Dan Schaumann

Travel

The Ruined Castle

I love the Blue Mountains!

On a previous visit quite some time ago, I noticed a sign not far from the bottom of the world’s steepest railway that pointed toward a mysterious location known as the “Ruined Castle.”

I decided that I had to return one day to visit this seemingly dilapidated fortress. After some investigation, I found that it was not a castle as such, but a rock formation at the top of a hill which, if climbed, offers stunning 360° views from the cliffs of Katoomba all the way to Mt Solitary.

After a failed attempt two weeks ago due to poor weather, I headed back once again last weekend and successfully embarked upon the nearly-7km trek to the Ruined Castle summit. It was, quite frankly, a freakin’ incredible hike. I tried by best to capture some of this Blue Mountains beauty on camera:

 

 

 

 

After about 2.5 hours of moderately graded bushwalking and a slightly hairy but manageable experience on the upward rockface, I reached the breathtaking Ruined Castle summit. This is what I was lucky enough to witness:

 

You can click on the photo for a larger view, or alternatively click here for a 360° panoramic tour (opens in a new window).

Whilst I was taking in my surroundings, a sneaky crow took advantage of the fact that I was far from my backpack, which I’d left on a rock about 20 metres below. He managed to pull out most of my jacket but eventually gave up after realising the food was too securely packed for him to get to. Then he flew up to the rocky summit, landed a metre away from me in the shade, looked me right in the eye and made these incredible hooting noises (similar to an owl) which I’d never heard come from the beak of a crow before. I’d love to know what he way trying to say to me.

On my return journey, I paused for a few moments to take in the atmosphere near a section of Federal Pass known as the ‘Landslide.’ I noticed a faint sound in the distance akin to splashing water, and after a short detour through the bush up to the cliff face that looked upon me, I discovered a waterfall.

The source at the top wasn’t large enough to expel a constant stream of water – instead, thousands of droplets sprinkled in wind-shaped clusters to the ground some 40 metres below. I stood still with my camera and watched from a safe distance. It felt like I was in a dream, with my own personal waterfall before me, the rainforest below, the cliff face & the open skies above, and not another single soul around for miles. Frozen in this state of surreality, the unpredictable breeze caught me off guard and showered my camera and I with a sudden deluge.

After only having taken a handful of snaps of my newly-discovered fountain, I was left with a soaked outfit in the already-shivering climate… not to mention a non-functioning Canon…

 

(fortunately it turned back on again after drying out for an hour, and I’m pleased to report, remains completely functional )

 

After my awesome afternoon of exploration, I fully recommend anyone visiting the Blue Mountains who is chasing more of an adventure than the easily-accessible attractions such as Scenic World and the Three Sisters, to check out the Ruined Castle. There’s a fantastic guide at OZultimate.com with further details on the walk and what to expect.

Just try not to wet your camera along the way!

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Belgium, I Love You

A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry called Egypt, I Love You, which chronicled a 17 day tour I took of the incredible Middle Eastern country in 2009. Earlier today, my friend Nils, who lives in Belgium, tweeted the following:

Funny, when @danschaumann wrote “Egypt, I love you” a revolution broke loose. Think you can write “Belgium, I love you” anytime soon, Dan?

Absolutely!! As it happens, I do love Belgium! This won’t be quite as detailed, as it’s been over two years now since I was there, and I didn’t keep a travel journal like I did in Egypt, but I’ll try my best to remember as much as I can.

I travelled to Brussels, the Belgian capital, on the first weekend of January in 2009. I was living in London at the time and was fairly down in the dumps and heartbroken after a bad end to 2008, so I thought that a trip on the Eurostar across to the continent would be a great way to bring in the new year with a fresh start. I sure wasn’t left disappointed

My first impression of Brussels, after checking into my hotel, was one of grandeur and majesty. After a short stroll through some inner-city residential rue’s (excuse my terrible French), my first destination was the very impressive Grand Place in the centre of town. The architecture was second-to-none, and I was especially blown away by the nearly 100 metre tall spire of the nearly 600 year old Town Hall on the south-western end of the square.

I walked through and around the Grand Place for about an hour. It was the middle of winter and the district still had a real European Christmassy charm to it, which is not something I was used to, after having spent my last 24 Christmasses in the hot summer of Australia. Eventually I moved onto the markets and streets to the north-east of the square, and came across the beautiful Galeries Royales de Saint-Hubert – one of the oldest and most magnificent shopping arcades in all of Europe.

It was about time for lunch by now, and I discovered that there was a main strip through the centre of town where all the tourist restaurants were located. I was skeptical of such tourist restaurants, as all my guidebooks in the past had warned me that most European restaurants with an English menu at the entrance will not be famous for its authenticity. But due to my budget constraints and my complete lack of knowledge in German, French or Dutch, I opted for said tourist restaurant, and unsurprisingly, wasn’t very impressed with the food. However – what they lacked in food, they made up for with fire!

A leisurely post-lunch promenade through the city streets saw me head towards the inner south-eastern district, through the Albertina Square Gardens:

 

I ended up at the Musical Instrument Museum, which I managed to get into without paying. I’m pretty sure there was an entrance fee, but there was a lack of English translation in the foyer area, so I smiled politely at the staff and they let me through the gate. The Musical Instrument Museum houses thousands of instruments ranging from glass harmonicas to hajhoujes to modekus (don’t ask me what they are), but I was particularly taken by this piano kinda thing:

After my very thorough education in all things musical, I took to the streets again for an afternoon walk, where I discovered some of the more humorous aspects of Belgian life:

I discovered the local winter wonderland was still in operation, which had such a lovely atmosphere. I adored watching the families on the ice skating rink, and I regret not giving it a go myself, although it had been about 15 years since I last went ice skating so I wasn’t keen on embarrassing myself. Beyond the ice skating rink, the paths were lines with dozens of little food stalls, bars and fashion shops. I drank mulled wine, ate Belgian chocolate, and from the top of the Brussels wheel, marvelled at the skyline of this gorgeous city, wishing that I had brought somebody with me to share these precious few moments with.

On the way back to my hotel, I happened to pass a protest taking place on the steps of an inner-city building. It may well have been a governmental establishment, I’m not entirely sure, but the people were loud, angry and demanding action of some kind. I stood and watched the protest for a few minutes without understanding what was occurring, and thought it best to vacate the premises sooner rather than later in case things took a turn for the worse. As I was leaving the area, the group of enraged citizens suddenly disbanded and took to the streets in all directions, stopping traffic on the nearby road and continuing their protest, chanting at the tops of their voices. Luckily there was no violence, just anger in the form of words. I’d never seen anything like it before.

The following day I got up early and braved the 1°C chill as I ventured toward this piece of architecture I’d heard so much about, called the Atomium. The city map I had in my guidebook didn’t stretch far enough to the area where the Atomium was located, so I had to guess which Metro stop to disembark at. I knew it was towards the end of the line, but unfortunately I’d managed to get on the wrong line, and unbeknownst to me, I was heading in the complete opposite direction. I cottoned onto this as the scenery outside the window grew more suburban and I noticed the distinct lack of tourists on my carriage. After finally deciphering the Metro map, I got off at a random station in one of the outer suburbs and thought I’d have a quick look around before heading back towards my desired destination.

I didn’t see anything too interesting here, except for Santa Claus hanging onto a window for dear life:

Finally I made it to the Atomium! I went inside and took the escalators right to the top. It was indeed an incredible piece of architecture.

I will borrow a few paragraphs from a past blog entry of mine, Why I Love The Winter, to describe the epiphany I had in this district of Brussels.

I had just finished wandering through the Atomium, a popular tourist attraction built in 1958 that resembles the cell of an iron crystal (albeit 165 billion times bigger than the real thing). I’d walked past a chemist earlier in the day whose digital thermometer told me it was 1.5 degrees, so I’d made sure I was well-layered, with two t-shirts, a jacket, and gloves. The sky was overcast as well, so I had an umbrella handy in case it decided to rain.

Departing the warm comfort of the Atomium’s enclosures, I made my way to Mini Europe, another nearby attraction, featuring downsized scale models of famous landmarks from all around Europe. Within 5 minutes of me entering the premises it started to drizzle, so I took my umbrella out of my bag, ready in case I was to be attacked by a downpour. Strangely, however, I quickly noticed that the falling droplets were not like normal raindrops at all. Instead of being sponged up by the surface of my jacket upon landing, the droplets stayed as they were, gradually melting their way into absorption.  This was not rain at all, I realised – this was snow, falling from the sky!

Oh, what a joyous occasion it was. To the average Belgian citizen, the flakes were so few and far between that they would have been fobbed off as a feeble and unnoteworthy. But to me, it was magic. Here I was, with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower in front of me and an enormous monument dedicated to the iron crystal behind it, and I was witnessing my first ever snowfall. I will never forget the day.

My next Brussels adventure took me to the Belgian Comic Strip Centre. Now, I normally cannot stand comic books, but the one exception I have to this rule is that of Hergé’s famous comic book character Tintin, and his trusty sidekicks Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson, and other such friends. Many hours of my youth were spent reading Tintin books borrowed from the school library and watching the cartoon on TV, so I simply had to relive my childhood fantasies and visit the many Tintin-related exhibits housed within the walls of this museum.

Aside from my mediocre experience at the tourist restaurant on day 1, one of the things I could not get over in Brussels was the delicious food and drink, the likes & vaiety of which I hadn’t seen available in other European cities. There were chocolatiers galore lining the streets, Belgian Beer cafes, more chocolate, waffle shops, chocolate again, frites for sale at street markets, and for a change, some more chocolate. One of my favourite stalls I’ve ever been to was a take-away hot chocolate cafe just off to the side of the Grand Place. For four Euros, you could purchase a decent-sized block of chocolate stuck onto the bottom of a paddle-pop stick, with a small plastic tube protruding from the chocolate, the reservoir of which was filled with whatever type of alcohol you desired, from rum to whiskey to Cointreau. As you stirred your stick through the provided cup of hot milk, the chocolate melted away causing the alcohol to drip through the plastic tube, and before too long you were left with the perfect cup of hot liqueur chocolate. I wish they would open a stall like this in Australia.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of it, but I did get a few other food & drink-related snaps:

I scoffed down my waffle and frites, and explored some more inner-city streets and shops. I found myself at the same location I was in the night before, with exactly the same event taking place:

My final destination before the Eurostar back to London was the very popular yet completely bizarre tourist icon, Manneken Pis (translate: Little Boy Pee). He’s stood here for nearly 400 years, pissing into the basin of the fountain. Every couple of days a member of City staff changes his costume, and I happened to catch him on the day that he took his dog out for a walk:

Despite the very short time I spent here I can honestly say that Belgium is one of my favourite countries, and that of all the European cities I visited, Brussels was the most authentic. You go to Paris, and as incredible as it is there, you can see they’re trying to prove themselves to be the romantic capital of the world. Rome is the pizza capital, Vienna is the classical music capital, Munich is the beer capital, Zurich is the capital of clean waterways and offshore bank accounts. But Brussels? Brussels is just Brussels. From a tourist’s perspective, I didn’t feel that the people of the city were trying to prove or be anything in particular – they were just being themselves. That, as well as the great attractions, sights, humour and food, is what I love about a city.

And that’s not to mention that since my brief visit to Belgium, I have made some awesome Belgian friends through the internet, namely Nils who inspired this blog post, Vincent and Frauke. You guys rock! (those links are to their blog sites, and if you’ve read this far, please do yourself a favour and check them out)

I can’t wait to return one day to these fine Flemish shores and explore more of this country outside its capital.

Belgium, I love you!

Now that I’ve said it, can you please form a government?

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Egypt, I Love You

In September 2009 I had the great pleasure of going on an Imaginative Traveller tour of Egypt.

I kept a journal of my time there, and planned on turning it to a travel blog on my return from Egypt back to London. I never ended up getting around to it, and it was only a few weeks ago (16 months after the tour) that I rediscovered my journal after having completely forgotten about it. Reading through my entries brought back so many incredible memories, so I’ve dedicated the last couple of weeks to typing out my writings and creating this blog. Rather than focus on the historical facts associated with the country, I’ve tried instead to detail the interesting, unique and often humorous activities, sights, people & emotions I experienced during my time there. It’s turned out to be the longest piece I’ve ever written – over 13,000 words with 53 photos, more than double the longest essay I ever wrote at uni!

It’s ironic that over the past few days we’ve heard about the political unrest and the violent (but understandable) protests tainting the streets of Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and other such Egyptian cities. I therefore wish for this blog entry to not only inspire you to want to travel to the fine shores of Egypt, but to also bring to mind the fact that, behind what you see on the news, Egypt is a glorious, vibrant, safe and happy country to explore.

I wish the Egyptians all the best for a peaceful resolution to the current situation, and I hope you enjoy reading this post. Feel free to leave a comment at the end if you do like it – it took me ages to compile and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

12^th September 2009. Cairo

Well, here I am in Cairo. Months of anticipation have finally culminated with me stepping foot off British soil, onto a plane, and then onto the grounds of Africa five hours later, making this the third continent I have now visited. The plane ride was straightforward and not too long. I sat next to a girl from Lismore who was also on a two week tour of Egypt, but with a different travel company. I watched a very interesting documentary thanks to the in-flight entertainment about Britain as seen from the air. I read through my Egyptian guidebook and made note of some interesting places I wouldn’t mind visiting, and for our meal we had a beef sausage breakfast with egg, tomato and potato, fruit salad, blueberry flapjack, a loaf of bread, and pineapple juice. I specifically shared the details of my meal because it seems people often have a strange fascination with airplane food.

I was sitting in the middle seats of the plane, so I didn’t have much of a view of the outside, but the plane turned sharply about 10 minutes before we landed and I caught a glimpse of the landscape. Barren, plain, dusty, hazy desert was all I could see. I commented to my Lismore friend about how foreign it looked, which she completely agreed with, and we marvelled at the scenery until the plane levelled out again and continued with its descent.

On stepping out of the plane I was greeted with the sudden ferocity of the heat, mixed with the breezy coolness of the airport airconditioning. That initial jolt of warmth was enough to make me realise I was a world away from the overcast skies of England, and now in the harsh, unforgiving desert climate of the Middle East’s largest city. Walking down the giant airport “carriageway” I looked into the distance and all I could see outside the boundaries of the landing field was desert, followed by more desert, greeting the sky at an ambiguous, grey, cloudy horizon.

After a brief period of confusion at the bank (I asked for change for my Egyptian notes but they refused to give it to me), passport control (I filled out the wrong form and had to fill another one) and baggage claim (I stood at the wrong carousel and wondered why my bag wasn’t appearing), I was greeted by a friendly Imaginative Traveller agent who welcomed me to Egypt and directed me to our driver who would proceed to take me to my hotel. Immediately upon leaving the airport, I realised that not only was I faced with a change of climate, but a change of culture as well. All the street signs were written in Arabic, locals were walking casually across the motorway without regard for the seemingly endless traffic, and my driver in particular was doing a terrible job at keeping within the confines of the lanes. Looking around me I realised that very few people were following the road rules as I knew them; it was clearly a case of every man for himself.

My guide left the van about half way through the journey and I continued on with the driver who, in very broken English, and also with a few indecipherable Arabic words, pointed out to me the train station, the Egyptian Museum, the Nile, and the tall but thin Cairo Tower.

We exited the main road after crossing the famous river, where we took a more localised street – the traffic situation being even more chaotic than that of the motorway. Finally after about half an hour on the road, we made it to the Indiana Hotel, in the residential Cairo suburb of Dokki.

After checking in, the porter took my bags and showed me to my room. There was a moment of awkwardness where I knew he was expecting a tip, and he realised I wasn’t going to give him one. No thanks to the bank at the airport, the smallest change I had on me was 100 LE (LE = Egyptian pounds) – and that would have bought me an entire meal in a fancy restaurant. Hopefully I’ll have some change by tomorrow – If I see him I’ll give him something.

* (1 LE = approx. 17 Australian cents or 10 British pence)

The hotel room was tidy enough, but quite dingy and a little bit ramshackle. It was a nightmare getting the door open, the airconditioner made a horrible whirring noise, the bathroom door wouldn’t close and the lock on the balcony door fell off. I needed the toilet and discovered there was no paper – I cursed myself about that, due to my blatant disregard for the recommendation that I bring my own toilet paper everywhere I go. New lesson learnt: A4 printer paper is the epitome of discomfort.

I took a shower and could instantly feel the hardness of the water. It was so full of chlorine, and I could smell it on my body for hours following. In keeping with the ramshackle trend, there was no hot water, which I didn’t mind because it wasn’t the type of climate where you require a hot shower anyway. I opened the shower curtain back up again, only to find two rolls of toilet paper patiently hanging high up on the wall opposite the toilet, waiting to be used. Shit! Who hangs toilet paper on the opposite wall of the toilet, for heaven’s sake? I have a feeling this will not be the final instance of my imminent love-hate relationship with the bog roll.

I ventured out to wander the streets, where I’m immediately chased and stopped by a member of hotel staff. I assumed this was for some kind of security breach (there was a metal detector at the entrance of the hotel), but it turns out he just wanted to ask if I required a taxi. After I politely refused and continued on down the street, a man got out of his car and hassled me for about 20 metres, claiming he could take me anywhere for a fraction of the cost of a normal cab, his voice getting louder the quicker I sped up, frantically trying to at least offer me a business card so I could consider calling him later on.

Aah, bring on the bustling streets of suburban Cairo. I ventured towards the end of El Sarray Street and turned left along the main road. I desperately wanted to cross the road to walk beside the river, but the sheer volume of traffic mixed with my lack of confidence didn’t bode well, and I stick to the built-up side of the road.  The footpath was quite dusty and dirty, with rubbish littering the streets at regular intervals, barefooted beggars with their babies asking me for money, and noise pollution like never before experienced. Seriously, a car must honk its horn here at least three times per second. It’s like in the movies, and there is absolutely no reason for it. It seems motorists just like honking their horns for the sake of it. I continued on down the main road for 15 minutes or so, taking in the sights & sounds and also noticing a strange but sweet smell of coconut at regular intervals along the city streets.

I returned to my hotel room, where I decided to keep this journal of my experiences. I will be sure to update it at every day, and document as many interesting things as I can. But for now, I must be off to meet with my tour guide and group for the first time, in the reception area. I already know that there are four Australian girls on the tour, so who will the rest of them be? I have only been in Cairo for a mere 3.5 hours and already my sensed have fallen into overload. And I love it!

* * *

It was a pretty awkward start to the tour. We met at the dining area near the hotel reception, where we discovered that two American friends on our tour, Todd and Lilly, had been robbed. They had left some valuable items, such as an iPod, a mobile phone and some cash in their room while they were out, and on their return it was nowhere to be seen. Understandably, Todd was absolutely furious that this had happened, however I do feel he took out his anger at the tour group & our guide a little bit more than what he should have. The rest of the tour introduction had a strange atmosphere… it was supposed to have been a happy, excited beginning, but instead it was tense and a little depressing.

Not to worry though, we soon finished our formalities and decided to walk through the local area for some dinner. Todd and Lilly went with Ramzy, our tour guide, to make a report at the police station, while the rest of us (the four Australia girls, Angie, Sarah, Katie and Fiona, and a British couple, Oli and Tracy) wandered down a suburban street, stopping by a supermarket, a chocolatier and finally, Dominoes Pizza for dinner. Such a traditional meal! We figured we’d be gorging our mouths with local cuisine over the coming weeks so we cut ourselves some slack and went for a Western takeaway dinner to break the ice. We took our pizzas back to the hotel where the friendly waiter chatted to us openly about how much he despised his own country, and wrote our names in Arabic on serviettes.

Everyone went back to their rooms after dinner, but I headed out once more to buy a travel adapter so I could charge my phone. There were a few interesting things I noticed on my travels through the streets at 10:15pm. A hell of a lot of shops were open, that’s for sure. Every time I walked past a bank there was a security guard dressed in white and sitting inside a phone booth type of enclosure, keeping an eye on things. There was a surprising amount of people out, mostly middle-aged men, all of whom would have been 100% sober due to religious reasons. The streets had a very social feel to them, and there was laughter, people greeting one another, people sitting in chairs on the actual road itself, people walking in front of cars without any fear of their safety… definitely a completely different scenario compared to anything I’d ever seen before. I felt safe, at ease, and happy amongst the Egyptian Saturday night social scene.

Back at the hotel, where I sit now writing this, my phone is busy sucking up electricity and I am watching Crocodile Dundee II on TV. Who would have thought – of all the movies that could possibly be showing. It even has Arabic subtitles!

Tomorrow at 9am we leave for the Pyramids of Giza. I can’t wait!

13^th September 2009. Cairo & Giza

This morning after a breakfast that included sausage, capsicum & tomato stew, cucumber, tomato & feta salad, boiled eggs and sweet bread with jam, we caught the bus with our Egyptologist guide, Sahar, to the site of the pyramids. We were also joined on our tour by another girl, Claire from Ireland, who wasn’t able to make the group meeting the night before.

Once more, along the way to Giza, I marvelled at the insanely busy streets, noting the abundance of white Kombi vans, many with doors and rear bonnets wide open, presumably to aid with air circulation. The local buses were crowded, rackety, old, and God forbid, unairconditioned. I can’t begin to imagine how uncomfortable it would be for a Muslim woman in full headdress & robe to be standing in the aisle of a Cairo bus in the 38 degree heat.

We arrived at Giza where our tour guide purchased the entry tickets for us, and a few of us purchased extra tickets that allowed us into the pyramids themselves. Those who bought the extra Pyramid entry tickets opted for the cheaper 50 LE Pyramid of Khafre (the Second Pyramid), but I paid the more expensive 100 LE to enter the Pyramid of Khufu – more commonly known as the Great Pyramid.

Cameras weren’t allowed within the pyramids so I left mine on the bus, because I didn’t want to be caught by a security guard and have to fork out an extortionate amount of money for him to release me. I headed straight to the entrance of the Great Pyramid, in awe of the sheer size and grandeur of it. You see it in photos and on TV but until you actually see it with your own eyes, you don’t realise its extent.

The entrance was through a small passageway at the north end of the pyramid, and initially the path was tall, wide and fairly level until it narrowed down to a long thin passage that ascended at a steep angle. I crouched down and began climbing up, suddenly aware of the humid, stale air and scorching heat, presumably from the sweat and breath of the other tourists making the pilgrimage. After what seemed like 60 or 70 metres, the passageway opened up and I was able to comfortably walk the remaining distance to the pharaoh’s tomb.

Entering the tomb itself was a very humbling experience. In reality, the room is dimly lit and it’s about 8 metres long by 6 metres wide, with an empty sarcophagus sitting at the western end. However, while standing in this room, it springs to mind that not only are you in the direct centre of one of the seven wonders of the world, but also that Egypt’s greatest pharaoh, Khufu (also known as Cheops), was buried here millennia ago and remained so for approximately 600 years.

Initially the room was occupied by another five or six tourists, but they left, allowing me to have the room to myself for about five minutes. I just stood there, in the middle of the Great Pyramid, taking in the atmosphere and marvelling at the fact that I was actually there.

I exited the pyramid the same way I went in, and collected my camera from the bus. I really wanted a photo of a camel so I approached one of the local camel keepers and asked him how much he would charge me for a photo of the camel? All I wanted was a photo of the camel’s head against the backdrop of the pyramid, but before I knew it, the cunning rascal had manipulated me into actually getting on the camel so he could take a photo of me. I didn’t mind that at all, to be honest, but I knew he was going to drive a hard bargain. He tried to convince me that he had to move the camel further away (hence, taking me for a ride, which would add to the price), but I stuck my foot down and told him to take the photo from where he stood right now. He begrudgingly obliged, before trying once more to move the camel, and it was only when I told him I was late for my bus and threatened to jump off that he lowered the camel so I could disembark. Now the tricky part was, he had my camera, and I had the money. I knew I wasn’t going to get away with 10 or 20 LE so I pulled out my wallet to give him 60 LE, which I thought was a fair price. Unfortunately he happened to see my 200 LE note, so he wanted that instead, and refused to return my camera until I made the handover. In the end I met him half way at 100 LE and prised the camera out of his hands before heading on again towards the northern end of the Great Pyramid. He followed me for a while as I sped off, shouting to me that “the buses are the other way!” I knew I’d been ripped off but I had some comfort in the fact that I lied to him about having to be back on the bus.

All in all, I came to realise that he was actually a nice guy, as all Egyptian people seemed to be – all he was trying to do was make a living to feed his family. Having said that though, I later found out that one of the girls on the tour had the exact same photo taken atop a different camel, and only coughed up 10 LE for it.

Todd was late back to the bus. We left the pyramids and headed towards the Sphinx after making a quick stopover at the lookout where you see all three pyramids from the one viewpoint. The Sphinx was interesting enough to see, although I was more engrossed by the ancient structures, ruins and chambers just outside the Sphinx complex. I wandered around there for half an hour before meeting up with Claire and heading back to the bus. Todd was late back to the bus.

Our next destination was a local papyrus museum where we saw a demonstration of how to make papyrus paper, and was clearly a means of providing a commission to our tour guide. But it was interesting, and there were some lovely paintings on offer. Along with the majority of the group, I declined to make a purchase.

We had lunch at one of the few roadside cafes still open over Ramadan, and I had my first experience of an authentic Egyptian falafel. Oh my god, that was possibly one of the most amazing vegetarian experiences I have ever had in my life. If all vegetable matter tasted like that, there would be no point ever eating meat. And it only cost me 2 LE!

The final major tourist destination of the day was the Egyptian Museum, where myself, Lilly, Oli & Tracy opted for a guided tour, followed by 45 minutes of spare time. It’s a crowded museum, in that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff on display, but very little notification on what it actually is. The guide was absolutely fascinating, and she took us to see (among other things) the one & only remaining miniature statue of the Pharaoh Khufu, a supposedly famous painting of a duck, and of course Tutankhamen’s valuables that were found within his burial chamber.

After watching a repeat of Crocodile Dundee II in our hotel room, the majority of the group decided to go to – wait for it – KFC for dinner! I wouldn’t have mentioned that here, if it wasn’t for the uniqueness of this particular restaurant. The cashiers didn’t utter a word to us as we placed our orders, and initially we thought they may have been taking a vow of silence due to religious reasons, or ignoring us because we were tourists. However it turned out that every staff member who worked at the restaurant was deaf. They communicated only by sign language or by pointing to the menu. This was a concept unique to Egypt and it was set up as a community support aid. Needless to say, not only was it the tastiest KFC meal I’d ever eaten, but the service was surprisingly efficient and we all went to bed happy that we’d assisted the community.

On the way back to the hotel, Angie, Sarah, Katie and Fi stopped by the front of somebody’s apartment to feed a gorgeous litter of kittens that they’d noticed the night before. Cairo appeared full to the brim with cats and kittens – they ruled the streets as much as the men did.

14^th September 2009. Cairo to Aswan and the Temple of Philae

You would think the 13 hour overnight journey from Cairo to Aswan would be boring, but it turned out quite the contrary.

The train pulled up at the platform at 8:20pm, and we all took our allocated seats inside the surprisingly comfortable and roomy carriage. We’d barely made a move out of Cairo when Ramzy suggested we head on down to the club car to have a drink and a smoke. We were the first group inside the club car so we got pick of the seats, and I was very impressed with the quality of its outfit. It reminded me of a posh, well-respected gambling room you might see in a movie that was set in LA.

The majority of the group hung around for an hour or so, but as time progressed they one-by-one went off back to the carriage to catch some well-deserved rest. Claire and I stayed up and made friends with the other tour groups who had conglomerated into the club car to drink Luxor beer and dodgy French chardonnay. Claire and I opted for said bottle of dodgy wine, and within a matter of moments, a few of the guys next to us burst into song, with everyone in the carriage following suit. I believe it started off with Wonderwall by Oasis, but soon progressed to Mr Jones, Brown Eyed Girl and American Pie.

The only locals on the train were the staff, and our group of roustabouts consisted of plenty of Australians, Claire the Irishwoman, a few Americans including Lilly from our group who had since joined us, an Italian guy and a Spanish guy. Two Aussies, Tyrone from Lismore and Tim from I can’t remember where, just happened to bring guitars with them so we all sat up well into the wee hours of the morning, drinking wine and singing along with all the pub classics. It was the most awesome jam night I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking part in. I finally got back to my seat on the train at 3:15am.

We arrived in Aswan at about 9am, where a bus took us to our hotel room and we discussed the options for the day. Oli, Tracy, Claire and I were about to take an organised bus tour to the High Dam to see Lake Nasser, but we pulled out at the last minute and opted for a taxi instead. It turned out that the bus tour was going to cost us 180 LE each, whereas the taxi was only going to be 100 LE between the four of us. Pretty much the whole group decided to go to the Sound & Light show later that night at the Temple of Philae, and all of us were up for the three hour round trip the following day to Abu Simbel, our southernmost destination.

After a quick rest, the four of us hopped into our taxi for our expedition to the sights of Aswan. On driving through the streets, we found it to be quite a pretty town, considering its location in the middle of the desert. Our first destination was the Unfinished Obelisk which was a part of rock chiselled out of the ground many millennia ago, to be made into a sister obelisk to the one that was already standing in Rome. Unfortunately, after countless hours, days, months of intensely hard work in the desert sun, the team of diggers found a fault in the rock, so the entire project was abandoned and has laid resting there ever since. It was interesting to see, but not a very spectacular attraction, and definitely not fun to walk around in the probably 43 degree heat of the midday sun.

In the bazaar just off to the side of the Obelisk, I was impressed with Claire’s bartering skills, as she had her eyes set on a gorgeous piece of hand painted Egyptian pottery. As yet, I hadn’t purchased anything from a market stall, so it was encouraging to see how a deal such as this one came into place. The bidding started at 600 LE, which to be fair, would be the price you’d pay if you were buying a similar item from a Western store, but in the end the stallholder settled for a grand sum of 250 LE. That’s just about double the weekly wage of a local Egyptian.

We continued on in the taxi, the driver of whom was a little antsy as we had taken so long at the bazaar. We passed the old Aswan dam before paying the 20 LE entry fee to get across to the High Dam. The dam was quite impressive, but it wasn’t until we made an about-face and witnessed the sheer enormity of Lake Nasser, the world’s largest artificial lake, that I felt a sense of being blown away.

On the way back to the hotel, I was looking out the window of the taxi taking in the scenery, when all of a sudden my whole body became awash with a very eerie feeling of déjà vu. I could see a small lakeside community with a number of sandstone buildings, a harbour with lots of boats and a small set of hills in the distance, and I swear that I had been in this exact same location before. I’d experienced small senses of déjà vu in the past, but this one bowled me over completely. I had enough time to take a photo of the scene that lay before my eyes, and as I pondered the situation over the following half hour, I remembered that I had seen it once before in a dream, which I had maybe four or five months ago. In my dream, the day was overcast & rainy, and I specifically recall exploring the township and then heading towards the lake where I went fishing. I don’t recall much more detail from the dream, but I remain absolutely adamant that it was set in this precise spot by the side of the old Aswan dam. Freaky stuff.

We arrived at the hotel where we paid our driver the princely (but still highly affordable) sum of 150 LE. He was very pleased with his tip, and we were pleased with the money we’d saved by not opting for the bus trip.

The four of us headed down to one of the few restaurants open over Ramadan – we had initially thought of opting for McDonalds, but ironically, the restaurant we chose instead was called Makka. I had a delicious meal of a whole fried chicken & chips with rice & veg, plus an amazing assortment of dips and side dishes that we shared. If we’d have received a meal like this in London it would have been overpriced and tasteless, but here in Egypt it was cheap and full of the most amazing flavours.

Following our meal we headed back to the hotel for some rest, then the group met up in the lobby for a walk around the streets & the bazaar. Claire wasn’t feeling too well after the meal but the rest of us seemed fine. The bazaar was a truly cultural experience, full of colour, smells, flavours, and salespeople out the front of every stall trying to attract our attention. My favourite was simply a guy who yelled out to us, “Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Captain Cook!”

I had my first go at haggling and bought a pair of much-needed sunglasses. The storekeeper initially asked for 350 LE but I got them in the end (after declining his “final price” of 100 LE) for 70 LE. I’m not sure if that was much of a rip off but I was happy with the price and I now had some protection from that fierce yellow ball of light in the sky.

As I returned to the hotel room I found that my chocolate biscuits had made their way out of their packet and had melted all through my bag. It looked as though someone had shat in the bag and shaken it up with extreme diarrhoea-like force. I emptied it into the only waste disposal vessel I could find at the time – the toilet – but I forgot that I had packed my keys into a pocket without a zip. Shit.

After a short one hour rest we met back in the lobby and took the bus to the Temple of Philae. The temple was situated on an island, and we got there thanks to a small boat, which took around 10 minutes in the pitch black of the night. Construction of the temple began around 380 BC, however it was originally built at a different location, and had since been deconstructed and moved to this island to save it from being submerged during the construction of the Aswan dam. We walked up toward the temple where we were greeted with some very ambient lighting scenes and soft music playing in the background. The light & sound show took us on a journey through the temple as we heard the story of its dedication to the goddess Isis, and the constant changing of lighting effects made the experience a whole lot more exciting than what it would have been if we’d visited in the blazing sunlight. We journeyed back to the hotel, and as much as I wanted to experience the now vibrant city streets, I was exhausted so instead headed to the room. There was only a four hour gap with which we could sleep, as we had to be up at 3:30am for our trip to Abu Simbel.

15^th September 2009. Abu Simbel, Aswan and the Nubian Village

We arose at 3:30pm and boarded the bus for the three hour journey to Abu Simbel. For security reasons, we went as part of a police convoy, along with countless busloads of other tourists. I slept most of the way, but towards the end of the journey as the sun rose I watched the scenery out the window in awe of the nothingness. Just sand, sand, sand, rocks, more sand, some sand hills (for a change), the horizon and the sky.

There are two enormous rock temples that make up Abu Simbel. Construction began in 1,244 BC, under the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II, as a testimonial to his love for himself and his wife, Queen Nefertari. Similarly to the Temple of Philae, the Abu Simbel temples were originally built at an alternate location, 200 metres away from where they currently stand. Due to the construction of the Aswan Dam and the threat of inundation from Lake Nasser, UNESCO spent four years in the 1960’s deconstructing both temples and reconstructing them on higher ground.

We arrived at Abu Simbel at 7:30am where our guide told us the story and the history behind the great monument. We took copious amounts of photos and entered both the smaller and larger temples; Todd got told off by fellow tourists for illegally taking photos on the inside. We happened to meet up with the same guys we partied with on the train as well; Lilly especially was delighted to once more see a particular guy she’d met who she fancied. I misheard Ramzy’s meeting time – I thought he said to meet at the bus at 9:55 at the latest, but apparently he actually said 9:45, so when myself, Todd & Claire rocked up at five to ten, Ramzy was busy trying to locate us so as not to hold up the police convoy any longer. Oops!

We drove the three hours back from Abu Simbel, the only interesting features of the journey being a rock in the shape of a turtle and the waterlike mirages of the Western Desert.

We had an hour of spare time, during which Todd, Lilly, Claire and I went to McDonalds. Todd had ordered a burger but it was prepared slightly differently to the way he was used to in the US, and he unsuccessfully tried to score free stuff from the manager to make up for the terrible inconvenience.

We met once more at the hotel and ventured out again at 3:30pm. A motorboat took us to a Nubian cafe on the other side & a bit upstream of the Nile, and along the way we were joined by some local boys in a small boat who held onto the side of our boat and sang us nursery rhymes. They were cute and we each tipped them a pound or two.

The Nubian cafe was such a great experience. Half of the group went straight to the cushioned seating area to relax and drink coffee, while Oli, Tracy, Claire and I opted to climb to the top of the nearby sand dune first. I had always wanted to climb a sand dune, and now was the time to fulfil this dream. It was incredibly hot and our feet burned to a crisp during the long, steep trek, but it was so damn worth it for the view from the top of the dune. Below us we could see the Nile, followed by miles of green, fertile ground, Aswan in the distance, and endless desert off until the horizon. We had an awesome time “skiing” with our bare feet back down the sand dune, and rejoined the group at the cafe where we sampled some very tasty Nubian coffee made with ginger & mixed spices. I also noticed a boat by the banks of the river that had the very peculiar name of “Boob”.

Following the cafe we continued up the Nile to a traditional Nubian village, where we walked along a rocky path to a local mudbrick house. A family greeted us and cooked us a meal of korma, chicken pieces, rice, potato salad and pasta, plus ladyfinger bananas for dessert. We drank hibiscus, chatted into the night, and some of the girls had henna tattoos drawn onto their skin by the Nubian women. After using the bathroom – which consisted of a squat bowl, a rubbish bin for toilet paper (not supplied) and a hose, we sat on the roof of the motorboat and made the extremely peaceful journey back to Aswan.

I spent an hour at the internet cafe before walking down the main bazaar to experience Aswan at its prime, when all the locals & tourists come out to shop at night. I happened to hear Todd’s voice from a mile away and followed it until I found him & Claire in the middle of the busy street. The three of us went to a stall where Todd had purchased a miniature lute from the day before. Todd was already well known on the street, and being the loud, outgoing American tourist that he was, he had a habit of hassling the hasslers before they ever had an opportunity to hassle him. He told us later that one of the stallholders had threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave him alone!

We were at the stall for at least an hour. I went through about ten minutes of haggling, which was quite fun, and bought some small artefacts for 30 LE. Todd also bought a few smaller items after some heated bartering, and Claire opted for some more expensive options that began at around the 600 LE mark and ended up selling for 450 LE. The whole process lasted almost an hour, involving many changes, price conversions, frustrations, givings & takings along the way. The stall holder accused us of being unfair for asking for such large reductions and said the three of us were some of the hardest shoppers he’s ever come across – why couldn’t we be like normal Americans who stop haggling when a fair price was agreed upon? In the end though, we were all happy, the stall holder had his money (double the normal salary of a local, mind you), he offered Claire & I a bottle of softrink as we closed the deal, and after a tip, he took us for a walk down the street to one of his stallholder friends who he knew could offer Claire a good deal for some luggage. Todd has left us by then, and we continued on to the end of the bazaar where we bartered for some luggage and got it for 39 LE.

16^th September 2009. The Felluca

We had a fairly late breakfast at the hotel, and got to our felluca around 11am, where we were to sail to Edfu, half-way to our next major destination of Luxor. In charge of our felluca was an older man, Mohammed, and he also had an assistant, a younger guy by the name of Luli. Luli wore a Bob Marley shirt, so for the duration of our time on the felluca, we all called him Bob.

For lunch we stopped for a swim by a large bridge spanning the Nile. While we had stopped, Luli spent a considerable amount of time working high up on the sail of the felluca, which was quite impressive to watch. I recall reading somewhere that it’s unhealthy to swim in the Nile, but we were assured it was ok in this particular section, and we went for a dip anyway. After our swim we made friends with a couple of local Egyptian dogs by the banks of the river who had come to greet us. I made sure to disinfect my hands afterwards.

We cruised further down the Nile for a few more hours, most of us spending the time sleeping or reading, and we eventually moored by the banks of the river for dinner. It was Todd’s birthday a few days beforehand, so we celebrated with wine and a delicious personalised cake that Ramzy had snuck on board without him seeing. Todd was pretty stoked about that. After dinner, some of us played Uno and we took turns plugging our iPods into the dock and sharing our favourite tunes. Quite a lot of the John Butler Trio was played, which made myself and the Australian girls feel a little homesick.

Aside from the mosquitoes and Todd’s snoring, we slept fairly comfortably onnboard the felluca.

17^th September 2009. The Felluca

Waking time was around 7am, after which we had breakfast and left the area.

We stopped for a swim around 10am, by a pleasant sandy beach. This particular part of the Nile was rather weedy, and after I’d finished swimming I ventured up the banks of the river where I found an aesthetically pleasing telegraph pole by the edge of the desert.

We continued on and stopped a little further up the river for lunch, which included cheese, salad and mashed potato. We went for another swim, walked to what I think were some farmer shacks, and I made friends with a nearby group of Egyptian cows chewing on some grass.

Later in the afternoon we stopped by a village for some supplies. A group of 20 local kids saw us approaching and ran towards the shore. As we docked and Mohammed sorted out the supplies, the kids all stood there and stared at us in silence. We sat on the felluca and stared right back at them. It was so weird.

As the sun started to set, we docked once more down the river, this time at a popular camping spot that was frequented by a number of fellucas from other travel companies. We had a quick football match (Imaginative Traveller vs Top Deck vs Contiki), and retired to our respective fellucas for dinner once it became too dark to see the ball. Dinner for us included rice, kofta and vegetables. As we were eating we noticed some really strange noises emanating from the banks of the river. We later found that the noises came from an angry donkey who didn’t appreciate being tied up.

A campfire was lit and we sat around it drinking, talking and singing until the embers died down. At one stage Bob Marley, who was normally a quiet & reserved lad, broke into a singalong of “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain” which we all joined in with. Bob knew a few different verses, and much to the delight of our ears, he threw in this one:

We’ll be smokin’ marijuana when she comes,
We’ll be smokin’ marijuana when she comes
We’ll be smokin’ marijuana, smokin’ marijuana
Smokin’ marijuana when she comes

There were no toilets by the side of the Nile, and the rule was that if you needed to relieve yourself, you had to find a spot far away from the camp and bury or burn your toilet paper afterwards. Unfortunately, not many people followed the bury/burn rule. It was pretty gross. You really did have to watch your every step.

Later on in the night after most people had gone to bed, I was talking with Bob Marley by the campfire. He couldn’t speak English very well but he did manage to share with me the reasons why he loved and envied Australian people, in these exact words: “You eat sheep and your wife give you good kissy kissy.”

18^th September 2009. The Felluca, Kom Ombo, Edfu and Luxor

We ate breakfast for the final time in our felluca, and returned to the same place where we the crowd of kids met us the day before, which was to be our drop-off point. Some of the girls went behind the nearby banana plants to relieve themselves, and discovered midway through that a creepy old man was watching them.

A bus was waiting for us, and it took us to Kom Ombo temple, built to honour a number of gods around 180 BC. We continued on to the very impressive Edfu temple, of which work began around 230 BC, and was dedicated to the falcon god, Horus. Eventually we arrived in Luxor.

On our way we drove through a number of small desert villages which all appeared quite drab, dirty and inhospitable, but in a strange way, also very charming. This appeared to me to be authentic central-Egyptian life.

Lunch at Luxor was at a restaurant called Amoun, which served some very affordable and tasty food for budget-wise travellers like us. For the afternoon, we took a horse & carriage to Karnack Temple, one of the most impressive temples in the whole country. This is where Cleopatra’s Needle came from (one of three obelisks that were given as gifts to the cities of London, New York and Paris). Part of an obelisk from Karnack Temple also resides in the Sydney Museum. Other attractions here that I found unique and exiting included a giant scarab beetle which is supposed to bring good luck depending on how many times you walk around it, one of the first known drawings of Jesus & Mary, and some ancient and very well preserved graffiti.

The horse & carriage took us back to the hotel, where our driver pestered us for more money even though the price we initially agreed upon already included his tip. We had dinner once more at Amoun, and I had a very quick walk with Claire around the surrounding streets trying to find an ATM. On our way back to the hotel, a man with a wonky eye who ran a papyrus store saw us walking past and asked if we would mind helping him read an English postcard he received from somebody, as he claimed his eyesight was too poor to make out the small writing. We entered the store and Claire started to read what was written, explaining the words he didn’t understand. Before too long however, he began a spiel trying sell us all kinds of things from papyrus to jewellery to a translation of our names into Arabic, and we realised that the postcard was just a clever ploy to get customers into his store. We caught him out because he started reading things to us, which he wouldn’t have been able to read if his eyesight was as dodgy as he made it out to be!

I was too tired to walk through the bazaar so I decided to go to bed. Before bed though, I met up with Todd in the foyer of our hotel, who had made friends with two British priests in town on holidays. The three of them were having a great time telling stories and drinking whisky together, and they invited me for a drink, which I politely declined, but I hung around for long enough to be social. The priests seemed very friendly, perhaps a little too friendly, and it didn’t surprise me the next day when Todd told me how they’d both made the journey as part of a secret homosexual getaway, far from the prying eyes of their home parish.

19^th September 2009. The Valley of the Kings and Luxor

Today was our journey to the Valley of the Kings, to see the tomb of King Tutankhamen.

We awoke at 5am, left at 6, and took a boat from Luxor City across to West Bank, where we met the donkeys who would be carrying us to our destination. I called mine Donahue and Tracy called hers Derek. Todd wanted to exchange his donkey for a horse. Interestingly, the donkeys kept exactly the same formation for the whole walk, and trying to race them proved virtually impossible as they refused to overtake one another. My donkey also had a bad case of diarrhoea, and at one stage, poor Sarah who was positioned behind me copped a bit of poo on her face! Not to be outdone, I ended up with it all down my trousers.

We arrived at the spectacular Valley of the Kings, where we visited the tombs of three of the many Pharaoh Ramses that had ruled Egypt in the past, as well as the tomb of the famous Tutankhamen, where we got to see the remnants of his spookily blackened body behind the glass display. It was incredibly hard to believe that the vast array of treasures we saw at the Egyptian museum in Cairo once fit into this cramped room where his body lay for many thousands of years. Unfortunately cameras were not allowed inside the Valley.

After our time at the Valley of the Kings, we took a bus to see the Colossi of Memnon, which are two massive statues erected in 1350 BC and dedicated to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. We took our same donkeys back to West Bank, who again walked in exactly the same formations as they did earlier, albeit much faster this time, presumably because they knew they were going home.

We had lunch again at Amoun and sat by the pool on the roof of our hotel, swimming, sunbaking, reading and relaxing for the rest of the afternoon. The sunset was beautiful, and the eerie but magical sounds of Islamic prayer filled the city below us from the moment the sun disappeared.

The hotel we stayed at had eight levels, however only levels one to five actually consisted of rooms. Levels six, seven and eight could be best described as construction zones that doubled as a place for rubbish to be stored. We were later told the reason behind this was that if a building remained unfinished, the owner was able to evade a hefty property tax that would otherwise have to be paid were the building complete.

Later that night after a quick walk around the boundary of Luxor Temple and the street bazaars, a few of us took a boat to West Bank to an African restaurant for dinner. The meal consisted of noodle soup, battered eggplant, mixed salad, fried rice, chicken, beef, potato & vegetable, plus mango wine and some cake & slice for dessert. It was amazing.

After dinner, Claire and I went walking through the bazaar. Every stall we visited we felt pressured into buying something, but we managed to walk our way out of two stalls before finding one particular stall we liked and felt comfortable in, which sold a large variety of Egyptian paraphernalia. The owner of the stall said he had twelve brothers who helped him out with business. We bought a few items from him and were interested in buying some more, so he took us to his second stall down a backstreet not too far away, hidden behind a locked door. Claire specifically wanted to buy a souvenir coffin with a black mummy inside, so the stallholder sent his brother off to find one while we browsed the contents of his second stall. He then took us to a third stall down another backstreet, where his father and grandfather work, underneath the house he and his whole family reside in. We remained there for about 15 minutes, going through the many artefacts and bartering our way into a sale. I bought two mummies and a small statue for about 170 LE and Claire bought a number of smaller items. The stallholder told us about his life as a salesman on the streets of Luxor, and he said that although the two of us did hard business with him, he knew that we were not hard people, unlike others he had encountered in the past. That was nice to hear. He was a lovely guy himself. His younger brother Akmal walked us back to the hotel and offered along the way to take us on a makeshift tour of Luxor which we politely declined due to the fact that it was pretty late (12:50am). We tipped him 15 LE which he was stoked about, and before bed I went for a short walk down the main street to find a bottle of water.

Back at the hotel I ran into Todd on the top floor, who was admiring the views of the city below. We chatted for a bit and he left for bed, while I stayed up for a little longer. I noticed a small commotion going on at street level, and on further inspection, saw a group of 9 or 10 kids playing, standing and jumping on a row of parked cars. The little shits.

20^th September 2009. Luxor to Hurghada

Today we awoke at 7, had breakfast at the hotel and took a bus to the coastal town of Hurghada.

We checked into our hotel, ironically called the Luxor, and I shared my room with Todd, as I had done at the majority of the hotels we’d stayed in so far. It appeared we were the only group of people staying in the whole hotel.

Todd and I went for a walk to the beach, but he wasn’t too keen on paying the small access fee, so he talked me into cutting through a building site just down the road from the official beach entrance. We were almost at the beach when some construction workers saw us and shouted to us in broken English to go back. Todd argued with them and tried to tell them that we were only looking – in the end I left him to continue arguing and went back by myself!

I tried to find an ATM to get some money, but couldn’t for the life of me locate one. I stopped by a mini-mart to buy some water and deodorant, which came to 27 LE at the checkout. I told the shop assistant I’d give him 20 LE for it. He snapped straight back at me as if I was an idiot and said “This is a supermarket, not a bazaar.” Oops.

I returned to the hotel where we took a bus to the harbour and went on a glass-bottom boat tour of a nearby coral reef. We snorkelled for about 45 minutes in one area, then moved on to another shallower area where we spent 15 minutes. It was absolutely stunning, I’d never been snorkelling anywhere as beautiful as this before in my life. We were surrounded by hundreds of fish of all kinds, they were swimming over my arms and through my fingers, with the turquoise sea and the gorgeous coral as my backdrop. Back at the boat I found that Oli had badly cut his finger on a piece of coral and needed some bandaging to stop the incessant bleeding. We returned to the hotel where I discovered just how sunburnt I was, and Claire, Todd and I went down to the beach resort to do some reading and relaxing. We coughed up the money and paid to get in this time. Todd had a great time chatting up two Egyptian sisters who were on holiday from Alexandria. He became particularly friendly with one of the girls, and a number of months later as I was catching up with him on Skype, he told me he had actually returned back to Egypt to meet her again.

After dinner at a Lebanese restaurant and some ice cream from a streetside stall, we all descended upon the Cacao Bar (except for Todd, who we hadn’t seen since we left him talking to the girls at the beach). The bar offered very affordable 10 LE drinks all night. At one stage a group of Buddhist monks (who I believe were under a vow of silence) gathered around the DJ equipment, where one by one, they all took turns at breakdancing to the music.

21^st September 2009. Hurghada to Dahab

Our alarm was set for 2am so we could catch the hydrofoil ferry at 4. Todd finally came home just before 2, drunk as a skunk and exclaiming how great a night he’d had and that he got so close to getting lucky. It was his & Lilly’s final day on the tour with us, as they’d booked a slightly different tour and were taking a different way back to Cairo. He passed out on his bed before I had the chance to say goodbye!

The ferry finally arrived at Sharm el Sheik at 10am, where we took a bus through a long & winding granite mountain road to our next destination, the coastal town of Dahab, on the far eastern side of the country. On arrival I went for a quick walk by myself down to the beach, where I realised that only a few kilometres off the coast to the east, I could see the mountains of Saudi Arabia. I returned to our (rather posh) hotel to sleep for a few hours. At 5pm we all went for a group walk and ended up at a beachfront restaurant for dinner. My amazing meal came to 47 LE – well short of the 100 British Pounds (about 20 times the price) that you would expect to pay for a similar meal in England. A resident cat lived at the restaurant, and we were told that no other cat would dare come anywhere near him for fear of being mauled in an attack. The greedy bugger had the whole restaurant and the attention of dozens of adorning tourists all to himself, every night of the week! After dinner we passed around a sheesha pipe and I failed miserably at inhaling the sweet apple-flavoured tobacco.

This was soon followed by some drinks on the balcony of a nearby (and rather trendy) bar, after which we walked back to the hotel, and happened to pass a random camel in the middle of the street. He was very friendly and didn’t mind at all being patted. Apparently they wander down from the desert to the city at night to fossick for food.

22^nd September 2009. Dahab and the Red Sea

We woke at 9, and after breakfast which included mouldy tomatoes, we caught a jeep and drove for half an hour down a dirt road to the Blue Hole diving beach. This is one of the most popular snorkelling / diving areas in the whole of the Red Sea. We entered the water through the designated entry point, and slowly made our way up the beach to the exit, marvelling at the massive underwater cliffs of coral and the thousands upon thousands of tropical marine creatures within our view. The colours were so bright and vibrant – so much more than our snorkelling expedition the other day at Hurghada. We left the ocean once we reached the exit point, rested for a little while, then went back in again and snorkelled for even longer.

We had an hour to spare after we returned our snorkelling gear so I went for a small trek by myself up a nearby hill, to see what was on the other side. At the top I was greeted with an incredible view of Blue Hole beach, and I thought the area below me to the north would be the perfect place for a repeat of the near-naked photo I took in the snowy Scottish highlands earlier on in the year – except this time I was in the Middle Eastern desert in the middle of what may as well have been summer.

The jeep took us back to our hotel, and the group went out for dinner once more, this time to a beachside seafood restaurant. We ordered a humongous fish to share between us. We also learnt the hilarious fact that in Egypt, if you ever want to get the attention of the waiter, all you have to do is stand up and yell “Mohammed!” and somebody is bound to arrive at your table and fulfil your request for service. It’s true – it worked for us!

On the way back home I passed the same camel I’d seen the night before, at exactly the same location.

23^rd September 2009. Dahab to the Bedouin Village

Claire and I went shopping in the morning after a frustrating debacle trying to get money out of the local ATM’s, and we all met up at the hotel at midday for our next adventure to a Bedouin hut, which really was located in the middle of the desert. We had lunch at the hut, and trekked through the desert and a canyon for a few hours, before we reached the Bedouin camp in the middle of the middle of the desert where we would stay that night.

We played frisbee with the local Bedouin kids, who seemed to really enjoy hanging out with this group of strange white people who didn’t speak their language. We played charades and ate dinner cooked for us by the Bedouins. Most people had an early one and were in bed by 8pm, but Oli, Angie and I stayed up for a little bit longer and chatted while looking at the stars. This was one of the few places I’ve ever been where there was absolutely no light pollution from anywhere nearby, and the sky was as black as black could be.

For our accommodation, we were provided with a mattress which we laid down inside a small hut, exposed to the outside wind and the mosquitoes. Everybody else on the tour remembered to bring a sleeping bag, except for me.

Fuck, I was cold.

24^th September 2009. Bedouin Village and camping in the desert

We had a small breakfast at 7am and left for a camel ride through the desert. We had to share camels, so half of us walked while the other half were on camelback, and we swapped at the halfway point. My camel was called Regan. We’d only been atop the animals for a few minutes, when completely out of the blue, Angie’s camel went psycho and decided to storm off ahead into the desert, leaving us all behind. The Bedouins managed to calm the camel down, and somehow she survived without getting thrown off. It sure looked pretty scary.

Our destination was a place called the Closed Canyon, and on our way we were greeted by a stray camel who appeared out of nowhere and decided to tag along for the journey. We also had a five month old baby camel with us, who was on one of her first ever treks away from home base. Her mother was one of the animals getting ridden on.

We walked through the amazing Closed Canyon for about an hour, with the impressive sandstone cliffs reaching up to the sky above us, blocking us in as though we were travelling through a tiny crack in a massive concrete slab. There were some pretty hairy moments trying to squeeze through the bits where the canyon almost came to a close, and we eventually reached the end where we all huddled around for a group photo.

Back at our resting spot where we left the camels, some of us had turns at offering water to the baby. She was so damn cute!

We arrived back at camp for lunch, and left again at 2pm to trek back up to the top of the canyon, stopping a few hours later at a sandy spot underneath a cliff, not too far from the Bedouin hut where we began our desert journey. We were to camp here for the night, in the desert, under the stars. Opposite our camping spot was a mid-sized sandstone hill, and a few of us climbed up to the top to watch the sunset. I thought I’d be all macho and opted to go barefoot, but it didn’t take long before the soles of my feet had been ripped to shreds by the jagged rock edges.

The view and the serenity up the top was just perfect, and we had a great time throwing rocks off the edge trying to see how far away we could get them to land. Unfortunately though, our camp below was in the shade, and for all the people who remained down there knew, the sun had probably set hours ago. Dinner had been prepared and we were called down before we got the chance to see the golden orb of light dip below the horizon.

It was dark by 7pm and there wasn’t much to do aside from talk, play word games, and sleep. I went for a small walk about 300 metres away from the camp, where the rocky cliffs separated & the desert opened up, and sat down and watched the moon. It was such a surreal moment, knowing that I was in a country I’d dreamed about visiting ever since I was young, and that there was barely a soul around me to experience this incredible moment beneath the moonlit Egyptian desert sky.

Once more, I just about froze to death thanks to my foolish failure to bring a sleeping bag.

25^th September 2009. St Catherine

The girls all woke up at 6:30am with tick bites over their bodies, and on closer inspection of the sand, we discovered heaps of the tiny grey creatures crawling around underneath our mattresses. The place where we were camping had obviously been a recent camel rest, and the ticks had fallen off and survived in the sand.

After a small breakfast, we returned to the Bedouin hut, said our goodbyes to the locals, and took a bus toward St Catherine. Upon checking into the hotel – which I might add, had a gorgeous view of the mountains from my window – we went to the monastery at the base of Mt Sinai, one of the oldest monasteries in the world. Here, we became witness to the exact site where Moses apparently saw God arise from the burning bush, and instructed him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Not having studied the bible in the past, I was a little unsure of the significance of what laid before my eyes, but it was still a powerful moment nonetheless.

We stopped by the general store on the way back to the hotel, where some local kids (dressed up in flash clothes and new shoes) tried very hard to beg us for money.

A lovely buffet lunch awaited us at the hotel, and after a few hours sleep, Claire and I went for a wander around the streets of St Catherine. We found an old cemetery, which was unlike any cemetery I’d ever seen before, it had an eeriness to it that I just can’t explain. We walked along a narrow winding path through the gravestones and up towards a mosque at the top of a hill, when we noticed a guy a few hundred metres behind us, walking our way. We didn’t think anything of him, until we reached the mosque and realised he was following us. It was starting to get dark by this time and we didn’t like the idea of confronting a random Egyptian man in the middle of a twilit cemetery, so we took a different route back through the gravestones and exited onto the road. By this stage the guy had caught up with us quite significantly and was yelling something to us in Arabic. I will happily admit at this stage that I was pretty freaked out. Eventually he tried another language and yelled something in English along the lines of “Where are you from, my friends?!” and we heaved a sigh of relief, because “Where are you from, my friends?” is the generic opening line that pretty much all Egyptian stallholders and salespeople use to break the ice to their customers. I don’t think he was an axe-murderer after all – all he probably wanted to do was to sell us Westerners some jewellery. We made our way back into the town and didn’t see him again.

26^th September 2009. Mt Sinai to Cairo

Today was the day that we were to climb to the summit of the legendary Mt Sinai, where Moses stood as he received the Ten Commandments from the hands of the Almighty himself.

We awoke at the rather ungodly hour of 1:15am, and left for our walk half an hour later. On arrival at the base of the monastery, we realised we were not taking this pilgrimage alone, but rather with a couple of thousand other people. The journey up the long but moderately graded “camel path” commenced, with Oli, Trace and the Australian girls speeding up ahead, and myself, Claire and Ramzy lagging a bit behind. We were stuck for ages behind a bloke walking a camel, and for the first time on our tour we saw Ramzy get angry, shouting some harsh Arabic words at him, along the lines of “get the fuck out of our way you dickhead!”

After 6km, three hours, and a couple of rest stops at the various huts lining the path, we caught up with the rest of the group and climbed the final 750 steep steps to the summit. Ramzy stayed behind and waited for us at the base of the steps.

We finally reached the summit, and considering the hordes of tourists also making their way up the mountain, we somehow managed to be one of the first groups up there. We found a prime position and sat down on the mountain rocks, patiently waiting for the sky to light up and the first golden rays of the day to appear from behind the mountains in the distance.

Just as the sunrise was about to occur, a very rude and arrogant German tourist pushed Katie and Fiona out of the way and claimed a spot amongst our group all to himself. Needless to say, he didn’t last there for very long.

The sunrise happened at 5:30 am, which was very spectacular, and quite a moving experience. We hung around for 10 minutes afterwards and slowly made our way back down the steps along with the thousands of other pilgrims. Just as we were starting to descend, I got talking to a guy from Indonesia, who was very impressed at my abilities to count from one to ten in Indonesian. The summit of Mount Sinai therefore proved to be the ONE AND ONLY TIME in my entire life (so far) where two years of learning Indonesian at school had actually come into some kind of trivial use.

The group took the camel path back down, but I wanted a bit more of a challenge and opted for the slightly more difficult 3,000 steps. I wasn’t allowed to go by myself in case I got lost or hurt myself, so Ramzy organised for a Bedouin guide to descend the steps with me. I was so freaking glad that I’d chosen to go down the steps, and not up, because it would have taken months to get over the muscle pain caused by an upwards journey. Those steps were long and steep alright.

It may have taken three hours to get up the camel path, but it took less than an hour to get down the 3,000 steps. I tipped the Bedouin, met the rest of the group at the base of the mountain about 10 minutes later, we returned to the hotel for breakfast, and left the dear little village of St Catherine for the seven hour bus trip back to Cairo. The only exciting thing about the bus trip was getting to see the Suez Canal.

We checked into the Indiana Hotel once more – the same hotel we stayed at on our initial arrival into Cairo. It was even worse an experience this time compared with last time, and if you are interested in finding out exactly what happened, you can read the review I left at TripAdvisor.

It was to be our last official night of the tour, and although most of us had an extra few days booked in Cairo, Claire was leaving early the next morning.

We took a taxi late in the afternoon to Al Azhar Park, in the eastern suburbs of the city, to watch the sunset. It was absolutely gorgeous, made all the more amazing thanks to the deep colours formed by the thick cloud of pollution in the air, as well as the stirring sounds of Islamic prayer gracing the city skyline.

Claire had been to this park a few weeks ago before our tour started, and we followed her lead to the nearby legendary Khan El-Khalili Bazaar, as she claimed to remember how to get there. We got lost along the way, but eventually found it after wandering through some dodgy back streets. We sat down as a group one final time and drank juice at El Fishawy cafe (apparently it hasn’t been closed a single day in the past 200 years), before the others decided to return to the hotel, while Claire and I did a small amount of last-minute souvenir shopping at the bazaar. We spent a few hours browsing, bartering and getting lost amid the alleyways, and I had my first (and only) encounter with an aggressive salesman who grabbed my arm and threatened me in Arabic because I declined to buy something he was offering. Once we were done, we took a taxi back to the hotel. Amused by the look of horror on our faces at the crazy nighttime Cairo traffic, the driver pulled up and asked if I wanted to have a go!

(No, but thanks for the offer).

We had KFC for dinner, served to us once more by members of the deaf community, and then decided to go for a quick walk down to the Nile before bed. This involved crossing the very busy road that I refused to cross at the beginning of my journey, and even though it was almost midnight by now, the traffic was still bumper-to-bumper, equally as busy as it was throughout the day. We gauged the traffic for a few minutes and when it felt like the right time, we put our hands out to signal the oncoming cars to stop, somehow managed to dodge them and made it across four lanes safely to the island in the centre of the road. This was only half way. We did it again to the cars driving on the other side, but this time Claire missed the signal and I started walking alone, leaving her behind. I couldn’t turn back for fear of killing myself, and got to the other side with the poor girl terrified in the middle of the road not knowing what to do! Luckily, some kind locals saw what was going on and helped her across. After that hair-raising adventure, we continued on towards the bridge over the Nile, only to find a designated pedestrian crossing a hundred metres down the bloody road.

27^th September 2009. Cairo, Saqqara and Dahshur

After saying goodbye to Claire, I got up at 8:30, had yet another Indiana Hotel breakfast, and then said goodbye to Ramzy, who had another tour starting that afternoon. Oli, Tracy and I had decided to take a taxi to see Saqqara (the “Step” Pyramid of Djoser) and Dahshur (the Red Pyramid & Bent Pyramid). The taxi driver could barely speak English, nor did he know how to get to either of the places we wanted to visit, but he stopped and asked locals along the way and managed to find our destinations without any major dramas.

Along the way to Saqqara, we saw a side of Egypt that regular tourists wouldn’t normally get the chance to see. We drove by a small canal, which I believe was a tributary that ran out of the Nile, but the banks of this canal were absolutely filthy and littered with household rubbish, industrial rubbish, oil, cars, sewage – you name it, it was there. Not only this, but people were bathing in the water as well. It was quite shocking for us as Westerners to witness, but I guess the locals just see this as being a normal part of everyday life.

The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was quite interesting to see. It was constructed around 2,700 BC and was the first attempt at a Pyramid-like structure in Egypt, obtaining its step-like shape from the six “mastabas” (the flat, rectangular structures) being built on top of each other.

We left Saqqara for Dahshur, where we had the opportunity to explore the Red Pyramid. This structure is the third tallest in all of Egypt, and was built under the reign of Snefuru. It was the first in the world to resemble the shape of a true pyramid that we know of today. Oli & I made the venture inside, and despite the massive sign out the front saying NO PHOTOS, I ignored all cultural respect and took a picture of the tomb in the centre.

The Bent Pyramid was inaccessible to tourists, but the taxi driver took us to a location where we could see it from a distance and take a few snaps. Also built under Snefuru’s reign, the Bent Pyramid was an earlier attempt at constructing such a structure, except it didn’t quite keep the same inclination all the way up.

Driving through a small village on the way back to Cairo, I was amused to see animal carcasses hanging outside the front door of the local butcher.

Back at the hotel I said goodbye to Oli & Trace, had a nap, and was awoken by a phone call from Katie saying her & the girls were about to go for dinner. I must have been dreaming at the time of the call, because there was a weird five seconds after I woke where I had absolutely no idea where in the world I was or what the hell was going on.

We went to Dominoes for dinner and followed the pizza up with some icecream from the local supermarket. On the way back to the hotel we passed a guy in the street who the girls had met earlier called Mohammed, and he took us to his store where he talked us each into buying a sheesha pipe as a souvenir. He was very fond of Australians, and took us to his second store which was full to the brim of Aussie paraphernalia – flags, kangaroos and “Crikey” signs galore!

I said goodbye to Angie, Sarah, Katie and Fiona at the hotel, and tucked in for my final sleep on Egyptian soil. The trip was nearly over.

28^th September 2009. Cairo

My plane wasn’t due to leave until late afternoon, so I had the majority of the day to explore the city one last time. I opted to take the metro from nearby Opera station; initially I was a little worried that I might not understand the system, but thankfully the guy who I bought tickets from spoke English and told me how to get to the Coptic Centre in Old Cairo. I was also blown away by the utter cheapness of the metro ticket. It cost two Egyptian pounds for a return trip. That’s just over 30 Australian cents.

I decided to get off a station early, and walk through the streets of suburban Cairo to the Coptic Centre instead. I was glad I did this, because it allowed me to see more of the authentic, residential parts of the city that a tourist wouldn’t normally get the chance to see. The shops, houses and apartments that lined the streets appeared quite ragged and dirty, but I noticed as I got nearer to the museum, my surrounds suddenly appeared significantly cleaner. I got yelled at by some locals for taking a photo of their street.

Eventually I reached the Coptic Centre of Cairo and spent a few hours exploring the numerous churches in the area and looking through the artefacts in the museum. The Hanging Church was particularly impressive – it was built around the third century and remains one of the most famous Christian churches in the city.

I took the metro back to Opera, where I made my way on foot to Cairo Tower. I could see that it wasn’t too far away, but God help me trying to work out which streets to walk to get me there. It took ages. But once I’d found it and made my way up to the top, it was totally worth it. 20km away in the distance, amid the grey polluted haze, I could just make out the soft outline of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I could hardly believe that only 15 days ago, I had stood in the direct centre of that very piece of world-famous architecture.

I collected my luggage from the hotel, took my prearranged van back to the airport, and boarded the plane destined for London. I had just lived though the 17 most thrilling and amazing days of my life, full of the most incredible people, food, architecture, geology and culture, none of which I will ever forget.

Egypt, I love you.

* In memory of Todd Rakes. Thanks for the laughs and the good times, mate!

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Why I Love The Winter

As the hot and bothersome summer months approach us in the southern hemisphere, I find my friends in the northern speak of the joys of their upcoming winter and their already-falling snow. How I long for the winter to return; how I long to once more bask in the romance of the whitened streets and the puff of those pearly petals precipitating from the heavens above.

My first experience with snow-filled landscapes was here in my own home country, on our grade 12 camp to the Snowy Mountains in the year 2001. A group of about 25 of us ventured 2,500 km down to the township of Jindabyne at the base of Kosciuszko National Park, where we stayed for just under a week, commuting to and from the Perisher ski resort every day. For many of us, including myself, our first journey along the winding, mountainous road between Jindabyne and Perisher gave us our first taste of that cold, white fluff we’d all been dreaming of, beginning in little pockets by the side of the road, and by the end of the commute, culminating in entire mountain ranges blanketed in it.

I have very fond memories of having to properly rug up here for the first time in my life. We were told one morning that it reached minus 11 degrees the night before. After living for so long in the tropical climate of North Queensland, it was surreal for me to even imagine that Mother Nature had the ability to drop the thermostat down to that level. But I loved it!

My favourite memory from this holiday was the day a small group of us caught the chairlift up to the top of Back Perisher Mountain. We could see the snow-capped peak of Mt Kosciuszko in the distance, and we were most likely the highest ground-baring people in Australia at the time. It was an incredible feeling:

We never actually got the chance to see snow fall from the sky during our time at the Snowy Mountains, as the flurry of the flakes only ever occurred throughout the night. My curiosity was left in limbo, and it wasn’t for another eight years that I would finally experience what it was like to witness snow falling from the sky.

I was in the Belgian capital of Brussels during the first few days of 2009, and I had just finished wandering through the Atomium, a popular tourist attraction built in 1958 that resembles the cell of an iron crystal (albeit 165 billion times bigger than the real thing). I’d walked past a chemist earlier in the day whose digital thermometer told me it was 1.5 degrees, so I’d made sure I was well-layered, with two t-shirts, a jacket, and gloves. The sky was overcast as well, so I had an umbrella handy in case it decided to rain.

Departing the warm comfort of the Atomium’s enclosures, I made my way to Mini Europe, another nearby attraction, featuring downsized scale models of famous landmarks from all around Europe. Within 5 minutes of me entering the premises it started to drizzle, so I took my umbrella out of my bag, ready in case I was to be attacked by a downpour. Strangely, however, I quickly noticed that the falling droplets were not like normal raindrops at all. Instead of being sponged up by the surface of my jacket upon landing, the droplets stayed as they were, gradually melting their way into absorption.  This was not rain at all, I realised – this was snow, falling from the sky!

Oh, what a joyous occasion it was. To the average Belgian citizen, the flakes were so few and far between that they would have been fobbed off as a feeble and unnoteworthy. But to me, it was magic. Here I was, with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower in front of me and an enormous monument dedicated to the iron crystal behind it, and I was witnessing my first ever snowfall. I will never forget the day.

 

 

 

Less than a month later I found myself in the English portside town of Dover. I’d spent much of the very chilly morning exploring Dover Castle, before hopping on a ferry across the English Channel to Calais in France. I returned to Dover later in the evening and it was during the walk between the ferry port and the train station that it began snowing. Unlike in Brussels, this was proper, thick snow that poured from the sky by the bucketload. I stood by the side of the road underneath a tree in hibernation for the winter, with my arms outstretched, basking in the glory of these beautiful falling white flakes catching the light of the passing cars and dancing their way toward the ground. On arrival at the train station, it had been snowing for long enough that the platform bound for London was covered in a thin film of wintry white. I had never seen anything like this before and I loved it.

 

 

I spent the entire train ride home to London in silence, staring in awe out the window as it became clear that the whole south-east of England had been blessed with a blizzard. It was still snowing heavily by the time I reached London, and I was lucky to catch one of the final trains home to the southern suburbs before they got cancelled for the night due to the adverse weather. On arriving home, my housemates and I played in the half-foot of snow that had now accumulated on the road, and this made us all very, very happy

 

 

I went to sleep that night, my mind still trying to comprehend this amazing new experience called “Snow” that I had just encountered. But nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen the following day!

 

 

 

 

Snow Day in London on the 2nd of February, 2009, remains one of the all time happiest and memorable days I’ve ever lived in my life. Words cannot express how much this country boy from tropical North Queensland came to fully appreciate London and its incredible weather patterns on this day, so different to anything I’d experienced before.

Only a month later, I went on a road trip through the Scottish highlands, which further cemented my fondness for the cold months. I got to experience the most incredible snowcapped mountain ranges, a hundred times more impressive than what I’d ever seen in the past. I got the chance to drive through a blizzard trying to reach the western side of the Isle of Skye – one of the scariest, yet most exhilarating drives I’ve ever had the pleasure of undertaking. I stopped by crystal clear waterways with tufts of white powder gracing the shoreline, I made friends with sheep on the snow-covered fields surrounding ancient castles, I ran near-naked through frozen vanilla valleys, I saw some of the best fucking scenery ever imaginable, amplified by the crisp, frosty atmosphere and the sensational, shivering SNOW!

Having grown up in such a hot and tropical climate where the closest thing to winter I ever experienced was a few days in June where it got down to 14 degrees during the day, my time spent in Europe over winter was a godsend. This was “me” – this was the climate that I felt most suited towards. The warmth and sunniness of the Australian summer simply doesn’t interest me, and I yearn to be back where the clouds are grey and the mercury struggles to reach anywhere above 7.

This, my friends, is why I cannot help but ADORE the winter. Bring it back, please!

 

 

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67 going on 17

Last weekend, the day before I was due to leave Brisbane for the drive home to Sydney, I went on the XXXX Brewery Tour at the famous Castlemaine Perkins brewery in Milton. I’m not too much of a beer drinker to be honest, but I am fascinated by large industrial workplaces. It’s one of the many touristy things I’ve always wanted to do while I actually lived locally, but never got around to doing.

I chose the “Brewery, Beer and BBQ” tour. After we’d finished the walkthrough of the premises we were all treated to four beers at the bar and a freshly cooked barbecue.

I’d gone on the tour alone, and out of the group of about 20, there was another guy who had also come along by himself. He ended up sitting with me for the barbecue and we got talking. You know when you meet someone who inspires you and makes you think to yourself, wow, what an awesome person this is?! He fell into that category.

His name was Alan.
He was from LA. Supported the Lakers.
Initially I thought he was in his early/mid 50′s. It turned out he was 67.
He’d been a school teacher for the past 30 years and had only recently retired.
He travelled through Australia back in 1996, and was now on a return trip 15 years later, retracing his steps to see if much had changed, and visiting some of the country that he didn’t get to see last time.
His trip was going to culminate in December in New Zealand, where he’d booked tickets to U2 in Auckland. He’d already seen them about eight times in the past.
Over his lifetime he’d set foot in 104 countries.
He refuses to stay in a hotel, and has only ever opted for accommodation in youth hostels. That way he gets to meet people.
All his friends back at home think he’s crazy.
He lives to travel, and has no plans to slow down any time soon.

We spend about an hour drinking our complementary ale and chatting about all kinds of things, from beer to travelling to iPhones to Lady Gaga. He was such a cool & friendly guy who was genuinely happy to be alive, with the world at his hands, and living life to the maximum capacity. There is no way at all that he had the mindframe of a 67 year old – he was as youthful and full of zest as any one of his past students would have been the day they graduated from high school at 17 years of age.

If I could be half as active and happy as Alan when I’m his age, I would consider my life a success. He proved to me that there is no such thing as growing old, if you don’t want there to be.

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Toilets Of North Queensland

For the past few weeks I’ve been up visiting my home territory of north Queensland, holidaying around the place and showing the sights to my dear friend, Jess from London.  My lovely mother bestowed a gift upon me in the form of a digital SLR camera, so I thought that throughout our travels – just for something different – I’d keep a photo journal of all the interesting toilet-related paraphernalia that we came across.  This idea was inspired by another one of my London friends, Rhiannon, who appreciates a good dunny when she sees one!

And so I begin my journal in the small township of Tully, about half way between my home in Bluewater and the tropical city of Cairns, where I would meet up with Jess. Tully is known for being one of the wettest towns in Australia, and an eight metre statue of a gumboot was erected at the entrance to the town to signify their highest annual rainfall. It’s also the UFO capital of Australia, with more sightings occurring here than anywhere else.

I stopped at the public toilets located just behind some picturesque gardens on the main street of town, Butler St. I was particularly impressed with the art deco tiling and the dislodged floor tile by the wall:

A few days later we made a stop at Granite Gorge, about 15km west of Mareeba. Here we went for a bushwalk around the spectacularly scenic gorge, taking in the giant volcanic boulders protruding from the earth, a waterhole full of turtles and a crystal clear stream flowing down over the rocks and into the scrub. The highlight was the opportunity to feed the many tame rock wallabies that called this place their home – as many as three at a time would come right up to our hands and eat the feed pellets we were offering them.

The amenities at the privately owned Granite Gorge were very photogenic, and I loved the cute little frog painted onto the base of the urinal:

Later in the day on the way back to Cairns we made a detour down a dirt road just south-east of Mareeba to Emerald Creek Falls, a pristine and seemingly not-too-well-known natural attraction. We walked for half an hour down a deserted bush track, eventually arriving at a lookout where the track officially came to an end, offering superb views of the falls. Being the adventurous types, we continued on past the lookout, through the bush, until we reached the top of the falls and had a swim in the icy-cold waterhole.

The facilities at Emerald Creek Falls would be the first of many drop-toilets that we encountered throughout our travels:

A few days later we passed by a suburb of Cairns with the laughable name of Yorkey’s Knob. Jess climbed a tree, we walked down the beach, and I snapped away at the mural outside the men’s:

I’ve crossed the crocodile-infested Daintree River a number of times in the past but never before had I been to Daintree Village, so we opted to stop there for a quick look around before continuing further up north toward Cape Tribulation. “Village” is the correct terminology for this place; it definitely had a quaint country-town feel, and we enjoyed a coffee at one of the local cafés before I discovered the amusing crocodile banners adorning the outside walls of the local lavatories:

We arrived at Cape Tribulation that evening after spending the day discovering some amazing secluded beaches, walking through the dense rainforest, eating tropical fruit ice cream (jackfruit, wattle seed, soursop and raspberry all in the one cup… yum!), and quietly stalking a small family of cassowaries in the bush to the side of the road. The following day we went jungle surfing, where they harness you up to a flying fox and you swing through the canopy of the forest from platform to platform.

We camped the night at PK’s Jungle Village, who had put a very impressive effort into the tropical mural embellishing the entrance to their outhouse:

Venturing back down south, this time via the inland road, we stopped for a picnic lunch at a camping ground near Mt Molloy. The facilities here were unique in that a donation box was positioned outside both the ladies and the gents, with signs on the toilet walls requesting that we leave a few quid. Some smart-arse (ha, what a pun!) left a suggestion on the sign saying that we should perhaps leave a different type of donation…

We camped the next night along the shores of Lake Tinaroo. First we pulled into the Platypus Rock camping area where I found this large, earthly, redbrick toilet cubicle:

We opted instead to stay at the local scouting campground, which turned out for the best as I was lucky enough to find the one and only toilet through our whole two weeks of travel where I was greeted by a little spidery visitor!

We stopped at the tableland village of Yungaburra the next day and had a delightful lunch at the historic Whistle Stop Café.  You can’t get much more Aussie than this:

At an elevation of 930m, Ravenshoe holds the title of being the highest town in Queensland. We had a drink at the Tully Falls Hotel (the highest pub in Queensland), and I was hoping to find some kind of enlightening Godly message inscribed in the toilet walls, seeing as we were so close to the Royal Throne of Heaven itself. Alas, for I was barely able to make out something along the lines of “better guard your ass,” and “stiffy.”  :-/

By far the most exquisite toilet block we found was within the grounds of the gorgeous Paronella Park, one of my all-time favourite tourist attractions (so far) in the whole world. Dating from the 1930′s and built by hard working Spanish cane farmer José Paronella, he thoughtfully positioned the restrooms just downstream from the magnificent castle and delicate garden that he constructed for his beloved wife. He even framed the dunny block so that views of the Mena Creek waterfall could be enjoyed whilst whizzing away.

Unfortunately the toilets are no longer in use today, however you can only imagine how exhilarating it would have been to make use of the gravy bowl back in the day:

A couple of days later after visiting Paluma with my brother Jay and his girlfriend Kate, we had a quick look through the quiet riverside township of Rollingstone. Jay and Kate’s eager eyes spotted this happy fellow, Bushy at the Beach, painted on the rear of the local toilet block:

We drove to Charters Towers with my parents, which was once the second-largest city in Queensland during the gold rush of the late-1800′s. These days it’s a quiet town with restored 19th century architecture giving it a very country & western feel, and we headed up to the lookout on Towers Hill to view the streets from above. I especially loved the panorama from the small screen window inside the men’s room:

Ravenswood is another humble mining town, substantially smaller than Charters Towers, and about 100km to the east. With a population of less than 200, you could almost say it was a ghost town, were it not for the spattering of locals who work at the nearby open cut mine, and at the various tourist attractions around the township. We had a beer at the Railway Hotel where I discovered the WC, complete with a handwritten request to “please pull the leaver slowly”:

To my great delight, the final of my Toilets of North Queensland, just down the road from the pub at Ravenswood, turned out to be the penultimate of all pissers! What more could I ask for but a genuine outdoor thunderbox alongside an old miner’s cottage built in the 1800′s? Carefully restored after a cyclone in 1989, the thunderbox proved to be an historic and shitting… err, I mean, fitting… end to this journey, which I sincerely hope you have all enjoyed sharing with me:

 

 

Oh, alright then! Because you asked nicely, here are some normal snaps I took along the way of non-toilet-related subjects such as wallabies and waterfalls!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the lav’s!

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Newcastle Is Not A Hole

This morning, for the second morning in a row, I rose from my slumber unusually early. Yesterday it was 2:45am for the ANZAC day dawn service, but today’s wake-up alarm was a slightly more reasonable 5:45am. Laugh at me all you will, my friends, but I had all intentions of heading on down to Circular Quay along with 5,000 screaming teenage girls in order to catch the Justin Bieber gig that Sunrise was putting on.

Just before I was due to leave home though, I heeded to the fact that the riot police had cancelled the event due to the overly raucous crowd refusing to abide by safety announcements, resulting in a number of tween girls getting crushed. I was quite disappointed – not at the ironic hilarity that fans had flown across the country for this moment only to screw it up for themselves – but because I genuinely did want to see him perform. I’d heard so much about him via Twitter and wanted to see for myself what the hype was about.

Which left me in a debacle as to what to do with my day seeing as it was so early and I was already wide awake. So I randomly decided to hop on the next train to Newcastle!

The first thing that struck me was the painfully slow three & a half hour train journey just to travel 160km. If I was still living in London I could have passed through three whole countries in that time, for heavens sake! A lot of the scenery was pretty spectacular though, especially around the Hawkesbury River area, so I couldn’t really complain.

Approaching the city though, the train line ran past the ugly rears of run-down, graffitied old shops & buildings, and my first impression as the locomotive pulled into my destination was as follows:

That really is what I thought. I was now beginning to understand why Daniel Johns’ music is so out there – clearly, growing up in Newcastle makes artists go crazy.

Following a minuscule and overpriced breakfast at a waterfront cafe, I felt like I’d not only wasted a good sleep-in, but written off a whole bloody day! Still, I thought I’d make the most of my time there and at least walk around the city for an hour or so and take some photos.

Thankfully, my dim impression of Newcastle was soon to change

It turned out to be a gorgeous little town. I climbed the 40m tall Queens Wharf observation tower, then made my way down the Hunter Street mall, discovering some amazing buildings from the earlier part of last century, before making a detour to a beach nearby the famous Ocean Baths. I continued along toward Nobbys Head and journeyed up the breakwater, discovering some inspirational and heartfelt graffiti written on the rocks along the way. I returned back through the local funfair, and finally climbed the hill to the very impressive Christ Church Anglican Cathedral.

On the train bound for home I overheard something really cute and so typically Australian. We passed through the Novocastrian suburb of Cardiff, and an old man sitting across from me said to his wife, “Do you know where they get the name Cardiff from? It’s actually a small town all the way over in Wales which is a part of England!”

I now take back what I initially said about the unofficial capital of the Hunter region. You’d think I would have learnt by now after so much travel, but it just went to reinforce the fact that it does pay to break outside the walls of your immediate surroundings when you first arrive at a destination.

So thanks to the Bieber Brigade and their crowd-crushing, warning-ignoring ways which led them to ruin their own and everybody else’s fun, I was able to make the delightful discovery today that Newcastle is definitely not a hole!

PS. and unlike Rihanna, who inspired a previous blog about my travels in Rome, I really don’t mind this Justin Bieber kid at all

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Skyscraper (Muffins Are Bad)

In August of last year I took a trip to Amsterdam for a long weekend:

I ate a muffin and I saw some pretty colours:

Then I floated back to my hostel room, laid my exploding head down on my fluffy white cloud, and wrote the following:

There is a guy in the room. He is looking in his locker. He just took a sip of a drink. I think he’s taking a pill as well, it looks like he’s getting one out of the foil wrapping. But no, he’s not, he’s just getting out his toothpaste. Brushes teeth. I can hear the gentle whispering of the brushes against his molars, with the trickling of the basin tap in the background. Perhaps I should request that he closes the tap valve so as to cease said trickling? No, that would be foolish of me because he just closed the valve himself. Leaves bathroom. Changes shirt, sprays deodorant. He is moving too quickly for me to make note of his actions, I ask in my mind that he slows down but the fucker doesn’t catch my drift, he keeps on moving and moving, quicker and quicker, my world slows as his becomes fast, fast like a rocket, fast like the speedboat I hear in the canal outside my window, which on my following moment of awareness introduces its road-handling abilities indicating that it’s not actually a speedboat, it’s a motorcycle, and I do possess a motorcycle learners licence so perhaps I could ride off into the unknown and use that to gain my advantage with the situation. This here situating moment that I currently notate, as I return for a brief sobering moment to compose the fact that I bear a magical auric shade of green. And not in a way which particularly refers to compassion with ones surrounding ecosystem, although I’d say much the same about the green in question. This is the emerald oasis of absolute confusion, fascination, morbid darkness and intrepid awakeness which emanates majestically from my harrowing hallway of whispering echoes. The hallway upon which nobody dares speak their truths, utter their desires, or bask in any form of brashen hopefulness altogether. Are they the sinners who retire amongst the trio of perpendicular shadowed edges? I hastily sermon my response as a yes, a yes for humankind who wishes for nothing more but love and peace coexisting with all lifeform, defiance not existing for but a second. As I pause to reflect among said goings-on, one realises where ones true foolishness lies. ‘Tis where the greying embers plunge away the golden.

Oh skyscraper in the sky,

Were you merely a scraper, the moons rays you would not reach,

Caught abreast your cracked, crooked lips.

The epitome of our evolutionary evils rests amongst the laurels of your tall, cumbersome self.

Were you not prefixed “sky,” the heaven’s blazing self you’d nay embrace, trapped amid fields of brashen development.

But skyscraper, the two criteria by which you fulfil, encompasses all such qualities of a yearning and ever-exploring wisdom beyond worlds of whomever is physically highest.

My tuneful self slowly returns to one of less melody, as the horizon draws near centre from its previous unbalanced windowframe. I have returned, but my travel sickness may linger with her aromatic breeze.

I read it the next day and was like :-O

Muffins are bad, boys & girls.

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My Favourite Thing That Starts With R Is Rome

A few weeks ago the 7PM project ran a competition to win a Rhianna CD, and all you had to do to enter was leave a message on their forum describing what your favourite thing is that starts with R, and why? I ended up writing a mini-essay as my competition entry so I thought I might as well post it here and tell the world why my favourite thing that starts with R is Rome!

I went to Italy in July of 2009 for a weeklong holiday, incorporating a few days in Rome, a daytrip south to Naples and Pompeii, then up north through Pisa, Florence, Venice and finally to my mum’s birthplace of Trieste.

I have many fond travel memories of my European adventures, but one of the fondest of them all was the evening I went to a small and quite hard-to-find pizzeria in central Rome called da Baffetto. It was just around the corner from Piazza Navona, and it was suggested by my trusty guidebook to be the best pizzeria in the city. It actually looked quite dodgy and run-down from the outside – you couldn’t see inside the windows because they were blocked out with newspaper – but the smell was heavenly, and there was a substantial lineup of people waiting outside the front door, so I decided to give it a go.

It took about 10 minutes and an encounter with a cranky Italian waiter to reach the front of the queue, and when I finally stepped through the doors I found the place was so packed that they had to sit me at the same table as someone else – a happy & smiling girl who looked to be in her late 20′s and was still perusing the menu. We got chatting and established that English was our common language. She was an actress from Spain and had a few days in Rome for business, and I soon found out the reason she was at this restaurant was because she had the same guidebook as me (albeit in Spanish of course). She too wanted to experience the best pizza in the city!

Our hungry tummies were not at all disappointed when our pizzas arrived. To the eye, I will admit that it looked pretty average, but it actually turned out to be the most delicious, crispy, cheesy, flavoursome, amazing wood-fired pizza I have ever eaten. The base was just the right consistency, and even though I initially thought the toppings were lacking, I soon discovered it was composed of the perfect amount. Every portion of the delicious, meaty salami was savoured, every string of mozzarella was devoured with fevorous intent, every sprinkle of oregano adding to the flavour sensation that made up this true Roman pizza:

My newfound Spanish friend and I ended up having a brilliant night. Thanks to her ability to speak Italian, we made our way afterwards to a bar in the inner-southern suburbs called Big Mama (also listed in our guidebooks as one of the top nightspots to hit) where we were lucky enough to see a genuine Sicilian folk band, performing a unique style of folk music my ears had never before been graced with – and something I never would have done had it not been for meeting Carmen. I still to this day haven’t quite figured out exactly what the bladder-like instrument was that the band were using (it was very similar to a bagpipe yet at the same time, completely different), but it sure sounded amazing:

Two nights later, Carmen and I again met at the same pizzeria for an encore meal. This time I ordered a rocket and prosciutto pizza; it was just as incredible as the first. We sat outside and were grouped with four Italian guys who were in town to watch some football, and I somehow managed to make polite conversation with them using the few Italian words I knew and the small amount of English they knew, along with a bit of translational help from Carmen. We then decided to share another pizza between the two of us, and after a delicious tiramisu and a shot of Limoncello to wash it all down, we bade our football fans goodnight and headed towards a proper Roman coffee shop for an espresso. It was pretty disgusting but I’m glad that I tried it, and before heading home we stopped by the Trevi fountain to bask in its glory and take a few happy snaps.

Walking back to my hostel with a smile, I realised I finally fulfilled an experience I’d been waiting for since I arrived in Europe a year beforehand: that kind of travel experience I’d read about all too often where you meet a random person in a random city who you were clearly “meant” to encounter. And what better thing to bring us together than the best pizza in the city? I left the Italian capital the next day a much richer person – and that, my friends, is why my favourite thing that starts with R is Rome.

* * *

I ended up winning the Rhianna CD but unfortunately I don’t at all dig her style of music. Does anybody want it?!

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Things I Will Miss About The UK

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT THE UK:
* Coleman’s mustard
* Lincolnshire sausage
* The slow food market by the Embankment… mmm spit roast hog, garlic hummus and pigeon!
* Eating organically
* Rachel’s organic Greek style yoghurt with honey, and the Coconut yoghurt as well
* Puccino’s hot chocolate
* Jaffa cakes
* Chocolate that tastes ever so slightly different to Australian chocolate
* Digestives
* (The innocence of originally thinking that Digestives were tablets to help relieve indigestion)
* Yorkshire puddings
* Toad in the hole
* Fish & chips on the Brighton pier on cold winter days
* Mushy peas
* Proper steak & ale pies
* Authentic cave-matured Cheddar cheese
* Breakfast fry-ups
* Ploughman’s lunch
* Walkers Builders Breakfast crisps
* The word “crisps”
* Proper cups of tea (without sugar)
* Tea cosies
* Going out to folk music nights
* Countless amounts of gigs by well-known acts every night in London
* Australian acts who tour Britain and who are greeted with the rapturous support and applause of us expats
* The incredible assortment of theatre, comedy and musicals on nightly display throughout the city
* Locally-owned pubs built on atmosphere
* Historic and unique pubs
* The Tooting Tram & Social
* The Selkirk
* The fact that hardly any pubs have pokies
* Supermarkets that sell alcohol
* Off licences
* Guinness that actually tastes like Guinness should
* Real ale
* PINTS of beer as opposed to those pathetic little “pots” that us Aussies drink!
* Being able to fly to Europe for 20 quid
* Collecting stamps in my passport
* The red circle with the blue line
* Tube station advertisements
* Studying the tube map trying to work out which route will get me home the quickest
* Choosing random stops to get off at and explore, ie. Maida Vale and Ealing Broadway
* Oyster cards
* Night buses home from Brixton
* Cycling through Thornton Heath, Norbury, Streatham, Tooting & Colliers Wood on the way to work
* The massively long escalators at Angel
* Northern Line train carriages
* Coal miners with erections (you had to be there to understand!)
* Double decker buses
* Tube station buskers
* People slagging off Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson in the newspapers
* The Metro, The London Paper and The Evening Standard
* (but not the London Lite, that’s just shite!)
* Page Three girls
* Inquisitive dogs on trains
* Squirrels
* Urban foxes
* Mole hills
* Friendly Wandle Path street cats
* Wild blackberries
* Playing pool, table tennis and guitar on lunch breaks
* Hanging out with Team Six Nations and the rest of the A&C folk every day
* Staff bags
* Team snacks
* Cold, drizzly, overcast weather
* Snow
* Conservatories
* Regional accents
* People telling me that I’m losing my Australian accent
* People mistaking me for a Kiwi or South African
* Making fun of the Welsh just like we make fun of the Kiwi’s
* The M25
* The fact that motorways are referred to by number rather than name
* Rows of terraced houses
* Independently owned boutique high street stores
* Robbie Williams
* Take That
* Top Gear
* QI
* Cash In The Attic
* The Apprentice
* Jeremy Kyle
* Simon Amstell
* Dara O’Briain
* Susan Boyle
* Dave
* The BBC
* Castles
* Cathedrals
* Actually wanting to walk into a church to marvel at its history and architecture
* Church cemeteries
* Being nine hours behind
* Dyson air blades in airport bathrooms
* Heated towel racks
* The lady who reads the O2 voicemail message
* The lushness of the Wimbledon Common
* The deer within Richmond Park
* Microchipped bank cards
* Not having to select Cheque, Savings or Credit every time I make a transaction with my bank card
* Not being charged for every transaction you make at a cashpoint that is not owned by your specific bank
* The word “cashpoint”
* The word “innit”
* “You alright?”
* The museum quarters at South Kensington
* Hearing about people’s suggestions for places to visit
* Heading out to random towns and villages on the weekend
* The hilarity of Brighton “beach” that doesn’t actually possess any sand
* Boston & Stickney
* Edinburgh… my favourite place in the entire world
* Hanging out with Jess
* The British postcode system
* Toilets with levers instead of buttons
* The homeless girl in Thornton Heath who keeps asking me for 36p
* The fact that the school year begins in September
* Electric showers
* The bulky but cute three-pronged electrical plugs/sockets
* Camden and Portobello Markets
* Rough Trade Records on Talbot St nearby Portobello Market… the best record store ever
* The music shops on Denmark St
* Incredible, historical architecture
* Red telephone boxes and post boxes
* Bobbies
* Big Ben
* Leicester Square
* The Thames
* The endless fascination with the Royal Family
* British people in general
* The Union Jack
* God Save The Queen

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT THE UK:
* 1p and 2p coins
* Living in Thornton Heath

The end!

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