Oh, The Glamour!

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  I know we´ve blogged very recently but it´s been an interesting day and I thought this would be a nice ¨day in the life¨story for those of you who wonder what it´s like being on the road like this.
  
  
  
  We´re in Madrid, here for three nights because our hostel requires that as a minimum.
  
  
  
  
  • 10:00 AM - stir awake, realize there´s nothing pressing to do today, roll back over.
  • 11:00 AM - again, stir awake and roll back over.
  • 11:30 AM - roll over for the last time, debate with Gina as to who should get the first shower. Gina offers, even though I usually take the first shower, and I´m happy to let it happen that way.
  • 11:40 AM - Gina calls from the shower - ¨Bob?¨ I stick my head in, and Gina informs me that the water has stopped. Simply no water. So I throw my clothes on and head downstairs to the street, to see if I can find the source of the problem. The room has a device that requires the room key to be in a slot for electricity to work, so I had to take that in order to get back in. So I left Gina in the shower, still soapy, dripping wet, in the dark. I go outside and find that the construction on the next block has bust the water main, and there´s water gushing down the street. I return to the room to find Gina toweling off. We tried the water again, and with luck found that it came out in a trickle, just enough for Gina to rinse out her hair and for us to fill up our 3 liter Platypus water bag for use later.
  • 11:55 AM - I shave with the water in the Platypus bag, and somehow manage not to cut myself.
  • 12:00 PM - throw on my dirty clothes from yesterday, figuring I couldn´t shower anyway. I looked at the underwear I had washed in the sink the night before, and not done a very good job of because there´s no stopper in the sink. Decided to wait on changing underwear until later in the day when I could shower properly.
  • 12:15 PM - left the hostel looking for lunch. Walked around for 15 minutes until we found a place that meets the two magical criteria - edible and cheap. (In Europe, unlike elsewhere, hostels do not provide kitchens.)
  • 12:30 PM - sit down at an outdoor table for lunch at a pleasant cafe near the Puerta del Sol, Madrid´s focal square. Order the most expensive thing from the sandwich menu, a triple decker of chicken, ham and cheese, and a cup of coffee.
  • 12:30 - 1:30 - linger over lunch and enjoy the peoplewatching. Spend most of the time avoiding the eyes of the drug addict woman singing and dancing to herself in the street. But the peoplewatching here is most agreeable - we really enjoyed sitting there.
  • 1:30 PM - leave the cafe and buy a ticket for the Madrid tourist bus, a double decker bus with an open air upper deck that drives around the city, telling you about the sights. At first, we took the historical route, and got to see a lot of the major sites here in Madrid. It´s a typical European capital with some really remarkable architecture and statues.
  • 3:00 - got off the bus tour to mooch the bathroom at KFC.
  • 3:10 - order sundaes at nearby McDonald´s and really savor them.
  • 3:45 - Back on the tourist bus, this time for the ¨newer Madrid¨route which isn´t nearly as fun as the other one.
  • 5:30 - Back from the tourist bus, sit down at the internet cafe to try to find accommodation in Lucerne, Switzerland, our next destination. End up booking a Formula One hotel, which is from a chain we know, because it´s cheap, but it´s a bit away from town which is frustrating. Also booked our room in Barcelona, where we´ll stop en route.
  • 6:30 - Return to the hotel room, hoping the water´s back. Good news: it is. Bad news: no hot water. So I took an ice cold shower.
  • 7:00 - off to do laundry.
  • 7:15 - arrive at the laundromat. It went out of business, but fret not, there´s another location, just 15 minutes walk away. Here is is, you all - schlepping across Madrid carrying my skivvies in a plastic bag. It took 45 minutes. In 90 degree heat.
  • 8:00 - arrive at the other laundromat. There are two other guys in there, using three of the four washing machines. We put our stuff in the fourth, thankfully the largest one, and spend 6 euros ($8) to wash it.
  • 8:30 - our washing´s done, but the two guys ahead of us took both the dryers.
  • 8:45 - our stuff is still sitting there, wet, waiting for the dryers to come free. The attendant drops in - closing in 15 minutes, please start to wrap up, she says.
  • 9:00 - the two guys ahead of us negotiate ¨ten extra minutes¨ to finish their stuff drying.
  • 9:20 - one dryer comes free, after these guys run the dryer twice, with the cleaning lady sitting in the corner staring them down. We hurredly fill the available dryer with our cotton clothes, leaving most of the stuff to dry later back at the room.
  • 9:40 - Our stuff is done, and the other guy is still monopolizing the first dryer. We leave the laundromat, the cleaning lady fuming that the ¨ten minutes¨she had spotted those guys were abused so bad.
  • 10:00 - get on the Metro with our wet laundry.

  

• 10:15 - get back to the room and put up all our wet stuff to dry. Hope it does, our train leaves at noon tomorrow for Barcelona.
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• 10:30 - leave the room and grab a quick kebab for dinner. So yummy, and so cheap.
• 11:00 - arrive at the internet cafe to make a quick call home.

So that´s a day in the life of - not to say that it´s a good day or a bad day, just an example of the stuff we do on a daily basis. Sorry, my internet time is running out, so no time to proofread!

African Escapades

Hi All,

We owe you all a big debt of apology because we have not been able to blog for a while. We´ve found that places like Zambia have internet cafes that mostly don´t have the equipment to allow us to post photos online, and since we´ve had a great time in Africa we wanted to make sure that our blog was appropriately illustrated.

We are now in Madrid, Spain, and we won´t be returning to Africa, sadly. We last left you in Cape Town, where we had completed a cultural tour and were headed off to a safari in Kruger National Park. Kruger is a massive tract of land, and a safari there isn´t quite what you might imagine - you basically fly there, rent a car, enter the park and drive around looking for animals. Our rental car happened to be a bright red VW Golf hatchback, which isn´t quite what you might think of as a safari vehicle.

In Kruger Park we spent a lot of time driving around ourselves, doing organized game drives, and we were able to get out on foot for a guided morning walk. For that, the drive leaves at 6am, but you do end up seeing some really phenomenal sunrises.

On one of our morning walks, we were able to see a pair of white rhino grazing. Mind you, this rhino is 100 meters away, but it´s pretty cool to be out there on foot, in the silence of the morning, watching such an amazing animal have his breakfast. This guy is a baby.

There is an amazing variety of wildlife in Kruger Park. Zebras and giraffes stick together for security purposes - each of them has a special skill for detecting danger (giraffes can see far, zebras can smell well). You end up with scenes like this around a waterhole.

Kruger is home to all of the Big Five of game - water buffalo, elephant (loads of those), hippo, leopard and lion. We were able to see all five, which was a treat. In one case, a pair of male lions was hanging out near a herd of Impala (a type of antelope). We hoped the lions might try for dinner, but they were being pretty lazy. We subsequently learned that only the female lions do the hunting. More on that later.

From Kruger we made our way to Livingstone, Zambia - made famous by the British explorer Dr. David Livingstone (as in, ¨Dr. Livingstone, I presume¨). Zambia is bona fide third-world, but we stayed at a backpackers there that was pretty sheltered. It was funny, it seems that there are a lot of British teenagers who come to Zambia thinking they´re going to save the world. Most of them, though, seemed more interested in lounging around in skimpy clothing and drinking too much beer.

We had gone there to see Victoria Falls, for which we had budgeted four days. Realizing that being in a third world town for four days with one days´worth of sightseeing to do would probably drive us nuts, we decided to do an overnight safari to Botswana. Livingstone is near the confluence of four countries - Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. In fact, en route to the safari, we were able to stand in one spot and see four countries. Here´s a cheeky photo of us straddling the Botswana-Zimbabwe border.

In Botswana, we spent two days in Chobe National Park, which was really great because the landscape was so different than that in Kruger Park. Chobe is actually in the Chobe desert, complete with desert sand. But there is still a good bit of vegetation - but it´s sparse enough there that you can see the animals really well.

On our first game drive, we really lucked out and were able to see four lionesses just waking up from their day´s slumber. (They sleep during the day and hunt at night.) A few giraffes were unlucky enough to be in the area, and we saw the lionesses rouse from their slumber and begin to quietly stalk the giraffes (remember, the females hunt). We were nervous, thinking the giraffes might become dinner, and the lions did indeed attack, but were unable to catch the giraffes. Our guide says that lions don´t often like to feed on giraffes, but they´ll scare them away in hopes that the giraffe will hit a tree or something and become easy prey.

The lionesses returned to the area where we had found them and had a bit of a siesta.

Here are some more photos we took in Chobe. There´s a ton of hippos. They´re very agressive and kill more people than all the other kinds of animals there combined.

This is a Fish Eagle. They mate for life. (aww.)

This herd of elephants lined up picturesquely for us. They then proceded to get in the water and swim a good 100m across the river to the Namibian side of the river, using their trunks as snorkels. This included the whole herd, including 6 week old babies. Who knew that elephants were such good swimmers?Finally, here we are at our campsite. We´re not this good at camping. The safari company set it up for us! It was a bit scary because the campsite was not fenced, and you can see the lamp in the background. Animals will not come too close if there´s light.Back in Livingstone, we went to visit Victoria Falls, which according to Wikipedia ranges from 90 to 107 meters high and is 1.7 kilometers long. Pretty impressive, really. Here´s a photo of us in front of it, but what you can´t see is that between us and the falls there´s a ravine as high as a ten story building.

We took the time to see the falls from the Zambian and Zimbabwean sides. There´s a famous bridge between the two countries, over the gorge, where you can bungy jump - but you have to have your passport stamped out of Zambia, and the bridge is before the Zimbabwe border post, so not only are you jumping a giant ravine you´re doing so without actually being in a country. A bit dodgy if you ask me. Maybe that´s why we were offered three jumps for $90. (We didn´t take it.)

Not sure if you are aware but Zimbabwe is a country in major disarray at the moment. Its president, Robert Mugabe, holds an iron fist on power. Inflation runs 4,600% a year and basics such as bread are simply nonexistent (the government forces stores to sell it at half what it costs). It was wierd walking into Victoria Falls town there, and seeing no tourists at all. The shoe stores had no shoes, the liquor stores had no liquor, and the people there were desperate for any kind of money - they tried to barter for your hat, your sunglasses, the shirt off your back. It was all very sad. Mr. Mugabe should be ashamed, but he won´t step down because he´s been murdering and torturing his opponents, and he fears being prosecuted for human rights violations or vigilantes. For more on the crisis, here´s a link - http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3535&l=1

It´s particularly sad because for a long time Zimbabwe was the jewel of southern Africa.

From Zambia, we made our way back to Johannesburg then onto Cairo via London, which we tell you, made for a long and exhausting two days.

If you could sum up Cairo so succinctly, you could say that it´s chaos embodied. The traffic is by far the worst we have ever seen (traffic lights are rare and almost never obeyed), people accost you at every corner, and it´s the scam capital of the world. Here´s a street scene.

Note that the women are all wearing Islamic headscarves, which was a bit of a problem for Gina. Not being Muslim she didn´t wear one, and whenever we went out into the city she was getting harassed pretty mercilessly. Surprisingly, this came mostly from other women. People we interacted with didn´t even acknowledge her existence. Pretty intense culture shock, to be honest. But the adherence to Islam means that Cairo is a very safe city, there is almost no crime and terrorism hasn´t been an issue for a decade now.

Most people don´t travel to Cairo independently so we had some trouble getting out to see what we wanted to see. In one case, we hired a driver to take us to the Giza pyramids (from a Hertz branded service), and the guy got in a fender bender and ended up in a fistfight with the other driver in the street. The driver we hired the next day to take us to the main city sights didn´t understand that we actually had done some homework and knew what we wanted to see - we had to yell at him to get us to take us to the off-the-beaten-path stops.

We stayed at a hotel near the Pyramids. It´s kind of surprising, but the Pyramids aren´t really in the desert as you might picture them. They´re on a reserve at the edge of modern Cairo. If they were in Boston, it´d be like if they were in Quincy. God bless the Starwood Preferred Guest program because we were able to stay at Le Meridien hotel right near the Pyramids on points. This was the view from our room -

Modern Cairo is right up against the ancient ruins. Here´s a view of the Sphinx from behind.

If you look closely, he looks out over a Pizza Hut/KFC franchise (the red signs). We spent a good bit of time near the Pyramids. Suffice it to say, it´s hot, and can reach 52 degrees centigrade there (that´s 125 F). We drank a lot of water.

We got to go on a camel ride, which was really cool. It brought us to some great views that we wouldn´t have otherwise gotten.

There are nine pyramids on the main plateau at Giza, but there are about 100 of them scattered around Egypt. None are quite as impressive, or have stood the time as well as the big ones at Giza. Here are some photos of us out and about in the heat.

We got to go to the Egyptian Museum as well, which is pretty amazing, but no photos were allowed inside (sorry). We did get to see some priceless stuff, like King Tut´s death mask. But the Museum is pretty amazing in how, well, half-assed it is. It feels like a warehouse. Lots of things you can just walk up and touch. You would think they would do a better job of preserving their artifacts. At Saqqara, a site south of Giza, there are some impressive tombs with original carvings and even original paint, that you could walk up to and touch if you wanted to. It´s sad that so little is being done to preserve these great treasures. At least you can´t climb the Pyramids themselves.

And we have to say that the Pyramids are amazing. It´s hard to find the words to describe how very immense they are - you can see them from clear across town (smog permitting). And they´re 4,500 years old.

Finally, here´s a photo of Gina with our bellman as we left the hotel. Note the quality of the cab, and that our bags are being lashed to the roof.

We have so much to say about each of these places. Southern Africa was nothing short of amazing, we loved it there and would go back in an instant. Cairo was a bit of an attack on the senses, and rivaled China for the most difficult place yet to travel, but we were really glad we made the effort to go.

-bob

South African Adventures

We are currently in Cape Town, South Africa, but before we get on with the blog here's a nice photo of Hong Kong that we took during their nightly light show. The light show is every night at 8pm set to music. On alternate days, they have English music and Chinese music. Really impressive. We also spent a day a Hong Kong Disney. We spent the bulk of the day on Space Mountain making strange photos at the camera as we whooshed by. Photos to follow later.


We are loving it here in the Western Cape province of South Africa, which is beautiful. The weather is fantastic, the scenery is outstanding, the people are friendly and there's a plethora (Jefe agrees, a plethora) of really unique activities to do. We drove out on the Garden Route, which is about a five hour drive southeast of Cape Town down the Indian Ocean coast.

Near a town called Oudtshoorn, Gina got the opportunity to ride an ostrich. They loaded her onto the ostrich and then as you can see in the photo they ran next to her, then pulled her off at the end. You have to hang on by the feathers... whew! It was quite the experience though!!
They actually have ostrich races that you can bet on. They pull the neck of the ostrich in the direction that they want the bird to go. Sadly, Gina did not ride the ostrich with that much accuracy.
Also in Oudtshoorn, there is a wildlife park where we caught this photo of a tired lioness. The park was pretty sweet, they had all kinds of big cats like cheetahs, white tigers and jaguars. Take a look at those teeth! Looks like she is saying cheese for the camera!


There is an Elephant Sanctuary too, where you can get up close and personal with some elephants which were rescued from various maladies. This elephant had once been a house pet! Amazing because they eat so much food, something like 3-400 pounds per day. Another elephant had been rescued from a lifetime in a Chinese zoo. Gina is leading the elephant with her hand here, the same way elephants will hook onto each other's tails and walk. It's not quite as pleasant as it looks - there's a lot of elephant snot involved! Small price to pay to spend some time with these magnificent elephants.
Of course, sometimes the wildlife comes to you. We took this photo after driving down to the Cape of Good Hope. The baboons are everywhere, and this car pulled to the side of the road and got a bit of a surprise. This baboon sat on the car for a while, and when he got off, another one promptly got right on. They didn't see the need to leave, apparently.

Also on the Cape, we stopped at a place called Boulders where there are lots of wild penguins. You can go right up to them. There are about 3000 penguins in this colony. You can't touch them, though because they're mean. And this photo isn't quite as nice as it looks - Bob had to sit in a pile of penguin poo to get this close!

Today we did a township tour of the Cape Town area. A township is a community of Black or mixed-blood ("Coloured") people created by the government's re-population schemes during Apartheid. We were a bit apprehensive about how we would be accepted into their community. They welcomed us with open arms. The children here love to get there photo taken and will gladly strike a pose to be able to see themselves on your camera. Here I am with some of the children. Their houses are modest and all of them have running water and electricity. There is a wide range of living conditions within the community. There are people with full cement houses and roofs and TVs and eat in kitchens and there are people with tarps and aluminum roofs and one public toilet and kitchen for the whole area to share. A lot of them are waiting for an upgrade in their housing, which the government will provide on a first come first serve basis. The main issue is that there are more people then time to build these houses. In 1998, there were 248, 000 people and in 2001 there was 500,00 people in the township. As you can see, the need can never be possibly be met. The cause of this is that there are a lot of people immigrating from Zimbabwe and other nearby countries and moving into the township.

This great country is definitely on the mend after a long time to struggle for basic human rights. This is a great country and thus far our favorite. We are off to Kruger National park for our safari. I have been looking forward to this for awhile and hopefully will have a bunch of great photos to share with you when we return. As always, sending good vibes to all of you back home.

Love,
Gina & Bob