Top 10 Things I Love About New York ....So far...

I’ve got a preliminary “Top 10 Things I Love about New York” list …

So far:

1. $1 slices from Two Bros. Pizza
2. Duane Reade on every other block
3. Lots of Jews. I am with my people.
4. Delivery, delivery, delivery.
5. Effective public transport
   
6. Chelsea Market
7. Cabs
8. People who are actually willing to interact.
9. My doorman
10. Wash and fold
    

Didn't She Say She was Going to Africa?

Ok -- it's catch up time. We spent a couple of nights in beautiful little Dahab - - not nearly long enough. The snorkeling was gorgeous and the beach was lined with those wonderful restaurants where you sit on cushions on the floor and dozens of cats always milling about. Wish I could say that I liked Cairo as much, but unfortuinately is was hot, dirty, loud, crowded, polluted. . . ugh. And we could seem to get anywhere successfully in a taxi because of the language barrier. Luckily we only budgeted two days for the city. We saw the pyramids during an extremely uncomfortable horse ride. I hate to sound ungrateful, but I really just couldn't wait for it to be over. It was hot. HOT and UNCOMFORTABLE.
We flew on to Nairobi from there to meet up with our overland truck tour. Very fun. Fabulous group of people. Hit the Masai Mara and saw thousands and thousands of wildebeest migrating, tons of zebra, many elephants, some rhino and about a gazillion little Thompson gazelles. There was just an amazing abundance of wildlife. We also hit Lake Naivasha, and Nakuru National park and saw even more animals. I think we saw just about everything we could in terms of the wildlife. We had some additiona great game spotting when we moved south to Tanzania. In the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater we saw cheetahs, leopards, hippos, more and more zebra and giraffe (which we had already seen plenty of in Kenya as well -- in fact, in Kenya we went to a giraffe orphanage where you can feed the giraffes right out of your hands). Basically the safari was wonderful - - great tour guides and great tourists. We made plenty of new friends.
After the constant movement of the tour, it was time for the beach. We made our way to Zanzibar on the stinkiest (remember the B.O.?) ferry ever. We couldn't even bear to sit inside it smelled so bad. Way too much humanity. But the island was gorgeous. The whitest, softest sand and clearest water possible. It was a week well spent, and the decision was made there to fly to Jo'burg, South Africa rather than torture ourselves by going it all overland.
Sorry for the boring as hell, poorly written posting but it is all about catching up at this point. Urgh.

The Last Crusade

Petra, the Rose Red City, was the main reason for visiting Jordan. Spectacular ruins. Have you seen the third Indiana Jones movie? I think it was called The Last Crusade, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it's the one with Sean Connery and Harrison Ford is looking for the Holy Grail. They filmed a lot of it here at the ruins in Petra because of how incredibly spectacular they are. It covers a huge area of ground and a person could easily spend two or three days exploring them...unfortunately we only had one to spare and by the time noon hits it is so hot that it becomes way too unpleasant. Luckily we started our day at 7:30 because we hit the wall at noon. It is beyond words.
Getting out of Jordan proved to be frustrating. We took a mini bus to the coastal town of Aqaba in order to take a ferry across to Egypt. It probably didn't help matters that the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el Sheikh had just been bombed the day before. After some time trying to communicate at the port and determine what time the next ferry departed (I still don't know exactly) it appeared that we would have to wait in the hideous ferry terminal for about 10 hours if we wanted to travel on the same day. No thanks. I really couldn't sort out whether the boat was at 7, or 9, or 11 . . . I was seriously on the verge of freaking out on the man working there but managed to exercise self control. We grudgingly caught a cab back into town and found a hotel for the night.
Catching the ferry the next day to Nuweiba, Egypt wasn't too much of a hassle (comparatively speaking) but did involve going back and forth from one window to another to complete all the different steps in the process. We were reaching our fill of the middle east, but still, it was on to Egypt we went.

A Bit of Indulgence

From Damascus it was only a hot, crowded, four hour cab ride to Beirut, but it may as well have been a different world. Gone were the women in veils and head coverings and in their place were women wearing tight jeans and tank tops. The signs were all in English and almost everyone seemed to speak it as well. We didn't lose the high temperatures in Beirut, but we did gain some intense humidity. Think Georgia in July. We splurged and settled into a large, heavily air conditioned hotel room for some down time after our constant movement through southeastern Turkey and Syria. Because of the heat, we decided the best way to explore Beirut would be nocturnally.
Beirut is full of stylish bars and happening nightclubs. It was a Monday night but still the club we went to was jampacked and we were treated to an amazing bartender show a la Tom Cruise in Cocktail ... juggling bottles of booze and pouring shots through glasses stacked 20 high.
Needless to say, we spent the next day doing some recovery and having what we call an "American Day" with burgers at The Hard Rock Cafe. Our free 48 hour transit visas expired quickly, so we made a dash back to Damascus and then hopped straightaway into another taxi for Amman, Jordan.
Amman is built around many hills and while we did stay in the cheap, grotty old part of downtown, there was a thoroughly posh, westernized neighborhood about a 15 minute cab ride away where we spent the evening. There was a startling difference between the two neighborhoods. We went from conservatively veiled women, to women all made up and wearing designer clothes at the snazzy cafe we chose for dinner. I actually had Mexican food for dinner!! Mmmmm...sour cream, my good friend. Oh, how I have missed you. And here is the kicker. As embarrassing as it is to admit, we went next door to the brand new Starbucks that had recently opened. It was another little piece of heaven. After weeks of drinking Nescafe we lingered over our REAL coffees and felt thoroughly indulged.

Four Nights in Syria

We are currently comfortably lodged in the home of Mr. Muslim Remtulah in the town of Arusha, Tanzania. How did this happen? Well, when we were in Damascus, Syria we went out for a fabulous dinner with a very international group of people we met at the hotel. There were a dozen of us, from France, Australia, England, Russia, the U.S and one lovely woman from Tanzania who currently lives in Vancouver, B.C. In the generous way of travellers she instantly invited us to stay in her family's home when she found out that we were headed to Tanzania. We have been made to feel extremely welcome and have met well over a dozen cousins, uncles, and aunts.
As for Syria. . .
We arrived by taking a bus from Antakya (southwestern Turkey) across the border (no hassles at all) to Aleppo and then from there managed to find our way to the bus for Hama, where we spent one night. Hama is a smaller city which was actually subject to a horrible massacre (from it's own leader) in the 1980's (if I am remembering correctly from my reading of the fascinating book From Beirut to Jerusalem). Hama is know for it's immense wooden water wheels called norias which make a continuos moaning noise as they revolve. From there, we hired a taxi to go to an ancient crusader castle named Crac de Chevalier and then our taxi dropped us in the dismal town of Homs where we caught a bus (just by the skin of our teeth) on to Palmyra. There are fabulous ruins preserved in Palmyra which is on the ancient trading route of the Silk Road. Our bus ride to Palmyra was not without a little bit of excitement . . . the bus brokedown on the dusty desert road. This, in itself, was not a problem. A replacement bus was quickly sent, but as the new bus began to take of down the road, I said to Laurel, "Hmmm...I hope they transferred our baggage to the new bus." Of course they hadn't and it's a good thing Laurel ran up to ask the driver while we were still close enough to run back down the road and grab them from the broken down bus. The other passengers must have thought we were complete idiots. We were the only tourists on the whole bus. As foreign as Syria felt, and as much as people looked at us with curiousity, we certainly felt we recieved a warm welcome. In Turkey and Morocco when people came up to offer help, you always knew that they wanted something back (and usually they did, whether it was money, or they wanted you to visit their brother's carpet shop, or a date) but the Syrians came across as a bit more genuine. In Aleppo we had to find a different bus station from the one we arrived at, and we didn't walk more than a block before a man stopped to ask if he could help us. He then walked us the 4 blocks to the bus station and expected nothing in return. The fruitseller at the bus station gave us a big smile, a "Welcome! Welcome!" and a couple of pears. The most challenging task we faced in Syria (in Damascus) was mailing a package of souvenirs home. I like to call it "Arab efficiency". One person behind the counter reluctantly helps you while 3 or 4 others look on when they could be doing any number of things to speed the process. We must have spent close to an hour dealing with the post office even though there was no line. One young fellow there spoke some English and was helping - - he also wanted to use the video recording function on his cell phone (everyone has cell phones here and they all seem to be the newest ones with all the bells and whisltes) to record me speaking so that he could "use it to practice his English". Like and idiot I said yes. He began with benign questions and then came the inevitible "Do you like George Bush?" Of course I went with the "no, not really". Then came "Do you like Condoleeza Rice?" Again, I came back with a negative answer. "Do you like Sharon?" This is when my heart started to beat a bit faster and it seemed that the temperature rose from hot to hotter in the stuffy government building. "Who??", I stammered. "Ariel Sharon", he says. (Pound, pound, sweat, sweat.) I feign ignorance and say "Who is that?" and he responds with the answer as I continue to have no idea who Ariel Sharon might be. We manage to end the video session and finish our prolonged mailing process in a few more minutes and catch a taxi to Beirut. One of the women we had dinner with the night before was from Paris (ethnically Tunisian) and worked at the French embassy in Damascus. She had advised us to go ahead and say we were from Canada "just in case" because there are spies everywhere and had also refused to even say the word "Israel" in conversation, referring to it always as "The country that starts with an 'i' and ends with 'l'." So that added a bit to my post office panic.

The Amazing Race

Have you seen the show? That is how the last three weeks have felt.
We plowed our way through the Middle East (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt) in all of two weeks. In fact, there was one day in which we were actually in three countries -- a four hour taxi from Beirut to Damascus and then right into another taxi for a four hour drive to Amman, Jordan. Not one of my favorite travel days I can tell you. It may sound nice to travel by taxi, but you are crammed into a 20 year old Chevy Caprice, usually with three other hot sweating Arabe men or possibly a family of four with a child sitting on someone's lap. Oh, and it is about 95 degrees out and there is no A/C in the car.
More on the middle east later ... we are now in Arusha, Tanzania and about to head to the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater tomorrow. Kenya was fabulous (except that we weren't as prepared as we should have been for the chilly weather and camping) and we saw an absurd amount of wildlife. Elephants, zebras, gazelle, hippos, rhinos, and more...plus we really caught the wildebeast migration. There were thousands and thousands (millions?) of them.
I wish I could elaborate but unfortunately we are on a tight schedule -- look for more stories in about a week. Promise!

Throne of the Gods

From the bizarre rock formations of Cappadocia we made our way east to the small city of Malatya (population 500,000) to use as a base for our excursion to Mt. Nemrut. We were joined by our new friend, Joel, a hilarious college student from Colorado who helped to keep us entertained.
Malatya is something like the apricot capital of Turkey and we arrived just before the big harvest festival was about to begin. Unfortunately we were unable to stick around and take part in the festivities. No matter how long you are travelling for, there is never enough time to do everything. Our bus landed us in town at two in the morning after stalling out a couple of times en route. After our first choice hostel was full, and our second choice turned out to be too expensive, we settled for some dumpy pension next door and crashed.
The next day turned out to be more simple and successful. In the morning we located the tourist information office and grabbed a tour that was to make it's way to the mountain in a few hours which left just enough time for breakfast (by the way, have I mentioned that Turkish breakfast is cucumbers, tomatoes, crumbly white cheese, a hard boiled egg and tons and tons of bread?).
About an hour into our trip up the winding mountain road to the hotel we would spend the night in, we began a conversation with a lovely family of five (four year-old Mohammed, six year-old Reem, and nine year-old Zaineb and of course their parents) who were also on the trip. Turns out that they are Iraqi and currently live in Baghdad. The conversations that followed were interesting and revealing -- of course we had a lot of questions. The most memorable remark made to me by the mother, Niran, was that there had been days where she left her home and walked over body parts. We all know it's going on, but it really drives it home to meet and speak with someone who is living through it. She said she preferred the previous regime even though she did not like Hussein. "At least it was stable" she said, "and we didn't have this." She was a pharmacist (and her husband a doctor) but had to close her business for fear of being killed now that Sunni and Shia'a Muslims seem to have turned against eachother unlike before. She happened to be Shia'a and her husband was Sunni. The children were beautiful and high spirited and Joel must have taken a hundred photos of them at the summit of the mountain as we waited for and watched the sun set on the western side. When we all said our farewells the following day back in Malatya, Niran's parting comment - - "Pray for us."