mishanadel

[mishanadel]

[mishanadel]

T.A.R.M.A.C.

Tibet Autonomous Region My Ass, China

Tibet is one of the most beautiful countries, I mean places, I’ve visited on my travels, but it was also one of the most bizarre, owing to the almost complete takeover of the urban areas by the mainland Chinese. Arriving in Lhasa you do not get the feeling that you are in Tibet. It’s all bright lights and shop signs in Chinese, like a small, Chinese version of Las Vegas. (I gather that this is pretty typical for Chinese cities.) On one hand, the infrastructure is very good, the cities are fairly clean and the major cultural sights are quite well-maintained. On the other hand, it just doesn’t feel all that authentic. Basically all of the major businesses - hotels, restaurants, and larger stores - are owned by mainland Chinese. The Tibetans work in them…sometimes. The “old city” part of Lhasa certainly looks very Tibetan, aside from the approximately 1000 Chinese flags flying overhead and the small squads of Chinese soldiers who walk counter-clockwise around the main temple (you should always walk clockwise around a Buddhist temple), with traditional architecture and small shops selling arts, crafts, and souvenirs, but everything seems a bit too perfect. I’ve described Lhasa to people as a Chinese-owned Tibetan theme park and I haven’t come up with a better way to describe it.

Our visit to the Potala Palace, the erstwhile home of the Dalai Lama and one of Tibet’s greatest cultural monuments, was emblematic of the surreality surrounding the Tibet-China “situation.” The palace is spectacular, a massive castle-like red and white temple built on a high hill overlooking Lhasa. It’s one of the most impressive structures I’ve seen on my travels. It is still considered the home of the Dalai Lama and much of it has been left, or at least restored to look, the way it was when the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959. As our tour guide, who was Tibetan, guided us around the palace, he consistently used the present tense to describe what the Dalai Lama used the rooms for, as if he had been there at some point in the past 57 years. It’s as though the Chinese, who are sure to be controlling the messages told to foreigners, think this is some temporary disagreement which will be settled shortly. It left me shaking my head.

Outside of Lhasa and Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city, things are a bit different, with the (relative) cleanliness giving way to decidedly less cleanliness (rural Tibet had the most disgusting bathrooms I’ve encountered on my entire trip), far less neon and bright lights and something that feels a bit more like what one might expect of Tibet. The landscapes are desolate and beautiful, the temples and monasteries numerous and actually functioning as temples and monasteries, and the towns small, rugged, and remote. At times you might forget who’s running the place…but probably not. The fact that you are required to be escorted at all times when you are outside the two major cities, to the plentiful Chinese Army checkpoints you must pass through, travel permits in hand, to the unwillingness of the tour guides to answer certain questions makes it pretty hard to forget that the Chinese are firmly in control of Tibet. Or that the Chinese are making major changes to Tibet.

From the massive influx of ethnic-Han Chinese to the “voluntary” relocation of entire mountain towns, it’s hard to think that Tibet in 10 or 20 years (or perhaps much less) will look anything like it does now, to say nothing of the changes that have already happened. Around the time of the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” by China in the 1950s (seriously, that’s what the Chinese call it - there’s even a Peaceful Liberation of Tibet Monument directly across from the Potala Palace), Lhasa’s population was ~50,000. It’s now over half a million. Shigatse has gone from ~12,000 to ~120,000. China is very quickly transforming Tibet from an almost-entirely rural existence into a quite urban one, whether the Tibetans like it or not.

Entire towns are being built by the Chinese along the major roads with modern services and slightly-too-perfect looking Tibetan-style houses. These are for the purpose of moving Tibetans who live in remote mountain areas to places where access and services (and presumably control) is better…you know, “for their own good.” We asked about the relocations and actually got a fairly honest answer. They are deemed voluntary as the Chinese will not forcibly move Tibetans who don’t want to move, but those who do not move will be left behind to fend for themselves in a greatly diminished community with little to no services and, presumably, a government that won’t exactly rush to help if needed. Not exactly a free choice. I personally have no problem with modernization or urbanization, but the people affected should be the ones making the decision and that hardly seems to be the case in Tibet.

Leaving politics aside, which one kind of has to do to enjoy Tibet, I really liked my visit. The Tibetan people are extremely friendly, the temples and monasteries are magnificent, and the landscapes are some of the most incredible I’ve seen. The Tibetan Plateau is extremely arid, receiving virtually no rainfall, with only the snowmelt serving to irrigate the land. The virtually vegetation-less hills leading up to the completely vegetation-less Himalayas run a gamut of colors, from yellows to sandy browns to reds. Much of it reminds me of northern Arizona and southern Utah or the desert to the southwest of the Bolivian Salt Flats. And then there’s the Himalayas.

It’s hard to fathom the Himalayas until you’ve actually seen them up close. Nothing I’d seen in pictures or on television fully prepared me for seeing them in real life. They are just so impossibly massive and jagged and rough-cut. They jut out of the plateaus below them so abruptly it’s as if they were cut out of solid blocks of iron and simply dropped onto them. Even if Everest Base Camp, which sits at about 17,000ft/5,200m, were at sea-level, the height of the peaks looming over us would make them very high mountains most anywhere else in the world. Standing at Everest Base Camp and looking south toward the “north face” of Everest, you could see a nearly continuous sheer face dropping from its 29,029ft/8,8848m peak to the high valley below. It was incredible.

Even in this seemingly remote wilderness, evidence of the Chinese abounds. The road to Everest Base Camp is a quite new stretch of blacktop that leads all the way to the temple near Base Camp, with only the last stretch a dirt road in very good condition. I’m not sure if it is out of necessity, caution or Chinese over-engineering, but one section of the road which leads down from a ridge, which provided a spectacular view of the Everest Range stretching across the horizon, had the most ridiculous set of hairpin switchbacks I’ve ever seen. It hardly seemed like we were making any progress as we slowly wound our way back and forth across the hillside at a snail-like pace. Each turn seemed to be only 15 or 20 meters below the last one. It honestly might have taken less time to walk down.

It’s possible to do the entire trip from Lhasa to Base Camp without ever leaving your vehicle, which I almost did. When we reached the temple and teahouse complex which would be our stop for the night, there was the option to hike the last 4km or so to Base Camp, but it was very windy and cold, so we all piled into back the bus and headed off. After a kilometer or so, as we passed some beautiful outcroppings that were catching the late afternoon light, I asked our guide to stop so that I could get out and walk the rest of the way. It just seemed too much of a pity to not walk at least this part of the journey and three of my tour companions thought the same and joined me. The trail, mostly on the road or next to it, was easy enough, but the roughly 60km/h headwind made for a challenging and chilly trek, even over the short distance we had to cover. I’m glad I did it, though, as the scenery was much better appreciated outside of a vehicle and led to at least a small sense of accomplishment when we reached Base Camp. Incredibly, at over 17,000ft and in a textbook definition “middle of nowhere,” there was cell phone service and I was just able to use my freezing, numb fingers to post a quick picture of Everest shining in the late afternoon light, before heading back to the teahouse to get warm.

There were two tour groups with the same company doing the same itinerary at the same time and somehow a girl who was traveling with her two friends had been put with us, despite her friends being in the other group. After much complaining, and an odd amount of resistance from the tour company, she was able to switch to the other bus to be with her friends, though she stayed with us at our hotels as the tour company was unable, or unwilling, to make that change. On the last day, on the way back to Lhasa, she started the morning with us and when we met the other bus so she could switch over, she decided our bus was more fun and we helped convince her friends to join us in our bus, though with no small amount of resistance from the tour company again. Responding to changes in plans did not seem to be the tour company’s strong suit. The rest of day back to Lhasa was a lot of fun and there was one last experience waiting for us.

One of the friends who had come over to our bus had met a Tibetan guy while traveling in China who just happened to be in Lhasa and invited her, and us, to meet him for dinner. We assumed we were just joining him for a casual dinner and drinks, but when we arrived at a fancy hotel on the other side of Lhasa, we were surprised to find him at a dinner party with nearly 20 old friends and business associates, who had come together in Lhasa from the various places in Asia where they now resided. They had been eating and drinking for quite some time, a few of them were pretty drunk, but there was lots of food and drink left and they welcomed us warmly with an amazing spread of local and Chinese dishes including such delicacies as sheep’s head, dried yak and many things I couldn’t identify. There was singing, there was dancing, there were lots of introductions and there was one guy who had to be carried out (not one of us). It was an incredible evening, unlike anything else on my trip.

It was a wonderful last impression of Tibet and one that I will never forget.

[mishanadel]

The Tyranny of Sunrise

Few things seem to universally attract travelers more than the opportunity to watch the sun rise from a beautiful viewpoint, be it on a mountain top or over some significant landmark. While there is something magical about the dawning of a new day, the way the rising light opens up the world and the beauty of the sun coming into view over the horizon, many of these sunrise spots have become so overcrowded that the magic is lost somewhat. Not that I begrudge other people wanting to see the sun come up in these places - they are generally popular for good reason - joining hundreds, if not thousands, of selfie-stick-wielding people in one place is not usually my idea of a good time.

I’ve woken up in the pre-dawn darkness (and frequently cold) specifically to catch sunrise eight times (at least) so far on my trip: Machu Picchu, the Namib Desert, Kilimanjaro, the Taj Mahal, Poon Hill, Phu Chi Fa and Angkor Wat. Some of these have been decidedly better than others. Generally, the best ones are those that have a high size-to-walking-selfie-stick ratio. Machu Picchu, the dunes of the Namib Desert and Kilimanjaro were all large enough areas that you didn’t feel inundated with other tourists, even if there were actually hundreds of people around. Poon Hill benefited from its ridiculous 360-degree vista of the Himalayas, so even though it was very crowded, there was a lot to look at and many places to look from. I have no idea what sunrise at the Taj Mahal looks like because I was standing in line waiting for them to open the gates. Thanks India.

Phu Chi Fa, a cliff promontory on the Thai-Laos border, was by far the most absurd. It was also one of the most beautiful. Standing about 450m above the Mekong River valley, the viewpoint offers unobstructed views across western Laos to the horizon in the east. In the morning, the valley fills up with fog extending as far as the eye can see, with only the continuation of the ridge south and north and the hills of Laos poking through. This makes for a pretty spectacular sight as the sky brightens and the sun finally comes into view. For this reason, it is immensely popular with Thai tourists who travel from Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai and even Bangkok to take a selfie or 50 against the beautiful backdrop. Unfortunately, the area from which one can really appreciate the vista is not very large and during the popular winter period, when huge numbers of Thais come to cool off in the “cold” part of Thailand, it is packed.

We carefully calibrated our visit to be on a Monday, hoping to avoid the weekend rush, only to discover when we arrived that it was a three-day holiday weekend…fail. There were at least 1000 people there and it could have been 1500. The main ridge was packed 10-15 people deep and alternate areas lower down were not much better. We arrived early enough to carve out a spot only a few people from the front, but even so getting a picture without someone’s head or, more often, their selfie-stick in it was challenging to say the least. And that’s to say nothing of the joy of being continuously jostled as people move around you trying to get a better view or picture. I love taking pictures so I can’t fault others for dong the same, but it really does feel like many people, in Asia in particular, are more interested in taking pictures of themselves in places rather than enjoying the actual places. My personal favorite was one Thai woman who stood with her back to the sunrise the entire time snapping selfies. I honestly don’t think she looked at the sunrise at any point while she was there. I hope she got a good one.

I’m not sure there is any place in the world where the sunrise is more hyped than at Angkor Wat (perhaps Machu Picchu). Every day, hordes of tourists wake up between 4 and 5am to rush up to the west gate to try to claim the sacred ground of the northwest corner of the northern pond just to the west of the temple. This is the only vantage point from which the sun will actually rise directly behind Angkor Wat and it also affords the opportunity to get the best reflection shots. Having already heard some underwhelming reports of sunrise in recent days, my travel companion and I were not overly concerned about getting there ahead of the crowds to grab a prime spot. We had decided to bike up from our hostel and we set off at about 5:30 in the pitch dark, completing the 7km ride in about 30 minutes. By the time we got to the ponds, the northern one looked like the GA pit at a Justin Bieber concert. Having no desire to wade into that mess, we grabbed a quieter spot at the southern pond for a while before moving back to sit on the ledge of one of the small temple buildings nearby. (Note: the photo above is of the southern pond. Click here for a good idea of the crowds at the northern pond.)

Conforming to the reports we had heard, the sunrise was a disappointment, kind of like opening a huge, elaborately wrapped gift box only to find a substantially smaller gift inside…it’s still a gift, but not what you were expecting. Due to a bad combination of clouds on the horizon but no clouds in the sky above the temple, there was very little color, other than various shades of blue, and the sky got light without the sun really being visible. It didn’t take long for a substantial number of sunrise viewers to decide they’d seen enough and head off. This actually afforded us the opportunity to go over to the northern pond to see the view from there, but it really wasn’t that much better…the sun was still behind clouds. So, we wandered back to one of the many outdoor cafes offering coffee and breakfast.

There were 9 or 10 of these cafes all in a row, each with their own seating area out front and each with a handful of people, many of them children, running around with menus trying to get tourists to sit at their cafe. Before sunrise, we had been approached by a nice boy of 11 or 12 who tried vainly to get us to sit at his cafe and, when he realized we weren’t going to sit down, asked us to remember him. As we wandered in the direction of the cafes, we were approached by a couple other touts, but managed to find our guy who told us his name was John Michael and kindly directed us to his stall. He patiently waited for us to figure out what we wanted and ran off to place the order, before heading back out to gather in more customers. A few minutes later someone else from the cafe came out to confirm our order. I took from this whole process that the touts only get paid when they get a customer to sit down and actually order, which is why he was so careful to take our order and run it in. This was a Wednesday at around 8am. I wonder what time school starts.

At this point, the sun had finally poked its head out from behind the clouds and I quickly wandered back over to the pond to get a quick picture with my iPhone, a picture that turned out to be one of, if not the, best photos I took that morning. Good things come to those who wait I guess. After a quick and woefully unhealthy breakfast, we wandered back to our bicycles and headed off to explore the temples of Angkor Thom.

I’m happy I woke up to see sunrise over Angkor Wat, but it’s hard not to think that if I had missed it, I really wouldn’t have missed that much. Yes, the silhouette of Angkor Wat is very impressive, but there isn’t really much else around to make the sunrise special. No dunes or mountains to catch the changing light, no clear line of sunlight marching across the landscape. Maybe it was just the subpar sunrise or all the other amazing sunrises I’ve seen this year, but in the end it was just a sunrise.

We went back for sunset. It was just as good.

[mishanadel]

Blogger’s Block

I knew I hadn’t written anything recently, but I only realized the other day that it’s been over two and half months since I posted something. Part of this is due to posting to Instagram more regularly, which covers little travel updates, and part of it is that I haven’t had anything overly funny or absurd happen recently. I guess my travels have been going too smoothly :-)

I actually started a few posts, a couple of which I subsequently scrapped and one that’s been sitting half-written as I figure out how to finish it or if I even should finish it. Maybe I put all my writing energy into my last post, but for whatever reason they just haven’t come into place like my earlier ones.

Well, finally, a few more complete post ideas have started to fill my head, so I think it’s time to finally sit down and put pen to paper…well, fingers to keys really. And what better time than the quiet period around New Year’s :-P

[mishanadel]

The Joy of Traveling Solo

The shit finally hit the fan at a small restaurant in the holy town of Pushkar, India. Two weeks of simmering annoyances and grievances finally bubbled to the surface in an ugly display of accusations and name-calling and a fairly joint decision that we’d rather not see each other ever again. Thankfully, we were the only people in the restaurant, save for the presumably shocked and almost certainly uncomfortable staff.

Aside from 5 weeks at the beginning of my travels, when I was in Antarctica and Patagonia with one of my best friends, my journey had been undertaken as a solo traveler. That changed when I arrived in India and met up with a guy I had met in Antarctica almost 8 months earlier (for purposes of this story I will refer to him as D). While we had maintained contact online and messaged here and there, other than the 11 days we spent on a boat at the southern end of the earth, we really didn’t know each other very well. I knew our personalities were different - he: loud and brash and outgoing, me: quiet and modest(ish) and somewhat introverted - but I figured it could be fun hanging out with someone a bit more lively than myself. I expected there to be some negatives but I figured the positives would outweigh them.

Our plan to meet up had come about when we realized we were going to be in Tibet around the same time and I decided to join the tour he had already booked. This made sense in any case as you cannot visit Tibet without being on some sort of arranged tour. Apparently, the Chinese government doesn’t want tourists wandering around Tibet freely doing subversive things like talking to Tibetans. Later, after my plans for Oktoberfest were scrapped because one of the friends I was supposed to be meeting there mistakenly thought Oktoberfest was actually in October (I mean, that would be ridiculous), I ended up with some extra time and was roped into joining D in India for the two weeks he was going to spend there before heading to Tibet. His original plan was to do the “Golden Triangle” of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, but after a very limited amount of research, I realized you didn’t even need a week for that, so we expanded the itinerary to take in much of the highlights of Rajasthan as well: Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Pushkar.

It quickly became apparent that we had very different travel styles and that both of us were not used to having a travel partner - or even wanting one. Even before we met up in Delhi, I was surprised by D’s refusal to share a room. We were both arriving the same morning but because he was arriving at 3am, he had booked a hotel near the airport for the night prior so he could get some sleep. I wasn’t arriving until almost 9am, but the idea of trying to grab a little sleep appealed to me as well, so I asked if he was willing to split the room. He didn’t seem to like that idea, as he would still be sleeping when I would arrive, and suggested I wait for him in the hotel lobby. In the end, my lost bag fiasco made the whole point moot and I left the airport and headed straight to the downtown Delhi hotel we had booked for the following two nights. Again, despite my suggestion that we split a room, D had insisted we book separate rooms because what would we do if we “met some chicks.” Things were not off to a great start.

Due to my still-missing bag, I was traveling with a bare-bones wardrobe and badly needed to buy some clothes. I had hoped to do that the afternoon I arrived but much of my day had been wasted at the airport trying fruitlessly to track my bag down. When D finally made it to our hotel at around 3:30pm, I said I wanted to head out to try to find a few things and he opted to come along. Our hotel was on a busy market street aptly named “Main Bazar” and we wandered it checking out the shops and getting hassled by every person we passed. In the span of 10 minutes, we had an identical conversation at least 5 times with 5 different people: “Hello. Where are you from? When did you arrive in Delhi? How long are you staying in India? What are your plans?” I did my best to simply ignore them, but D became steadily and visibly more irritated with each of them. I wondered how he had made it through all his months of travel getting aggravated so easily.

I eventually realized that none of the bazaar stalls were going to have what I needed, so we headed for Connaught Place, where there was supposedly a shopping center. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as obvious to us as it appeared on Google Maps and so, in a fit of insanity, we made the mistake of asking one of our friendly interrogators if there was a shopping center nearby. There was, he assured us, and pointed us down a large street which was not in the direction I thought Connaught Place to be. After walking for a few minutes past piles of garbage and streams of what smelled like fresh urine, we decided this didn’t seem right and doubled-down by asking someone else for help. This person described the place we had been directed as a government market that specialized in crafts from around India. Since I wasn’t planning on wearing saris or yoga pants, I explained that I needed some “Western” stores and he pointed us back the way we came.

Arriving back in the general vicinity of Connaught Place (according to Google), we continued wandering hoping to see some sign of the mystery shopping center. Noticing our lost appearance, a passing man instructed us to go into a nearby tourist office and get ourselves a map. In fact, this might have been the same person we originally asked about the shopping center. We seemed to have two or three people tailing us and I didn’t really recall who we talked to which time. In any case, we went into the tourist office for a map���and came out two and a half hours later with a two week tour with a car and driver.

I had not particularly wanted to get a car and driver, preferring to go by train, but once D got his head around the idea he was dead-set on it and eventually cajoled me into it. Multiple times I said I wanted to leave to go buy clothes and think about the options, but he kept pushing me to get on board. Finally I relented, hoping it would mean we could leave the damn tour office already. When we did leave, after what seemed like an eternity, we were properly directed to the shopping area (it turned out it was the huge circle of buildings we had been walking around, but on the inside) and found our way to an H&M. At this point I was just ready to buy the first few things I saw, but once again I was waylaid from my ultimate goal by D’s insisting we first go get the haircuts we had discussed getting, just in case the salon was busy. I was too mentally exhausted at this point to even argue, so off we went to the hair salon. (In fairness, this was a nice diversion as it was a very nice salon that gave a great wash and cut.)

Seemingly done with all the non-clothes-shopping things we could do, we wandered around Connaught Place hopelessly looking for shorts, which are in very short supply in India as most men do not wear them. We eventually stopped into a store that sold a variety of Western brands, but although I did not find anything, D managed to find a pair of jeans he wanted, purchased them and had them hemmed while we waited, another 15 minutes or so. When we left, D decided he was hungry and wanted to go to a place next door that the store salespeople had recommended. All I wanted to do was head back to H&M as it seemed like the only place I’d find what I needed. He opted to go eat and so off I went to H&M, by myself. At this point I was pretty fed up with him and the whole situation, having left the hotel nearly four hours earlier to buy clothes and still not having any, but I was willing to chalk up D’s selfish obliviousness to simply having not traveled with anyone recently. I figured it would get better. It didn’t.

The next day, after a tour of Delhi the tour company threw in as part of our package, we headed back to their office to pick up our itinerary and vouchers. They asked us what time we would like to leave for Agra and this resulted in our first fight of a trip we weren’t even on yet. D wanted to leave at 11am which I thought was rather late and wouldn’t give us much time to see anything other than the Taj, since we wanted to catch both sunset and sunrise there and were leaving the following day. He didn’t seem to care about anything in Agra other than the Taj, wanted to sleep in and didn’t seem interested in compromise. I was probably overly insistent on leaving earlier and this resulted in him throwing his hands up and loudly stating “This is why I travel alone!” My response of tossing the itinerary on the desk in front of me and saying “Well this is going to be a short trip!” likely didn’t help. In the end, after cooling off, we “agreed” on 10am. Later I suggested we talk about the disagreement to see if we could avoid future issues, but he brushed me off saying it was no big deal. I took this as a hopeful sign that it was just a case of two tired people still figuring out how to travel together and not that he didn’t care to find middle ground between us. That was not to be the case.

The following evening, after catching the Taj at sunset from the north bank of the river, we returned to our hotel and discussed our plan for sunrise. D’s primary goal was to get a picture of the Taj reflecting in the fountains in front of it with no people it. In order to achieve this, his plan was to arrive at 5:30 (30 minutes before it opened) to purchase tickets and get in line. I didn’t care so much about getting this photo, was less certain in one’s ability to get it and didn’t really want to get up that early. I was leaning toward catching the sunrise from a rooftop cafe Lonely Planet recommended and heading into the Taj afterward, but he tried to talk me into going with him on the basis that I would regret it if I didn’t. D said he was going to leave the hotel at 5:15 and I told him I would text him in the morning if I was up.

In the end I decided to go with him but forgot to text him, something I realized at 5:14 as I was brushing my teeth. I quickly popped out of my room and knocked on his door to find him gone already, so I finished up, jumped in a tuk-tuk and headed off to meet him at the West Gate. It was still pitch black out when the tuk-tuk dropped me off and I wandered around for almost 10 minutes trying to figure out where the ticket office was, even though two separate people tried pointing it out to me. I finally found it and got in line with him behind two guys who were traveling around the world on their motorcycles. When the ticket office opened, we ended up being the third people to buy tickets (some tour group operator line-jumped us by going in the women’s line) and quickly headed for the gate itself, only to find a substantial number of people already lined up. These turned out to be the tour groups themselves who had gone straight into the line while their guides bought tickets…sneaky, but smart.

The gates were supposed to open at 6, but that time, and sunrise itself, came and passed with us standing, unmoving, in line. They finally deigned to open them around 6:20 by which time the four separate lines (foreign women, foreign men, local women, local men) contained around 100 people that would be getting in ahead of us. Our next stop was the security check which involved going through a metal detector that went off every time, being subjected to a pat down, having our tickets punched manually because the ticket reader in our line wasn’t working and then D’s needing to have his camera bag scanned and checked. The final insult came when they wouldn’t let him take in a small tripod and required him to retreat outside the gate and put it in a locker. I thought he might have offered something like “Go ahead and go in, I’ll find you” but he didn’t and so, not wanting to be rude, I waited patiently inside, only going so far as the main arch to take a few photos before heading back to find him.  

D re-entered 10 minutes later, furious, and blew past me through the arch to the front of the fountains. Upon seeing the hordes of people already swarming over the grounds of the Taj, he determined that his time there was ruined and stormed out after only 5 minutes, heading to the rooftop cafe I had suggested and leaving me behind, stunned and speechless, somewhere between bemused and appalled. I just couldn’t understand how someone could have so little interest in seeing the Taj, even if the perfect photo op hadn’t worked out. Both our driver and I had warned him that it seemed unlikely he’d be the first person in, but somehow he hadn’t mentally prepared himself for this to happen. Yes, the whole gate thing was a fiasco, but why ruin the rest of your visit? I tried to put it aside and enjoy my time at the Taj, by myself.

And so the rest of the trip went. In Jaipur, while I visited Amber Fort and went on a morning bicycle tour, D stayed in the hotel…the entire time. He was still tired from his travels before India and seemed to prefer to stay up late, so that he could post to Instagram at just the right time back home, and then sleep in, than to get out and explore the city. In Bikaner, there was nothing on Instagram or TripAdvisor that piqued his interest and so it was left to me to direct our driver to a temple the driver had seemingly never heard of, despite it being the second-listed sight in my Lonely Planet. This resulted in us winding our way through tiny streets our car had no business being on and almost causing gridlock when we got stuck at a narrow three-way intersection with tuk-tuks in front of and behind us, motorcycles everywhere and too little space to turn around. It eventually cleared, but for a minute I thought we might be there all day. In Jaisalmer, we mostly went our separate ways except for our camel safari and a trip to see the cenotaphs just outside the city, two things that combined to result in our second fight of the trip.

The morning after the camel safari, where, by the way, D barely rode the camel and didn’t camp out in the desert which seemed to defeat the purpose of the safari, he was short on cash and so I paid for him some amount between 450 and 500 rupees. That 50 rupee difference ($0.75, by the way) would be the straw that broke the camel’s back (sorry, that’s a pretty bad camel safari joke). Later that afternoon, when we went to the cenotaphs, I paid for both our tickets for simplicity’s sake and updated the amount he owed me (he had been insistent on keeping close track lest we forget who owed whom what). He immediately disagreed with me by those 50 rupees and I countered with what I thought had been the amount we agreed in the morning, or 500. He angrily disagreed with me that it had been 450 and went off on a rant asking where on earth I had gotten 500 from.

I honestly didn’t remember what added up to whatever the amount had been, I just thought we’d agreed on 500, and so I said “Fine, 450, no big deal.” But by now he had his tail up and continued ranting about it, claiming that he had been paying extra for me on many occasions and going so far as to insinuate that I was trying to steal money from him. He was right, in that he had paid extra twice: he called an Uber one night which came to 120 rupees and I had failed to offer to pay him my share; and, after I bought us beers on the dunes for 200 rupees each, he had paid my 250 rupee share of the camel drivers’ tip (though he had “called it even” with the beers). So, in total, we were talking about 160 rupees (or $2.40). And somehow this was worth losing his mind over and accusing me of being a thief. After that, except for meals, and not even many of those, we spent as little time together as we could manage.

By the time we got to Jodhpur we were communicating mostly by text and the night before we left for Udaipur I reached out to D to discuss what time we would leave in the morning. We had a long drive and only one night there and had previously discussed getting on the road early enough to leave time to do something when we arrived. Anticipating pushback, I opened with a suggestion of 9am to which he replied “I’m good with 10, bro” as if that settled it and the matter was over. After re-explaining that I wanted to arrive in time to do something before dark, I offered 9:30 as a compromise and he accepted it, though I would soon learn, very begrudgingly. In the morning we ran into each other at breakfast and he quickly launched into questioning me about what I had planned for when we arrived in Udaipur, why I needed to get there so early and why did 30 minutes matter to me anyway, never mind that I had wanted to leave an hour earlier. He didn’t seem to grasp the hypocrisy that the 30 minutes that he felt should be so unimportant to me were at the same time so important to him.

It’s possible we could have survived all this, if we hadn’t been forced to spend so many hours together in a car during the drives between cities. More than anything, it was the constant stream of self-aggrandizing bullshit I had to listen to during these drives that contributed to a general sense of antagonism. D was basically the Donald Trump of travel companions: he was the best at absolutely everything (took the most “epic” photos, ate the most “epic” meals) and was never wrong about anything and if he was, well, then he didn’t say or do it in the first place. I rarely talk about myself and when I do it’s usually self-deprecating, so listening to someone continually tell me about how amazing they are really gets to me. After the first couple days I took to simply putting in my headphones and listening to an audiobook, but that didn’t stop him from pestering me to talk about all his hot Russian Tinder matches, some “super-hot” girl he hooked up with in the past or was going to in the near future, or regale me with some tale of his past that was invariably a tale of his awesomeness.

My personal favorite was his story of how, at his old job during downtime, he and his colleagues would often watch movies and he had devised a ranking system for the movies based on their names and their perceived skill at their job. So a “Bob” was a 1 or a terrible movie because “Bob” was always screwing up, and so on. D had, of course, given himself the task of actually assigning the names to the ranks and, to absolutely no one’s surprise at all, D had named 9s and 10s after himself. I feigned laughter but my eyes were rolled so far into the back of my head they almost got stuck there. I doubt that helped the overall situation. Though I am better than I used to be, I’m not very good at tolerating people I don’t like and my annoyance with the various events and his bullshit and stupid jokes, mostly at my expense, was clearly showing through.

During our restaurant blow-up, D had said that I never smiled and had no sense of humor and while my initial reaction was to think that wasn’t true, I realized that for him it was. On my own, I was quite happy, but in his company I had become an asshole. I was so fed up with everything to do with him that when I was around him I was in a constantly sour mood. I have a sense of humor, just not his. I mean, seriously, there’s only so many times you can have someone tell a waiter “That’s for the lady here,” motioning to me, before it gets really old (it’s zero times, by the way). The rest of what D considered amusing, and clearly thought I should, involved things like him asking servers who spoke barely-passable English for separate bills in the one word of Italian he seemed to know and then reminding me how many languages he “spoke” or finding a hotel spelled “Gaj Palace” funny (he rhymed it with “Hay Palace”). By that point of the trip I wasn’t even pretending to laugh and, after D repeated the joke for the fifth time, since I hadn’t laughed at it the first four, I responded by saying “Yeah, I get it asshole.”

I think I would have felt more responsibility for what happened between us had the fight at the restaurant not devolved into such farce. The fact that we were at the restaurant together at all was a farce. I had told D I was heading out to dinner to a certain place and he had said he was headed somewhere else…perfect. Yet, when he passed the place I had mentioned, he went in to have a look and decided to sit down. When I arrived he was the only person there, so I sat with him…what else was I going to do? As we were waiting for our food, I asked him why he disliked tour guides so much. During our trip, he had reacted to the random guides on the street like they had the plague and when our driver had offered to get us one to explain the religious practices in Pushkar, D had said “No thanks, I’m good” over and over while our driver was talking despite the fact that I was interested and listening to him. I’m not a big fan of guides either and generally don’t get them, but I was just trying to understand where D’s level of dislike came from, as it seemed to border on a visceral hatred.

D didn’t take kindly to my questioning and became very agitated, claiming that I had some deeper motive and that I was being a jerk. When I bemusedly pointed out that he had done the same thing with the “extra 30 minutes in Udaipur” issue, he completely lost it, telling me that I was one of the “worst people he’d ever met,” that he “hated my guts” and that “everyone was laughing at me.” I’m still not sure who ��everyone” was but he mentioned the two random Danish guys he had met in Jodhpur, who didn’t know anything about me except for what he had told them, and “the drivers.” Now, it’s possible our driver didn’t like me as I had gotten really frustrated with him a couple times at the beginning of the trip, but what I do know for a fact is that he had, unprompted by me, mentioned disdainfully to another driver that D had stayed in the hotel the entire time in Jaipur and didn’t seem to like to do anything…and that I was “nice.” Not sure where he got the idea that I was “nice” but he didn’t seem to be laughing at me.

The whole fight seemed more like a delusional rant by a person who couldn’t handle being even remotely questioned, than a legitimate grievance. If he hated me so vehemently, why did he go to the restaurant he knew I was going to? Even the earlier money issue got warped in his head at this point, as he started accusing me of having rounded up to 500, not from 450 or whatever, but from 300-something (mind you still only a couple dollars). Up to that point I had remained fairly calm during all of his ranting, but that was so absurd that I lost my cool and told him he was a “fucking liar” after which I was a little concerned he was going to punch me.

This unfortunate incident left us in a bit of a predicament. Not only did we have almost 48 hours to go before we got back to Delhi, at least 10 of which would be spent in the car, but we still had our original 8-day tour of Tibet together. I had actually been considering switching my Tibet tour dates for the prior few days but hadn’t done so as I hoped we would just be able to get through it all. That now seemed like very wishful thinking and any hopeful thoughts of a reconciliation after the fight ended when I discovered that within only a couple hours he had already de-friended me on Facebook and blocked me on Instagram. #adulting

The following day I reached out to the Tibet travel agency and was able to half-cajole, half-threaten them into switching me to a tour that started two days later. I assured them it was in everyone’s best interest to not have the two of us on the same trip and that I would consider finding an entirely different trip if they didn’t switch me. Thankfully, I still owed them some money. I think that did the trick. Switching the tour didn’t cost anything, but changing my Kathmandu-Lhasa flights cost me $180. It didn’t seem fair that I was eating the whole cost to switch tours, which D had strongly encouraged me to do during the fight, so I sent him a message asking that he share the cost with me. I’m still waiting for a reply.

In some ways I feel responsible for what happened. I went into this situation having an idea of what to expect and yet I seem not to have mentally prepared myself for the possibility that things might go wrong. Yes it was worse than I expected - a lot worse - but I certainly could have handled it better. I let our bad dynamic affect my attitude toward D and my time in India, in much the same way he let the line fiasco at the Taj affect his time there.

I guess if there is one takeaway for me from this, as far as dealing with difficult people I still have a long way to go.

Or I should just travel solo :-)

[mishanadel]

Epic Cluster#%@& Part 2

The bad feeling started not long after I arrived in Delhi.

I had breezed through immigration in less than 5 minutes and was feeling a little giddy about being reunited with my bag, but when I got to baggage claim and found the attendants for Jet Airways, who was supposed to be ferrying my bag from Mumbai to Delhi, they were very busy dealing with a few irate passengers who were obviously having some baggage issues of their own. After a quick explanation, a very nice Jet Airways employee offered to walk me over to domestic baggage claim where my bag would likely be, but asked me to wait 10 minutes until the flight my bag was on had actually arrived and he had hopefully dealt with the other customers.

After waiting, I found him next to the baggage carousel surrounded by a substantially larger group of irate Jet Airways customers. It seemed as though half the flight was missing their bags and they were not happy about it. This did not seem to bode well for the odds of Jet Airways having properly delivered my bag. I waited another 15 or so minutes, but it became clear he wasn’t going to be able to help me any time soon. He indicated I could walk over to Domestic Arrivals myself and so off I went…to make a major mistake.

I thought I needed to leave the International Terminal to get to the Domestic Terminal and so I walked out of the building only to realize too late that they were in fact connected inside. This provided me my first exposure to Delhi’s wonderful fall climate. It was about 9:30am and it was already 30 centigrade and very humid. I began sweating almost instantly. I very quickly attempted to get back into the terminal but only made it as far as a security guard who would not let me in but instructed me to go to Door 1 all the way to the other end of the terminal. So off I went.

Arriving at Door 1, I explained my situation to the guard there, but he also would not let me in and told me I had to go to the Jet Airways counter in Departures on the second level. So up I went. It took me two more security guards, both of whom denied me entry and pointed me elsewhere, before I finally found may way into the Visitors Area where the airlines had their walk-up ticket counters. The Jet Airways woman seemed a little perplexed by my story, not entirely surprising since they had absolutely no involvement in my predicament, but she called down to their baggage people to see if my bag was there. Unfortunately, they were probably being beaten to death by bagless passengers and did not answer the phone after multiple calls.

She told me to come back in THIRTY MINUTES to see if they were around then. The shock must have registered on my face as I’m pretty sure my eyes bugged out and my jaw dropped open. I asked her if there was anyone else she or I could reach out to for help and she told me I could try the Kenya Airways people over by Door 8 at the opposite end of Arrivals. And so back out into the heat I went and all the way down to the other end of the terminal. It turns out that there are no Kenya Airways people at Delhi Airport. And so back out into the heat I went and walked the length of the terminal for the third time.

When I got back to Jet Airways, they were on the phone and waived me inside their office. Unfortunately, their baggage people had no sign or record of my bag and they instructed me to talk to the international baggage handling companies back down by Door 8…at the other end of the terminal. This was when I started to lose my cool a bit. Those who have spent time around me will know that when I get excited, or agitated, my voice tends to get very loud even if I’m not really intending to be “yelling.” That happened at this point and I had to catch myself and calm down so I didn’t start some sort of international incident. It wasn’t the Jet Airways employees faults my bag wasn’t there.

And so, after some debate over why or why not Kenya Airways would still be responsible for my bag at this point, I walked the length of the terminal in the heat for the fourth time. One baggage company had an attendant who told me they did not work for Kenya Airways and pointed me next door to the other baggage company who had no attendant, but did have a very helpful sign indicating which airlines they worked for. Kenya Airways was not one of them. It turned out that Kenya Airways lack of presence in Delhi likely had something to do with the fact that they do not operate out of Delhi, which I learned in talking to another security guard and two random guys who I think worked at the airport, though they could have been restaurant employees for all I know.

Armed with this new information and at the point of completely losing it, I walked the length of the terminal in the heat for the fifth time. I explained the news to Jet Airways, kindly insisted that they were the only possible people who could have my bag and pleaded with them to have someone actually search for my bag. To their credit, they did call down again to baggage and had someone come up and talk with me briefly before heading back down to search, in vain, for my bag. At this point it became apparent that my bag had not made it from Mumbai, or perhaps even out of Nairobi, and that I would need to go back to Kenya Airways to figure out what happened. So I plopped myself down on the floor, there were no chairs by the ticket counters, and pulled out my phone.

About an hour and many unanswered calls to Kenya Airways baggage department later, I finally got ahold of someone in their customer service department. They were able to pull up my case and see that my bag had been scheduled to be sent to Delhi (good news, I guess - at least they had it in the system) but could see no further information. They told me they would look into it and get back to me.

And so, feeling that I could accomplish nothing further at the airport, I finally left, four hours after I arrived from Doha, with only my backpack.

[mishanadel]

Epic Cluster#%@&

So I arrived in Zanzibar today after an annoying three-leg flight from Entebbe, Uganda. My bag, however, did not.

Maybe the travel gods were telling me not to go to Zanzibar. The trouble started when the flight I had planned on taking disappeared. I guess it could have been booked up, but I really don’t think so. It showed up on a different site and I was able to put a booking through but then they came back two days later saying they couldn’t confirm it. Something weird was going on. And this really messed with my overall travel plans as the other flight options were either really expensive, really long (no, I don’t want to fly overnight through Addis Ababa), or at inconvenient times. In the end I booked the three-leg flight which left in the morning and required me to travel to Entebbe the night before which was annoying and cost me an extra $50.

The fight itself went from Entebbe to Nairobi and then on to Zanzibar with a hop-stop in Mombasa and was on two different airlines, though I was able to book it as a single itinerary. It didn’t occur to me that the Nairobi to Zanzibar flight, because it stopped in Mombasa, which, like Nairobi, is also in Kenya, would be a domestic flight, so when I arrived in Nairobi, I wandered around almost the entirety of the international terminal, Terminal 1, trying to figure how to check in to this second flight. I asked three or four people before discovering on my own that it was in a different terminal, Terminal 2. I ended up having to go out through immigration on my way to Terminal 2. Thankfully I had purchased an East Africa Tourist Visa which is a multiple entry visa or I would have had to pay for another one just to get to my other flight.

When I finally got to Terminal 2 and went to check in for my next flight, I casually mentioned that I had a bag that was being checked through from Entebbe to Zanzibar. The woman at the counter looked very puzzled and called over another woman who assured me that this was not the case; that there was no chance that my bag was being checked through and that she was sure that it was in baggage claim back in the international terminal. When I had checked in for my flight in Entebbe, I had inquired about having my bag checked through and after a few keystrokes on the computer, they had attached a bag-tag to my bag that listed both “NBO” for Nairobi and “ZNZ” for Zanzibar on it, so they certainly thought it could be checked through. Also, on my way out of Terminal 1 after having cleared immigration, I walked through baggage claim and took a quick look just to ensure that my bag wasn’t there. It wasn’t, at least as far as I could see, so I seriously doubted it would be there when I went back, but they insisted it would, or rather should, be so off I went back to Terminal 1.

Upon arriving back at Terminal 1, I was nicely but firmly denied entry to the baggage claim area by a security guard. He told me that it was an exit only and that I needed to go in the entrance around the side. I walked all the way around to find an entrance which was labeled “Domestic Departures” but since I didn’t have a domestic ticket and hadn’t arrived on a domestic flight, they wouldn’t let me in either. At this point, I was somewhere between laughing and crying. I went back to the original security guard to try to plead my way in again, only to have him tell me, after a bit of a heated discussion, that I needed to use the entrance just around the side that was labeled “Staff Only.” Ah, of course, I should have used the Staff Only entrance. Why didn’t I think of that?

I finally got back into baggage claim and, not surprisingly, my bag was not there. I asked one of the baggage men where the bags from my flight were and he looked around a bit and helpfully offered up a small, brightly-colored suitcase and asked if it was mine. “No” I told him and attempted to explain what had happened with my bag, or at least what I thought had. He thought for a minute and then called over a colleague to help me further, but not before again offering up the same suitcase as he had previously - “Nope. Still not mine.”  The colleague he called over was a very nice woman from Kenya Airlines, who seemed to have responsibility for all baggage issues at the airport. She made a couple calls but could not dig up any information on my bag. No one seemed to have any idea what had happened to it.

It was now less than an hour until my flight departed and since it didn’t seem likely that my bag would materialize any time soon, I headed back to Terminal 2 to catch my flight to Zanzibar, hoping that my bag had miraculously made it onto the plane and would be joining me for the flight. In my mind, at least, that seemed as likely as anything else. Where else could it be? While that question remains unanswered, “on the plane” it was clearly not. I really had thought there was a good chance that my bag would show up in Zanzibar, but I wasn’t terribly surprised when it didn’t. Disappointed yes, surprised no.

Of all the places that my bag could go missing, Zanzibar is probably one of the better ones, in so far as I will be there for over a week spending most of my time sitting on a beach and can therefore wait for my bag and buy a pair of shorts and a t-shirt or three to tide me over. However, my onward travel presents a more serious problem. I can probably get through two weeks in India with a limited amount clothing which I can purchase cheaply, but Tibet and Nepal are another matter. I will need proper cold weather gear and, most importantly, a pair of broken-in hiking boots. The idea of heading off for 14 or so days of trekking the Annapurna Circuit, days which can be upwards of 8 hours and 20kms long, in a brand new pair of hiking boots (of potentially questionable quality), is not an idea I am relishing.

It’s now been about 24 hours since I arrived in Zanzibar and still no word of my bag. The people at the Zanzibar airport seem to be working on it, but it’s very hard to tell exactly what they are doing. There seems to be a lot of just waiting for additional flights to arrive and emails to be responded to. Both they and the people at my hotel assure me that my bag will turn up in another day or two. I really hope so.

Guess it’s time to go out and buy those t-shirts.

[mishanadel]

Gorillas and Chimps and Whitewater, Oh My

I know it’s just a name and I’m sure it has a reasonable origin, but given that they lead as many as 88 people into it every day in search of gorillas, maybe Uganda should consider changing the name of The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Perhaps “Steep and Challenging” or “Wet and Slippery” or “Bug Infested.” Any of those would be technically more accurate than “Impenetrable.” Though, in fairness, I could see where they got the name. The hillsides are incredibly steep - I measured one we were coming up at almost 50 degrees - heavily forested and blanketed with a thick layer of undergrowth. It was hard to even see dirt underneath the layers of fallen leaves, branches and vines.

Thankfully, the family of gorillas I was assigned to track wasn’t too far into the forest. We had only walked up one hill, or a part of one really, down the other side, and had gone part way up the next hill, a process which still took us over an hour, when we ran into the trackers who locate the gorillas in advance of our arrival. Seemingly out of nowhere, we heard crashing in the brush and got our first glimpse of a gorilla as it made its way down the hillside. The group was a large one, 17 individuals I think, and included three silverback gorillas, one dominant and two subordinate. Unfortunately, the group had finished feeding for the morning and was on the move, which meant we would be on the move with them.

After a few sightings at a distance, we got our first close-up encounter when a young male decided to show off a bit and came bounding toward the guides, pounded his chest a few times and ran off down the hillside. Everyone restarted their hearts and as we continued on in pursuit of the group, another young male made his way down the hill and settled right next to the path we were taking, no more than 4 or 5 feet from it. Making our way past him, he paid us virtually no mind, as if we were not even there. Shortly thereafter, one of the subordinate silverbacks seemed to take issue with our presence and jumped down from his spot in the bushes, crashing past the two guides directly in front of me with a bit of a growl. Having been told that this was all just for show and that we should not react and certainly not run, I just stood there motionless. The two guards however, both fell back into me making me wonder if they were just skittish or had more reason to be worried than they let on. We were able to follow this silverback for a while as he pushed on, stopping occasionally to eat some shoots and leaves, but soon our one-hour time limit was up and we headed back to the road, satisfied in our sightings and thankful we still had all our limbs intact.

If tracking gorillas is challenging from a physical perspective due to the terrain, then tracking chimpanzees is challenging due to their preferred location. The terrain where I went to see chimps was substantially more forgiving, a forest of rolling hills which was much less densely packed with trees and undergrowth….”Look…dirt!” However, chimps spend the vast majority of their time high up in the trees and even when you find one, getting a decent look at it can be difficult and that’s if you can keep up. We first came across a mother with her 4-month old baby, perched on a tree branch about 100 ft above the ground. After observing them for a few minutes as best we could, we headed off in search of the larger group, which the trackers had a bead on. However, when we got within viewing distance of them, they decided they didn’t like us and took off at high speed through the tree tops. They were soon well away from us and still moving and with little chance to keep up with them, we headed back toward the mother and child. Luckily, they were still in the same place we left them and we were able to hang out and watch them for quite a while.

In between my trips to see gorillas and chimps, I spent a day and half in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. The primary reason I added yet another safari onto my itinerary was in hope of seeing the tree-climbing lions of the Park’s Ishasha sector. Of course, they were nowhere to be found and, in fact, hadn’t been seen in almost two weeks. Instead, I saw countless numbers of Topi, an oddly-shaped and colored antelope, with high shoulders, a low backside and a few blackish-brown patches covering parts of its otherwise brown body and which, according to my guide, are very stupid; and Kob, Uganda’s national animal, a fairly normal-looking antelope with very impressive horns.

On the second day out, after many hours of Topi- and Kob-viewing, where the closest we came to seeing a lion was a very skittish leopard who slunk through the high grass it was hiding in and disappeared into a thicket, our 4x4 safari van just up and quit without warning…no coughing engine, nothing. It just stopped. The electronics worked and the engine would turn over, but it wouldn’t start. After 20 minutes or so of fiddling with the engine and the wiring, my guide gave up and called in a mechanic and I settled in for a long wait. They eventually showed up and proceeded to fiddle with the engine for another hour or so to no avail. At this point I was wondering if was going to get in some bonus camping, but they called a driver to take me to the lodge where I was staying for the night.

As we were waiting to head off, I asked the driver how far it was to the lodge and he said “One hour.” About 45 minutes later, we reached the junction with the main road and the assistant driver or navigator or whoever it was that was sitting in the passenger seat turned around and said “It’s one hour from here to the lodge.” Huh!? I didn’t even bother asking. One thing I have learned in Africa is that African’s have a very fluid relationship with time. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or a learned response to the fact that something that ought to take 10 minutes can often turn into 2 hours, but I frequently encountered an unwillingness or inability to properly estimate how long things would take, even with caveats. Oddly to me, instead of being conservative and saying that it might take longer, the answer I usually received was the shortest period of time possible with no explanation that it might take longer. The bizarre thing about this situation was that nothing occurred that increased the amount of time to get to the lodge. There wasn’t traffic and the roads weren’t in any worse condition than they appeared to be on any other day.

The main road we turned on to was, however, the single worst paved road I have ever seen in my entire life. Up to that point, I had been fairly impressed with Uganda’s roads, despite things I had heard about them. They were certainly better than either Kenya’s or Tanzania’s roads. This one was definitely an exception. It might as well not have been paved at all. It looked as though they had laid down a single layer of two-inch thick tarmac 10 or 20 years ago and not touched it since. If the term “pothole” is meant to describe a hole that is the rough size and shape of a pot, then these would be more like “bathtub” or “jacuzzi”-holes and there were two or three of them every 50 to 100 feet. Additionally, the tarmac was so badly eroded on the sides that at times the road was no more than about a lane and half wide. It was so bad that cars had taken to simply driving on the shoulder, where it was wide enough, effectively creating a parallel dirt road that was in substantially better condition than the paved road.

Rounding out my Uganda experience was a trip to Jinja, at the source of the River Nile (well, one of them anyway). The primary attraction in Jinja is the whitewater, some of the best in the world, with rapids ranging up to Grade VI, which are too big to raft…you have to walk around. While I thoroughly enjoy whitewater rafting and did that on my first day in Jinja, the real highlight for me was taking an introductory whitewater kayaking course. I have kayaked before in the ocean and was a frequent user of the “duckies” (small inflatable kayaks) on my trip through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, but whitewater kayaks are an entirely different animal. They are very small and light and while that makes them highly maneuverable, it also makes them pretty unstable, at least for the novice user. A fair portion of the two hours we spent in the morning going over basics was spent on what to do when I capsized (not if, when).

Not being one to panic and having just spent a day getting crushed by huge rapids, I was a quick study and had no issue getting myself out of my kayak when needed. I even worked on a “t-rescue,” which involves waiting upside down in your kayak underwater until another kayak comes over so you can use it to flip yourself back upright, and the “roll,” whereby you use your paddle and your hips to flip yourself back upright. The former was fairly easy, at least in flat water, but the latter not so much. My instructor claimed that I was pretty close in my attempts but I think he might have been humoring me. In any case, I had to dump out of my kayak each time. It was good fun to try though, in part to get an appreciation of how hard it is, despite how easy the pros make it look.

After lunch we headed down the river for some more lessons and to catch some small rapids. It was a good thing we spent so much time on getting me out of my kayak because I capsized on pretty much the first of everything: first time entering a current (also the third, fifth and and a couple more times), first rapid, first wave surf…you get the idea. By the end, however, I did start to feel a lot more comfortable in the kayak and made it through a few Grade III rapids without capsizing. It was an achievement.

A quick note about my kayak instructor: toward the end of the day the other person with us, who had just joined the company and was tagging along, mentioned that my instructor was one of Uganda’s freestyle kayak champions and had competed last year at the World Championships in Canada. Oh…okay…wow. No wonder he made everything look so easy.

Now, for the rest of my life, I can say I learned how to whitewater kayak from one of the best kayakers in the world :-)

[mishanadel]

Pole Pole, Very Slowly

So I have to say that summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro was not, in fact, the hardest thing I have ever done, despite having heard that from almost everyone else who has done it. I still reserve that honor for climbing those damn stairs into Machu Picchu. Maybe it was because we felt we were in a time-crunch and were moving much faster, but I was substantially more exhausted at 3500m in Peru than at nearly 6000m in Tanzania.

That’s not to say that Kili was easy. It wasn’t. Summiting is a miserable, nearly-7-hour slog at a snail’s pace in below freezing temperatures in the pitch dark. All you can see is about a 6ft radius of light from your headlamp and really all you see are the feet of the person in front of you as you try not to step on them or your own feet, since you are barely getting one out in front of the other with each step. Of course, it’s this carefully practiced slow pace (“pole pole” which means “slowly slowly”) which enables the vast majority of Kili climbers to reach the summit. While I wasn’t physically exhausted and wasn’t even breathing hard most of the time, on the few occasions I went faster than usual, I was out of breath, tired and wheezing, very quickly. The guides know what they are doing.

Our climb started out somewhat inauspiciously when the group met at our hotel and I discovered that two of my climbing mates were 78 years old. Not that I begrudge people pushing their limits at any age, but when they started mentioning one’s propensity for hypothermia and the other’s expected need for supplemental oxygen, which they generally do not provide on Kili (you need oxygen, you go down), I became concerned that our ascent was going to get bogged down if not outright compromised. The first day of the trek didn’t make me feel any better as we progressed at a pace so glacial I could barely take it. I kept losing my balance because I didn’t have enough forward momentum to keep me going. On the second day I politely asked to trek ahead and went with one of the assistant guides. In both the morning and the afternoon, I did in 2 hours what took the rest of the group 2 1/2.

My fears were both substantiated and alleviated when the two quit on the third day. The one who needed oxygen and had been the driver of the slow pace simply couldn’t go any further and while his friend seemed in better shape, he was suffering from the cold and decided to stick with his buddy and not push on. When we saw them at the hotel afterward, they admitted they had grossly underestimated the challenge. I did feel bad for both of them and our trek was the lesser for the loss of them. One was a NASA engineer from Alabama and Louisiana with whom I had some very interesting, and a couple rather spirited, discussions on science and politics and who always seemed to have a good story to tell…”half of them true” as he said. We bid them farewell and pushed on.

The route I had chosen is called the Lemosho route and is generally regarded as the most beautiful route you can take. It is also longer, both in distance and duration, which aids in acclimatization and leads to a higher summit success rate (I had even gone with the 8-day option over the 7-day option - everyone says it’s so hard…why take any chances). The length of the route came into focus on the second day when I crested a hill on the slopes of the Shira Peak (one of three peaks that make up Kili) and finally got my first glimpse of the mountain itself. My first thought wasn’t “Wow, that’s beautiful,” or “Wow, that’s really high,” but “Wow, that’s really far from here.” Stretching between me and the peak was the expanse of the Shira Plateau, a fairly flat, very beautiful and rather large section of moorland heath, one of the many vegetation zones we would pass through on Kili. It took the rest of that day and the next to get across it.

If there was a defining feature of climbing Kili, it was the dust. It was everywhere. And it didn’t seem like regular dust; it’s an incredibly fine, talc-like version that permeates everything: clothes, socks, skin, hair, tents…fingernails…ugh, my disgusting fingernails. We were provided washing water twice-daily (morning and post-hike) but if you washed up more than a few minutes before eating, you were invariably dirty again by the time you sat down. It was a losing battle and one that I mostly gave up after the first couple days. I was going to be dirty and I was just going to live with it. Problem solved.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about climbing Kili, at least on the long route I had taken, was the amount of downtime we had. Having hiked Torres Del Paine and Fitz Roy in Patagonia and the Lares Trek in Peru, I was accustomed to long, hard days where you rarely reached camp before dusk or even dark. On Kili, we were generally done by lunchtime or early afternoon and often had many hours to kill…and there weren’t that many ways to kill those hours. Sometimes it was warm enough to be outside, catching some sun or admiring the amazing views, but often it was cold and windy and there was little do but retreat into the mess tent or your own tent and wile away the time reading or sleeping. Of course, the camps were full of other mostly young, probably cool people, but with no central place to congregate, there wasn’t really a way to hang out…it wasn’t like I was going to start knocking on people’s zipped up tents. So I read a whole book and listened to a lot of Game of Thrones on tape. Worse things have happened.

So back to summit day. While I didn’t find it as physically demanding as I expected, I do agree that there is a large mental aspect to it. My gloves did not cut it so my hands were freezing the entire time, which of course made the rest of me cold. I eventually gave up on the outer pair and just wore the lighter pair and stuck my hands in my pockets. Spending the last four hours climbing this way was not enjoyable, but at least my hands weren’t numb. Then, perhaps because of the awkward gait caused by having my hands in my pockets, my right big toe started feeling like I had sprained it and my left leg just started generally hurting. I never reached the point where I considered quitting, but I did think to myself “Why on earth does anyone do this? This is awful” and there were a few occasions that I started mulling over just how much more discomfort I would need to be in to start considering quitting. But in the end, I just kept putting one foot barely in front of the other, “pole, pole,” until we reached the top.

Reaching the top changed my entire outlook on the whole endeavor (well, until we started heading down anyway…more on that in a bit). It’s hard to describe the joy of finally getting to Stella Point (which is at the crater rim, not the summit) and knowing (well, thinking) that the hard work is over. We had gotten there in only 5 hours and 30 minutes, a pretty quick pace, and the sun had not even come up yet. Not wanting us to sit around getting cold waiting for the sun to rise, the guides pushed us on to Uhuru Peak (the summit proper) which is about 45 minutes further. At this point, likely due to a burst of adrenaline combined with a lack of oxygen, I was hardly feeling the cold and was gleefully removing my gloves to take photos of the sun as it rose and the changing light on the crater and glaciers. I barely noticed the walk to the summit or even the time we spent there. After what seemed like only a minute or two and a few celebratory photos, we were headed right back to Stella Point.

I kept stopping to take photos, trying to soak in the experience, but before I knew it we were headed right back down the steep slope that made the last 45 minutes up to Stella Point so painful. It’s all crumbled rock (“scree”) and it’s not much fun to walk in. It is, in fairness, much easier to walk down in than walk up in and if there is enough of it, you can “ski” down it, taking large steps and using your momentum and the looseness of the scree to skid down. This is fun and fairly quick, but we couldn’t do it the whole way. We eventually came to harder ground and let me tell you, when your legs are shot, trudging downhill on hard ground is a nightmare. I was also starting to feel very tired and had developed a blistering headache. I likely hadn’t eaten enough or drank enough water, but it barely occurred to me to do either - such was the state of my brain on limited oxygen I guess. I stopped as many times in the last hour back to base camp as I did on the whole way up.

We finally reached base camp and our tents around 9:15am. In total, the round-trip had taken us only 9 hours. In some ways it seemed like less and in some ways it seemed like a whole lot more. After a quick break to relax and pack up our gear (and take two Aleve with a lot of water), we were treated to brunch and then quickly sent off again for the next camp where we would be spending the night. This was the point where the misery really set in. The path down from base camp was steep and rocky and required strength and concentration, two things I had in short supply. What could have easily been a 2.5-3 hour hike turned into a 4-hour death-march which had me again wondering why anyone did this. Reaching camp, I didn’t even have energy to wash up. I ate lunch, laid down, got back up for dinner and then promptly passed out again.

The following day was only marginally better. The hike from the last camp to the exit gate was about 4 hours along a maintained path, but it was fairly steep and the ground was hard-packed and just wet enough to make it slippery…very slippery. I consider myself to have very good balance and to be very sure-footed but I slipped a few times and fell properly once. It’s surprising how exhausting it is just trying not to fall the whole time. I think I felt as much joy and elation at reaching the “Congratulations” sign at the exit gate as I did the summit.  All I wanted was a hot shower and a beer…and not necessarily in that order. (As luck would have it, they had beers for us at lunch before we left the mountain.)

Having had a few days now to reflect on the experience, I can honestly say that I am very glad I did it and that I would absolutely never do it again. I think there are “experience” people and “achievement” people. The former get the most joy out of being places and doing things, for their own sake; the latter get the most joy out of pushing their limits and accomplishing things. I don’t think you have to be entirely one or the other, but I do think a lot of people fall strongly into one or the other category. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am more of an “experience” person. Summiting Kili was special and I do feel a sense of accomplishment in having done it, but I enjoyed the 6 days of trekking leading up to it just as much. If I were to come back and do it again, I think I would enjoy the trek but I would struggle to care about pushing myself for 6-7 hours to reach the summit again.

Once was enough for me.

[mishanadel]

Animal Fatigue

If you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to see too many wild animals, let me tell you that it is. There are really only so many zebras, wildebeest, baboons, giraffes, and even elephants you can see before they start to seem a little less interesting. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments which are unique and special, such as when a herd of close to 20 elephants - mothers, juveniles and babies - came wandering across the road in front of our truck. Getting to see that many elephants up close and personal, doing elephant things like tearing limbs off trees and plucking leaves from branches with their trunks, is always special. And who doesn’t love baby elephants…I mean c’mon.

But I definitely noticed on my Masai Mara-Serengeti safari that I was getting a little jaded to animal sightings that didn’t involve a large predatory cat. “Huh…what’s that…a giraffe right next to the road? Wake me up when you see a lion.” And for the first three safari days we had on the trip, two in the Mara and one in the Serengeti, we saw exactly zero lions, leopards or cheetahs. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t plenty of food on offer for them. It was a veritable moving feast of thousands and thousands of wildebeest and zebra and antelope in the Mara - in fairness a pretty amazing sight, not quite the unbroken sea of hundreds of thousands of animals shown on Animal Planet, but still animals in groups large and small stretching to the horizon - as well as smorgasbord of animals in the Serengeti. It was as if an all-you-can-eat restaurant had thrown open its doors…and no one had shown up to eat. I was starting to wonder if we would even see any predators at all before leaving the Serengeti.

Our wishes were granted on our second day as we made our way across and out of the Serengeti. We were treated to four separate lion sightings, including a large group of lionesses with their offspring in a range of ages and what appeared to be the aftermath of a battle for mating rights with one lioness. We first spotted a male lion limping away with an undetermined injury and then came across another male lion, who had a very large gash across his cheek, along with the lioness who he had painfully won the right to mate with. There were about 7 vehicles surrounding the pair and the male lion, presumably in some pain and probably just wanting to put the moves on his girl, was not in a good move.

Some asshole in one of the other vehicles kept standing up and waving his arms which caused the male lion to get up and move in the direction of the vehicle. He never got very close to it, but I was kinda hoping he would flip out and try to jump into the vehicle, at a minimum to make that stupid jerk shit his pants. We eventually moved alongside the pair and while our vehicle was fully enclosed, some of our movements inside caught the attention of the perturbed lion and he got up a couple times and stared at us. Once or twice when he actually moved in our direction, I mentally measured the height of the windows and how large they were, since they were open, and slowly moved toward the back of the truck. Nothing ever happened, but he was clearly pissed.

We were also treated to a quintessential leopard sighting, with a beautiful adult perched lazily along a tree branch, legs and tail hanging down. It was pretty much a postcard shot, which I could have gotten if we were closer or I hadn’t dropped my camera in the Mara. My replacement camera was working fine, but with a much shorter zoom I couldn’t really get a close up and had to rely on trying to use my iPhone along with my binoculars. I was able to get a pretty decent shot, but it’s not going to be gracing any magazine covers.

Our next stop after the Serengeti was the famed Ngorongoro Crater, a place I had been looking forward to ever since I started planning my Africa trip. Perhaps my expectations were too high, having heard so much about the concentration of animals in the crater, but I have to say I was kinda disappointed. The setting is pretty spectacular and there were definitely animals, but it didn’t really seem like all that many. It was very windy, which apparently scared the black rhinos which reside there into the foothills where we couldn’t go and the rest of the animals seemed fewer and farther between than they had been in the Mara or the Serengeti.

The one exception to this was right at the beginning, when we came across a pack of maybe 30 spotted hyenas finishing off a wildebeest carcass that they likely killed that morning. Around the perimeter were the largest hyenas relaxing after having taken their fill, their heads tinged reddish with blood, while the smaller hyenas picked the carcass clean, getting what they could from what was left. And there wasn’t much. It was basically a skull with skin on it and a hide. Everything else had removed, including the eyes and ears and all of the other bones. It was kinda amazing. It was also fun to watch the hyenas yap and nip at each other over the carcass. They are ugly animals - they remind me of what Cerberus, the hell-hound, might look like - but they are also kinda cute at the same time - like an ugly-cute mutt you’d get at the pound.

The trip mostly wrapped up with two days spent in a town called Mto Wa Mbu, which seems to serve as a middle-ground between the traditional herder life of the Maasai and the more modern life to be found in larger cities. We got to see both sides of this with a tour of the town, which focused on their current rice and banana agriculture, craft workshops and the local, home-brew banana beer production; and a trip to a traditional Maasai village. I have come to dislike these village tours as I tend to find them either wholly inauthentic or simply contrived. I almost backed out, but there was a very tasty sounding local dinner on offer after the village visit and not being one to pass up good food, I went along. While we did get to participate in some traditional Maasai dancing, which consisted of jumping up and down repeatedly (my calves hurt for three days after), and were shown the inside of an actual hut, which was about the size of a extra-large round dining table and housed five people, it was, as I feared, pretty lame. After a very brief explanation of Maasai life and a couple questions, I was left to wander around the small village, trying not to make eye contact with the woman trying to sell me various handicrafts I didn’t want.

The meal, however, made the whole village visit worthwhile. It was a wide variety of dishes that would be prepared for a special event, such as a wedding. There were meat stews, beans, potatoes, salads, spicy salsas and my favorite discovery of east African cuisine, the chapati. How exactly these came to be so popular in east Africa I have no idea, but I am certainly glad they did. They serve them with everything: breakfast, lunch, dinner, you name it. And they are really good. The meal was outstanding…possibly the best I’ve had in all of Africa.

The next day we had a short drive to Arusha, where I would be leaving the group as it was the starting point for my Kilimanjaro trip. After some lunch and a wander around a very large and rather fancy art gallery/cultural museum/gift shop, we headed back to our campsite outside of town for a last dinner and a few drinks before I took my leave and caught a taxi back to town and the hotel I had booked. The rest of the safari crew was getting up at 6am to start the drive to Nairobi and I wanted no part of that.

TBC at the “Roof of Africa”

[mishanadel]

Victoria Falls to Cape Town, Overland

The first leg of my Africa adventure was a 22-day “overland” trip from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to Cape Town, South Africa. “Overlanding” is a term generally used to describe long-distance travel in a large, purpose-built truck or bus and which usually involves camping. This trip was with Intrepid and we were using a very sizable Mercedes truck with a 24-seat main cabin fitted out with big seats, two tables, lockers, a freezer, a couple coolers and even power outlets to charge all the electronics people carry with them these days.

Our group was 17 people, comprised of 8 Aussies (including 2 Tazzies), 3 Swiss, 2 Germans, 2 Brits and 2 Americans. The age range was 19 to 60-something and overall had a fairly quiet feel to it. Seven of the 17 people were on the trip having started at an earlier point, Zanzibar or Nairobi, with a few of them having already done almost 40 days. They took advantage of the opportunity to have a few nights in a regular bed and had upgraded to cabins at the place we were staying in Victoria Falls. Having spent so much time together and not having gotten to know us yet, they kept to themselves and so the first two nights of the trip everyone had gone to bed or otherwise disappeared by 9pm. I was left to drink by myself in the bar, wondering exactly how quiet the group was going to be.

In the end, there were really only four of us that had much interest in hanging out in the evenings. Everyone else, except for the occasional beer or cider after dinner, pretty much packed it in by 9 or so. There were a couple nights where people hung out playing Spoon, which I introduced to the group and was good fun whether or not people were drinking, and even one night where a handful of us stayed up listening to music by the fire and eventually got ourselves in trouble for being too loud. Well, really one person was being too loud, but I’ll just leave that alone. That isn’t to say I didn’t have fun on the trip, but little of it was of the partying variety. Some change from my South America trip :-)

The trip itself was pretty spectacular, spanning game reserves both extremely lush and exceptionally arid, a river delta which simply vanishes into the desert, terrain of hills and mountains and sand dunes and a canyon which gives the “Grand” one a run for its money.

However, about 10 days into the 22 I was wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into and if overlanding was really for me. After a great start at Victoria Falls and Botswana’s amazing Chobe National Park (there are something like 10,000 elephants there and I think we saw most of them…just kidding, we obviously didn’t see that many, but we did see A LOT), it felt like we spent that vast majority of the next week in transit. Yes, we visited the Okavango Delta and Namibia’s Etosha National Park, both of which were great, but around and even during those, there was so much transport time that I was really wondering if this was the best way to do this part of Africa…or anywhere for that matter. In reality, with the distances so vast and the terrain so sparse, there just isn’t that much to see and it takes a really long time to get from one place of interest to the next. I do think Intrepid could improve their itinerary a little bit - two days allotted to the delta was too much given what we actually did - but it’s not obvious what the better options are.

Once we reached Swakopmund, the adventure sports capital of Namibia (and also a firm relic of German colonial occupation), things improved. I finally got to go skydiving (!!!!!!!), rode quad bikes over endless sand dunes and ate dinners at a table (it’s the little things). After Swakop, we headed to the world’s highest sand dunes in the Namib Desert outside Sesriem. Waking before dawn, we climbed the famous Dune 45 (or was it 46…not sure) to catch the sunrise, followed by a 4x4 journey to Sossusvlei, a dry salt pan surrounded by massive dunes, including the biggest of all, Big Daddy. We didn’t have time to hike all the way to the top, but two of us did climb part of the way and then slid and ran down the back side of the dune. It was great fun.

The following two days had us in Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world, to catch a gorgeous sunset and at the Orange River on the border between Namibia and South Africa, where we were able to go canoeing - nothing overly exciting or adventurous, but a very relaxing float down the river. I even got to see an African fish eagle, cousin to America’s bald eagle, swoop down out of a tree, pluck a fish from the water and fly back to its roost - I’d never seen that before and it was pretty special. After that, we were pretty much done, save the trip from the border to Cape Town. It was a fairly long distance on the map, but it’s amazing how quickly you can cover distance on well-paved roads.

Our arrival in Cape Town marked the official end of the trip, but some of the people were sticking around for a few days and three of us took advantage of the city by staying out at some random club until 3am. While it seemed like a good idea at the time, it didn’t mesh well with getting up at 7am for a trip down to the Cape of Good Hope. Having already been, I seriously considered bailing, but I had already paid for it so I dragged myself out of bed with about 15 minutes to spare, thanks to a friendly wake up nudge by one of my fellow club-goers, and piled into the van. I pretty quickly wished I had stayed behind. The tour was led by a driver/guide with bad English and a worse accent who insisted on talking the entire time we were driving. If the information he was disseminating had been useful it might have been tolerable, but it mostly consisted of horribly obvious tidbits that he repeated three or four times to ensure that we had heard it. It was truly painful and I tried my best to sleep through it.

The rest of my time in Cape Town was uneventful. I walked around areas I hadn’t visited previously, hiked to the top of Lion’s Head at sunset for a spectacular view of Table Mountain and the city and generally enjoyed the city life for a few days. Pretty soon it was time to fly off to Nairobi to join up with my Masai Mara-Serengeti safari tour.

TBC in East Africa.

[mishanadel]

Murphy’s Law of (Im)Perfect Timing

If you had told me before I started my travels that I could only have a “proper” camera - one with a good zoom and some advanced functionality (i.e., not a smartphone camera) - for one section of my trip, I would have picked Africa in general and the Masai Mara and Serengeti portion in particular, since that is when I would be doing game drives and seeing lots of animals for which you really need a zoom lens. For everything else I could probably get by with a smartphone.

So of course it would be that on my very first day in the Masai Mara, on a game walk no less - a game WALK - I would fumble my camera out of my hand and break it. I had just taken a photo and didn’t like something so I was fiddling with the settings and somehow it slipped in my hand and then out of my hand. For some reason I didn’t have the wrist strap on, which I almost always do - maybe it was because we were walking…how could I possibly drop it. It bounced off my knee and I think my shoe before hitting the ground. It didn’t seem like an overly hard drop, but when I picked it back up the zoom/focus mechanism wasn’t working - the lens was frozen in place, half extended. It was zoomed out when I dropped it and it must have hit the lens when it landed. Though the electronics seemed to still be working, the camera was as good as dead.

When I went to South Africa for the World Cup in 2010, my camera was stolen out of my bag in the hotel on the very first day in Cape Town, really within the first few hours that we were there. But that was Cape Town. I was able to find a camera shop that had good equipment and buy a new camera - albeit at about a 40% markup to what I would have paid in the US. I still have that camera, though it is safely back in the US as I didn’t want to bring a full dSLR with me. (As an aside, I actually walked past that camera shop when I was in Cape Town a few days ago.)

Now, however, I’m in west Kenya and Tanzania and finding a camera store to attempt to fix my camera or replace it is not such an easy task. Thankfully, in between the Masai Mara and the Serengeti we had one night in a town on the shores of Lake Victoria and in the morning our guide/driver was heading in to take care of some banking necessary for entry into Serengeti National Park and was using a local cab driver who was able to take me around to a few stores. None of them was a “camera” store, so any thought of fixing my camera was out, but one of them did have two camera options and, so, for about $90 I was able to get a perfectly decent Canon IXIS with an 8x optical zoom - not great, but still a heck of a lot better than using my iPhone.

I guess I’ll just add that $90 to the “miscellaneous travel expenses” category :-)

[mishanadel]

Lima to Buenos Aires and Everything in Between (Part 4…and the end, I promise)

After nearly 5 weeks of buses and various other land transportation, we woke up at 4am and headed to the Salta airport to get on an airplane. It felt very strange. Arriving in Buenos Aires felt equally strange. After mostly passing through small towns and large but relatively underdeveloped cities (see: La Paz) we were in a real city. I have to say it was kinda nice though to be back in “civilization.” Though I enjoyed most of the places we had passed through, I do still love big cities with all that comes with them.

The first day and night were spent soaking up as much of BA as possible. Some of us went on a really cool bike tour of the older, and generally poorer, parts of BA. We grossly underestimated how cold it would get in BA and by the end of the tour, after the sun had dropped, we were freezing, in particular the two British gap year kids who were wearing their standard uniform of shorts, a “beater” and a hoodie. After power walking back from the tour to our hotel, in part because we were late and in part to warm up, we rejoined the rest of the group and headed off to a tango dinner show - one of those “can’t miss” things in BA. While clearly very touristy, it was still really enjoyable as it guided us through the evolution of tango and was accompanied by an excellent dinner.

The following day represented the official end of the tour and while a handful of people would be sticking around after the tour ended, quite a few in the group were leaving that night or the morning after, so this was our last day together. It was also a Saturday night, so the plan was an appropriately late dinner followed by a night out at a club. It was a bit of a shit-show. Our guide was continuing on to Rio with four of the people in our group along with some others who were joining in BA and since our tour was technically over, he was with them. We had made plans to meet at the club at 1am but some of the people he was with had taken naps and overslept and they ended up being an hour late. It was bitterly cold that night, so we were left shivering outside the club unable to get in since he had made the arrangements and needed to be there. We were not happy to say the least.

He had reserved a table at the club and indicated that this included alcohol. Well, it included two bottles of alcohol. How he ever thought that was going to be enough for the whole group I will never know, but it was gone in less than 30 minutes. Because this was the end of most people’s trips budgets were running pretty tight, but we were able to procure another bottle of vodka, along with some energy drinks, to help keep the night going. Good thing too. Many of us had actually started our Saturday at a pub in San Telmo in order to watch the England-Russia Euro match, so I was pretty wiped out by 2am or whatever time it was, even though I had taken a nap after dinner. The energy drinks did the trick, though, and I ended up staying at the club until almost 6am and then walking back to the hotel after I refused to pay 120 pesos for a cab. It seemed like a ridiculous amount to pay for a five minute cab ride which should have been 40 or 50 pesos at any other time. Of course, the difference was like 5 dollars so it was pretty silly to refuse it and walk, but it was the principle :-)

After recovering from the club, the three of us who were left took the ferry across to Colonia, Uruguay, to check it out and get some extra stamps in our passports. It seemed like a nice town with some cute shops and old streets and would probably be a lively, fun place to visit in summer, but in winter there really wasn’t too much to do. The highlight was renting a golf cart to cruise around in which was both absurd and hilarious. We did catch a pretty spectacular sunset, though. You could even see the setting sun reflecting off Buenos Aires’s tall buildings in the distance.

We headed back to BA and subjected the vegetarian among us to our second straight steakhouse dinner, in part because the first one had been so disappointing. This one was much better. The steaks were so impressively huge that she almost tried some. Almost :-) I think it was the largest steak I’ve ever been served which was only for one person (see picture at the top). I ate the whole thing. The place also had fantastic drinks, which we thoroughly enjoyed and which eventually resulted in a cucumber slice slapping incident. It was hilarious…to us as least. Thankfully we were pretty much the last people in the restaurant.

The last of my fellow travelers soon bid me farewell and I prepared to spend another 10 days in Argentina solo, 6 in BA and 4 in Mendoza. Most of my time was spent wandering around trying to find food that wasn’t steak-related, interspersed with trips to steakhouses. I went to a private asado dinner held in a Palermo loft, had a steak-heavy lunch while on a wine-bike tour and a steak-heavy dinner at Francis Mallman’s restaurant in Mendoza and had my last meal at one of BA’s most famous steak places, La Cabrera. No wonder I went almost-vegetarian after I got back to the US.

With my time in South America at an end, it was finally time to head back to the States for a bit of a break, some warmth and to prepare for the remainder of my journey.

Next up…Africa!

[mishanadel]

Lima to Buenos Aires and Everything in Between (Part 3)

The final portion of our tour started with us heading into the Salar de Uyuni (the Bolivian salt flats) and across to the Atacama Desert on the far side. To say that the salt flats are surreal is an epic understatement. A sea of absolute whiteness stretches out as far as the eye can see, punctuated only by mountains rising in the distance seemingly floating above pools of water but which are only mirages. The most popular thing to do in the salt flats is use the endless whiteness to create crazy and often hilarious false-perspective photos. Having seen so many of these photos that people have taken over the years on the salt flats, I mistakenly assumed that they would be easy to take. Not so. It was much harder to line up the shots than I expected and even harder still to think up ones that every other person who had been there hadn’t already done. In the end, we got some good shots, but I left feeling a little disappointed that we hadn’t done better. It didn’t help that my back, still sore from earlier in the trip, seized up while I was trying to pose for a “holding up a truck like Atlas held up the world” shot. I spent most of the rest of the time wobbling around stiffly trying to keep from making it any worse.

The journey across the salt flats and the desert was a 3-day trip in 4x4s with nights spent in very basic accommodations on the edge of the flats. It had been quite cold at night during the Lares Trek, but it didn’t even come close to how cold it was in the salt flats. The places we stayed only had heating in the common areas, though even this was limited, and spending any time outside once it got really dark was a painful experience. On the second night in the flats, we managed to arrange for some portable heaters to be set up where we were hanging out after dinner, drinking and listening to music. These heaters were similar to the ones you’d see outside at a restaurant on a cold night, with a propane tank and heating element that radiated heat directionally, except that these were literally just a propane tank with an attachment, which screwed into the valve, sticking upright from the tank. This led to me nearly killing myself and possibly the rest of the group.

Coming back from the bathroom I noticed that one of the heaters was blasting its heat directly into the back of a couch and, thinking it would be more effective around the side of the couch, decided to slide it over. In the process of doing this, the heating element came loose and pivoted so it was hanging down from the valve. Instead of doing the smart thing, say turning it off and asking for help, I decided to fix it by swinging it back up and tightening it. This seemed easy enough, except that I had been drinking, didn’t look carefully and turned the knob in the wrong direction which loosened it even more to the point that propane started coming out of the valve at the attachment point. This caused what can only be described as a large fireball to burst from the tank/heater set up. Somehow, I managed to not panic and was able to reach down and turn the tank off before it exploded or the room caught fire. All of this happened in a few seconds and most everyone in the room was too surprised by the fireball to have even really reacted, other than a few screams and shouts. Thankfully, no one, including myself, was injured. I had managed to burn off most of the hair on my hands, as well as about half the length of my right eyelashes and a little bit of the hair on the front my head…but that was it. All in all pretty damn lucky. We all stared at each other for a few seconds in shock, made sure everyone was okay, had a laugh and continued drinking.

The final day of our 4x4 adventure saw us leave the salt flats and head into the desert, through some of the strangest and most beautiful scenery we had seen on the trip: mountains shaded in various hues of red and orange and yellow; white and green and blue lagoons; and bizarre rock formations created by millions of years of being blasted by howling wind and sand. And howl the wind did. The lagoons were populated by many birds, among them andean flamingos. Unfortunately, it was so cold and windy that what were supposed to be 30 minute sightseeing stops quickly turned into 5 minute snap-one-photo-and-get-back-in-the-truck stops. I think some people were over the cold by this point and just wanted to get out of the desert. At one stop, I wandered off a bit to get some shots of flamingoes and came back up to where we had parked to find the other trucks gone and mine idling with everyone inside just waiting for me. Apparently they had honked a couple times to get my attention…but I guess I couldn’t hear it over the wind.

Crossing into Chile, we soon reached the town of San Pedro de Atacama, which is Chile’s version of Uyuni, being the starting/ending point for journeys across the salt flats and desert. The vast majority of people who pass through San Pedro likely also pass through Uyuni but where Uyuni is a dusty wasteland, San Pedro, the center of which also has dirt roads, is a very attractive frontier town with lots of little shops and restaurants. San Pedro seems to perfectly encapsulate the difference between Chile and Bolivia. Chile is taking full advantage of all the tourists coming through and Bolivia is almost entirely failing to do so. It’s sad. San Pedro does have one thing that Uyuni does not: the Valley of the Moon, a spectacular, lunar-like landscape only a few miles out of town, where we spent a couple hours walking on immense sand dunes and gazing over cliffs and were treated to an absolutely spectacular sunset.

When I planned my trip to South America, one of my “must-dos”, not all that far behind Machu Picchu, was stargazing in the Atacama Desert, one of the best places in the world to do so due to the extremely arid climate. I really wanted to visit one of the many observatories that are stationed in the Atacama, but they weren’t close to us so I had to settle for stargazing with a portable telescope. During our trip “stargazing with Misha” had become a running joke, though in reality I had managed to get a lot of people very excited about it. Of course, as luck would have it, both of the nights we were in San Pedro it was cloudy and the trips were called off. While I was disappointed to miss the experience, the prior two nights in the salt flats had been crystal clear with some of the most beautiful night skies I’ve ever seen, so overall I felt satisfied.

The next-to-last stop on our tour was Salta, Argentina, which I’m sure is a lovely town, but I can’t tell you anything about Salta because I spent about five minutes there. We arrived late and I got up early in the morning to conquer a random fear of mine: horses. I’m not entirely sure why I’m intimidated by horses, but I think it has to do with a horse we had when I was a little kid. It was this huge (to me at least) white horse and I seem to recall it being nasty and mean. In any case, I’ve just never felt totally comfortable around, or particularly on, horses. I don’t know how to ride them and feel like I don’t have any control over what they do or know what I would do if a horse I was on bolted or something. So after an hour drive from Salta to a local “estancia” I mounted a very large horse, the largest in the group, named Odin. He was amazing. While I still didn’t feel like I really had the hang of controlling him, for the most part he did what I asked him to do as we rode for about 2 hours around the ranch, through woods and streams. The guide even had us take the horses for a full gallop which was pretty exhilarating. Not sure I’m going to start riding horses on a regular basis, but I feel much better about getting on one now.

Returning to the ranch house, we met up with the rest of the group which hadn’t gone riding for a traditional Argentinean asado and a copious amount of sell-serve wine. The food was incredible - by far the best we had all trip - and we took full advantage, eating an absurd amount, and number, of meats and sides and salads and drinking far more wine than we should have. If you looked up gluttony in the dictionary you might find a picture of us at this meal. Our hosts said that we were the first party to completely finish all of the meat and claimed that it was an entire cow’s worth. Not sure if I believed that, but it was a lot. After that we returned to Salta and passed out, which was a good thing since we had to be up at 4am for our flight to our final stop, Buenos Aires.

To be continued…

(Note: I had fully intended for this to be the last part, but there was much more left than I thought. So on to Part 4 we go.)

[mishanadel]

Lima to Buenos Aires and Everything in Between (Part 2)

So where was I…oh yes…Machu Picchu.

After taking the bus down from Machu Picchu (what, you thought we were going to walk down), we met up with the rest of the group for lunch to swap stories of our treks before boarding the train for Cusco. It turned out that the Inca Trail group had a quite different experience from our Lares Trek group…and I don’t just mean their lack of a fact-denying wacko. The Inca Trail group had all four of the youngest members of our group, all of whom were from Britain and all of whom were on some form of a “gap yah” (for explanation, please refer to video I posted to Facebook; or look it up). It appears that they spent most of the four days discussing such important subjects as poop and, well, poop. While I’m sure this was absolutely hilarious to the four of them, it was apparently a little tiring after a while for the other people in the group. Needless to say, some people were ready for a little break.

After a quiet day in Cusco, we headed off for Puno, Lake Titicaca and the most cultural part of the trip: a home-stay with a local Aymara family. My mind is still mixed about home-stays. I think they are genuinely interesting and worthwhile but they are also genuinely awkward. The woman who my roommate and I stayed with spoke Aymara and Spanish, but not a word of English. We had been given a little phrase-guide but it mostly consisted of how to say “I’m cold, I need another blanket” or “These potatoes are delicious” and my Spanish was pretty much limited to ordering food and drinks…mostly drinks. It’s hard to hold a meaningful conversation in these circumstances. During the course of our dinner together, we came to the conclusion that she had four children, two of whom were in college in Puno, and that her husband was either dead or just not there. Perhaps she just wanted him dead. It wasn’t clear.

In the morning, language barrier or no language barrier, she didn’t hesitate to put us to work. After walking her six sheep down a hill and across a field and tying them out so they could graze, we got to work digging up potatoes. This involved using a pickaxe to loosen the dirt and dislodge the potatoes, rummaging around in the dirt to find the potatoes, and dusting them off and tossing them on a large blanket. We ended up unearthing about 40 kilos of potatoes, which we then had to carry in the large blanket back across the field and up the hill we had come down earlier. I wished I was back climbing the stairs to Machu Picchu. Just kidding. It was hard, but very satisfying at the same time. Were were very proud of ourselves. Even the local guide who joined us for this portion of the trip was impressed. After that we had some free time to wander around the village before saying goodbye to our hosts and heading back to Puno.

Lake Titicaca marked the effective end of the Lima to La Paz portion of our trip and our time in Peru. Crossing the border, it was immediately obvious the difference between Peru and Bolivia. Our first stop was the town of Copacabana, still on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and gone were the mostly paved streets and general order of Peru, replaced by dusty, dirty roads and an overall feeling of, if not chaos, then at least disorder. “It’s Bolivia” became a common refrain every time something went wrong. We were probably being a little harsh, but Peru had spoiled us. From there we set of for La Paz and endured the worst non-overnight bus journey of the trip. The last two hours of the trip involved short stints on paved roads broken up by longer, circuitous stints on bumpy, unpaved roads that seemed only to be detours from the paved road. Most of this was through a suburb of La Paz called El Alto which was once a separate city, situated on the highlands above La Paz, but is now part of greater La Paz. El Alto developed around the building materials industry and while this was evident from the vast array of recently built and currently under-construction buildings, it was less obvious why they dedicated so many resources to erecting new buildings and so few resources to actually finishing their roads. La Paz itself, while not nearly as bad as I had heard, was pretty uninteresting. It was dirty, busy, loud and a pain in the ass to get around.

Our first stops in Bolivia after La Paz were Sucre and Potosi and they could not have been more different. Sucre is a well-preserved colonial town with beautiful architecture; Potosi is a faded-glory mining town whose most interesting sights are the still-operating mine, once the richest silver mine in the world, and the Mint Museum which focused on the history of currency production by the Spanish and later the Bolivian Republic. In fairness, my trip to the mine was fascinating and eye-opening…and a little scary: we were in an active mine and at one point were only a few meters from where they were drilling dynamite blasting holes; and the Mint Museum was quite interesting. I honestly don’t remember much about Sucre other than it looked like most of the other colonial towns I’d been in.

Next up was Uyuni, the gateway to the Bolivian Salt Flats, and possibly the strangest place I have ever been in my life. At some point, the Uyuni city planners decided that Uyuni would be as big as New York City and built it to that scale, with massive, divided avenues running the length of the town. And then it didn’t become as big as NYC. We were told there were 30,000 people living in Uyuni, but if I had been told there were 300 I would have been more likely to believe it. It looked like the set for a post-apocalyptic movie or, honestly, a war zone. Minus the actually bombed-out buildings and cars, it looked like video you’d see of Syria: desolate, dusty, devoid of human life. But it was the scale of the streets that was so bizarre. These enormous, unpaved (or at least not paved in recent memory) streets with no one on them. Just the occasional car…and us tourists wandering around. I half-expected a horde of zombies to burst out at any moment.

Two more things fully completed the circle of weirdness that was Uyuni. One, it featured the best pizza I had on my entire trip. Some guy from Boston and his wife had decided to relocate to Uyuni and open a pizza joint. WTF. I have no idea what was going through his or her head when they decided to do that, but I have to say they can make a mean pizza. Two, Uyuni featured a bar focused entirely around sexual innuendo…and not subtle innuendo either. Its house drinks were served out of mugs shaped like male and female genitalia and if you were willing to allow them to “tattoo” your ass with permanent marker and photograph it, you got said photo on the wall and a free shot. After a few penis drinks most of the girls in the group went for the free shots. The bar also had a drinking challenge that involved something like 8 different concoctions which one person (or two) attempted to consume in under 2 minutes (or 1 minute if 2 were doing it), in which case it would be free. The record times were insane: something like 30 seconds for one person. Two of the girls decided this would be a good idea. It did not end well. They weren’t even close to the 1 minute, one of them almost threw up in the portable toilet the bar provided for such expected outcomes and the other one had to be carried home.

And so ended our time in Uyuni…and this post. To be continued…

[mishanadel]

The Amazing Race…to Victoria Falls

My three-leg journey to Victoria Falls got off to a bit of a rough start. I hadn’t even left the gate on my first flight when I realized I had forgotten to pack the power source for my computer. Not a great thing to leave behind as they are not cheap and not that widely available - you have to a find a store that specifically stocks Apple computer products and not just mobile products. I was concerned that I might have to have my sister FedEx it to me if I wasn’t able to find one at JFK or OR Tambo in Johannesburg and given that I was going to be on the move almost constantly over the first three weeks, this would be easier said than done. Luckily, the electronics store in JFK had a couple versions, one of which worked with my computer. Unluckily, but wholly unsurprisingly, the store was taking full advantage of the forces of supply and demand in pricing it. Unlike if you are looking at a pair of headphones or an iPhone case, if you are looking to buy a power source for your laptop, you are probably pretty desperate and your demand curve is going to be VERY inelastic. Mine was at least $50 inelastic, since that is the premium over list price they were charging and which I paid. Ahhh…price gouging at its finest.

The next little bump in the road came when I went to double check the arrival details for my tour and noticed in the itinerary that it mentioned seeing Victoria Falls from the Zimbabwe side. Well, that’s odd, I thought, since I’m flying into Livingstone, Zambia. Why would we cross into Zimbabwe and see the falls from that side? Do we not start in Zambia? No, as a matter of fact, we do not start in Zambia. The tour starts in the town of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and never goes into Zambia. Not entirely sure how I missed that, but miss it I did. I think I got it in my head that Livingstone was the town you went to for Victoria Falls and never bothered to check if there were other options. In reality this would not be a disaster as the towns are only a handful of miles apart, separated by the Zambezi River and Victoria Falls itself, but it would be a hassle to go through Zambian border control at the airport and then immediately jump into a taxi to be taken to the border to go back out Zambian border control and in through Zimbabwe border control on the other side, never mind that I would be paying $50 for a Zambian visa I didn’t need. To throw an additional wrinkle into this, when I went to check my flight details for Livingstone I couldn’t find the final confirmation from South African Airways, only the original booking confirmation that said I would eventually get a final confirmation, and when I went onto the SAA website to pull up my flight it showed nothing for my record locator. At this point I was wondering if I even had a flight to Livingstone. As it turned out, my flight had been confirmed - no idea what happened to the email - and after waiting a few minutes for the ticket agent at JFK to get ahold of the right booking agent for a non-US flight, I was told I could change to a flight to Victoria Falls instead of Livingstone, but that I would have to pay for it…$5. $5? Why even bother charging for $5. We both had a laugh about that.

At this point I hadn’t found the power source yet, so I was still stressing a bit over that, but knowing that I had an actual flight to the actual town I was supposed to be traveling to made my morning a lot better. The agent was even able to link my two flights, which had been booked separately, so that my bag would be checked all the way through. Ahh the title things.

The rest of my journey to Victoria Falls was pleasantly uneventful. I even managed to sleep a decent amount on the plane, thanks to being in business class (gotta love air miles)…and two sleeping pills. Mmmm…chemicals :-)

The only negative was that I left my water bottle on the airplane, which I didn’t discover until I got into town. I think it’s going to be disposables for the rest of the trip. I hate the waste of plastic, but I seem to lose these far too easily.

As I’m finishing this post, I’m sitting in the restaurant of the lodge camp I’m meeting my group at having a coffee, waiting for the sun’s warmth to offset the chill that set in last night. I was woken up this morning by what sounded like someone starting a prop plane outside my cabin. It turned out it was the camp generator…which is outside my cabin. Apparently, the entire town will be without power for the day due to scheduled maintenance or something.  Yet somehow I still have wifi. And a family of monkeys just walked through the restaurant. Africa :-)

Well, I have a limited amount of wifi, so I will end this here. Need to use it to upload some of those photos I didn’t get around to before I left.

Ciao for now.

[mishanadel]

Lima to Buenos Aires and Everything In Between (Part 1)

It’s going to be hard to sum up my five week G Adventures tour from Lima to Buenos Aires. It was incredible, crazy, exhausting, wonderful. By the last week, I was both ready for it to end and terribly sad that it was. I don’t think I’ve ever spent 5 straight weeks in the near-constant company of 15 other people (plus 3 more for the first 3 weeks). There’s really no way to make friends…or occasionally get on each other’s nerves…like spending that kind of time together :-)

Our group consisted of 8 Brits and a British-resident Pole, 3 Canadians, 2 Australians, 2 Irish, 1 Dane and 1 American…me. The age range was 18-39, perfectly maxing out G Adventures “Yolo” age restriction. Overall it was young group, with half the group 23 or younger and only two people over 30. The group made fast friends, however, and generally went out to dinner and nightlife as a group…a very large and sometimes rather loud group :-)

I’ve frequently said that age is just a number and this trip proved it to me. Despite being the oldest person in the group by 4 years (or maybe 2 years depending on whether or not that person was lying) and the oldest person who drank by 9 years, I more than held my own with the “kids.” In fact, through the first week I’m pretty sure I made it out more nights than anyone else. One thing age does teach you is how to pace yourself each night :-)

The first week was a whirlwind of activity as we worked our way from Lima down to Paracas, Ica and Huacachina, Nazca, Arequipa and Chivay. Along the way we tasted pisco at a local distillery, rode in dune buggies and went sand-boarding, took a nauseating flight over the Nazca lines, bathed in thermal springs, played futbol at 3500m and gazed at giant condors soaring thousands of feet over Colca Canyon. (One of us even laid on a rock and hung his body out over the edge of a thousand foot cliff - it might have been me).

That was really just a warmup for what, for many people on this trip, was the main attraction: Machu Picchu. After a couple days acclimating in Cusco (and by acclimating I mean going out partying all night), we split into three groups: one group was hiking the Inca Trail, one group the Lares Trek and one group wasn’t hiking at all and would meet the rest of us at Aguas Calientes, which lies directly below Machu Picchu.

I was hiking the Lares Trek along wth 6 others and we were joined by 4 people from another G Adventures group. To say that our group of 7 didn’t click with the 4 people who joined us would be an understatement. They were comprised of a very annoying and rather creepy German guy and three Canadian women who were traveling together: a very sweet but woefully out of shape woman who had no business on a serious trek and didn’t make it past the first day, a pretentious and spoiled banker/real estate agent who bragged about how good of shape she was in and yet complained constantly and barely made it over the highest pass…and a third whose views included a willingness to entertain the idea that the world might actually be flat, questioning if gravity was real, that anything with “chemicals” in it was inherently bad for you and that copious amounts of saltwater would help with dehydration. It might not surprise you to hear that I had a long and heated debate with her within the first hour on a number of these subjects. She was special.

The Lares Trek itself was spectacular, winding its way up from 3500m through forests and local villages, past exquisite mountain lakes, to the highest point on the second day at 4850m. The second day was intense and very tough. It was 10 hours of trekking with 1000m of elevation gain and then 1000m back down to our campsite. The distance and the time weren’t so much an issue for me…but I definitely noticed the lack of oxygen: shortness of breath, pounding heart, legs very quick to tire. It was an amazing feeling when we reached the pass and knew it was all “downhill from here” :-) That afternoon, after lunch, we all sprawled out on the grass in the sun and had a well-deserved nap. The following day we completed our trek and were driven back to where we started, Ollantaytambo, for the train ride to Aguas Calientes.

Arriving after a somewhat boisterous train ride during which we were shushed and scolded for being too loud (it must have been extra oxygen), we settled in for dinner and started discussing the morning trip into Machu Picchu. The standard procedure is to get a bus that drives you up the steep, twisting road, with the first bus departing around 6am. However, people start lining up for the buses around 4am and depending on what time you get in line and how many people are there, you are not guaranteed to get into Machu Picchu in time for sunrise. A few of us were not thrilled with the idea of potentially missing sunrise and, perhaps feeling a little disappointment with the Lares Trek not really being a trek into Machu Picchu, I offered up the alternative of hiking up the same steps that Hiram Bingham took when he discovered the ancient city. I didn’t know much about them, other than that many people do it, so how hard could it possibly be. Famous last words.

So, three of the girls in the group and I got up around 4:30am and headed off for the steps. After about an unanticipated 15 minute wait for the gate to open, we headed up with a few hundred other intrepid stair-climbers. I’ve hiked the W in Torres del Paine, hiked to Cerro Fitz Roy in Argentina, summited Volcan Villarica in Chile and just completed the Lares Trek. This was as hard as any part of those. In fact, I’d say only the last hour of the Fitz Roy hike, which was truly excruciating, was its equal. It was straight up a seemingly never-ending procession of stairs, over 2000 I believe. It took well over an hour and eventually the first set of buses started passing us - not a great feeling when you feel like dying and could have easily just waited in line for them.

The climb was made all the more painful by a distinct and, near the end, very serious need to use the bathroom. Problem was, I didn’t need to pee and there was absolutely no where I could go: the stairs are built into a cliffside. We were also racing against the sunrise. We had been told it was at 6:40, a time which was rapidly approaching as we finally neared the top. In the end, we made it inside well in advance of sunrise, which didn’t actually occur until 7:20ish. I wish I had known this, because we raced in past the gate leaving the only available bathrooms behind. After reaching a decent vantage point inside Machu Picchu, which involved another 100 or so stairs, I gave in and had to run back down to the bathrooms. Still worrying about missing sunrise, I attempted to run back up…not a great decision. I made it about a third of the way and then wheezed my way slowly up the rest. I still managed to find the others well before the sun came up.

The end result of all of this was a serious sense of accomplishment…we definitely hiked into Machu Picchu…but also a serious feeling of exhaustion.  After meeting up with the rest of our group and taking a guided tour, the four of us found a patch of sun-drenched grass and just laid down. We did finally get up and hike to the Inca Bridge but we we ran out of time to hike up to the Sun Gate…and were too tired in any case. If I do have one regret about the tour, it was that we didn’t have more time in Machu Picchu. We were all so tired that first day, I wish we’d had a second day to go back.

Well, this is already way more than most people will likely read at one time, so I’m gonna end this part here.  To be continued…