12 Pubs of Christmas, Dublin

Carnage. Total Carnage.

A day trip to Petra

While in Egypt, I couldn't pass up a day trip to Jordan, to see Petra, the 8th wonder of the ancient world.

It turned out to be quite an adventurous day...which started at 4.30am...I awoke to the sound of banging & yelling at a door across the corridor from my own in the hostel. For some unfathomable reason, the security man was banging on this door and yelling in Arabic at the occupants. I assumed he was giving someone else a wake up call - I was expecting to receive the same treatment half an hour later, but I got up then anyway.

The previous evening, Jimmy, the guy on the front desk had told me that I would be called at 5am and he would take me to the security check point outside of Dahab to meet the coach to Petra. 5am came & went and there was no sign of Jimmy. The security guy had no english, I didnt have enough arabic and the security guide's sidekick would just smile at me & say 'yes'. After half an hour of trying to explain that I was waiting for Jimmy and did not want to hail a non-existent taxi from the street, I gave up and wandered out of the hostel complex. There was a 24 hour supermarket across the road and I went over to check if the guy there spoke english. By some miracle he did, I explained to him my problem and he came back across the street with me to talk to the security guy. The security guy explained that he was told to wake Jimmy at 4.30am (that was the banging & yelling from earlier) but there was no response from the room and he didnt know where he was or what was going on. I thanked supermarket dude who went back to his shop and I went back to my pacing.

Once back at his shop, supermarket dude told the story to a random passerby who also spoke english, he came in to me, and when I explained again that I was waiting for Jimmy, he said, ok, hang on, and then ran off down the street and around a corner. OK :-/ He came back with a phone & Jimmy was on the line! It seemed so amazing - I had given up all hope of finding Jimmy & our link to the coach.

Turned out Jimmy had not liked the room he had originally told the security guy he would be in, and decided to move, without telling anyone. We took off like a bullet down the road, at double the speed limit, to reach the coach in time. Got on the coach and slept like a baby all the way to the ferry port to Aqaba.

On reaching Aqaba, there wasnt enough room in the english speaking tour bus - so four indedpendent travellers (including me) ended up on the russian speaking tour bus.

After another 3 hour journey to reach Petra, we eventually got to walk down As-Siq and stand in front of the Treasury. I made an absolute fool of myself singing the tune to Indiana Jones - da da da DAAA, da da DAAA, da da da DAAA, da da da DA da...etc...

Petra was cool, but the 3 hours afforded by the day trip to explore was not enough & I would like to go back again, hike to the Monastery and just spend some more time there soaking up the atmosphere.

Before we were allowed back into Egypt, we were checked for Swine flu, by having our temperatures taken, by 2 guys in the full outbreak gear! I met up with some Dutch travellers who were also staying in Dahab, shared their bus back, which was much quicker than taking the coach I had that morning. On returning to Dahab a full 17 hours after departure, went to a fabulous fish restaurant for dinner.

A great day with some real Indiana Jones adventure :)

Egypt - week 2

Luxor

After the peace of our felucca journey on the Nile, Luxor was intense. 85% of Luxor's revenues come from tourists so you get hassled here quite a bit (although not as much as in Cairo, I'm told). First afternoon, I had a bit of a scare in an internet cafe when I thought I was being locked in, but I came to no harm and had a protector/saviour in a 12 year old boy named Karim :).

That first evening we went to see Luxor temple, went for dinner & then hit the silver markets for which Luxor is well known.



The Egyptian soccer team was playing that evening so all along the streets, TVs were set up on chairs/stools with lots of people crowded around shouting at the screen. When Egypt scored (what turned out to be) the winning goal, the proprietor of the shop we were in, ran out into the street to celebrate and when he returned, he made presents to all of us in the shop of silver Ankh charms (Ankh is the symbol of the Key of Life).



While in Luxor, we also visited the Valley of the Kings & the Valley of the Workers. The Valley of the Workers contained the village & burial sites of all the workers who lived & died while digging the Valley of the Kings' tombs. It was incredible (if a bit claustrophobic) to see the 5,000 year old paintings in the tombs that looked as fresh as if painted yesterday.

Our last morning in Luxor we spent at Karnak Temple which is enormous. We had a fantastic guide who told us the stories, scandals & intrigues surrounding some of the more famous & infamous Pharoahs of the time. I really enjoyed this temple.



After Karnak, we loaded our bags onto our bus for the 4 hour journey to Hurghada to meet the ferry to take us to the Sinai peninsula. When we got to Hurghada we found out the ferry was cancelled due to rough sea conditions so we had to board an overnight coach to Dahab. I didnt mind, it was good practice for South America (not to mention the return journey to Cairo!).

Dahab

Oh Dahab, Dahab, Dahab - I LOVED Dahab. After the few frenetic days in Luxor, Dahab was a really welcome oasis of calm & relaxation - with VERY little hassle on the street from vendors.
Dahab is a couple of hours north of Sharm-el-Sheikh on the Red Sea coast. There is plenty of diving to be done here, but if, like me, you are a land rat :) there's plenty of other stuff to do. Gorging yourself on yummy seafood, banana pancakes & milkshakes while sitting beside a fire reading a book, being one.

Mt. Sinai

2nd night in Dahab, most of our group opted to climb Mt. Sinai. I'm going to be lazy here & plagiarise Cayley's description of the night (which is spot on): "We woke at 11pm and drove two hours to the base of Mt Sinai to retrace Moses' footsteps. Battling the freezing cold we trekked in the pitch dark to an Arabic dance music soundtrack courtesy of our local guide. But it was worth it to see the magical sunrise! It was great to see a holy site that is significant to Christian, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim religions."

Snorkelling...

...is not for me! OK, maybe I'll give it one more try somewhere else..but next time I'll make sure to start in shallow water and not over a Blue Hole...
Last day of the organised tour, our tour leader arranged a jeep to take us out to the Blue Hole. A ramshackle, boneshaking, no suspension jeep seemed like a strange choice...until we suddenly left the paved road and took off across the edge of the desert following the coast to get to the Blue Hole site. It's not far at all from Dahab (less than 30 mins), but it really is a rollercoaster ride across rough ground, the only transport apart from jeeps like ours, are camels!

The Blue Hole is really close to the beach, you walk out along a little jetty, jump into the water and it's there below you! I could snorkel (technically) but I didnt relax enough to stop hyperventilating each time I put my face in the water. Looking into a yawning blue-&-getting-darker-into-deep-dark-black-nothingness chasm didnt help matters either, so I contented myself with sunbathing, feeding a camel water from a bottle & contemplating how lucky I was to still be alive :) while the others continued on their quest to see a tiger/lion fish (cant remember the correct name) or sharks (yeah, thinking of sharks didnt help me much in the water either).

Rock-Climbing

Originally I read about rock climbing in Jordan, but didnt have the time to go there to climb without sacrificing some of my Egyptian itinerary, which I decided I didnt want to do, so after some google searching I found Desert Divers in Dahab http://www.desert-divers.com/ and booked with them. I'm really glad I did it, it was great to get to do some climbing outdoors in warm weather, and it's one more thing ticked off the to-do list! I signed up for the 2 day beginner's rock climbing course.

Jenny was my instructor and was fantastically patient, kind, encouraging & entertaining all in one. We climbed different crags each day. Each day, I met Jenny & our driver, Mohammed at Desert Divers office and off we drove to Wadi Gnai. Mohammed was also our cook and would serve up the most amazing tahini I've ever had with warm pitas cooked over a fire in the desert while we climbed. The first day I found difficult, but by the end of the 2nd I was loving it and wished I had booked another day. Rock climbing is in its infancy on the Sinai peninsula, but Jenny is always mapping new crags & new routes, and I do not hesitate to recommed her services.

Egypt - week 1

I'm out of Egypt almost a week now, and it feels like another world already so far away...so much happened and we covered a lot of ground and saw so many things, forgive me if this post is not as detailed as the first, but this one should have some pics this time :)

Day2:
We hit Cairo's Egyptian Museum & the Pyramids at Giza with a vengeance. The Egyptian Museum was really something to behold - as became a theme on the trip, I could have spent a whole day there, not just a couple of hours, and still not have seen everything. The best (& slightly queasiest) part was seeing the mummies - they are so well preserved you can even see their eyelashes still! If you can bear to look that closely...
Before we headed out to the Pyramids, we stopped at a par(per?)fumerie for lunch and some shopping. The guy who ran the place was hilarious, similar to Oisinn in Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books by the way he could tell you the components of almost any perfume you cared to mention (and reproduce the essential oils). After picking up some lavendar & lotus essential oils we were off to meet our camels & see the Pyramids & the Sphinx.

The Pyramids & Sphinx were super busy. After successfully dodging about 17 touts, a fella managed to wrap a towel round my head, take the obligatory cheesy photo and relieve me of some cash. All part of the experience :).
After dinner that night we took the night train to Aswan.

Day3:
We got to our Aswan hotel just before midday & after lunch went out to see the Temple of Philae. This was one of my favorite sites during the whole holiday - because there were so few other tourists around :). We were there during the hottest part of the day so there was only one other group on the temple island at the same time as us. The temple was moved from its original site to the present island to preserve it from being submerged when the Aswan Dam was built. The markers of the original site are visible in the water just off the islands shore. One of the temple guards wanted to show me around the temple but when I realised he was carrying something similar to an AK47 I decided it would be more prudent to head back to our tour leader and hide in the canteen in case he decided to press his case for baksheesh!
In the evening, we took a boat trip on the Nile and went to a Nubian village for a traditional meal. Our host was very entertaining, explaining Nubian life and customs, showing us his pet crocodiles and explaining how climate change is affecting the Nubians even in the desert: normally it rains 10 mins per year(!!!) in that area, but earlier that year it had rained for 3 hours and almost washed the village away!

Day4:
We had an early start to get to the convoy to drive to Abu Simbel. Built by Ramses II, and another temple moved to save it from the waters of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam, what struck me most about it, was the work and dedication it took to move this ancient temple and faithfully recreate it and the mountain it was carved from.
This day was characterised by a number of encounters with friendly Egyptian women who complimented me on my headscarf at Abu Simbel, and who preserved my modesty at the Aswan souq when a young Nubian boy wouldnt stop staring at me :)


Days 5&6:
2 relaxing days spent lazing on a felucca on the Nile. The second day the wind made it difficult to sail but the crew took great care of us, the food was gorgeous and despite having to get used to the lack of toilet facilities, it was great fun. We partied late into the 1st night & the 2nd night, our felucca crew joined another and treated us to traditional Nubian singing.

First day in Egypt

So I started out this morning feeling like Indiana Jones due to my dirty, dusty boots which was unfortunately not the result of archaeology. The Indy feeling didnt last long, when I had 2 heartattacks because I couldnt find my epipen, and then couldnt find my health insurance card (they were too well packed).

Two things about Zurich airport which I didnt know when I lived there:
1) the post office in the train station attached to the airport has a photocopier. 20 Rappen for B&W, 1CHF for colour
2) the chemist in the train station does not have a good selection of travel size toiletries, so buy them before you get there, because the duty free shopping area only has the travel size expensive-perfume type stuff.

Coming in to land in Cairo was cool! When we came out of the clouds there were green fields below, then all of a sudden, as if there is a dividing line, the green ends, and there in nothing but sand. As we flew lower, the amount of work visible in the sand was amazing. Tracks laid out for roads went for miles & miles. My guidebook talked about how Egyptians are constantly working to reclaim the land from the desert and it was so accurate. The work going on is truly impressive.

Cairo airport Terminal 3 is very impressive. You could be mistaken for thinking it was Zurich! I was expecting chaos as per the description in my guidebook but it was calm, quiet and had western style toilets!
Tourist visas have to be bought from the bank foreign exchange counters in the arrivals hall before customs, which was a bit confusing, but passing through immigration was very quick and painless.

The drive to the hotel was not as crazy as expected, but it is Sunday so the traffic was lighter than normal. OMG there are Ladas everywhere here! (I developed a bit of a Lada obsession after visiting Moldova a couple of years ago). Lots of police and military types on the street here too, it seemed like on every corner after leaving the airport. Mostly they seemed to be directing traffic or telling people to move on and not park here.
I thought my driver understood me well enough until I asked him whether traffic was usually this heavy or if it was rushhour - and his answer was 'yes'. But to be fair, I was having difficulty understanding him as well, but he did his best to point out the sights to me on the way to the hotel and told me that there are two Nile rivers flowing through Cairo, a little and a large one (but maybe I understood him as well as he understood me??!!)

Would be Sprungli-Snatchers & the Brave Hero who foiled them

Finally packed up and ready to hit the homeward bound trail...for a whole week :)

Flying with the wonderful (NOT) AerLingus which will not happen again (for reasons other than chocolate thievery). The flight was completely booked and because I always hang back until the end to board by the time I was at my seat most of the overhead storage areas were full so I had to squeeze my hand luggage in a couple of different places. So the booze and chocolate went in one spot and my hand bag in another.

All fine with the flight, I slept through most of it. When we landed in Dublin, there was the usual scrummage to get bags and get off the plane. I was keeping an eye on my booze and chocs to make sure they hadnt fallen on someone's head, when I saw a dude reach up for the duty free that my chocs were resting on...and then he took the Sprungli bag with him!

I was in a window seat so I couldnt hop into the aisle after him, the only thing to do was yell: HEY! That's MY Sprungli bag!!
A very decent chap who was already in the aisle asked me which fella I was talking about and took off after him to intercede on my behalf. I eventually got out of the seat, collected my remaining bags and got to the terminal building to find my hero had apprehended the would be chocolate thief, who sheepishly handed over the bag with many apologies and assurances that he thought it was his wife's shopping.

The hero disappeared into the melee and I never got his name or to thank him in person. So just in case...thank you Mr. Beige-Jacket-Grey-Pants-Chocolate-Rescuer-Extraordinaire. You saved my chocolate, I am more grateful than you could realise. It was my Mammy's bribe for collecting me at the airport :)

Start at the beginning...Switzerland...

Right...here goes...

Because I dont have enough to do while trying to organise myself out of Switzerland where I've been living for just over 2 years, I've taken the notion of starting a blog.

Actually, I signed up to start this blog over 2 years ago when I meant first to be heading off on my gap year (or whatever you want to call it), before I moved here. And it was someone at work who reminded me of this place (thank you Mike M).

There are 2 kinds of people in my life: those I've worked with, and those I haven't. If I've worked with you, you already know what I do, you're not interested in that. If I haven't worked with you, you know enough not to want to know anymore about my work (accounting is a conversation killer).

So this blog should be about everything else except work.