All Done

So it's now four days since my last post and I'm still stuck at Singapore Airport. I started walking around and got myself lost. This place is huge with so many identical looking corridors. Hours turned into days. Days turned into...well, the following day. You get the drift. I'm hoping if I email someone from Singapore airport they can track me down.
Ok, that's enough of that. I made it back safely and tiredly on Sunday night. Got through customs quick and was home in no time. There wasn't much point in writing this last blog entry but I figured the blog should have an end. Leaving it still in Singapore just seemed wrong. So it's got an end now. Happy? Good.

Singapore airport

Well we're now at Singapore airport after a 9 hour flight from Johannesburg. It's 6.44am and the plane leaves for Melbourne at 9.55am and we are wondering what the hell we are going to do for the next 3 hours.
The morning after the winery tour was better than expected. I pulled up fairly well and so did Dave. We caught the 11am ferry to Robben Island which is the site that Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 29 years imprisonment. The tour was led by one of the former political prisoners who had been kept at the jail. It's now basically a World Heritage site open for tours. He walked us through the place, telling us what various rooms were for and telling us stories about some of the brutality that they faced. Some of it quite tough to hear. As well as political prisoners, they also used to keep some fairly hard-core criminals yet it was the political prisoners who received the worst treatment. It was very interesting hearing all about it and everyone shook the guy's hand when we left. We then were driven around the island in a mini-bus and told about how it also used to be a leper colony back in the days and we saw some of the islands wildlife (various sorts of antelope, a couple of tortoises, african penguins) etc.
The rest of the day was spent doing a little shopping and drinking the local beers. That turned into nighttime as well although I piked and got back to my room at about 11.30pm. Dave finally showed up at 3.30am. With a 6.30am wake up call this morning, he didn't do too bad.
That's it for me. Gotta go find something to do.

Cape Town

Hello. Two things to say to start off with:
1. It's now about 9.50pm and I'm currently in that weird state between being drunk and awaiting a hangover after a day of wine tasting in the Cape Town wineries. COME ON POWERADE!!! DO YOUR STUFF!!! DON'T LET ME GET THE BEROCCAS OUT!!! Dave is sitting at another PC nearby and thankfully his hiccups have stopped now.
2. The blog website has been down for a couple of days so I've got an update I wrote yesterday that I saved and I'll just add to it and adapt it to make it look like I just wrote it today which is silly because I've already given it away that it was written yesterday. Adam, good to see you recognise truth from fiction. :) The weather bureau website seems to suggest that the Melbourne weather is picking up which is good. I don't want to come back to "suckacious" weather. That could hurt!

We are now in Cape Town, South Africa after spending a short time inVictoria Falls, Zimbabwe which was great fun. First thing we did was some adventure stuff. The great Zambesi River flows along Vic Falls with Zimbabwe on one side and Zambia on the other. By stringing cables over a gorge there, they have come up with some really cool things to do. First up was two shots at the flying fox. This was a simple cable spanning the gorge and you got strapped into the harness and ran at the edge of the cliff and jumped off Superman style and sailed across to almost the other side. The first time I did it was actually really painful. The guy who had put my harness on hadn't done it very well and it gave me the worst wedgie I've ever known. I'm talking on the scale of an Atomic Wedgie here! They adjusted it after the first go and the second go was much more comfortable and I could enjoy it much more. Next was the Foofie Slide. It's a dumb name and in some ways easier than the Flying Fox. You sit on the edge of the platform and hold onto a trapeze looking pulley thing and off you go cruising across the gorge again. Fun but not really scary. The final stunt was the best. It's known as the Gorge Swing. It's about an 80 metre drop straight down off the edge of the platform, then after the free-fall you swing across the gorge. Sort of like a bungee that moves into a swing. Trying to get up the nerve to step off the edge of the platform was the hardest thing. You just gotta not think about it. I jumped, starting yelling then for some reason lost my voice and eventually stopped falling and started swinging. Great fun. I was shaking afterwards with adrenalin. It's all recorded on Dave's video camera so I've gotta get a copy of it all.

The day before yesterday we did an elephant ride. It was two people per elephant plus the driver so it was a bloke called Noah (who obviously decided that of all the animals on the Ark, the elephant was his favourite) plus Dave and I. We had the biggest elephant of the lot. He was a 25 year old male called Doma who liked to stop in the middle of a walk to rip the odd branch or two off a tree to eat on the way. A funny elephant and much friendlier than Stampy from that Simpsons episode where Homer gets an elephant for the kids from a radio station. After the hour ride we got to feed him. You could either put the food directly in his mouth which he quite liked or put it in his trunk. Both options were fun but big on saliva. He was such a cool elephant though so there was no worry that he was going to cause any trouble like sample my arm or anything. It was also funny while we were feeding the elephants because a couple of local warthogs were hanging around and eating any of the food that the elephants poor eyesight had missed. They weren't quite getting close enough to touch (and I'm not sure I'd want to touch a wild warthog) but it was interesting to watch them. They are the sort of animal that has character purely because it's so ugly. Also because they tend to kneel on their front legs to eat which is kind of strange.
Yesterday we went to Table Mountain (Not a great name but better than calling it Flat Mountain I suppose) which is a rocky mountain with a flat top on it like a table and it's one of those sites that you have to see if you visit Cape Town. It was quite nice up there (we used the cable car to get up rather than climbing it for a couple of hours). We saw a hyrax too which looks like a cat sized guinea pig yet is actually distantly related to an elephant. I decided not to ride it due to the fact that I would have crushed it.

Today we did a full day winery tour. It was very enjoyable with about 25 degree weather. I think I drank way too much as you do on these tours. Fortunately we had a really good crowd of people about our age. The driver was very much against snobbish wine drinkers so taught us how to drink wine but at the same time was quite happy to make fun of them. Dave and I copped it because we were the "Aussies" on the tour so especially at the start if there were unfinished drinks, they were thrown our way. Tough stuff.

Tomorrow (assuming I come up alright) we visit Robben Island which is where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for all those years. The tours are given by former political prisoners so should be well worth it. Then I think we are catching up with some of the people from our wine tour for afternoon drinks.

On Saturday, we get in the plane and head home. We'll arrive late Sunday and I'll be back at work on Wednesday. Unfortunately it's all coming to an end. Still, it'll be good to get home. I'm just about done with travelling for now.

Ok, Dave left while I was writing this because he's drunk way more than me and wants sleep. I've now gotta go back to the hotel and knock on the door until he wakes up and lets me in. NOT looking forward to that. :)

End of East Africa

G'day! My tour of East Africa ended today. They've dropped us off in Arusha which is a town in Tanzania and we've got about three hours to kill before the 6 hour bus ride back to Nairobi. So much has happened so maybe if I put it in point form I will write less! Yeah right.

* After my last blog update, Dave and I were walking around Nairobi and got scammed either once or twice. Depends on whether the first scam was part of the second scam or not. No time to write the whole story but after giving a small amount of money to a guy who claimed he was one of the porters in our hotel, we were then spoken to by some guys who were "the police" who said they had arrested the guy we gave money to. They wanted to interview us to clear our name and prove we weren't involved in drug trading. Turned out he wanted to take us to a dark looking restaurant to do this interview. this is where we put the foot down and asked for some uniformed police to identify them. We were told to "GO!" at this point and made our way out of Nairobi pretty quickly after that. Scary stuff considering that the least that would have happened was robbery. I tell ya, the beers back at the hotel afterwards were much needed! We learned why Nairobi is sometimes called Nairobbery that day.

* We've seen so many animals in the game reserves. Monc, we've seen two sets of mongoose (also known as meerkats) and they are way cute! Those we saw yesterday were really small and would have fitted in our pockets easily but I already had three baby Elephants and a baby Giraffe to smuggle back at that stage and I was starting to look suspicious.

* Camping in the game reserves has been slightly scary. A couple of them were quite open to animals. One night a lion was heard walking through our camp at about 4.30am and we've also seen bush pigs, Cape Buffalo (big angry bastards!) and hyenas (I think I trust these least of all of them) near our campsites. The two nights that we were warned are most dangerous were the ones that I decided it was best not to get up to use the toilet at night. Better to feel a little discomfort than be eaten.

* Dave got lucky a couple of days ago. No, not like that! They say it's lucky to be shat on by a bird from above. Dave copped a whole lot of luck the other day from a bird that must have been saving up for a special occasion. That bird had been eating a lot of fruit! It gave the tour a laugh.

* We stayed at a Maasai camp and met the people and visited a village and a school about three days ago. I wasn't expecting too much but it was great fun. The village kids that were too young for school came charging out and we were picking them up and throwing them around and swinging them and everything. It was tiring but luckily they are as light as a feather with not an ounce of fat on them. Not starving or anything though which was good. At the school the kids sang us "Heads and shoulders, knees and toes" in funny English and were struggling to get the parts of the face matching up with the words. Another group sang for us a more traditional song and did a dance. Since our group is 10 Aussies and 4 Canadians, we sang Waltzing Matilda, Oh Canada and gave a really bad rendition of "I'm A Little Teapot" but we struggled with the words and the actions on that one and it dissolved into a bit of a shambles.

That'll do for now. Tomorrow Dave and I are in Johannesburg, SA and then we go to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe for a couple of days of seeing the Falls and some sort of adventure stuff like bungee jumping or a flying fox across the falls.
Finally, if you've emailed my gmail email account I can't check it becase the internet browser here can't handle it. If you have something urgent (yeah right) then it can be sent to superdam@hotmail.com. That works everywhere.

Nairobi, Kenya

In Nairobi, Kenya now and tonight we meet our tour group and tomorrow we get in the bus/jeep and go on safari for 14 days. We don't really know what to do with our time today because there's not a whole lot to do in Nairobi that is interesting us. We could go to a museum but we've had enough of museum's after Cairo the other day. There are also small safari game parks but we've got heaps of that coming up anyway. So we're going to wander around the city a little and see what we find. We've been told not to walk past a certain street because that's the dodgy area of Nairobi. Sometimes the need for security here is a worry. In the hotel we are told to use both locks on our doors at night and if you want to go out at night you take a taxi - never walk. Otherwise it's nice and the people are friendly and love to laugh at just about anything.
Part of the reason for getting on the internet today is that we saw on tv this morning that there was a bombing in Egypt in the last day or so and figured it might be worth letting people know we are alive and not in Egypt anymore. I gather the last bombing in 1996 had a huge impact on tourism for a couple of years with a flow-on effect to the many people making a living in the field. Hope this isn't the case again. Too many nutters out there unfortunately.
That'll do from me for now. Gotta go check what's happening with AFL player trading.

Bye to Egypt

I didn't think I'd be writing again before leaving Egypt but we needed to check on an email from our travel guide. We've got a little time to spare too. It's now 4.18pm and the plane leaves the airport for Kenya at 10.30pm. We are hoping that the service back at the hotel for dinner tonight will be as slow as ever because we aren't too sure what to do with our time.

Today we finally made it to the Egyptian Museum. A little disappointed to be told that cameras have to be left at the front door because we would have been taking photos constantly. So much to see. I'm all "Pharaoh-ed out" now though. After paying about $AUD5 to get in, you then pay another $AUD10 to get into "Mummy Room". It's a small room with maybe 10 - 15 mummies on display in special temperature controlled cases. Some of them were really well preserved although I think all of them could use a good moisturiser when they finally make it to their afterlife. Seeing hair and teeth on some of them was kind of creepy. I was wondering how I would react if I saw one of them wink at me. Fortunately I never found out.
Afte the Mummy Room we checked out the Animal Mummy Room. They used to mummify all sorts of animals. We saw cats, dogs, gazelles, horses, baboons, massive Nile Crodiles and other animals. Very impressive. A whole lot of walking around later and we were done. We started out looking slowly at each exhibit but by the end as we grew more and more tired, we would pick a room and zoom through it at record pace. Dave would take one side of the room, I'd take the other. If there was something different or worth seeing then we'd let the other know. The Lonely Planet Guide reckons you could spend two days there if you had the time. An afternoon was enough for me. I just don't have the stamina. Some of those big wooden sarcophagus' were looking mighty comfortable by the end. Just a small nap surely wouldn't invoke a curse would it? Very interesting place though it started me thinking that perhaps it's a little disrespectful to be digging up bodies and putting them on show. I don't reckon I'd like it. Probably a good argument for cremation.
That will do for now. I've been checking the Age website and about the only thing of interest was that Rodney Dangerfield died. I guess he'll be finally getting a little respect now. :)

Pain in the...

G'day, I'm back in Cairo again after spending three nights in Giza which is back where the main pyramids and the Sphinx are. We've now got 2 nights in Cairo and then we hop on a plane to Nairobi in Kenya. I think we are very ready to go. Whereas originally I thought that Cairo was dirty and polluted but had character, I've now decided that there isn't much character and that it's just a dirty city that will ruin your lungs. :) I like Egypt a lot but I think that Cairo isn't one of it's highlights. There are much better cities to visit.

One of the best and also physically damaging things I've on this holiday was a couple of days ago. We went horse-riding very close to the pyramids at night. There were five of us (Dave and I plus our tour leader and two other people from our tour - Adam and Serena). Everyone but me had horse-riding experience. I told them I'm a beginner so they picked a suitable horse. I rode a horse once about 10 years ago and it wouldn't have gone any faster than a slow trot. These horses however soon moved up from a walk to a trot to a run and I was freaking out! I was barely in control of the thing at all and was yelling out to the guy in charge "Too fast, too fast!". His reply was "no, you fine!". Thanks a lot buddy! I disagreed but it was no use. So I had to hold on while the horse was running along up sand dunes with only the light of the full moon to show the way. We made it to the top of the sand dunes and I was still not dead which was good and we stopped and turned around to see a great view of the three pyramids in Giza all lined up in order. What a view! Made it all worthwhile. Fantastic. Then my horse decided to turn around so I lost my view for a while. He didn't listen to me at all. I'm just hoping he's not your Mr Ed style Egyptian-talking horse because he learnt a few choice words of English that night. After stopping for five minutes to enjoy the view we then turned around and headed back down the hill we had climbed and once again I hung on for my life as the horses ran. It was less scary this time as I was getting used to it but still I was worried about falling off if he slipped or missed his footing in the dark. It was around this time that I started to notice I was getting a sore butt from the constant bouncing into the air and landing in the saddle. Obviously I wasn't riding the thing properly and need to use the styrups more. By the time the ride was over I was glad I had done it but was also worn out physically, mentally and verbally! I think I only appreciated how much fun it had been once I was off the thing. I could then weigh it up and decide that although scary, it had also been really well worth the ride. I think it worked out to be about the equivalent of $AUD10 for maybe 45 mins ride so great value.
Ok, at this point I should point out that if you are receiving email updates from Dave, that you should just ignore what he has to say about my injuries because he's bound to make them out to be more entertaining than they were. He's a lying hound. We all know that. That said, even i had to laugh. Riding home in the taxi, I couldn't sit comfortably. My butt was pretty sore from the ride. I could tell that my bad riding style had been causing me to pinch skin on my butt each time i landed. I got back to the apartment, went into the bathroom and found that I had removed a layer of skin off my butt. It was damn sore. It was red raw in parts and painful to sit on. So for the next couple of days I was using gauze to keep it dry while it healed and wasn't able to go into the pool cos I didn't want to get it wet. Embarrassing but cos it's kind of funny then I figure it has to appear here. It's now got a good scab on it so is healing nicely thankyou. Why me???? To Dave's credit, occasionally he was able to keep a straight face and ask how it was healing. Once he had an answer he'd revert back to butt jokes. But I expect no less and he'd be copping it big-time if it had happened to him.
Crease, thanks for your Mark Twain comment. The line about being a consumate ass seems more appropriate now doesn't it!?
The resort we stayed at in Giza was nice. It claimed it was 5 stars but that's 5 Egyptian stars. The service was more like 3 stars. I rocked up to breakfast this morning and asked where I should sit. The guy said "I don't know." Not too helpful. The previous day I saw him clear a place for someone at a table by brushing the food crumbs on the table onto the ground. It's kind of entertaining though.
Finally, we saw the pyamids Sound and Light Show the night after the horse riding. You sit facing the Sphinx and the three pyramids and a voiceover in a funny Pommy accent talks in an overly dramatic voice about ancient Egypt. Pick the most pompous English accent you can think of, picture the Sphinx and imagine the guy saying loudly "I've seen years pass by, empires rise and empires fall and all the while I've kept watch. Kept watch over the tombs behind me and the rolling sands in front of me." It was a little over the top. What was great was the light show side of things. They used lasers and huge spotlights to light up a pyramid at a time or at one time they projected eyes onto the Sphinx while the rest of the Sphinx was in darkness. It looked really eerie. I've kind of bagged it a bit but it was actually pretty cool.
Not much more to write now. Today we just checked out of our apartment, changed some travellers cheques and dranks a couple of beers at our old favourite - the Ali Baba Cafeteria which overlooks a crazy roundabout. In one day we saw two car crashes. Just simple rear-enders where it's cheaper for both parties to exchange nothing more than bad language, wave the arms in the air then just walk away.
Not sure when I'll write next. One we get to Nairobi we night not get much of a chance to use the internet. At least we've got our itinerary and everything else sorted out now. Finally heard back from our useless travel agent and everything is sorted.