Photo of the Day: Graffiti

From New-Old

Check out the bottom of this picture -- British graffiti in Luxor, Egypt. Kinda made me laugh a little bit.

Photo of the Day: Under the Red Sea

From More scuba pics

Ferry to Aswan

The desert in Sudan was peaceful. The town of Wadi Halfi was unusual. The ferry ride to Aswan was just annoying.

In most every guidebook that I’ve read on the trip, there is a section that talks about travel considerations for women. Frankly, I’ve been amazed at how many solo females travelers I’ve met on this trip. They have a level of travel courage for which I have the utmost respect. In all the various crime stories I’ve heard so far on the trip, I’ve yet to hear a bad, sexual assault story, thank God, but I’m still in awe of the woman I’ve met tromping around the world by themselves. I have glanced through those sections in the guidebooks, but the warnings have never really registered with me.

Until I got to the Muslim countries in northern Africa that is. Until then, I’d really never traveled with women in parts of the world where those warnings apply. I’d seen women get hit on or whistled at (my guys other than me even), but had all been pretty tame until this part of the world.

Of the twenty of us on the overland truck, about half of us slept up on the deck of the ferry and the other half paid extra to get cabins. After going through the exit procedures at the dock in Wadi Halfa, we got into buses to go to the ferry (the lakes levels are way, way down and the dock is about a half mile from the original one), got on the boat and immediately went up to the top deck to mark out our sleeping territory.

One of the overland truck drivers had warmed us that it can get quite crowded up on deck. He told us one time that he almost had to elbow his way to get enough room to lie down and sleep. Luckily for us, one of the benefits to traveling in the middle of the summer heat was that the ferry wasn’t completely packed, so there was enough room to spread out a rug we were carrying to mark out a spot for five us to sleep. The other five spread our a rug around the corner.

I did get to see something on the ferry that I’d never seen before – a Muslim woman praying. I was up near the bridge on the shady side of the ferry reading a book and listening to my iPod, when two woman walked up, spread out a rug, and one of them got down and started praying. I’d seen hundreds of men praying before at various calls to prayer during the day – in fact, in just a couple more hours, when the sun went down, there was a big prayer session on the top deck – but I’d never before seen a woman praying. I think for the most part, the woman pray in private, while the men go to the mosque for their daily prayers. One of the many things I will have to research before writing the tome.

The other thing I unfortunately got to witness was a bunch of young, rude Muslim guys that thought nothing of standing a few feet away from us and taking pictures of the girls with us on their cell phones. Click. Show your buddy standing next to you. Click again. Over the hours until the sun went down, this probably happened a half a dozen times.

Worse was the expression on their faces. They weren’t just taking pictures of ‘strange’ or ‘unique’ things. These weren’t just innocent tourist pictures. Though our female friends were quite conservatively dressed, as you should be in this part of the world out of respect for their culture, these guys were taking pictures of the ‘Western sluts.’

I simply have no doubt of this. After doing a bit of reading on how woman are thought of in this part of the world and talking to scores of female travelers, I’m completely convinced that is how a lot of these younger guys look at every western woman. I’ve heard a number of stories of guys walking up to western woman and just flat asking for sex. One of the girls on the trip had a guy tell her that she had nice breasts – and he was the guy checking her into the hotel she was staying at! A couple of the girls on the truck took the train from Khartoum to Wadi Halfa and one got groped on the train – just a flat, walk-up right to her, boob grab. Then he smiled at them, as if that was a perfectly acceptable way to say hello.

Not my style to condemn an entire culture, but a lot of these guys make drunken frat guys on Spring Break look like polite gentlemen.

We huddled up on the ship and made a decision about our sleeping arrangements. Our group was sleeping in a passage area, so we needed to leave an aisle down the middle. One of the girls was going to sleep on one side up against a wall, with a guy sleeping on her outside, on the passageway side. The other girl was going to sleep up against the railing, with another guy sleeping between her and the aisle. Basically, we were worried that if they slept somewhere that was exposed at all, they might get groped.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t organized my sleeping arrangements nearly as well. There wasn’t any more room on the rug, so I had to fold up my lightweight sleeping bag in half and put it under me, from ass to shoulders, to try to cushion a bit against the steel floor. I took off my sandals and used them as a pillow.

Not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever gotten.

We got to Aswan at 9:30 a.m. We had all been told that the Egyptian immigration agents were not the most efficient in the world. That was a gross understatement.

After experiencing their level of government efficiency and organization, it is not shocking that Israel kicked their asses in four wars last century. I think France might even be able to best them.

When we arrived, a small boat pulled up and four guys with gloves and masks over their mouths got onto our ship. They were there to check everyone’s passports for entry visas and also do a temperature check (in your ear) to make sure you didn’t have swine flu. They also handed out a small form you had to fill out regarding your health: any recent fevers? Coughing? Recent hospitalization? And so on.

Small sidenote. One of the girls on our truck got malaria in Ethiopia. Then at the end of the desert trip, she suffered from a bout of heat stroke. She had to go to the hospital in Wadi Halfa to be able to get enough fluids in her to get on the boat. On the boat, the ship’s doctor personally oversaw giving her an IV in her cabin. They let her in. Makes you wonder why they even bothered with all this.

Four hours later, everyone’s passport had been stamped and everyone’s temperature had been taken. Time to get off the boat and go through customs, right?

Not so fast, my friend. It seems that one of the locals hadn’t picked his passport back up from the immigration agents. So there was one guy on the boat that didn’t have his passport on him. For some inexplicable reason, they wouldn’t let anyone off the boat until they found him.

Just to make sure I beat this point to death, we still had to go through customs. In fact, before we finally exited the dock area, we all had to show our passports five more times to different people. Five times. Now, I understand it might be a big deal that you’ve got someone’s passport on you and that person shouldn’t be entering your country, but you know when you’d be able to figure that out, if you let everyone off the boat? About 3 minutes later, when the guy realized he didn’t have his passport at the first checkpoint.

But no, we all got to wait around on the boat until they found him. It took an hour for us to even realize this was all going on, until our local fixer that was on the ship with us talked to an official to figure out what was going on. During that hour, there wasn’t a single announcement made over the loudspeaker for this person to come pick up his passport. Apparently they just wandered around the boat and asked the 400-500 people if they’d seen Mohammed.

Yep. Mohammed. Because that is a pretty unique name in this part of the world. Then someone finally got on the loudspeaker and made an announcement that Mohammed needed to come pick up his passport.

Another hour went by before he did.

He must have been a former high-ranking military commander.

Updated Travel Stats

My very good friend, Doug Muzzy, requested a basic update on how I’ve managed to get from Egypt to Instanbul and I thought it would be a good time to update some of my travel statistics and recent basics of the trip. I don’t think I’ve done that since I left South America. Which gives me an excuse to post an old link to one of my old posts. . . and tell you if you haven't read any of my older stuff -- it is there and ready for you to read now :)

travel times update

As to the route, for Doug, I crossed Lake Nassar from Wadi Halfa, Sudan to Aswan, Egypt on the weekly ferry. It is the only overland method to get from Sudan to Egypt and vice versa. At Aswan, I took my leave of the Oasis Overland truck that I’d traveled on for the last three weeks.

They were on a five-month trip from Capetown to Cairo and were a heck of a lot of fun to travel with for a few weeks. That being said, I have no idea how they managed to travel together for that long a period of time – more power to them, but there is no way I would have made it (or more likely, no way they would have been able to put up with me for that long and would have voted me off the truck).

Another great friend of mine, Dave Roberts, flew from Germany (he and his wife’s home for the past four or so years) to meet me at Luxor. I took the train from Aswan to Luxor to meet him, we saw the sights there, and then we took the overnight train to Cairo and spent a few days there. Dave then flew back to Germany to finish packing for their move back to the States, which I think happened this week. I then took a bus over to Dahab, on the coast of the Red Sea and did some scuba diving there.

In Egypt, I decided to cheat on one of my travel goals. As most of you know, I decided before the trip started to get one tattoo on each of the continents I went to. On the original route, that was to be five tattoos. Since my route change, it’s now going to be six.

In Panama, I got the map of the world. In Uruguay, I got the modes of transport that I was going to use on the trip, for the most part. In Africa, I was going to get the summit of Kilimanjaro and the date that I summited (June 4, 2009). My unexpected problem is that there are very few tattoo parlors in Islamic countries – tattoos are frowned upon here. I did manage to finally find one online in Cairo, but the additional problem I had was that I was due to leave the next day to scuba dive for a few days. Fresh tattoos and swimming are not a good mix.

So I put off the Africa tattoo until leaving Africa. I will be getting it done in Berlin, since I will have a bit of a wait there for my Russian and Chinese visas. Considering how short a period of time I am going to be in Europe, I’m totally unsure of what tattoo is going to be appropriate for there also, but I have a destination neutral idea, so I will be doubling up my tattoo total in one location.

In any case, back to the route. From Dahab I took the ferry to Aqaba, Jordan. That ferry is the only option, if you are planning on going to Syria or any of the other countries in the Middle East (and Indonesia, I think) that will not let you enter if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport.

From what I’ve read, you can sometimes talk the Israelis to stamp a piece of paper upon entry, instead of your passport, but that isn’t guaranteed. The other problem is that even if you get the Israelis to agree to do that for you, the Syrians might still turn you down if you have an exit visa from Taba, Egypt, because if you exited from there. . . you had to be going to Israel.

Damn immigration agents.

The reason that the ferry isn’t the preferred choice, if you had a choice, is that it’s a bit unreliable on its departure times. For me, it was only about three hours late in leaving, so not a big deal. I’ve heard of ten-hour delays.

From the port of Aqaba, there was a group of about eight of us that met on the ferry that were all going to Petra. We negotiated a fairly reasonable group rate from two taxi drivers to take us there. From Petra, I took a minibus to Amman, switched to a taxi cab to the Syrian border, waited around there for about five hours for my visa (they aren’t big fans of Americans, hence the delay) and then took another cab to Damascus.

One of the things I didn’t expect in the Middle East was how compact everything is – the distances are so, so much shorter there than what I’d been experiencing everywhere else on the trip. Taking a taxi from city to city would not have been a realistic option in many other places on the trip. There, it is common.

I wanted to take the train from Damascus to Hamah, but the cab driver must not have understood which station I was trying to get to and he took me to the bus station instead. So, bus to Hamah and another bus from there to Aleppo, in northern Syria. From there to Goreme, you should have already read my blog about taxis and idiot bus companies. If not, scroll on down and read it.

In Goreme, I met Aileen and we then took an overnight bus to Olympus, then she went off somewhere for a couple days and I went directly on to Istanbul on another overnight bus.

That very boring update provides me the opportunity to update my time/method of travel information. I don’t think I’ve done this since I got to Africa, so here goes. From Capetown to Istanbul:

Bus 265 hours
Train 65 hours
Truck/lorry 109 hours
Ferry 5 hours
Taxi 8 ½ hours

Total 452 ½ hours = 18.85 days

I arrived in Capetown, South Africa on April 10th and left Istanbul on August 28th. That is roughly four and a half months. For some reason, I have been telling people that I spent five months in Africa (and another half month getting to Istanbul). Apparently reading a calendar isn’t one of my talents. I’d expected originally to get out of Istanbul about three weeks before I did, but now that I look at the timeline, I think I did fairly well, all things considered.

Books read on this leg of the trip:

Notes from a Small Country and Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (I aspire to be one-third as good/funny/interesting as he is)
Quiet American by Graham Green (best English language writer to not win the Nobel Prize in the 20th century)
Loving Frank by
Too Close to the Sun: The Finton Hatch Story by Sarah Wheeler (Robert Redford in ‘Out of Africa,’ quite interesting)
Around Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks (maybe my silly travel ideas really will inspire some publisher sometime)
The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara by Terry Brooks (mindless fantasy stuff)
Treaty Planet by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye (mindless poor sci-fi)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (depressing doesn’t come close to describing it)
Lolita by Nabakov (master wordsmith. . . in his 3rd language)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (incredibly good. One of the best I’ve read.)
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (very good Japanese author I had never heard of)

Three continents so far an only two countries that I didn’t like: Costa Rica and Ethiopia. And even for those two countries, I can honestly say there are incredible things to see there. Both countries have gotten excellent reviews from many other travelers that I know or that I have read. My dislike of each isn’t me just be contrary, which I am certainly capable of, but rather just that I just had bad experiences in both of them.

In Ethiopia’s case, perhaps I built it up too much in my mind. It was one of the 6-7 countries that I was most excited about visiting on the entire trip. The danger with heightened anticipation is that the expectations are that much harder to meet. On the other hand, some of the countries that I had low or no expectations of (Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Uruguay, Uganda) were some of my favorites.

Probably a lesson in there somewhere. One of the phrases I’ve used for a long time about setting goals in your life might apply: set the bar low; you will look that much better going over it.

Lesson learned. . .again

Sometimes you have to relearn life lessons over and over before they stick with you. Yesterday, with my good friend David Roberts (who was nice enough to come join me for about a week on my trip), we both relearned one of the classics.

Always, always ask how much something is before ordering/buying/getting in and so on.

Dave's trip to Egypt was a whirlwind tour. Fly into Luxor. We hit the sights there for a couple days. Overnight train to Cairo. Hit the sights here for a couple days. Then he flies home to the wife and kids. . . and moves back to the States in less than a month. Lots on his plate.

Luxor was really, really good. More on that in another blog. The train was quite nice. And Cairo has been more than expected also. Egypt, so far, has been a huge hit with the both of us. I'm a big fan -- and didn't expect to be.

So, the train arrived two days ago around 6:30 a.m. We went and found our hostel. Checked in. Rested for a few hours. Then went and hit the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum.

The Pyramids are big. There is no other way to describe them. Yes, you've seen pictures. No, you have no good idea of how big they are, until you are standing there. Big. That's all that can be said. Just looking at them, everyone -- everyone -- sits there and thinks the same thing: "how fricking much time/effort/stone/people went into these monstrosities?!"

And my pictures are pretty poor. Really heavy smog the morning we went. Sorry.



You aren't allowed to take pictures in the Egyptian Museum, but it was much better than what I'd read in various guidebooks. Most comment on how little English signage there is on the exhibits, but seriously, how much do you want? There are little cards on most of the exhibits that give you 3-4 sentences on the object. It wasn't like we were there studying up for some Egyptology exam. And the exhibits were great.

At the Pyramids, you'd look up and say "big." At the museum, you look around and say "old." Really old.

Yes, I'm using all my big words today in this blog.

Now on to the life lesson. On Dave's last day, we decided to walk over to the Islamic section of town. We wanted to wander around, take pictures, eat a bit of local food and perhaps have some coffee or tea. Its a really nice part of Cairo. We got a smidge lost trying to find it and milled about aimlessly in some series of small alleys, which was a market section of town, but eventually we found what we were looking for.



After walking around a bit, we found a little street vendor for some food. Both Dave and I are always up for some street food (plus, I'd just gotten over my 72 hour bad stomach/adjustment to local food and water, so I was immune to anything possibly bad happening). We walked up to one of the guys cooking some sort of bean-type food and asked for "food." We got three or four bowls of stuff, plus a bunch of bread. It was obviously a place that only locals ate. When we walked up, the guy said "no Coke" before we said anything. He'd assumed we just wanted to buy a Coke out of his refrigerator and seemed quite surprised that we actually wanted food.

Good, filling meal. Cost = 2 Egyptian pounds total. That's less than fifty cents.

Then we got up and wandered around some more. We ended up walking by another guy cooking some falafel around the corner. We were pretty stuffed, but the guy got Dave to stop and try a free sample of the falafel. He loved it. I tried it. It was the best I've ever had. Dave said the same thing.

The guy asked if we wanted to get some. Absolutely. I tried to order a half dozen of the falafel balls. And then everything went downhill.

The guy waved us off and essentially said, don't worry. I will bring you food. He set up a table specially for us, right across from his little shop, in the alley. He then proceeded to bring out a feast of food -- considering we'd eaten, there was no way at all we were going to be able to finish it.

The major problem was that we never asked how much it was. Maybe we were still thinking about the two pound meal. Maybe the heat had gotten to the both of us. Maybe we were just on one of those traveler's highs, because people had been so friendly the last couple days. Maybe we were smitten by the falafel.

I don't know, but you never, never, ever get anything without asking the cost. We should have known better.

In the end, we ate about a third of the food, somehow. He wanted 110 Egyptian pounds for it. More than the dinner we had in a nice place the night before. And don't even let me think about how much more than the meal we just ate. We got him down to 90, which was at least triple what a moderately reasonable price would have been, paid it and walked away pissed off at ourselves.

If you see this guy in Cairo -- keep walking. Arrrggggggg.


And I've explained this before, but its a strange concept, so I'll do it again. Its not the money. 90 pounds split between Dave and I was about $8 U.S. dollars each. Its just that we got ripped off. Totally because we were stupid. It can ruin your mood for hours or even days.

Thirty minutes later, it all turned. I saw a kid on the street selling underwear. I needed some more boxer shorts (don't ask). I asked him how much they were and he said ten pounds. I asked if I could have two for fifteen. He asked Dave and I were we were from. We told him we were both from America. He lit right up and asked us some questions about the U.S. He was justifiably proud of his English, which was really good.

Then he told me that I could have the two pair for just 10 pounds -- although I was offering 15.

After I bought them -- he wanted his picture taken with Dave and I. Not on his camera. He didn't have one. On mine. Just to have his picture taken with us.

Faith in life restored.

Cairo traffic

Frogger with car horns.