at the airport, paid our departure taxes and then waited. Our flight at 1:15pm was delayed, the plane touched down about 1:25, so it took about another half hour until we started boarding… not that I was worried as we had 6.5 hours ahead of us waiting around at Johannesburg airport. The ‘lunch’ on the plane was the smallest lunch I have ever seen.

We got to Johannesburg just after 4pm. When we landed we transferred to a bus which took us to the airport terminal (a common happening on most of our flights). We lined up at the check-in desk but when we reached the front we were told that check-in for our flight did not open until 7pm. We thought we’d better change some money anyway since we required US$ for payment at the beginning of our Egypt tour. We queued at the Bureau Exchange but were told they could only get money out from a credit card; no way I’m paying for a cash advance. We looked for an ATM to get Rand out, which we could then exchange for US$. Nup… no ATM in the airport… unbelievable… I’d have thought an ATM would be the first thing you’d put in an airport terminal! We used the net for a while, then went back to check in. No queue, bonus. We asked for window seats away from the toilet. Back through security, we had dinner at one of the cafes/restaurants. We went and waited at our gate until boarding the plane at about 9:15pm; our flight departed on schedule at 9:45pm; the flight was pretty packed. No entertainment on board so the only option was to try to sleep.

More pics

I have finished posting pics on the Joh’burg to Durban post, and have done several on ‘South Africa Continued’… I know I’m way behind!

Blog Update

One more post as well as some additional pics from Kruger in the ‘Exploring South Africa’ post. Sorry for the limited updates, power is hard to come by and internet access even harder. Haven’t had much photo-readying time.

Enjoy

Cooking in Namibia

2008-03-18

Summary

- Swakopmund

- Italian restaurant; ate springbok, oryx & ostrich

- Clubbing at ‘Cool Bananas’

Tuesday morning we were up before 6am to get our tents down and gear packed before we had breakfast. We set off on another day of long driving. We stopped off at Solitaire in the morning for a toilet stop and snacks/drinks. Back on the road, the scenery changed from red sand dunes to lush greenery, then onto white sand dunes. We stopped off by the coast for lunch, where there were heaps of sand flies along the waterside. We’d been told by the tour guide that there’d be flamingos there, however not a flamingo in site. After hot dogs for lunch we hit the road again to Swakopmund, where we stopped at the activity centre to decide on our optional activities for the following day. 15 of the group, including us, chose to do quad biking in the morning, with another 2 doing sandboarding in the morning, and there was also 8 people interested in going sky diving in the afternoon. From the activity centre, we walked to our accommodation; hooray no tent to setup! We stayed in 2 bedroom bungalows, so we shared with Harley and Cathy. There was a Laundromat just down the road, but it was 4:50 when we were ready to go there and figured it closed at 5, so didn’t know if we’d make it in time. We also figured it’d be expensive like previous laundry we’d had done; not the case it turned out to be 15 Namibian dollars per kg (around $2). We washed our stuff by hand instead, nevermind.

After doing the laundry and having a shower, it was time to go out for dinner. We (the tour group) went to an Italian restaurant, though I forget the name, I just know it started with an N… maybe Napolitana? Anyway, I ordered ostrich strips and convinced Skye to order springbok medallions instead of something more conservative. The sweet chilli sauce that I poured all over the ostrich strips turned out to be much hotter than the usual sweet chilli sauce, next time I should check it before covering my food with it. Skye didn’t finish her Springbok (but she did like it) so I had that as well, and Cathy didn’t finish her Oryx so I had some of that too. The Oryx had a different texture to the other two, being a denser meat. I preferred ostrich best I think, followed by Springbok, then Oryx.

From the restaurant we went clubbing/pubbing. Glen and I hussled a couple of Zimbabwe guys there, Washington and David, on the pool table. They both had local market stalls selling their artwork. Washington was named so because he was born in Britain as his mother was a nanny/maid there. Mark and I decided to start going through the shot list to try to polish them all off; Sour Monkey, Bob Marley, Chuck Norris, Springbok, B-52, Kahlua, 4×4, and Icecream are a bunch of the shots I remember having. We realised that the shot list continued on the back of the page, so gave up on attempting to try them all. Washington came and talked to me again later, but his accent combined with the fact that he was pretty wasted made it hard to understand most of what he was saying. Our tour guide copped a beer bottle punch in the face after trying to get in between a drunk guy and a few of the girls on our tour. A few of us hit the dancefloor occasionally when some decent music came on, which was usually quickly followed by a song that cleared the dancefloor… good work DJ! Skye and I walked back to our bungalows at about 1:30-2, but I think a bunch of others were out for another hour and a half.

2008-03-19

Summary

- Quad biking on the dunes

- Tug Restaurant

On Wednesday morning, we were up for breakfast at 8:30am, needless to say I was feeling pretty seedy. I skipped the dairy products and just had an apple and some bread, then popped a barocca to give me back my b-b-bounce Off to quad biking at 9:30; there were four bikes to choose from: auto, semi-auto, manual or the 350ccs. You had to weigh at least 80kg to go on the 350cc bikes. Everyone got an auto except for the two of the girls who went semi-autos as they were experienced with motorbikes. I ended up in the fast group who left first; there were 4 groups of quadders so I was in a different group from Skye. It was accidental ending up in the fast experienced group, but I’m glad I did. Most of the time I was going flat chat and still wanting more speed. The 2 semi-autos were in the same group as me and their bikes had more power, often leaving the rest of us (5 of us) in the group behind, then having to slow down so we could catch up, and like I said I was pedal to the metal (ok well thumb to the… full throttle) 95% of the time. The ‘rollercoaster’ part of the dunes involved going up and down the slopes of the dunes, similar to a skateboard ramp/tunnel. Harley and I were trying to get as high as possible up the dunes, raher than following the beaten tire tracks through the dunes; great fun. I wouldn’t want to be doing it without a guide though as there were some steep drop offs that you wouldn’t realise until it was too late. Luckily we stopped off on two of the dunes for a break and a drink, as both times I was butsing for a pee after drinking so much water throughout the morning. Just had to walk over the dunes away from the group before writing my initials in the sand I enjoyed the quad biking despite my hangover, as did Skye although I don’t think she was as much of a lead-foot as I was on them.

We’d been planning on watching the sky-divers who were leaving at 1:30pm, but when we found out the airport was 30 mins drive away and that it’d be a long process as all jumpers could not fit in the plane at once (i.e. several trips up in the plane for the 8 ppl), we decided not to go and to check out the town of Swakopmund. Skye had to buy some shorts so she could stop wearing my boardies (she hadn’t brought any shorts with her… bad move!) and some sunglasses as she’d stepped on hers and broken them. So I went with her to find these things then we checked out some curio shops. Went to Berley’s take away for lunch and we had a tropical pizza, which had banana on it; it was really nice. We found an Internet cafe which we used for 15 mins to check emails and update the blog, then we went back to the bungalow as we were feeling pretty knackered. Skye had a nap while I blogged away, then caught up with my photo backups which I’d been a bit slack on for a while. Then we went to the bar in town to check out the sky diving videos. We waited around for a while before they played the video and it turns out they only had the sandboarding video there, no skydiving. We went back to the bungalows, having lost an hour (we thought it would be a quick sky diving video viewing, but didn’t even get that). We had a quick shower and got ready to go out for dinner. There was no tour group booking anywhere, but most of us had agreed to eat at the Tug Restaurant. Most of it was seafood, but I avoided the seafood again not wanting to risk ending up sick from tropical toxins in the fish as our travel doctor had told us, so I went with a steak, but Skye had salmon with pasta. One beer was enough for me tonight, after last night’s effort.

Skye and I headed back to the buingalow, but Harley and Cathy had taken the key when we left the rooms and weren’t back yet. So I climbed in through the window, and then Skye followed. When Harley and Cathy came back it turns out they’d left the key at the desk after all, oh well. We packed up all our stuff before going to bed.

2008-03-20

Summary

- Seal colony at Cape Cross

- Spitzkoppe

- Cultural dance

Thursday morning I discovered it had rained overnight, so the stuff I’d left out to dry overnight (which still hadn’t dried from washing it on Tuesday) was now wetter than it was the night before. We packed our gear on the truck and had breakfast and were ready to leave at 8am, which is when we were told we were leaving. However 4 of the group hadn’t even woken up until after 8am, so the other 14 of us had to wait around until they were ready at 8:30. Then we made two stops to buy supplies from the shops. All up a very slow start to the morning, we didn’t actually leave Swakopmund until 9:30. The truck took us out to a seal colony at Cape Cross. There were hundreds of seals scattered across the rocks and in the water. They sound like sheep, with the noises they make. The smell was nothing to be fond of though!

We hit the road towards Spitzkoppe, stopping along the way in the middle of nowhere for a lunch break. I have somehow gotten myself the reputation as an exhibitionist, peeing where people can see me. The first occasion was purely not m fault; Tara walked in on me in the MEN’s toilet… and it was a urinal in the cubicle anyway! The second occasion was when we were pulled over for lunch on a previous day and rather than going behind the bush, I went in front of the bush since David was behind the bush. The third occasion was when we just about to leave the campsite and I jumped off the truck to take a leak, and the nearest toilet was a couple of hundred metres away; so I settled for the bush just next to the bus. Anyway, that last occasion was about a week ago, but I think the rep’s gonna stick now. Anyway, back to the lunch; we saw a small bird on a tree branch on the ground, but there was no sign of the nest or the mother.

Back on the road, we arrived in Spitzkoffe mid-afternoon. It was damn hot! Spitzkoffe was a bush camp, so had no facilities. The landscape there was amazing though, massive orangey red kopjes (massive rock mounds/formations hundreds of metres high). Most of the group decided to sleep out under the stars, but Skye and I went with the tent. Skye was having a lay down as she had a stomach ache, so I went for a walk to check out the flora and insects in the area, as well as the colourful agama lizards on the kopjes. I joined a few others walking down to the natural ‘bridge’ rock formation. As we got there, the weather took a swift turn and it started raining. It’s amazing how volatile the weather is here. The rocks were extremely slippery when wet, so we waited it out until the rain stopped. We went back to camp and I checked on Skye who was reading her girly magazine. So I went off for a walk again (as the weather had already started to clear again), taking pano snaps of the stunning landscape. I came across all sorts of insects and animals as well. Some of them I couldn’t see, but could hear them (it was very quiet out there by myself). I saw some stone-hoppers (as opposed to grasshoppers), tiny praying mantises, corn crickets, a bunch of different butterflies, some weird ass robber or horse flies, rock hyraxes and a field mouse. As I was out walking around a rainbow formed due to the rain and the setting sun.

I’d assumed dinner would be 7 or 7:30, so I got back to camp at around 7 to find everyone already eating. After dinner it started raining again. At 8:30pm we walked down the road to watch a cultural dance. The local indigenous youth choir sang and danced for us, and had us join in. We also played a game there called ‘1 to 7′; I’ll have to teach you how to play it when we get home We didn’t get back to camp until 11pm, so everyone hurried to bed ready for the early morning start.

2008-03-21

Summary
-

Friday morning was an early rise, getting up before 6am. We headed off in the truck and had a look at some bushmen paintings on a rock overhang. We then stopped off at a gem market where I bought a ring made from a large seed, with a rhino carved into it. On the road again we headed to Etosha; back to malaria zone… we only had 1 day of taking no malaria tablet, after our fortnight’s countdown after leaving Zululand, before having to start taking them again! Apparently it rained for most of the day in Etosha, so hoping that clears up! Hoping the rainy safari curse isn’t still following Skye and I!

We stopped off in a town to pick up supplies, and shortly after we had a lunch stop. Quite a few stores in the town were closed both due to Good Friday and due to Namibia’s Independence Day. After eating, back on the road for an hour or so until we reached Etosha. On the way in we only saw springbok and giraffe and a few zebra I think. Etosha is not as I’d imagined it. In photos I’ve seen the area was pretty arid; the photos must have been during the dry season. Outside of the dry season there is plenty of vegetation, hence the dry season is the peak period for tourism as it is much easier to view game with less vegetation. Etosha means ‘large white place’; getting its name due to all of the white sand that can be seen during dry season.

We arrived at our campsite and put up our tents. At this point I wasn’t feeling too well, with a stomach ache, so I laid down in the tent for a few hours, skipping dinner. I think the rest of the group (including Skye) spent that time down by the waterhole watching for animals. Four out of our group stayed in a lodge room at the campsite, which is adjacent to the waterhole. The rooms are stunning; a sizable two story hut with 2 bedrooms & bathrooms, all very modern and fancy… but all that comes at a price of 1500 Namibian dollars per person (over $200 per person), although they managed to get away with paying for 2 ppl, even though 4 stayed there. Everyone went to bed around 10ish; I think it rained a bit throughout the night.

2008-03-22

Summary

- Morning game drive in Etosha

- Lunch at Halali; black-faced impala at waterhole

- Afternoon game drive

- Waterhole sunset

An early start on Saturday, we were on the truck waiting at the gate by 6:45am; the gates open at sunrise and close at sunset. My stomach had settled a little by now. We spent the morning on game drive, and the typical overcast weather had rolled in for safari time again. On the plus side it wasn’t raining though. The day’s game drives included sightings of springbok, oryx, zebra, blue wildebeest, steenbok and giraffe (so the new ones for us were the oryx and steenbok). We also saw a few different birds; the more memorable being the pale chanting goshawk and the kori bustard(the largest flying bird in Africa).

At lunch time we stopped at Halali campsite to have brunch. While we were waiting for lunch to be prepared we walked down to the waterhole for a look. There were 3 male black-faced impala drinking at the waterhole. We watched those for a while before going back to the truck for brunch. After eating we went back to the waterhole, with the last impala trotting off into the bushes just as we arrived. No more game came to the waterhole for the next 2 hours we were there, so I spent the time bug spotting instead. There were a heap of different butterflies there, as well as dragonflies, large flies of sorts, big ass buzzing bugs and blister beetles. I love the way the blister beetles fly, they look as though they are parachuting through the air, gliding very smoothly and slowly (much unlike most of the other beetles here which fly very erratically, bumping into things all the time). Upon returning back at the truck, we saw some ground squirrels scurrying around by a tree.

Back on the road at 2pm, we had an afternoon game drive. The game drive was pretty quiet, only spotting a couple of animals before going back to our campsite at about 5pm-ish. I had a much needed shower, after not showering for 2 days, and then went down to the waterhole to catch the sunset. No animals at the waterhole as usual, but it was nice to watch the sunset as it reflected on the water’s surface; with lightning firing through the sky off to the left. I think with all the rain and the cooler weather, the animals don’t have so much need to come to the waterhole. We went back for dinner before returning to the waterhole. Still no animals and the 2 out of the 3 floodlights turned off at about 9pm (I think something went wrong with them), so Skye and I took that as our cue to go to bed. I think most people retired shortly afterwards as well.

2008-03-23

Summary

- Morning game drive (good weather)

- Lunch at Halali – kudu

- Afternoon game drive 1pm

- Etosha salt pans

- Namutoni

- Night drive

On Sunday morning we had to pack up our tents and have breakfast before leaving for a game drive at 7am, so it was another early start getting up at 6am. I was glad to see the sun beaming down from the more-or-less cloudless horizon; finally a safari drive where the weather is not overcast! We saw a bunch of jackals just outside the gate of the campsite, but not much else in the early morning light apart from springbok and a few zebra. I snapped away through the window of the moving truck anyway, trying to make the most of the (rare) morning light; good practice for panning nevertheless We stopped off by some mopane trees which were inhabited by mopane worms/larvae. Caryn (from Florida) and John-Lee (tour guide) seized the moment to get their photograph with a mopane worm in their mouth. Onwards through the morning it seemed we were only destined to see springbok, even they were hard to come by in the last couple of hours of game driving. I did spot a buffalo weaver flying from its nest on a stobie pole (another one of the ’small 5′) and several lilac-breasted rollers (Namibia’s national bird).

We arrived at Halali for lunch again. Down at the waterhole there was a few kudu off in the distance, which was the first we’d seen on this tour. We had to head back for lunch at 12 and apparently while we were gone the kudu hard (of 5 or 6) came right up to the waterhole. We went back to the waterhole after lunch and saw a single black-faced impala. A guy at then waterhole had showed us his photos of 10 lions he’d seen the day before and 2 cheetahs he’d seen that morning; we’d seen no big cats yet.

Back on the road at 1pm, we headed to the Etosha salt pans. Given the right light, the salt pans would make a great shot as they consist of vast flat shallow water all the way to the horizon; reflecting the sky on its surface. There was still some reflection, but as the sun was directly above (rather than at an angle) the amount of reflection on the water was limited. We saw some flamingos way out on the horizon; not visible with the naked eye… unless you have Sophie’s eyes. I’d seen a film clip done on Etosha with a guy walking out onto the salt pans; his image reflecting on the surface. It looked spectacular so had wanted to try a similar thing, but the mud here was like cement. Even while not in the water, my thongs kept getting stuck in the sludgey mud.

Back on our way, we continued game driving, spotting wildebeest, red hartebeest and oryx alongside the salt pans. As we drove onward the large vegetation seemed to die down, giving reasonably flat terrain. There was wildlife scattered all over the place; it reminded me quite a bit of Ngorongoro crater. Quite frankly I don’t understand why we hadn’t spent the whole time game driving in this area (near tonight’s Namutoni campsite) rather than around our previous campsite… we should have been staying in Namutoni for the 3 nights! Giraffe, zebra, oryx, wildebeest, and springbok scattered the plains. We also came across a group of warthogs wallowing in the mud. Then finally, we saw our lions; 3 males sleeping in the shade of the trees. We must have stayed there for a good hal hour or so, with a lion popping its head up occasionally to look around. I’d been waiting for a lion yawn the whole time with no luck; of course the instant we took off the lion yawned, and then yawned again 10 seconds later… always the way.

We headed to Namutoni campsite and put up our tents. Skye and I had a shower; meanwhile there was a whole bunch of zebra at the waterhole. I went down to the waterhole after showering, but by then there were no zebra anymore, only a few giraffes poking their heads up occasionally off in the distance. Skye (the other Skye) mentioned that the campsite runs night drives, but John-Lee had said that dinner would probably not be ready in time to do a night drive. Regardless, I decided I could eat any time, but I can’t go on a night drive any time; so 7 of us booked a night drive at reception. By the time we booked it was 7:20; with the 10 minute walk back to our campsite it was already 7:30 and the game drive started at 8:00. Some of the 7 still hadn’t paid (hadn’t had their money with them) so went up there and asked if we could get picked up from our campsite rather than meeting at reception. This worked much better as dinner was ready just after 7:45pm; had we needed to be at reception by 8 we’d have had to leave camp at 7:50pm… barely enough time to eat much. So we had to time to eat dinner, then the safari vehicle came and picked us up just after 8pm.

We headed off on the night drive; the driver using a red spotlight to look for game. We saw plenty of jackals to start out with. The game is quite easy to spot as night as their eyes glow in the light. We stopped right next to a black-faced impala, within 2 metres. The driver stopped the engine and turned off the lights. The impala did not run away, we could have just about reached out and touched it it was so close to us. We saw a spotted hyena walking through the bushes a distance from the truck, as well as a genet. We saw plenty of birdlife along the way, including a white-faced owl, a spotted eagle owl, northern black korhaan (noisy bastards!), a heap of plovers, a few freckled nightjars and a couple of kori bustards; one taking flight which was cool to see (recall that the bustards are the largest flying African birds). We saw a lot of spring hare along the way, springing through the bushes.

When we crossed over fisher’s pan we came up behind a white rhino. The pathway crossed the pan, so has water either side meaning the only way to go was forward. This meant we followed along behind the rhino for about 20 minutes. He stopped once and turned around to face us before continuing on his way. When we made it to the other side of the pan, the rhino trotted off into the bushes. We continued on our way, spotting plenty of birds and spring hare. By this time it was 11:00 and we’d been told it was a 3 hour game drive, so figured it was about over… no big cats which was a bit disappointing. A few of the others on the vehicle had drifted off to sleep, but were quickly wide awake when we came up behind 2 male lions walking along the side of the road. They looked pretty thin, so were no doubt looking for something to eat. I got one shot away before the batteries on my flash unit died. Fumbling around in the dark while trying to watch the lions, it took me a while to get out my spare batteries… got em in just in time as we drove up alongside one of the lions who was now laying on the road… nup… spare batteries are dead too… bloody Energiser batteries.. they don’t seem to charge up on the charger I’m using with them! Last resort, I opened up my head torch and took the 3 batteries out of that, combined them with one of my ‘dead’ batteries. This gave me enough power to get a shot away, but took about a minute to recharge for another flash. The lions had walked off again by now, but had stopped on the road looking away from us. We waited for around a minute with no movement whatsoever from us or the cats. Then they both sat down; one on the road, the other just off the road. We drove up beside them, within a metre of the lion laying on the road. It was a surreal experience. They just watched us, blinking often as they were dazzled by everyone’s camera flashes going off. Given the large recharge time I only took about 4 photos because I wanted to make each one count… as it was half of the shots had the lion blinking. We sat there for a few minutes before heading off to let the lions be. We were very satisfied with the night drive, feeling like it was worth the money we’d paid for it (500 Namibian dollars per person). We passed some giraffe just nearby the camp on our way back.

We didn’t get back to the campsite until after 11:30pm. We got ready for bed as quietly as we could and went to sleep to the sounds of lions roaring and hyenas calling. Tomorrow I definitely need to charge up my AAs! I have barely used the flash the whole trip until tonight… when I really needed full batteries. Next time I see some I’m gonna buy more spares! All in all, the night drive was a great experience, it made our day!

2008-03-24

Summary

- Rundu campsite

- Photo HDD froze up

Up at 6am again Monday morning; not much sleep after getting to bed late from the night drive. On the road, as we were leaving Etosha we saw an elephant; first we’d seen this tour. Also a whole bunch of giraffe… like I said… I think Namutoni should have been our base camp the whole time! We drove and drove… stopping off to get supplies, where I bought a bunch of coloured pencils and textas for the kids at the school. Well that’s what’s on our itinerary… but apparently it’s school holidays, so we’re not actually going to the school. Oh well, now I’ve got a bunch of pencils and textas to give away.

Back on the road until we reached our campsite at Rundu in the early afternoon. I wanted to upgrade to a room for a break from tenting as it was only US$42, but Skye was happy tenting again so we didn’t upgrade. We just chilled for the day really. I spent most of the time catching up on backups on dvds etc, as I’ve been pretty slack lately. The past week’s images I had only put on my multimedia storage HDD (plug a CF card into it and it downloads the images onto the drive), so they needed to be backed up somewhere. When I plugged the HDD into the laptop, the HDD locked up. It would not turn off, it wouldn’t do anything. I left it for a while, still no luck… the thing just kept getting hotter and hotter to the point where I decided I had to open it up or it was just going to end up burning itself out. In the process of taking the screws out and popping off the cover it turned itself off. I have no idea what the problem was, but after that it worked fine again; a close call as I could’ve lost a week’s worth of photos… which doesn’t sound like much but with the amount of activities that get packed into each day (including all our Etosha safaris) it’s a lot of pics. All the more reason to get back on top of the backups. The backups, combined with the blog update (offline) kept me occupied most of the day/night. A few people from our group went on a sunset cruise along Kavango River, which forms the border between Namibia and Angola. Apparently not a lot of wildlife, just a lot of Angola residents bathing in the river. A bunch of people went to the bar for a bit of a piss up, but I passed on the bar this time.

2008-03-25

Summary

- Chunderstruck

- Crossed border to Botswana

- Sepupa campsite

We left Rundu after breakfast on Tuesday morning. Skye #2(the other one) mentioned she was feeling pretty seedy, so she put a new bin liner in the bin next to her just in case. I had a bit of a doze; resting my head on the open window’s top edge (the windows open downwards). At one point I felt all this liquid hit my face; waking up from my partial unconscious state… I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. My first thought was that the truck had gone through a massive puddle, but as my eyes first flicked open I saw the road was dry… I also saw David leaning out of the window in front of me. My next thought was that he was trying to wash something (pouring water onto something outside the window… like an apple or something). Then I realised what was actually happening… David was spewing out of the window! Due to the high speed of the truck at this point, David’s yak was being blown up the side of the truck and coming inside my window… with my head leaning on the window…half in half out the window. Other people in the bus caught a few spots of it; at high speeds the wind just swirls through the bus, carrying spew spray throughout. Everyone was yelling out to the truck driver to stop. After a minute or so, he had pulled over and opened the door; I dived out of the truck and went straight to the tap on the side of the truck and shoved my face and hair under it. All I could smell was spew; I think some of it had blown up my nostrils given the angle of my head against the window. Like I said everyone had had a spot or two land on them, but I had worn the main blow. I towelled off and then got a tshirt out of my bag under the truck and changed. Harley handed me a bar of soap so I had a second scrubbing of my face before getting back on the bus. When I got back on the bus I put my window up straight away before we took off again! Everyone up front was a little edgy about a reoccurrence. Skye #2 was sitting opposite David on the other side of the bus, while Skye #1 (my Skye) and I were sitting behind him; when Skye #1 sneezed, Skye #2 flinched and spun around thinking David was about to ralf again… her expression /reaction was priceless! After a few minutes I moving to another seat further back in the bus as David was still looking a little queezy and I was feeling a little unsettled (as was my stomache) after my encounter; the lingering smell around the front of the bus was not helping either.

The rest of the trip to the border crossing was without incidence. We crossed over to the Botswana side and had lunch. My foot got stabbed by a huge thorn that went right through my thong (flip-flop) and into my foot. At least this got me out of helping with lunch as it was decided I was far too accident prone today to be near knives and graters. After lunch we headed onto our campsite at Sepupa alongside the Okavango River. When we arrived and had setup our tents, I did my laundry so I could clean my spewy towel before showering. I hung my laundry on a bamboo fence at the campsite… turns out the bamboo fence was covered in soot from the campfires, so my clean clothes now had black all over them! It was pretty warm so Skye and I went for a swim in the pool. After getting out of the pool I showered before sitting out on the deck by the river as the sun set.

We had dinner around the campfire as usual, with a freshly baked bread the crew had just made; it was beautiful. It did have small pieces of olives throughout and of course, being my bad day, I got the piece of bread that a sneaky olive stone had sneaked its way into and just about broke my teeth biting down on it. Anyway, after a bit of a chat around the campfire, everyone headed to their tents for an early night. I packed my day pack for the following day (we are going by boat into the Okavango Delta so are leaving our big backpacks behind) before going to sleep.

Heat and Sand!

2008-03-12

Summary

- Cape Diamond Hotel

We didn’t arrive at the Cape Diamond Hotel until 6:30pm, so had missed the pre-departure by half an hour….AGAIN. The tour group is much bigger this time, my count was 18 people. Mostly Aussies, but a few from Canada and Florida; only one other Adelaidian. Once again there is more girls than boys: 12 girls and 6 boys; a 2:1 ratio. After checking in, we dashed out to find an ATM before it got dark. When we got back we were both very thirsty having run out of water earlier in the day, so bought some water from the hotel restaurant… 18 Rand for 1 litre… that’s very expensive for here…we usually pay less than that for 5 litres! We had dinner at 7:30pm with an older Canadian couple on our tour; Cathy and Harley. We chatted for a while before heading back to our rooms just after 9pm as we were pretty exhausted after the long day on the truck. The rooms here are very nice, they even have a television! I felt obliged to stay up and watch some tv as I hadn’t done so since leaving Dubai.

2008-03-13

Summary

- Langa township

- Bought sunnies

- Exchanging cash deemed to be impossible

- Cederberg Region

On Thursday morning we had a buffet breakfast, then loaded our bags onto the overland truck before boarding a coach to take us to the Langa township. We heard of the history of discrimination faced by the black people in District 6, who had their homes and land taken from them and were forced to live in the Langa township. The level of racism we were told about was quite sad. The disadvantaged people are now being reimbursed by the government with new homes in District 6. The conditions these people live in is quite shocking. The size of the rooms is so small, their shops and supermarkets are smaller than a garage, more like little stalls; and there are flies everywhere. We passed by the condom factory, which supplies free condoms in order to combat the spread of HIV. We then visited a HIV project where women with HIV were making beaded bracelets and collars. All the women we saw working there were HIV positive. We later walked by some women running a small business. They were cooking sheep heads and selling them; first cutting the wool from the heads, then removing any wool remnants with steelwool, before cooking the heads whole. We then went onto some beer brewers and tried the beer, consisting of mostly malt; Skye passed though as she wasn’t feeling well. Next we went into some room with all sorts of weird things hanging from the roof (I couldn’t hear the guide most of the time, so I have no idea what the place was called or what it was for, but I think it was where people would go to find cures and antidotes). Pieces of string were tied across the ceilings with animal remains, voodoo dolls and a lot of other indistinguishable weird stuff. We checked out the interior of some of the hostels there, which were also very cramped and small.

The coach took us back to the overland truck and we stopped off shortly after for lunch. The truck then took us to a shopping centre; we were finally able to get some water… hooray! I bought myself a pair of sunglasses, an absolute necessity for Namibia! I went with polarised sunnies to reduce the glare off the sand in Namibia. When a went to the bathrooms there, the cubicle had graffiti scattered all over the place… pretty common for a public loo; however all the graffiti was prayers and that sort of thing rather than the usual swearing and abuse written in the toilet cubicles back home. I just thought it was an interesting contrast; reading ‘bless you’, as opposed to ‘f*** you’ that I’d usually read back home. Anyway, enough about toilets ay, apparently I write too much bout toilets…?! I went with Skye to the foreign exchange as she wanted to swap some Rand for US. Apparently non-South African residents have to provide proof of where they obtained the money from, along with their passport in order to exchange Rand for US. There was no way I could exchange my Rand then as I didn’t keep any ATM slips. Skye still had her ATM slip as she’d only drawn it out a half hour ago, but for some reason the number on her slip didn’t match the number on her card, so they wouldn’t exchange the money…. stupid ATM… and a stupid process to exchange money in my opinion!

We hit the road again for a long drive to our campsite in the Cederberg Region. This overland truck is similar to the past 2 trucks we’ve had, but they each have subtle differences. On this one the windows open downwards (same as our 2^nd tour’s truck); I think I mentioned the pros and cons already… pros are plenty of open window space, cons are you can’t really put it partway open… it’s all or nothing. This truck has lockers under each seat. This is better than our first tour, where there was only one main safe that was restricted to passports, tickets and cash only. At this stage I think it’s easier to lay it out as so; with the pros IMO highlighted in bold:

Tanzania tour

• One shared safe for passports, tickets & cash only
• Big bags stored under truck
  
• No seat pockets
• Leg-room
  
• No reclining seats
• Vertical ladder attached to truck to board

South Africa tour

• Personal locker at back of truck for each person (we were lucky and got 2 since there was only 8 on the tour)
  
• Big bags stored in personal locker
• Pockets in back of seats
  
• Leg-room
  
• Reclining seats
  
• Steps lead into truck; steps are automatically brought down when door is opened. (bad side to this is the door is not so easy to open)
  

Present tour

• Personal locker for each person underneath each seat… but the lockers aren’t big enough to fit much (my carry-on bag won’t fit in it)
• Big bags stored under truck
  
• No seat pockets
• No leg-room (due to personal lockers under each seat)
• No reclining seats
• Steps are physically placed and attached at the truck door by the guide at each stop.
  

The interior layout of the trucks also varies, with the 1^st and 3^rd tour having a couple of tables within the truck and not all seats having forward. The truck is much more crowded this time around; we’re used to having a window seat each and a pair of seats each from the last 2 tours (which would allow us to go from one side of the truck to the other to take photos on safari, but we don’t have that luxury this tour. The tents we have on this tour are very similar to the ones from the first tour, only minor differences. We got the ‘Springbok’ tent; I’d been aiming to get the ‘Pumba’ tent, but just as well I didn’t cos the zipper was buggered on that tent as the Florida girls found out. Unfortunately the sleeping mats we have on this tour are not as thick as the ones from our 1^st tour, but they’re still quite reasonable. We had dinner at around 7pm then there was an optional wine tasting. I’m not heavily into wines and Skye hasn’t been feeling well today, so neither of us did the wine tasting. Instead a bunch of us chilled out by the campfire and had a yarn amongst ourselves and John-Lee; the tour leader. I had a quick shower before joining them at the campfire, which in hindsight was pretty pointless (the shower I mean) as I smelt like smoke afterwards anyway. The showers had a big window at about head height, so you could look out as you had your shower. Then off to bed, spotting a few frogs around the tents on our way.

2008-03-14

Summary

- Springbok

- Orange River

Friday morning we were up before the sunrise, packing up our gear and our tents before 6am. We ate breakfast, which is the first time we haven’t had a cooked breakfast in some time, and then back on the truck for a long day of travelling again. We went to a town called Springbok for an hour stop to get some water, snacks and beer for the next day or so. The supermarket was very busy and the tour leader got held up, so by the time he was back to the truck it was around lunch time, so it was decided that we’d have our lunch stop in Springbok. The truck stopped off in a side street while lunch was prepared. The group huddled under the shade of a tree while the crew was prepping lunch. A couple of trucks pulled up behind us and asked that our truck be moved or we would be fined. Not sure what happened in the convo between our tour leader and the guy, but we didn’t end up moving anyway. After eating our hotdog lunch the one hour stop had ended up being a three hour stop, we continued driving until we reached our campsite on the banks of Orange River, which is the border between South Africa and Namibia. I had whacked a 5 litre bottle of water in the safe boxes beneath our seat to get it out of the way… turns out it leaked all over our passports and cash; more so Skye’s passport… oops my bad :s

It was a bloody hot day, so most of us went for a swim in the river. There was a big splash about 10 metres away at one point, so everyone got a little edgy as to what had made the splash. While in the water we could feel something nibbling at us, generally at our toes. We saw a few little fish near the surface, so I figure that’s what was nibbling our toes. When we got out, Skye and I went up for showers, which once again had big openings at about shoulder height. There was a massive bug on the wall in my shower, about 3 or 4 inches long; along with plenty of little spiders.

After showering we watched the sun set before eating dinner. Some little turd (kid) was down at the river terrorising the dog and anyone else down there, by throwing beer cans into the river for the dog to fetch and throwing mud at the dog, as well as trying to put beer cans (now filled with river water) in Harley’s camera bag. Later in the night, whilst we sat around the campfire chatting, we spotted some huge beetles a few inches long, a scorpion, and a few spiders running across the ground. We’d been considering sleeping out under the stars tonight instead of a tent, but now… yeah… not so much. Skye lost her head torch in the tent… it turns out it was on her head We went to bed around 10, but the bar was still pretty loud (we were camped right near the bar) until it closed a bit before midnight I think, when Skye came back to the camp ‘pissed as a fart’ (had to throw some good Aussie slang in) calling out to the tour guides. No, this is not our Skye… it’s another Skye whose on our tour. The camp dog started barking in the middle of the night; probably due to problems from the chicken bones he’d scoffed from the bin; other than that the night was pretty straightforward; spent sleeping.

2008-03-15

Summary

- Canoeing along Orange River

- Fish River Canyon

After eating breakfast on Saturday morning, we went canoeing along Orange River. It was about 2.5 hours of rowing; every now and then there was a small set of ‘rapids’ where the canoe would take itself along with the current. I was the ‘motor’ paddling at the front and Skye was the ‘rudder’ steering/paddling at the back. As the morning went on, the heat got more intense, so at one point I jumped out of the canoe to cool off in the river. When we got back to our campsite, most of us went for a swim in the river again. We ate lunch, then jumped on the truck to head across the border into Namibia. The officials at the border crossing were much stricter than those we’d encountered crossing from Kenya into Tanzania. The weather is damn hot today; barely a cloud in sight. As you can probably imagine, the landscape in Namibia is pretty arid, but still a few varieties of trees and vegetation including the quiver (sp?) tree which starts out with a fat trunk at the bottom and gets slimmer as the trunk goes higher… rather odd looking trees. Spotted a few animals on our way, just zebra and springbok. Springbok here are just as the impala in Kruger; a crapload of them! When I was chatting to the tour leader on our first night of camping he told me that it wouldn’t take us long before we’d just be saying AFS whenever we saw a springbok, standing for Another F***in Springbok!

When we arrived at our campsite, we set up the tents (finding a big ass beetle that had made its way into our tent bag) and checked out all the new bugs that this place had to offer; every change of landscape and conditions brings a different variety of bugs. This place has a ton of crickets that really don’t look much like crickets apart from the head. The full size corn crickets here are the size of the palm of your hand including leg span. We drove to the Fish River Canyon shortly before sunset and walked along the canyon’s edge as the sun went down. Fish River Canyon is the 2^nd large canyon, behind the Grand Canyon, so you can imagine that it was quite spectacular to see. Quite different from the Blyde River Canyon we’d seen on our previous tour, which was lush and green as opposed to the arid rocky area Fish River Canyon. Back at the campsite, we had dinner and hung around the campfire for a while. Skye and I went and had a shower to wash the days dust off; the ‘African tan’ as Skye and I have been calling it… it looks like a dark tan on your feet, but then it just washes off in the shower. Having said that we are both tanned up quite a bit, I wasn’t recognising my own hands when I looked down at them.

It was a hot night so we had rolled up the tent ‘windows’ and ‘door’ for the night. Around 1am I awoke to the howling wind that was pushing the back side of the tent into my head. I moved my body down the tent a bit, but I couldn’t stop the tent from hitting against my head with my legs straight out as my feet would hit the other end of the tent; on a side note…I’d hate to be any taller or I’d have trouble fitting in the tent while lying down. After laying there for a while trying to go to sleep, it sounded as though rain was dropping down onto the tent… I soon realised it was sand behind blown against the tent. When I ran my hands over my sleeping bag I realised it was covered in sand, so at that point I remembered my camera was just sitting in the tent so I quickly covered that up with a towel to prevent any more sand getting all over it and zipped up all my bags so sand couldn’t get inside them. After a while, it was getting a bit harder to breathe with all the dust in the air and if I opened my eyes I’d generally cop an eyeful of sand, so I decided to go out and face the sand storm in order to roll the windows and doors back down. I hadn’t bothered putting anything else on, so just in my boxers there was plenty of skin to get pelted by the sand. Anyway, closed all the windows and door of the tent making for a less dusty/sandy and a quieter night; the tent quickly began to heat up with the lack of wind passing through it though.

2008-03-16

Summary

- Travelling from Fish River Canyon to Sossusvlei in the Namib Desert

Sunday morning was a 6am’er, although I think I was the only one actually up at 6am; unbelievable I know! So after packing all my gear onto the truck, I had plenty of time to use the dust pan to clean all the sand out of the tent. Skye and I had plenty of time for breakfast; just as well for me as I’m a big breakfast eater. Then on the road for another long day of travelling. When looking through the itinerary prior to going on these trips, we didn’t actually take into consideration all the hours of travelling between all of the stops in the itinerary… there’s a lot of hours spent on the truck! We spotted some more mountain zebra this morning and a couple of ostriches; but the new one for us was seeing some oryx, although they were quite a distance from the road side. We stopped off at a bottle-o to stock up on beer and water. Most of the people on this tour drink a lot more beer than our previous two tours; buying it by the carton.

We stopped off for lunch at around 1pm in the middle of nowhere. I went looking for scorpions under rocks, but only found a bright orange centipede. We didn’t arrive at our campsite until about 4pm. After putting up our tents, everyone went for a swim in the campsite’s pool. Around 6-6:30 we got on the truck which took us out to a sand dune. We climbed the mountain and had a beer while watching the sunset (for those who drink beer that is); Windhoek is the local beer I’ve been drinking here. When we got back to camp, we ate dinner and sat around the campfire for a while. We spotted a sizable scorpion nearby running across the sand; it was of the kind with a large tail and small pincers… the more venomous type. We also spotted a few jackals about the place; I saw one in amongst the tents looking for something to ’steal’. Jackals are notorious for taking anything that’s left out, so everything needs to be in the tent or on the truck otherwise it may disappear. Everyone headed to bed fairly early as we had a sunrise sand dune climb first thing in the morning.

2008-03-17

Summary

- Sunrise on the dunes

- Sossusvlei to Deadvlei (sand dunes walk)

- Dune 45 for lunch

- Chilling at the pool & bar

- Sunset at canyon

Monday morning was a 5:30am start; second ready this time, still unbelievable I know. We were meant to leave by 5:45am, but a few stragglers held us up until just after 6am. The truck took us to a large sand dune to climb to watch the sunrise. The sun had already started rising when we were part way up. Only a bunch of the group actually reached the top. At this point I should mention just how hard climbing a sand dune is; it is literally two steps forward, one step back. Your feet sink into the sand and with each step the sand slides down taking you back a bit. A good portion of the group stopped halfway (this is where Skye stopped). I only went about ¾ of the way up along with a few others, and only about 2 or 3 people made it to the top. It was very windy up there so everything got COVERED in sand. All of the sand gets blown up the dune and then launches off the point/peak, which is where we were walking up the dune. My cheap ass Hong Kong shutter release obviously didn’t take to the sand too well and packed up. Once the sun had risen we descended from the sand dune, which was a lot more fun than climbing it, and took a fraction of the time. We had a quick 10 minute breakfast before going to the Sossusvlei for a walk through the sand dunes.

The guide we had through the sand dunes from Sossusvlei to Deadvlei was really good, quite funny and quirky. He made lots of clicking sounds with his mouth and his fingers. Ever since we’ve all been trying to click our fingers like he does, but only one person, Mark, has been able to do it. The clicking tongue is how the Bushmen talked, with a lot of tongue clicking through their language; just like in “The God’s Must Be Crazy” or Starvin’ Marvin in South Park. It was quite interesting to hear how the sand dunes are formed and how the vleis are formed. The sand dunes all run parallel to the coast as they are formed from the winds which blow from the west or the east. The wind direction if split about 50/50 from east and from west; that combined with the plants that grow on the dunes, helping to hold it all together and are then covered by more sand blown in from the wind. Most of it is red sand, but there are parts of the dunes with white sand as well. The white sand is blown in by the west wind from the coast. The red sand gets its colour due to the large amount of iron within the sand, which then rusts. There were areas amongst the sand dunes that were black/dark in colour as the iron had not yet rusted. The guide passed a clean magnet over the sand, which was then covered in iron when he lifted it back out.

There are sand dunes on the north and east of the river bed,; the river bed is usually dried out. Usually the water runs along the river bed, washing away any sand that has accumulated within the river bed. However, when there is no rain/water flowing down the river bed for an extended period, the sand dunes can become so high that they cut off the river from flowing any further. This is how the deadvlei was formed (previously this was known as the Sossuvlei), as it was cut off from the river due to a sand dunes forming across the river, so what was once a basin for where the river water accumulated is now a dead-vlei (vlei meaning the circular basin). Now the new basin formed at the end of the river is known as Sossusvlei. This has happened previously also; i.e. one Sossusvlei, then the Sossusvlei becomes a Deadvlei and a new Sossusvlei is formed, then the Deadvlei gets covered by sand (so is no longer a vlei), the Sossusvlei becomes a Deadvlei and a new Sossusvlei is formed. It was much easier to understand by his drawings in the sand than by explaining it in words… Sossus means ’stuck’; when white people discovered diamonds in the region, they would come through and get ’stuck’ as if they walked anywhere in the dunes the bushmen could track their footprints through the sand and kill them with a poison arrow.

We walked from Sussusvlei to Deadvlei, seeing a heap of black and blue beatles along the way. I didn’t quite understand what he meant as I couldn’t hear him clearly around these beatles as I was near the back of the group, but from what I picked up I think these beetles are normally black, but they coat themselves in something (I think limestone), giving them a blue colour, which protects them from the sun. We saw also some small desert lizards, somewhat like geckos, and a funnel web spider in the sand. The Deadvlei was just that, dead. The trees there are hundreds of years old, so the wood is extremely splintered. Distance is very deceiving in this sort of environment; the sand dunes don’t look very high and when you’re climbing them it doesn’t seem like there’s much further to go, but the slope just keeps going and going. Looking down at the Deadvlei it didn’t look very wide, but when we got down there it was at least a kilometre across. It got very hot as the morning progressed. The sand got extremely warm, so we were all wearing closed shoes. Apparently temperatures here can soar as high as 55 degrees Celsius, with the sand reaching 85 degrees Celsius; this is due to the iron in the sand heating up.

The guide told us about the Bushmen’s way of marrying. Any men interested in a girl would approach her parents; those interested would then have to go out for days trying to hunt down an Oryx. If they killed an Oryx they would then take the Oryx tail back to prove his kill and get help to go back with him to carry the Oryx body. The first to kill an Oryx would be the one who was allowed to marry the woman. The women had to smile and never argue or the men would leave her and find another woman (ladies take note! ). Bushmen didn’t eat very often, so when eating they would consume kgs of meat at a time. They believed that the moon provided them with the animal meat, so they dance for the moon to show that they are happy with their gift.

After getting back from the walk, the truck took us to Dune 45. This was the dune we were originally going to climb in the morning to see the sunrise, however everyone else goes there as well so we’d elected to go somewhere else to get a dune to ourselves. Skye and I didn’t bother climbing this dune as it was very hot at this point in the day; only a few from our group did the climb, but all of them said it was much easier than the dune we’d climbed for sunrise. I assume this is because people are going up and down Dune 45 so often that the sand gets compacted and hence is easier to walk up.

Getting back to the campsite, the temperature was soaring so we all hit the pool with a few beers to chill out. Everything was covered in red sand, I think we will be finding it for weeks. We spent a few hours in the pool before going to Sesriem Canyon to watch the sunset. A bunch of the group swam down the waterway in the canyon, but the water looked a little too brown and stagnant for my liking. Back at the campsite we ate dinner around the campfire. I went up to the bar for a beer and a game of pool while I charged my iPod up; my iPod had been elected as the music player on the truck tomorrow (it plugs into the stereo of the truck). Then it was off to bed ready for an early morning again and a long day of driving.