Africa
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Concluding Cairo: Time To Move On
Having visited parts of North Africa and the Middle East before, we know how common it is to see people spend a whole evening at an outdoor cafe table and only buy one mint tea all night, but here in Cairo there is another custom which has taken us by surprise: bringing your own food. Friends or families will occupy a cafe table all evening, order minimal coffee, tea or even just water, while tucking in to a bagful of food they’ve brought in from the bakers or from a takeaway, or even had delivered by courier to their table. How do these coffee houses make any money!? And as…
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Cairo, Saqqara And The Pyramids
It’s obvious as soon as we wake up that it’s quieter, Cairo’s volume levels have been ever so slightly reduced. It’s Friday morning, the working week here is Sunday to Thursday and today is of course the weekly day of prayer. Traffic is lighter and the streets are quieter, though as we were to discover later in the day, the respite is to be short lived. Absorbing ourselves into Cairo life has meant abstaining from alcohol – much as we enjoy bars, beers and nights out, we have been determined to do things the local way as much as possible. In truth, it’s pretty easy to do here, with the…
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First Days In Cairo
It’s somehow passed us by that BA are no longer providing meals on short haul flights, and it seems a 5-hour flight is classified as short haul. So there’s nothing, and by the time we make Cairo we are living up to our hungry travellers moniker. Cairo isn’t a traffic jam, it’s a complete gridlock, a gridlock of drivers who possess neither patience nor any lane sense and it takes well over an hour to inch and nudge our way from airport to downtown apartment. Dusk arrives on the way, and the air fills with the echoing and haunting call to prayer from the multitude of mosques around the city,…
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Farewell To Cornwall: Next Stop Cairo
As ever, we have loved this visit to Cornwall. Spring seems to have dawned before our eyes, colours have intensified, and Padstow, the estuary, the coast path…have all been as wonderful as ever. We always feel so at home here. We conclude our time here by climbing to the top of Brea Hill, the highest point in the area and consequently one of the best places from which to view the estuary. As we climb, we are again at low tide, vast reaches of golden sand either side of the river’s narrow channel where in just a few short hours water will stretch right across the divide. Windshields and windows…
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Travel Stories: The Nungwi Sunset
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yet at the time it seemed entirely logical that if we were heading out on to the Indian Ocean to see the renowned magnificent Nungwi sunset, then it would be time for dinner by the time we came back to shore. So it made perfect sense to change out of beachwear and into something more appropriate before we made our way to the boat – got to be the correct decision, right? Wrong. “We’re here for the sunset cruise”, I called to the pre-occupied boat guys, trying to elicit some kind of response. A couple of them looked up so we gravitated towards them. “Where…
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Tanzania Tales #4: Welcome To Dar
By now we were nearing the end of our Tanzania and Zanzibar adventure, looking to spend the last few days exploring the bustling and chaotic former capital city of Dar-Es-Salaam. The crossing from Zanzibar back to Dar had been noteworthy mainly because at least half of our fellow passengers were seasick on a journey where we had simply enjoyed the movement of the boat and certainly didn’t think it was a rough crossing. Dar, hot, dusty and humid, isn’t a place where traipsing around loaded with backpacks and struggling to find your hotel is an attractive prospect and we were just getting a little fractious when a skinny, swarthy individual…
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Markets: Look Away Now (Maybe)
Now, we know this set of photographs won’t meet with everyone’s approval, so just a quick warning: if you find pictures of animals in markets offensive or revolting, you might want to look away. But the truth is, markets across the world are fascinating places, and part of that fascination is in seeing things you wouldn’t see back home, even if some do have a certain yuk quality. Like lots of travellers we seem to have amassed a rather large collection of market shots, but these are some of the more “out there” ones from our archives…. Live eels, Riga…. Edible bugs, Oaxaca…. Delicious chocolate drink (despite appearances!), Ocotlan, Mexico……
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Photo #21: First Light
When we look back at this photograph we can almost feel the cold, not so much because the temperature was spectacularly low but more because the sweep was so stark. This is Tafraout, Morocco, close to the arid Valle des Armandes (Almond Valley) where we spent a few days exploring and hiking the dusty barren ground in very hot temperatures. Yet as the sun went down, the mercury plummeted at speed, bringing extremely cold nights and the need to use the shepherds blankets left by our bed. This photograph captures beautifully the moment the morning sun creeps down the mountains before brightening the town – our breath would have been…
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Tales From Tanzania #3: Hamadi
“Wait”, he said, “I come with you, till you have tickets”. And so Hamadi walked with us into the ferry terminal, acted as interpreter as we bought return tickets to Zanzibar, and only bid farewell when he’d seen us safely through the ticket barrier. Such actions were completely in character. Over our eight days together, Hamadi had become so much more than our driver and guide, and by now we felt a real warmth and friendship as we said our last goodbyes. He was also probably one of the most handsome men either of us had ever seen! Hamadi scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper. “Call me…
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Beautiful Places #5: Zanzibar
Without doubt Zanzibar is one of those evocative place names full of romance, the very mention of which creates images of an exotic island, paradise beaches and the dreamy blue of the Indian Ocean. The reality doesn’t disappoint: Zanzibar is indeed an idyllic destination. We split our time on the island between the capital Stone Town and Nungwi on the north coast, and the two places proved to be very different experiences. Stone Town, aka Zanzibar Town, is a bustling town in an unmistakably colonial style with grand old buildings and ornate gardens standing shoulder to shoulder with cramped townships. If you want anything in Stone Town, from excursions to…
