Tanzania Sunrise

The sunrise from Sopa Lodge was uniquely beautiful. It was worth waking up early to see it. What made it even more special was the animal sounds we could hear in the morning. Birds, of course, but also hyenas. We were worried about the mosquitoes because they are usually more active at dawn but luckily, it was just cool enough that there weren't many at all.

Tanzania

I wasn’t really looking forward to Tanzania. The Serengetti Plain sounded a little threatening to me. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, leopards and cheetahs and the Maasai. I was actually a little scared to go there.

As it turns out, it was one of my favorite stops on the trip. We took bush planes from Kilamanjaro airport to an airstrip in the Serengetti. Then we boarded pop-top jeeps in groups of six for a game drive. I was the designated scribe. With Shawn and Kathy as spotters, I had a list of animals two pages long in the first two hours! In fact, I still can’t shake the feeling that someone was running ahead of our jeep and planting the animals out there for us to stumble across. Understandable, considering we saw baby lions and a leopard in the first 20 minutes! These are two of the rarest sightings. No one saw a black mambo but I suspect that Jack Daulton will keep persisting until he does. Jack, when it happens, a picture would not be unwelcome. Chances are, there will be a dik-dik in the background. ;-)

Rather than being frightening, seeing the animals in their native habitat was calming to me. The animals were placid, calm, completely at home. We were the guests and their hospitality consisted of politely ignoring us. We were voyeurs. Comfortable for me.




These lion cubs are some of the first animals we saw.


So, Jackie, it was kind of like skiing, worth doing, even if you have to do it scared at first.

Travel Time

We travel from country to country on a 757 jet refitted for under 80 passengers. During the air travel time, which can range from 3-9 hours, we hear lectures from experts on the cultures, artwork, architecture and geography of the places we will be visiting. They hook their computers into the overhead video systems so we can follow their presentations.

We’re especially lucky that the lecturers stay with us at our hotels and participate in our tours and other activities. That means they are readily available for the storm of questions that crop up at each stop.

My fellow passengers are an additional source of information and insight. One of my favorite times this far was participating in an extra two hour exploration of Angkor Wat with a professor, the chair in fact, of the classics department at Cambridge. He, his wife Shawn and I wandered the temple complex very early in the morning, before the crowds arrived. Among the many other things I learned from Christopher and Shawn is this gem: visit sites early. Our time there was magical.

Thanks Chris and Shawn, for including me!

Breakfast?!?

For your enjoyment, some photos of the BREAKFAST buffet at The Grosvenor House Hotel.




Yes that is dessert, a chocolate fountain and sushi. And yes, I did eat some of each!

Blender

Put Disney and Vegas in a blender with some steroids and you get a Dubai smoothie. This place has the -est of everything; biggest, tallest, richest, fastest, newest, priciest, grandest, vastest. What it lacks is a soul. It feels lifeless. For all the money spent on architecture, much of it looks the same. And, looks the same as the high-rise architecture of any city. Just more of it.

The entire city is under construction. Pick any point and 360 degrees around it, there's construction going on 27/7. It's noisy, dusty, and utterly disorienting. Because of the construction, and its sprawl, there is no walking to be done. Everyone is in cars. Expensive cars but cars nonetheless. There's no public transportation to speak of though there is a monorail system under construction. Despite having great people from the tour to spend time with, I felt isolated. Like I was in an enormous sterile bubble.

Glad to have seen it. Will not return.

Dubai UAE

We arrived in Dubai and boarded a caravan (about 25) 4X4s and headed to the Dubai Conversation Park and the Mugham area of the desert. It’s about a 45 minute drive from the airport and we got our first impressions of just how BIG things are in Dubai. To call it sprawling would be an understatement. As I’m fond of saying, I’m prone to hyperbole, but I don’t have a superlative that accurately describes this city. And that, dear friends, says quite a lot.

We were hoping to take a short off-road desert drive to see a falconing demonstration. Falcons are very popular in Dubai. People who own faclons actually get passports for their falcons to travel on. Again, I am not making this up.

Our driver told us falcons are a pretty simple-minded bird. Well, the falcons were the ones who looked smart today. Despite a frightening, whipping, sun-darkening sandstorm, our intrepid caravan drove around in circles in the desert for 2 hours. It was like mogul skiing. Over Volkswagons. Wearing blinders. (Thank you John Theide for pulling the plug when you did!)

It took 4 hours but we made it to The Grosvenor House exhausted, disoriented and sugar-cookied in red desert sand.

It took a little refreshment but Tamara and I joined the Wiliams sisters for a digestif at Buddha, an outpost of Buddha in Paris. It’s a little bigger than the original but just as oh la la. The clientele of bankers, models and international business execs are young, chic and stylish. We stuck out like sore thumbs in Agra but here, we could really blend in. Kidding.

Monkey-ing around in India

In India, cows and monkeys are considered sacred and as such, there are lots of them running around the city. And I do mean LOTS!

The cows are more than a little hazardous to driving in the city of Agra but they monkeys really keep things interesting. They are so “friendly” they will actually enter dwellings through any open door or window and set up homestead. They are so clever they can open the refrigerator and cupboards to help themselves to dinner.

So, every building window has jail-style bars on it. Effectively, the people live in cages and the monkeys run free!

For the hotels, this is a big problem. They don’t want to bar up their widows, ruining the views and scaring the tourists, AND the monkeys are sacred so they cannot be harmed in any way. Our hotel Amervilas has a crafty solution to this problem, They actually have a monkey on their payroll. His job is to walk around the property and scare away all the wild monkeys, a sort of bouncer-monkey if you will.

As you can see from the picture, he doesn’t look too scary. But he does have one very special thing going for him. His cute black face. Because the wild monkeys of Agra all have red faces, when they see this black-faced monkey, they come completely unglued and run away. I am not making this up. Isn’t it brilliant!

Agra India

We got to India this afternoon at about 1:00 local time. In our hotel, every room has a view of the Taj. The staff are dressed like characters from Alladin. We were greeted warmly then marked with a dot. We were hoping to blend but the blonde hair gave us away.
By 3:00 I was standing in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. It's beyond description. There isn't a picture in a book or a word in my vocabulary to do it justice. It took 20,000 men 22 years to build. Or vice versa. No matter. As Jack would say "It's ginormous!"

And it is. On the plane, we heard a great lecture about the Shah Jahan who built it for his favorite wife. She died giving birth to their 14th child. He built the Taj as her final resting place. 30 some odd years later, his usurping son buried him next to her. His tomb is the only, and I mean ONLY, thing about the place that is non-symmetrical. I have a friend who really needs to come see Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal, these grand scale manifestations of symmetry. I nearly fainted. But then again, that might have been the malarone.

Angkor Wat

Cambodia was the least anticipated stop on the tour for me. It surprised me. I expected Angkor Wat to be a large, decaying, imposing, ancient structure. Instead it was a large, decaying, MEDIEVAL structure that was also inspiring, compelling and marvelously symmetrical. The place has it's own gravitational field. I felt pulled into its very center. Getting there was rewarded with striking views on the four cardinal points, each one a succession of doorways gaining in size like so many babushka dolls. I was hypnotized.

The highly selective breakfast club held their meeting at the reflecting pool at sunrise. Well done, friends.
The Raffles Hotel sure knows how to put on a show. We had a gorgeous native dance performance during our dinner. After the show, we got a photo with the performers. Don't we look like giants compared to the dancers?
At the tail end of the night, Tamara, Judy and I trekked on foot to the Night Market in Siem Reap. Because it was a holiday, the water festival, many of the vendors were closing early. Despite that, we managed to find something to buy. The walk there and back close to midnight was most of the the fun. On the way back, we caught the fireworks from a park across from our hotel. By then it was dark and the park was unlit so for that time, we actually blended in with the locals.

Lastly, and there's no picture for this one, I got the best massage EVER! I needed it.

Papua New Guinea

We spent 2 nights at the Randon Ridge Lodge in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The country has been independent from Australia since 1975. This developing nation welcomed us into their villages, showed us their customs and told us their folk stories.

We met a tribal chief and his 5 wives. He let me hold his spear. It's heavier than I thought it would be. The point is a sharpened piece of human femur that he dips in poison. I am not making this up. He killed three enemies in battle during his time as chief. Which has been about 40 years. But he doesn't know how old he is so that's just an approximation.

We also saw a special dance the women do to celebrate events in the klan. They let us take a peek while they were painting their faces. They even painted mine. Well, just a little. Here's a pic of me with Christopher and Lorraine. We three were the only volunteers for face painting.

Finally, we saw a fantastic play about the mud-men of the Western Highlands. It's a classic underdog story where a bully tribe pushes another tribe around and that tribe has to use all it's wily cunning to take back their land. Guess what....they won!
This little guy was pretty happy about that!

The Great Barrier Reef

Yesterday, I spent the day snorkeling two locations on the great barrier reef. I spent the evening learning to play poker from a highly esteemed and extremely humorous history professor and a breathtakingly gorgeous neuro-endocrinologist. Yes, Erik, she is single.

The reef was spectacular. I wish I had more pictures to show but I spent most of the day underwater. In a full-body (including hood) blue lycra suit. We all looked like teletubbies. Ok, never mind. I'm glad there's no photographic evidence of that!

Today we leave for the western highlands of Papua New Guinea. No phones. No computers. We'll be out of touch for three days. And full of tribal stories when we reach Angor, Cambodia.

Apia, Samoa

Jack and Lexie, you've heard, and helped create, your bedtime stories. Many start like this "long, long ago, and far, far, far away, on an island in the middle of the south Pacific....." Well today I swam in a lagoon off an island in the middle of the south Pacific. And next time we create one of those bedtime stories, we'll have to include baby black tip sharks! There are a few of them lurking about in the waters here and they are especially interested in people who come to swim early in the morning!

As you can tell, mies liebe, I have more stories to tell you when I get back. The Black tip sharks of Samoa are only part of the narrative. There is also Atariki (son of the king), anthropologists who re-established monuments decimated by monsoons, deadly box-jelly fish and cuddly wombats.

Every thing I see, I want to bring to you. But I know you would like better to see it all for yourselves. The sooner the better. Because like Mrs Curci says, we only get one spin.

I tried....

but no matter what, this guy was not coming back with us to the USA. I'm blaming it on politics and not my powers of persuasion. What do you think? Comment below or send me an email at swissalpmom@yahoo.com.

Easter Island

Strange and beautiful. Easter Island is a cacophony of contradictions. Lush but scrabby with black volcanic rock. Swiftly sweeping grey drizzles followed by sweet spring-like sunshine. Strong people with warm hearts. Easter Island populated my dreams with a presence. Everything I dreamed seemed so real. Like maybe I dreamed the whole thing?

Please come. You will not regret.

Machu Picchu

Yesterday we took the famed Hiram Bingham train to visit the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. An intrepid and more than a little crazy splinter group from our tour took an aggressive hike up to the Sun Gate so we could see the city from high above. At that altitude, everyone but the Andean guides was feeling the thin air. Despite the hard work, or maybe because of it, the hike was spectacular. But everyone in the entire group found visiting the city to be a moving experience.

The Hiram Bingham took us back for our last night at the Monasterio in Cusco. The train is outfitted just like the Orient Express. The journey to and from the sacred city was just as unique as the experience of visiting it! We had the chance to get to know our fellow travelers much better. Meeting the people has been as enriching as seeing these breathtaking sites.

My lucky star has been working overtime for me!

Cusco Peru

Cusco is the highest point we'll be visiting on this trip. With an altitude of over 11,000 feet, many people are talking about altitude sickness though so far, only a few mild headaches have been reported. The people are very friendly. Colorful, too.
It was amazing that perched high above this apparently very poor city we visited a cathedral more elaborate, ornate and gilded than most others we've visited in Europe. It certainly rivaled St. Stephan in Vienna and even St. Peter's in Rome.

Sadly, pictures were forbidden inside the cathedral. You'll just have to trust us. It was breathtaking!

Lima Peru

A six hour flight from Orlando took us to Lima, Peru. We had the chance to visit a museum with over 45,000 pots and statues from the many cultures that populated this area in past centuries. The first 5,000 pots were very interesting. After that, the Pisco Sours, Octopus Canapes, and chocolate bon-bons captured my attention.

Around the World in 25 Days

My mom and I are taking a trip around the world this month! We're looking forward to exploring countries we've never seen. You can see our itinerary here.