Here we are... what now?

Aswan: Lake Nasser, Abu Simbel, Kitchener’s Island, souqs, feluccas, temples, museums - the possibilities are endless. Most people who come to Aswan rush from sight to sight, aware that they only have a few days to see it all. They sit in a cafe drinking mint tea, for the experience. They stroll down the corniche, for the view. They drink in the sounds and smells of the city, because they are leaving far too soon.

We, on the other hand, are landed here. Of course we were going to spend a day or two, recovering from the Wadi Halfa ferry, taking a look at the temple of Philae, meet up with Alex. But basically this was our entry and moving-on point for Egypt. Instead, thanks to Eid al Adha (ironically a celebration of sacrifice), we are stuck here waiting for our car to catch up with us from Wadi Halfa. This gives us a whole different view on the town. Instead of an exciting holiday destination it has become a temporary home for our lost souls. Street vendors quit the banter and nod sagely when we tell them we are here for the duration, the hotel is promising a good room for the long-term tenants, and walking the streets we are more interested in the location of the cafe round the corner and the shop selling phone credit than the pretty view or the souvenir bargain.

Luckily the town has been quiet today, one advantage of the Eid holiday is the absence of cars and people. The few shops that are open cater to the tourists who have descended from the Nile cruise ships which throng the Corniche moorings belching diesel fumes. Other than the mzungus there are groups of rowdy boys on bikes and girls dressed up to the nines roaming the streets, trying out their meagre English on any foreign-looking passer by. We eat lunch, go for a walk, and back to the room to lose ourselves on the internet. Only ten more days...

PS: It was my birthday for a whole weekend!

- about an age and a country away, but I did say I would write more. Well, as we have no space in the car for all the birthday presents I might have got, this year my treat was going to be of the non-physical variety. For weeks I had noticed Stuart and Merryl whispering and suddenly shutting up, and whenever we did any trip planning there was a gap around my birthday where they couldn’t tell me where we were going to go. Then Merryl mentioned that she would be going rafting on my birthday weekend and a little later we were heading for Kampala, but I still had no idea of the size of the surprise until we drove around Kampala on the day before my birthday after Merryl had left, trying to follow the GPS without giving away the destination. We were going somewhere in town, but the GPS kept sending us down closed-off roads. Eventually we did end up where we were going, the Kampala Serena Hotel, poshest of the posh in that part of the World. A whole weekend in a real house with real rooms and real windows! Not only that, but there would be running water, straight into a nice bath tub, with white towels, and a toilet that flushed, and a shower with water pressure (my big obsession), and a sink with a mirror and everything! The water might even be hot, if I wanted it...

And that was just the beginning. There was a huge bed with white sheets and the mattress was most un-lumpy, and there were lots of plump pillows, and little bed side tables, and lamps I could switch off from the bed without getting up, and in the evening someone came to turn the bed down.The room had air con and a mini bar and a balcony and a soft chair, and a TV with lots of channels, none of which were silent or fuzzy. To crown the luxury there was wifi with a decent speed and no cut-outs (which is more than can be said for the other 5 star hotel we tried recently, where high-speed internet translated to 192kbps). Too much!!!

A whole weekend with this luxe lifestyle made me quite crazy, I didn’t know how to spoil myself first. Should I have a bath (of course) or a snooze on the bed? What could I download while I was here? Should I watch some TV? Or order room service. It was quite stressful, I tell you, and on top of all that Stuart and Merryl had arranged for me to have a massage and a manicure in the spa. As it turned out that was the best thing that could have happened, as I was totally relaxed after that.

Mozambique

Stuart finished his project, so as a treat we took off for a few days to Inhaca Island in Mozambique (cool how the most exotic locations are right door next to us sometimes ;-). He has posted a lovely description and some fab photos (taken with his new camera) here.

Going back in time and place

To Nottingham for a weekend and nothing much has changed in the last 5 years... Or so it seems. On closer inspection it turns out that some friends have a new puppy, some are pregnant, some are engaged or even married, some have acquired a new kitchen or published a book. My old home and friends are not so unchanged, after all.

Cape Town scraps

Too much is happening at once right now to keep up the flow of news. Cape Town is already almost two weeks ago, so here are some bits worth mentioning:

I am in love with its chilled atmosphere, the shady benches at Company Gardens right in the middle of the city; the ambitious exhibitions at the Art Museum; Charly's and the German Dinkel bakery - two businesses on either end of the baked goods spectrum, both perfectly formed; the not at all tacky V&A waterfront, which could so easily have gone wrong, but is surprisingly entertaining; baboons and seals right there in town; the incredible Aquarium - can't wait to dive with the sharks there; its similarity to Wellington which I miss terribly (not the crap autumn weather that they're probably having by now, though).

After Joburg and the constant warnings to watch your back - and your bag - I found myself wary to the point of paranoia walking the streets. I felt silly since certainly the CBD is perfectly harmless. Makes me wonder what is possible in Joburg CBD if one would just dare walk there.

Lesson learnt: when driving past a group of baboons, keep your windows up and don't leave the car. As we watched another car was invaded by a mother/child team of apish thiefs who emptied a stolen bag into the road in search for food only to bare their over-sized canines at anyone daring to take their loot off them.

A rare link

Since Stuart has already said everything there is to say about our weekend at Tshetshepi, I will just link to him. Some nice photos, too.

Ruminations on the train

Context: The Rovos train from Pretoria to Cape Town. A three day trip across South Africa. A long time to sit and look out of the window. There are only 33 passengers on this train, mostly couples, mostly retired, presumably relatively wealthy and all white. We have some Germans, an Italian couple, a few Brits and a bunch of South Africans. So there is a range:

Two Afrikaner couples travelling together with an innate sense of entitlement and lack of manners expressed in finger snipping and sparse use of the phrase "thank you". One of the expensively casual wives flashes her Blackberry in defiance of the request not to use mobile phones in public areas, while they generally monopolise the lounge with loud conversations.

At first I thought the Italian couple were Americans. The touristy dress sense and cranky Yankee accents gave them away, or so I thought as did the lady wife's tight facial skin. Out on the observation platform she said to me, pointing to a crack in the window pane where some rocks had hit it: "This train is not loved." I wanted to misunderstand her melodramatic comment and ask what it was that she didn't love about the train but instead wondered whether in her mind every graffitied intercity was a political attack on those who could afford public transport. But I wondered quietly to myself, fearful of cracking her controlled visage.

The two German couples also travelled together: A tall, confident, energetically dark-maned woman in her late 30's: we'll call her Stefanie; an equally tall, similarly aged male, tiny stylish diamond earring, dashing and casual: let's call him Stefan; travelling with two non-descript partners, early-middle age, crumpled and not even within earshot of those two in the handsomeness scale, she a dirty blonde with bargain rail clothes, he tired, sagging in the flesh: Gertrud and Norbert, let's say. So you would assume that Stefanie and Stefan would be one handsome couple, while Gertrud and Norbert were configured into the other. Matched in temperament, looks and inclination, you would assume, and you would be wrong. Despite the fact that Stefanie and Stefan flirt furiously, constantly, publicly showering sparks whenever Norbert and Gertrud are absent; despite the visible fact that they physically and mentally belong together, Stefan is in fact married to Gertrud and Stefanie lives in unmarried union with Norbert.

We have one single passenger, one person not travelling with a companion, a hunched over, balding gentleman from Germany. Without doubt everyone is assuming that he booked this journey with a travel partner - wife, maybe, but more likely his elderly mother, and that she passed away or was otherwise prevented from taking the trip. There is a stoic sad aura around him as he stares at the passing landscape, perhaps contemplating the semblance of this train driving through the dry veld to the travel through life, a trip that ends all too soon.

The most luxurious train in the World

Maldives Diving

We just returned from the best holiday ever - ten days diving in the Maldives.

The first thing we did is make major use of our recent diving qualification by spending every possible moment underwater in the Maldives. We had planned the trip to be the relaxing break for Stuart after go-live, so we chose the hotel because of its 'no news, no shoes' policy. And then we ruined it by getting totally hooked on diving so that we went on the boat every day to see more fish. In between we just had enough time to catch some rays, eat lots of great food and read a whole pile of books.

There were so many highlights on this holiday - and that's without ever leaving the island except to go diving - that it's hard to begin. Everything was taken care of, from the little things, like aloe vera after-sun lotion in the bathroom and bicycles to get around, to the big things like fresh fruit cut up to order in the morning and being able to leave our dive kit at the dive school to find on the boat whenever we went out. The rooms were ideal, large with sofas in all the right places, like next to the - outdoor - bathtub, so that I could keep Stuart company in his favourite way to relax. We had a piece of beach to ourselves and loungers, table and chairs and a hammock with our villa number on them so that they were reserved for us, and we were in the most basic accommodation there was on the island. Other villas had pools and sunken living rooms on multiple levels.

But it was the diving that really got us hooked (can you tell?). We thought we'd take it easy and not go diving every day, but after the first time over the drop-off of the house reef it was all we could do not to go out twice a day. The reef is really beyond description. There is more animal and plant life there than I have ever seen, and in such variety that we stocked up on books on fish, coral, invertebrates and every other creature to be found below the water line. I have never been so glad to have a camera! We saw every kind of fish from parrot fish to mantas, sharks and turtles, schools of bat fish and huge swarms of little silver fish so dense we couldn't make out the reef. There were corals in every colour hiding the most incredible life, poisonous stone fish and coral groupers, sea anemones housed pairs of clown fish, shrimp and lobsters hid in caves, moray eel looked more dangerous than they are, star fish and sea cucumbers, and on and on.

Lots of pictures here and here.

Musandam Boat Trip

The view is of the sun setting over the mountains lining the Strait of Hormuz, colours soft and pale after a hot and harsh day. Winter is coming, time to get out of town!

As a treat for the hard-working DIFX staff and their family we were invited to a dhow trip around the fjords (yes, really! They call it the Norway of the Middle East - except for the snow and the conifer forests and the ice cold water and the 6 months of darkness, and...) of Musandam, a tiny Omani enclave on the Northern tip of the Arabian peninsula. We had been meaning to come up here before (but never made it), as it is known to be a great winter weekend getaway for Dubaians.

Musandam Beach View

We decided to make it a weekend and booked a room in the Golden Tulip Inn in Khasab. After the usual fun encounter at the Omani and UAE border posts - where you have to pay to leave the county - we arrived just in time to get on the boat in the dusty little harbour. After that it was one breathtaking surprise after another: Majestically craggy mountains sloping unhindered into the sea; dolphins chasing our bow wave, occasionally cutting the water as they come up for air; an old British fort glued precariously to the hill on Telegraph Island, the location for the first telegraph cable connection to India; the most remote fishing village ever, only accessible by boat, crowded into a gap in the cliffs.

Our Lovely Boat

After meandering through a series of islands and inlets we eventually stopped to go snorkelling. Stuart and I could try out our recently (as in yesterday) acquired diving kit - snorkel, flippers and all - which we bought in anticipation of our soon-to-be-completed diving qualification. Near the rocks we saw blue fish, black fish, turquoise and yellow fish, neon-bright fish, orange fish with brown stripes (must get a fish identification book), and some dangerous looking sea urchins.

Everyone Enjoyed Themselves in Their Own Way

Lunch was a feast of salads, curries, fish and meat grilled on a barbecue crammed into the stern platform of the boat. The dhow had an upper and a lower deck laid out with cushions and rugs so we could all flounce about once we had stuffed ourselves. There was more swimming, including some bravado jumps off the upper deck into the water, before we headed homewards. The breeze as we were whisked past the craggy rocks was welcome after a pretty hot day, and we were treated to another sight of dolphins, although this time they paid us little attention as they were busy corralling a school of fish for their dinner. 'Magic', as Mike would say.

Easter Egg Hunt in the Desert

How do you keep chocolate eggs cold in the sand? How do you hide a basket of brightly coloured eggs in plain yellow sand dunes? All the questions we never had to address when we had our easter egg hunts in Germany.

This Easter we had visitors from India, who were keen to get out into the desert. So we combined the two events and had an easter egg hunt in the dunes. After Stuart had explained the significance of bunnies and eggs to the Christian tradition we arrived in Falaj al Mualla near Ras al Khaimah, an easy stretch of dunes near a camel race track, where the first-timers could thrash the cars through the dunes. After a while we found a shady spot under a stand of trees, perfect for lunch. While Stuart made tea, Anna went off to hide the easter egg boxes we had designed to withstand the gruelling desert conditions. The baskets had been stored in a cool box on the way out, to give the chocolate a fighting chance in the burning March temperatures. We had packed everything into individual tupperware boxes to keep out the sand and insects. The challenge was hiding these treats in the featureless dunes and under the few straggly bushes. Once this was done, everyone fanned out to find their easter egg box, as quickly as possible, before the chocolate bunnies dissolved or the beetles got in them. After much shouting and re-hiding of treats we finally got to scoff melting sweets and warmed up hard-boiled eggs with our tea and lunch. Divine!

So that was definitely one of the weirder Easter events of my life, not really comparable with our childhood trips shivering into a forest dripping with thaw, where we would invariably come back with fewer baskets than we took out with us, some always got lost in the dim darkness of the German woods.

Wedding Anniversary in Oman

The sea is slowly turning from turquoise to grey, the sun is setting behind the mountains somewhere, a lazy breeze is fanning the palm trees. Yes, we got away for the weekend.

Stuart had a voucher for a night at a Hyatt hotel, so we took the opportunity to drive over to Oman. Muscat is the capital of a geographically large but otherwise pretty empty sultanate on the Indian Ocean. It is about 4 hours drive east of Dubai on very unused and well-maintained roads. It's a long drive, but only occasionally boring. The terrain is more varied than we expected, ranging from rusty desert sand to craggy mountains, with fertile stretches of banana and date farms lining the road between dusty villages. After Hatta, which we had visited earlier this year with Anna, we quickly arrived at the Omani border post. Or rather the first of many. We had already picked up our exit stamp in Hatta. Although it's another 60km to the border from there,t the customs people had obviously preferred the pleasant surroundings of the Hatta Fort Hotel to the huts at the actual border. At he first Omani post we were waved through, only to be stopped at the second one, where we spend a futile half-hour filling in badly-designed visa forms and purchasing extra car insurance to cover us for driving in Oman. The place was so non-busy that the insurance salesman had gone to sleep on his sofa and Stuart had to wake him up!

After that rigmarole we had to stop at the third border post down the road to open our boot and show our luggage. It is illegal to carry alcohol into Oman from the UAE, so we were glad we hadn't stashed a bottle of champagne for the celebrations. After this we thought we were home free, but as it turned out there was one more stop, where a slouchy looking guy took back the slip of paper the luggage searcher had stamped for us that the visa guy had handed us what seemed hours ago at the first stop.

Oman's Roundabouts are Many and Imaginatively Decorated

Oman looks very like the UAE, except it has real clouds! In the 1970's Oman had only 10km of tarmac road (probably just enough to circumfence the palace), but that had changed a lot. What little oil money they have goes into creating a well-educated population, public services and hospitals. This means that unlike Dubai a lot of the workers here are actually locals, since the sultanate can't afford expensive expat labour.

Oman has a long history as a trading nation whose influence used to stretch as far as India, Pakistan, Zanzibar and Estern Africa. The Portugese arrived here in the 17th century worried about their own trade routes to India, and kept Oman subdued for about 200 years. Apart from a few forts their impact here seems to have been negligible. Local architecture, culture and arts are fiercely Arabian, and adherence to local style is required when seeking planning permission for local buildings.

Anyway, I am rattling on. The sun has set, there is a lone swimmer in the pool and we are getting ready for dinner. A good first wedding anniversary.

The Views Were Pretty Good