Banos

This little town in Ecuador is known as Ecuador’s adventure sports hotspot, with mountain biking, bungee jumping, rapelling, white water rafting, and lots of good hiking abound. After taking forever to get out of Quito due to the traffic I arrived in Banos in a light drizzle. The biggest attraction around town is the Pailon de Diablo, which means the Devil’s Cauldron, a huge waterfall about 10 miles outside of town. I paid 50c and hopped on the local bus heading that way. There’s actually two entrances, one that takes you on the low side of the falls where you can actually walk under the falls a bit, and one that takes you over the upper section, looking down on the gushing water.

I started on the bottom part, which is the wetter one, but that didn’t really matter much because it was raining already! There’s a rope bridge that crosses the river, giving you a great view of the falls. Then for the high side the weather started to clear up and you take a perfect photo of the water plunging down into the cauldron, as you can see!

The town is named Banos de Agua Santa – holy water baths – because of the thermal springs provided from the nearby volcano, Tungurahua. So of course that was next on my list of things to do in town. There’s a few fancier spas outside of town, but I was fine with just going to the local one in town, which costs $2. You’ve got your picks of four pool, freezing cold, cold, hot, and piping hot. The temperature ranges are a bit drastic, so the vast majority of people tend to hang out in the hot pool, which can get a bit claustrophobic. But still not a bad way to spend an hour or so.

I went to the grocery and loaded up on snacks and dinner supplies for the next night, where I would be spending it at the refuge up on the slopes of the volcano, Tungurahua. The usual way to climb it is taking a taxi up to this small village, hiking up 4,000 feet (1250m) to the refuge, spending the night, and then hiking up another 4,000 feet to get to the summit the next morning. The refuge contains sleeping pads, a stove with gas, and fresh water. There’s a guy that runs it, but he wasn’t there, so I had to the whole place to myself. I was glad I remembered my book, because there isn’t a whole lot to do up there. It started to pour as soon as I got into the refuge, so at least the timing was good! I made my ramen and tuna for dinner, read a bit, and then hit the hay early in anticipation of a 4am start!

summit logbooks

After a night of very poor sleep I was already up at 3:30 and ready to go. From the refuge you had clear views of the lights below in the valley, which was cool, but unfortunately a thick blanket of clouds up overhead. After about an hour of hiking in the dark the views of the city lights disappeared and I was enveloped by the white mist. The hike was a very steep uphill and some point the hardpan and gravel turned into fine volcanic sand, which was extremely difficult going, sliding backwards all the time! All this time the wind was whipping and I had no views of anything. There was even some hail at one point, so really fun stuff! After 4 hours I made it to the crater rim, where you can warm up your hands over the some the heat vents. The way to the summit another 50m over a huge snow drift and up an icy, rocky slope. I opted not to do this last part, being alone and without crampons, but it probably would have been doable. Well I definitely would have attempted it if the weather was nice, but my views certainly weren’t going to change at the summit!

So then it was back down, which was a lot fun sliding down the volcanic sand! That is until the hardpan + gravel part, which was really delicate hiking and really tough on the knees! I packed up the rest of my stuff at the refuge and headed down the other 1300m to get into the village. It was very muddy, so that was also tricky hiking and my knees felt absolutely shredded by the end. There seemed to be no cars at all going by, so I was able to call my hostel and fortunately they were able to send a taxi up to get me! I could have walked all the way down into Banos of course, but that would really not agree with my knees. So all in all, an interesting hike, but the weather was definitely disappointing. I met some people later who also did the hike, but had a clear morning, and their views from the summit with all the other volcano tops visible looked amazing.

My Huawei phone does not take very good photos!

lovely view on the way up

lot of snow at the top!

So back in Banos I met back up with Simon and Michael, the Dutch and Austrian guys I had been traveling with, and we hit the town that night, being it was Friday. Banos actually has a surprisingly good nightlife for a small town!

The next day there was a parade in town, so that was a good way to recover from the night before! It’s actually amazing how many dance troupes they have around Banos! There was everything from traditional Ecuadorian dancing, to swing dancing, to hip hop. After that I headed up to the famous rope swing in town, which gives some cool views overlooking Mt. Tungurahua (on a clear day!). There was a famous photo that won a nat’l geo photo competition of a guy on the swing just as Tungurahua was erupting. They had to evacuation right after that, as the dust cloud was heading right towards the swing. Fortunately the weather was nice and I got some pretty cool photos of the swings.

I’d head out the next morning to do some hikes around another volcano, the most well known one in Ecuador, Cotopaxi!

Quito

The volcano Cayambe looming in the distance

The three of us booked a kind of party-type hostel for two nights, which had a rooftop balcony that overlooked the whole city. We dropped off our stuff and had a walk around the downtown area and the main square, snacking on some sort of white bean dish, topped with onions and tomatoes, chicharones, cheese and dried corn, really good stuff! This would be my 2nd time in Quito, the first time visiting my sister who studied abroad there over 10 years ago now! I didn’t remember the city all that well, but I did definitely remember the famous church, Basilica del Voto, where you can climb these somewhat intimidating iron ladders to access the churches towers, something that probably wouldn’t fly back home in the US. The guys I was with were a bit more weary of these than I was, so I got to rub it in their noses a bit for wussing out!

shoe polishers in the main square

no shortage of churches in Quito!

We made it back in time for happy hour at the hostel to watch the sunset over the hills. They do a community dinner, which was chicken burritos, not very Ecuadorian, but very tasty! It’s the type of place that also does half off shots for an hour and beer pong tournaments, that kinda stuff. We met some girls (Canadian, Swiss, and French) who would join us hiking the next day, six different nationalities represented!

The hike we would do was called Ruca Pinchincha, 4,700m high, but you get to cheat a bit by taking the cable car up to 4,000m. From there its another 2-3 hours to the top. You also get some great views over the city and we could see one volcano in the distance, Cayambe. The girls were happy to only hike halfway up, but us men were not stopping until the top! It gets a little difficult at the end when you have to do some scrambling, but all in all a very nice hike! There were about eight of us who summited all around the same time.

weird birds waiting at the summit

clouds lift for a few seconds!

Success! Although starting to get a bit chilly up there

After the hike we treated ourselves to dinner at Bandito brewing, to get some fancy beers and burgers, and then we called it an early night. The two guys would head to Mindo for a night a or two and meet me again in Banos, which is where I was headed.

Colombia rages and I move onto Ecuador

So after Salento, I’d felt like I had just about enough of the coffee triangle, which I guess is what they call the area – even though it’s actually too high in elevation to produce to commercial coffee! It’s a nice area, but some of these little towns are all pretty similar. Being that I’d already spent a little bit more time in Colombia than I had planned I decided to start heading down to the border. What I didn’t realize was that things were getting pretty heated politically in Colombia. There was a protest against the president/government planned on November 22nd that was originally designed to be a student protest, but it eventually evolved into a nationwide movement with people from all economic sectors getting involved. Even the air traffic controllers would strike for a few hours. Uh oh.

So being that the whole country would basically be shut down on the 22nd I decided that it would be more interesting to be in a big city to witness what was going on. So Cali it is! (It’s the 3rd largest city I believe). I booked two nights at a popular hostel with a pool, that also specializes in salsa lessons – as that’s what Cali is known for. And it’s not known for much else! It’s a bit of grimy town with not a whole lot of interesting things for tourists. It was a bit of a strange first night because a lot of places were shutting down early in anticipation of the protests the next day.

Originally I was going to check out the protests for myself, which were focused in the downtown, probably about 20 minutes walking, but the hostel staff talked me out of it. So it was a pool day. It was definitely a ghost town walking around outside the hostel with almost all the businesses shuttered up for the day, but nothing really going on apart from the odd helicopter flying overhead. In the late afternoon I guess some of the protests got violent and Cali decided to put in place a 7pm curfew until 6am. Around dusk (6pm) you could see groups of protesters walking the streets in our neighborhood and shortly after that some armored vehicles and military in riot gear came down the main road and were tear gassing anyone that decided to stay on it. Then it calmed down for a bit and people in the hostel hung around outside entrance.

the main road

pockets of protestors on the side streets

Up on the overpass about a block away there was a whole bunch of policemen gathered, so I walked in that general direction to see what was going on. There were about 20 twenty protestors yelling at the policemen, and then the policemen started throwing rocks at the protestors, who ran down in my direction. Then blocking the exit some more policemen appeared, trapped the protestors and started beating them with their clubs. One policeman I saw was running towards the scene with his knife drawn, yikes. I was able to slide by with my hands in the air playing the gringo card! And that was enough excitement for me, back to the hostel! It still wasn’t even 7pm yet! The hostel would be on lockdown for the rest of the night. Fortunately everyone was prepared with plenty of booze.

rerouting traffic

the police gathered up on the overpass

The next morning everything seemed relatively normal, businesses were open, lots of traffic on the streets, the buses were running like usual. I was able to book a 9:30am bus to the border, which was supposed to take 12 hours and ended up taking almost 15! Ugh. Normally buses that long I’d opt for a night bus, but I was worried the night buses might be a little more dangerous than usual given the recent unrest. So I got dumped off at the bus station a the border town, Ipiales, just after midnight and stayed at the closest hotel.

Normally border towns have absolutely nothing going for them, and this town was no exception, but 15 minutes outside of town they have a beautiful church built straddling a river in the middle of a canyon, called Las Lajas Sanctuary. So that’s the one thing everyone does before crossing the border, seeing this church. It’s quite the sight! It seems like such an off the beaten path location for such a grand structure.

Las Lajas Sanctuary

After spending an hour looking around I checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to the border, got stamped out of Colombia and stamped into Ecuador. No lines on either side, no questions asked! Definitely one of the easiest border crossings I’ve done! You take a 10 minute taxi on the Ecuador side to nearest town and then they ship you off on a big bus going south, either to Otavalo, or the capital Quito. Since it was Saturday I went to Otavalo as they are famous for their Saturday market, so I’d have enough time to get there for the end of it!

The northern part of Ecuador is mostly indigenous, so the way people look and dress was quite the stark contrast compared to most of Colombia. I always love places where they don’t dress in the usual western style! For me the market itself wasn’t that interesting, as most stalls seem to sell the exact same stuff as everybody else, but it was more of people that caught my eye. The women would usually wear a white blouse with a black skirt and flats, the fringes of the skirts and blouses normally embroidered with some brightly colored lace. The men wore a bit more modern garb, but with lots of ponchos and cowboy hats. It was getting cold towards the end so I picked up a sweater that I don’t have much room for!

In my hostel I met a Dutch and German guy who I’d travel with for the next few days as well as a midwife from Chile, learning midwife techniques from midwives in the Ecuadorian countryside – not your usual hostel tourist! So we had fun drinking and playing cards as Otavalo isn’t the most exciting place, and then me and the Dutch guy did a nice hike the next morning, a mountain called Fuya Fuya which overlooks a really pretty lagoon. And it was a good idea to start to acclimatize to the higher elevations in the Ecuadorian Andes. The first hour I was really huffing, but then it got slowly easier. We made it up to 4,300m or 13,000ft, not bad! Our timing was perfect because as soon as we finished the rains came. Next up, the capital, Quito!

overlooking Mojando Laguna

lunch afterwards

Jardin and Salento

The town of Jardin lies up in the mountains a few hours south of Medellin. I’d read about it in some blogs and it sounded like a pretty nice, mostly non-touristy little town with some fun stuff to do around. The night before I got on the bus I went to some techno club with a Dutch guy who was into that scene (not really my thing, but once again amazing girls) so I was really hoping to get some sleep on this bus. Not happening! 3.5 hours of winding roads and potholes, ugh. I got checked into my hostel and had a walk around town, which you can do in twenty minutes! This whole area is known for it’s trout farms, so I walked just outside of town to have lunch in one. To my dismay the whole thing was deep fried, and served with patacones – fried plantains, so fried food paired with fried food. Very Colombian! It was decent, but I’d much rather have a properly grilled trout with rice and veggies please!

There is also also a cable car that goes up into the foothills, which is kind of neat. It used to be for locals getting up into the coffee plantations, but nowadays they’ve built roads, so it’s mostly just a tourist attraction. I had heard from someone else that it rains every single evening, so I made sure to get back to the hostel when the dark clouds started gathering, and true to form as soon as it got dark the skies opened up. It poured for hours, fortunately some Italians were making pasta (shocking I know) in the hostel and invited me to join in, so I didn’t have to venture out into the storm.

The next day was Jardin’s prime adventure attraction, a waterfall that falls through a hole in a cave, aptly named la cueva del esplendor. You can take a jeep/tuk tuk mostly up to the top and hike the last bit, but I thought hiking all the way up would be more fun. Unwisely I forgot to download the offline map of the area on maps.me, an app that is much much better locating small roads and hiking paths than google maps. So instead I had to trust google maps walking directions. I was heading along a river valley trail when google maps had me veer off it, but there was nothing to veer off to, so I kept going.

leaving town

getting higher up

some houses in the countryside

Eventually I ran into a young Colombian guy on his bike who wanted to walk with me and practice his English, so ok sure. This guy was definitely the weirdest person I’d met on the trip so far, he basically talked non-stop about weirdly deep topics, death, Freudian psychology, atheism, Gertrude Stein quotes, god knows what else. He knew lots of big words, but also his English wasn’t good enough to connect them coherently. I hardly even said anything. He was definitely creeping me out, but I wasn’t sure if I could tell him to get lost without him hacking me to pieces. At some point the trail just ended and the only way left was to go straight up the mountain on some very steep cow grazing land. I powered uphill as fast as I could with him continually asking to wait up, Not happening! Plus he was still carrying his stupid bike. So finally I lost him! whew!

Only problem now was that I was basically lost! Well not totally, I had a vague idea of where I was at on the google maps GPS, and I was on farmland, so I was still close to civilization. I meandered my way up this hill/mountain for about 1.5 hours along muddy cow paths, opening gates lined with barbed wire fencing, just waiting to see what it would look like at the top. It finally flattened out and there was a small ranch where I could ask for directions. There was a guy busy pounding on some horseshoes, and he didn’t seem exactly pleased that I was bothering him, but he told me the path was around to the left somewhere, so that was good enough for me! I ran into one gate that I couldn’t open, but it wasn’t lined with straight wire (not barbed) so I figured I’d hop it. At first I thought it was static electricity as my leg scraped over the top, but no no no! I yelled at in shock (literally  in shock) as this was a god damn electric fence! Fun times!

I did manage to get over it without touching the wire and continued on! Finally I found an actual trail that eventually had a signpost towards la cueva! Another 45 minutes later and I was finally there, over 4 hours of hiking when I expected 2, haha. Unfortunately you can’t go straight to the waterfall by yourself, you’ve got to wait until a park ranger takes you with a small group, but the walk down to it straight through the jungle, and it is a pretty amazing sight. The water literally falls through a hole in the roof of the cavern. The sunlight hits the rising mist and creates a cool rainbow effect as well! And because I walked so much faster than the rest of our group I had a few minutes to enjoy it all to myself and take a few photos before the selfies en masse. You an also swim in the pool, but it’s in the shade and the water is freezing! I was one of two people that took the plunge, but I did not last long! We stayed and admired the place for about 45 minutes and then headed back up.

pretty damn cool spot!

This time I took the path that actually leads to a real road along with a Mexican guy that I had met earlier. Supposedly you could take a tuk tuk once your reach the next small village a few miles away (which I was eagerly hoping for!!) but no such luck. We’d have another 5 or 6 miles walking back into town – all downhill though. This almost screwed up my plans, as I wanted to get to the bird park before dusk to see a very rare Colombian bird, the Gallito de Roca. I did make it back into town just in time though and found my way to the entrance with 20 minutes to spare! I still don’t really know anything about these birds, but they are pretty damn cool looking! The placement of their eyes makes it look they have enormous brains. The top, bright red half of their bodies made me think of that red monster thing in Looney Tunes, Gossamer (the google search ‘all red monster thing’ worked fantastically!)

Then I had some time to relax in the square where all the locals hang out and try some more exotic fruit juices from the myriad of food/drink tents they have set up. I met up with Diego, the guy I hiked down with, and we sampled some grilled meats, arepas, and even the Colombian version of a burrito. I will say, one of my complaints about the meat here is often they aren’t shy about overcooking it! The seasoning is good though and my large cut of pork costs $3, so I can’t complain too much. And then of course the rains came and it was back to the hostel.

Cowboy town

I was off the next morning, although I didn’t fully realize what kind of travel day I was in for! The 8am bus wasn’t your traditional bus, the entire thing (besides the cab) was open air, consisting of wooden benches to sit on, and raised really high off the ground because of the ginormous tires. It did have a tarp over to go over the top and sides in case it rained, as it was that very morning. The tarp is completely black, making the seating section very dark and claustrophobic. And the scenery outside is supposed to be gorgeous, we just couldn’t see any of it. I actually moved to very back row so I could roll up the tarp a bit and look out. Of course you need a truck like this because the road conditions are not ideal, so sitting in the very back row to catch a glimpse of the scenery had it’s downsides. It was bumpy as hell obviously.

our truck

foggy day up in the mountains

At some point a few hours in some locals in cowboy hats hopped on, sporting a half empty bottle of Aguadiente, the most popular liquor in Colombia. They were in a rowdy mood for 10:30am and were attempting to get anyone around them to drink it with them. I politely declined, but I was surprised to see they got the two Colombian girls next to them to have a few sips. Then they put the pressure back on me, basically saying these girls are drinking…. Where are your balls? So I did cave and had a few swigs, haha. It’s got a liquorice taste, which I don’t really care for, especially before noon on a bumpy bus, but it was kind of fun. The guys were trying to play matchmaker with me and one of the Colombian girls, who was actually pretty attractive. This is why I really need to speak much better Spanish!

After 3.5 hours we finally made it to Riosucio (a town named dirty river, ha) and then from there we had to catch a 3 hour bus to city called Perreira, and then from there another hour long bus ride to the touristy town of Salento, our final destination. So it was three different buses and 9 hours of travel to a place that really isn’t that far away distance-wise! That’s Colombia for ya.

Salento is also another nice highland town, nestled in the foothills. It’s similar to Jardin, but a little bigger and more touristy. It’s main attractions are it’s coffee plantations and the Cocora Valley a bit outside of town that host the worlds biggest wax palm trees! Pretty interesting to see palm trees in this part of the world! They’re so tall and skinny they look like they can barely support themselves. Do to a bit of snoring in my dorm room I was up awake nice and early - and the first jeep to get you to the valley leaves at 6:30am, so why not? And it rains in the afternoons, so the earlier the better! There’s a nice loop that takes a couple hours to do.

Some fun rope bridges to cross

I ended up hiking with an Aussie and Canadian girl and we finished up the hike before noon and then it was back to Salento for lunch and a much needed nap! I went out for dinner and beers that night and did a coffee tour the next morning (which was cool to learn the whole process!) and that was it for my short stay in Salento. At this point I felt like I had seen enough Columbian hillside towns, and I was getting a bit tired of all the afternoon/evening rains, so it was time to keep heading south towards Ecuador, but with a couple pit stops along the way!

Bogota and Medellin

Time to get back into city living! From Gaudalupe it was 1 hour by 4x4 to get back to the highway and then another 5 or 6 hours into Bogota. Seriously, it takes a long time to get from A to B in Colombia when you’re up in the mountains. Every single road is 2 lanes and there’s million slow moving trucks backing up the traffic constantly. Of course it could be worse for me, I’d heard some traveler horror stories of semi-trucks flipping on the highway or landslides and creating delays for absurd amounts of time, like 10-15 hours. So fortunately I have not had that experience yet!

I got into Bogota around 9pm and grabbed a taxi to my hostel in La Candeleria, which is the historic downtown section of Bogota. I’ve heard this area can be a bit sketchy at night, so I figured I’d test that out for myself, with very few valuables of course. And like most places it seemed fine, if you stay on the main, well-lit streets there’s enough people around where it’s hard to imagine getting into any trouble. Quite a few bums and vagrants around though. Although some of the small side streets with no one around definitely had me on edge a little bit. But nothing to report there. I called it an early night.

The next day was touristy stuff day. I had a walk around Bolivar Square, which is arguably the most famous part of the city. If there are any big demonstrations in the city, this is where they’ll be. It’s filled with pigeons, street vendors, and tourists! The focal point is the church (like every square in Colombia) built a few hundred years ago. From there I walked up towards the hills, which is a little rough around the edges, but you can tell the city had been working to improve the area, with lots of fresh paint and street art, as well as a veritable police presence! It had some nice, cheap coffee shops and budget hostels.

walking around La Candelaria

The view back down from the hills in La Candelaria

Eventually I made it to the Museo Del Oro, the Gold Museum, which has a great collection of artifacts from every period in Colombia’s history. A pretty cool place. And I’m a big fan of museums that have high quality audio guides, which this one had! After that I was all geared up to hike Montserrat hill ( I really need to lose this stomach pudge) which is the big hill/mountain with sweeping views over the whole city. I feel like the word hill is too understated, but the word mountain is too much, there needs to be a better word to describe these hills! Although when I got there at 2pm they said the hiking trail was closed (it closed at 1pm) because later in the afternoon they were concerned about robberies on the hike up. Weak! Although you could still take the cable car up, which I did, but was not happy about it. I mean the view at the top was pretty cool though. The city is so huge and expansive, especially compared to the one little neighborhood that I’d walked through.

Next up, poker time. I went back to the hostel, grabbed my cash and took a taxi to the Parque 93 area, the most hip, modern part of the city, which also has the best poker action. And when I walked in I was impressed to see a bunch of tables running, although for NL hold’em action the highest game was 2,500/5,000 pesos, which is the USD equivalent of a .75/$1.50 game. So pretty small, but the action was good, tons of terrible players, I ran my $200 buy-in up to over $1,000 at one point, but then lost some back at the end, due to some overly reckless, possibly alcohol induced play.

It’s hard not to bluff a lot in these games when the value of $100 or $200 is so much more to most of the Colombians playing than myself.  They did catch onto that eventually. But I had a great time screwing around at these stakes and won enough to pay for about 1/3rd of the trip in one night. Although I paid for it 20 minutes later when my iphone must have slipped out of my pocket in the cab getting home, sigh. Now I’m operating a $100 Huawei smartphone, which on the plus side I don’t care what happens to it! I really don’t like traveling with anything that’s overly important to me. Even my camera equipment is so old now that I wouldn’t be exactly be crushed if something happened to it. Laptop also. But losing that iphone definitely stung a little bit.

Cable car heading up the hills in Medellin. Not my photo though, credit Lonely Planet.

The next day was a bus to Medellin. I really didn’t get a chance to explore too much of Bogota, but basically every single traveler I’d met had said they liked Medellin better, so that’s enough anecdotal evidence for me. Plus Bogota weather is crap, it’s up in the mountains and the usual forecast is cloudy, rainy and a bit chilly. Medellin isn’t that far away as the crow flies, but winding through the mountains it’s a solid 9 or 10 hour trip. I got in pretty late, and was happy to hit the hay at 11pm or so when I got checked into my hostel. The dudes sharing my room popped in at one point to do some blow before heading out the bars, and were nice enough to offer me some, but I had to decline. The legacy of the cocaine cartels is apparently alive and well!

Having spent a good amount of time on the road and staying in hostels I was about ready for some R&R time, so I had a pretty nice airbnb booked for the next few days. It’s pretty great when you can book a very nice studio in the heart of the most expensive part of town for <$50/night. So honestly, I did very little in Medellin. At the same time there’s not like a ton of touristy stuff to do around town. But I had some photos to catch up on, work on my blog, research to do for the rest of the trip, buying a new phone, getting my laptop fixed etc.

I did make it to Botero square in the El Centro, which hosts a very cool looking museum dedicated to the artwork of Fernando Botero, as well as many interesting characters in the square itself. I met some middle aged Americans who stayed around there (for a very specific reason that definitely wasn’t the works of Botero) who warned me it was probably a good idea to get out before nightfall. The one guy was telling me a story about getting jumped by some teens a week ago and fighting them off with his very sturdy umbrella. It made me chuckle thinking of the movie the Kingsman. But El Centro is definitely a bit shady.

Statues by Botero

I also made it to the huge market, which has a fruit section where you can find basically every fruit they grow in Colombia. There are still so many ones I’ve never seen before and don’t know the name of! I picked up a few to sample at home. Lulo, tomate de arbole, granadilla were some of the names I remembered. Some were pretty good, but some were seriously tart and not the best to be eaten by themselves!

A very small sampling of the fruits available

the downstairs meat section was also incredibly largeda

And I’m not sure what these were, some sort of hanging plants? aromatics? This guy had to walk up a two different ladders to reach these!

The location of my airbnb was pretty cool, it’s the most upscale part of town and has the majority of the nightlife. Just next to my airbnb was a really nice Italian restaurant, a beautifully designed vegan restaurant, an artisanal bakery and sandwich shop, a great ice cream shop, and one the fanciest restaurants in town – something like the Alinea of Medellin. I really thought about going there by myself (would have cost $80 for 13 courses instead of the $300+ at Alinea) but couldn’t pull the trigger! But I think that gives you a good idea of the neighborhood, it’s probably not what you’d expect from Colombia.

Vegan tacos

Ajiaco, a tasty colombian chicken stew

And just blocks away is Parque de Illerias, which is where all of the nightlife is based around. The first night I was in the airbnb was Saturday, so I went back to the hostel bar to meet some people and had a fun night barhopping some of the clubs. It’s a very lively area, and definitely more dancing going on than in American nightclubs. Colombians are born and raised dancing, so it’s weird for them to not like dancing. And I must say, Medellin has some extremely attractive women! And it’s not like they’re overly dressed up or made up, they’re just very good looking. It’s unfortunate the quality of my Spanish…

After a few days of laying low I decided I should kick back into travel mode and go for a daytrip to a nearby town called Guatape. It’s two hours away and features a landscape full of fingerling lakes, a rock huge that you can walk to the top of, and a colorful little touristy town. It was definitely a worthwhile trip! In fact most of the photos I took in/around Medellin were from Guatape, so here they are!

La Piedra (the rock) in Guatape

The church in in the main plaza

even the alleyways are colorful

coffee guy

oozing with color

the view of the rock from the city

A fun little town: Gaudalupe

I’d been reading some blog posts about Colombia, and I must say that the best way to get good, up to date info when traveling is to read these travel blogs! One of them happened to mention this village that isn’t too far from San Gil, the caveat being you have to take a 4X4 to get there, but it sounded like a place I’d like. Guadalupe is known for it’s wide shallow stream a bit outside of town that has all these swimming holes carved into the bedrock of the river. The photos looked really cool. It’s called Las Gachas, which translated into English is ‘the porridge’ which makes no sense, but apparently it’s an indigenous word. It’s also the type of place where people from outside of town will ride a horse into town as opposed to a car/moto. Like an old country western.

my stopover in Soccoro,if you have one arm, driving a motorcycle doesn’t seem like the best idea…

From San Gil I took a 30 minute mini bus to a town called Soccoro, and then booked a 4x4 to Guadalupe from there. It’s basically pickup truck with the back converted into seats. The roads were half rock half concrete tracks winding through the hills passing cute little farms and houses on the way. Besides the rough road it was easy to tell this was not on the usual gringo tourist trail just by some of the looks I was getting. After 1.5 hours we finally pulled up to the town square which dropped me off right in front of the only hostel in town. I was the only one staying there!

I dropped off my stuff and started the 45 minute hike to Las Gachas, which is actually a beautiful walk, skirting the edge of some steep hills and giving you great views across a tremendous valley. The countryside in this part of Colombia is very pleasing to the eye.

I ended up being followed by some kids walking in the same direction as me on their way home from school, which allowed me to have some fun practicing my poor spanish, much to their amusement. And they did point me in the right direction to Las Gachas when I got close. Like I said before, it’s basically a shallow river with a bunch of holes in it. Although I did screw up a little bit, this was the one time I hiked not wearing socks with my shoes, and apparently the riverbed is so slippery that you’re supposed to wear socks to get a better grip so you don’t slip and fall! Oops. I managed alright though. It’s definitely a fun place! At certain points you can basically do a slip n slide on the slick bedrock into the little pools. And it wasn’t crowded at all, a handful of locals and two other gringos.

I ended up talking to the two other tourists, both of them were expats in Medellin (one Canadian, one American) and doing a little roadtrip, as one them owned a car - which is a luxury in Colombia because they’re very expensive here! They had actually contracted the guy who owned my hostel to show them around the area as a guide. They were a little older, but fun guys, they definitely liked to drink. The Canadian guy was showing me racy photos of his 30 yr girlfriend in Medellin, before and after the boob job that he paid for, ha. They invited me to go on a little excursion the next morning to some lookout point and little known waterfalls, so sure! Why not? We’d be getting off the beaten track, from off the beaten track. Sounded fun. Here’s some photos of the walk home as the sun was starting to go down, only iphone photos though :(

The next morning I met up with the guys and Jose, the hostel owner/guide, to do our little excursion. We drove about 30 minutes outside of town and parked at a non-descript spot on the side of the road. From there Jose opened a gate and about 20 minutes later we had a great panoramic view over the canyon. Then we meandered through some more farmland and through another gate or two (it’s all private property but Jose says he knows all the owners) and down a steep trail with a large rockwall on our right, with water dripping down over the edge, creating a rainbow effect in some places where the sunlight shone through. Eventually we got down to the bottom where the views open up to this gorgeous waterfall, that hardly anybody every visits! It was pretty special. Although Jose wouldn’t let me swim because he thought the undercurrent was too strong, which I was pretty incredulous, but whatever. In small towns Colombians are very protective of the tourists. In fact, when we were in town we got asked by the police to take a photo with them to demonstrate how well they were looking after the gringos! Colombians in general are very aware of how their country’s dangerous past looks to outsiders and are very eager to shed that reputation.

Into the mountains: San Gil

Well I’m not sure if you’d call them mountains, but definitely big rolling hills with deep valleys is how I’d best describe this part of Colombia. This was my view just outside of San Gil, Colombia’s adventure sports capital. From where I was staying on the Caribbean coast it was a ten hour night bus followed by another three hour ride to get here. I must say, I did not properly dress for the night bus, it was absolutely freezing in there. You’d think we were in the Arctic with everyone bundled up in coats and blankets, not the tropics. You couldn’t even see out the windows because they were so fogged up! Foolishly, all I had was a long sleeve shirt and a rain poncho to wrap myself in. Why they make it this cold I have no idea, but I learned my lesson the hard way!

The town of San Gil is pleasant, nothing too special about it, a pretty normal, seemingly well kept Colombian town. But within and hour or two in almost any direction there are tons of canyons, caves and waterfalls with opportunities for white water rafting, kayaking, paragliding, rappelling, bungee jumping, mountain biking, etc. So it’s definitely a tourist hotspot. The first day was definitely pool and nap day. Although I did have to wait an hour to check in, so I headed to the nice coffee shop in the mall that the guy at the front desk recommended. When I was in the mall I was busy looking at my phone trying to find the exact location of this coffee shop and I managed to walk into the fountain! The pool of water starts right at floor height, so you can literally just walk right into it! It was only a foot or two deep, but still, pretty embarrassing! Fortunately only one two people actually saw it I think (I hope).

Yup, this is the fountain

It was funny, during the course of that afternoon I saw a girl dressed in a wonderwoman outfit and someone had randomly gave me some candy out of his bag of treats, which seemed odd, and I still didn’t put the puzzle pieces together that it was Halloween! Unlike Asia, I guess Halloween is a thing here in South America! So it was kind of fun to see all the kids walking around in their costumes later that evening. Everyone was out in the central square having a good time.

the bridge over the river in San Gil

View from my hostel dorm window

a very hilly city

I was trying to photograph the race that was going on, but I’m not sure if that is the focal point of this photo :p

 Back at the hostel I met a few people and some were going white water rafting the next day, so I signed on to that as well. The river was a supposed to have some class IV rapids and two class V’s, very solid! After the bus ride and what was possibly the longest safety briefing I have ever witnessed (seriously it’s Colombia, just chuck us in the raft and send us off!) we were finally ready to hit the whitewater – although it was definitely more like murky brown water. The water was running pretty high, so there was some good action in the rapids. I will say, our paddling was pretty sloppy and about half the time our guide would just yell “everybody down” where we’d all fall into the raft. And then he’d have us paddle from inside the raft, which is something I’d never done before. As you might have guessed, it’s not very effective! Some of the rapids were pretty gnarly though, so I think they were just being very careful to make sure nobody fell out.

So we didn’t lose anybody, however the other raft dumped four people in one of the rapids! There were two rescue kayakers along to help collect the swimmers. Three out of the four swimmers laughed about it afterwards, but one Colombian girl was definitely shooken up by the whole thing. It turns out the water was moving so quick that the trip only took a little more than an hour, but at least it was an action packed hour with very little time in between rapids – bang, bang, bang. And then we had a nice meal afterwards with roasted chicken, bread, cheese, fruit, and beer. So all in all it was a fun trip, although the ratio of time driving/preparing to actually rafting was about 4:1, so not ideal. Ehh it’s Colombia.

picture stolen from the internet

The next day was mostly a chill day, with a little side trip to a waterfall nearby, which was worthwhile. The following day, a guy I met rafting and we decided to do some paragliding over the Chichamocha Canyon, which is apparently one the deepest canyons in the world (according to who, I don’t know, but it did not seem like one of the deepest canyons in the world!) My friend had never done paragliding before, although I’d done it a couple times now. But I’d never been to a place where you finish at the same place you started which seemed cool. I guess the thermals in this canyon are THAT good!

Now starting and finishing at the same spot originally seems like a pretty good thing, but in actuality, for the jumpers it kind of sucks. Normally when you go paragliding it’s one guide per one client, you do your two minute safety briefing and then you run off the edge, fly, and get picked up at the bottom – there’s very little downtime. But here, because you can start and finish at the same spot, a company can bring up a ton of clients and just have them cycle in between a few guides, meaning there’s a ton of downtime waiting and waiting and waiting. I was one of the last one to go, and I was bored out of my mind by the time I finally jumped, having waited almost three hours. And it was nice of course, just floating around in the sky above the canyon, very relaxing. But I think that will be my one time paragliding for this trip…

easy rider

The Teleferico crossing the canyon. Without it, it’s a loooong drive if you want to get to the other side

Next our plan was not to go back with the rest of the group, but to take the cable car across the canyon and hike our way back towards San Gil, through the canyon. This was my idea, and Raul the Salvidorean American guy I met rafting, decided he’d like to do it as well. Plus It’s always nice to have a fluent Spanish speaker around! Originally we’d hoped to hike a couple hours down into the canyon that first afternoon, so when we’d hike out the following day it would be during the early morning hours, but the paragliding took so damn long that we didn’t have time. So we stayed on top of the canyon in a little town called Los Santos and started to hike down early the next morning. Our trail was called the Camino Real, which back in the day before the highway was a much used horse and donkey track. Nowadays, not so much. At the bottom of the canyon we found the town of Jordan, which is mostly a ghost town.

Hiking down

The trail was a little bit more than a dirt track!

Looking down on the tiny town of Jordan

crossing the bridge into Jordan

Very few people remain in town

After Jordan and spending some time hiking at the bottom of the canyon it was time to ascend. It was now 10:00am and the sun was absolutely scorching and the trail was very exposed. Now Raul is a bit out of shape (Sorry Raul if you read this!), but I figured since he used to be in the army, he’d be okay. But apparently Raul hasn’t hiked more than a few miles at one time since his army days, and was struggling mightily going steep uphill in the blazing sun, he looked like heatstroke waiting to happen. I told him we should just go back to Jordan and catch a lift out, which he readily agreed, although he wanted me to keep going (which is what I wanted too!) so we parted ways. I’m a bad friend.

I was feeling surprisingly great despite the heat, and I was actually really enjoying powering through the straight uphill in the midday heat. Something about being alone in the canyon, with the sweeping views, exotic looking plants and some beautiful colorful birds had me energized and ready to pump out a nice sweat. It took me another couple of hours to get out of the canyon, and it was definitely a bitch! Thankfully the sign near the top said cold drinks and ice cream at the store on the top – but of course it was closed! Arghgh. I did find a tiny shop to get water shortly after that though. Then it was another 2.5 hours of hiking through the farmlands (which was very pleasant) to get into the nearest town. So a strenuous, but ultimately satisfying day of hiking, 13 miles in all. I was originally going to stop by a scenic colonial town nearby, but screw it, I wanted to get back to my hostel in San Gil and hop in the pool! And that’s about all I’ve got for San Gil! That was my last day there and I headed out early the next the morning to a very small village called Guadalupe.

Getting near the top of the canyon!

The dusty roads and farmlands getting back into town

Up the Caribbean Coast

After three nights in Cartagena I took a bus to a town called Santa Marta, a few hours away. The bus ride was a little interesting, as some villagers had set up a roadblock on the highway, not allowing anyone to pass. Most cars seeing this just simply turned around to go back another way. Our driver wanted to do the same, but the guy we had picked up very recently, who presumably lives nearby, argued very passionately against turning around, so we waited. After 20 minutes a police car showed up, and after another 30 minutes they finally opened up the road. I have no idea what the issue was about, or why the police didn’t just make them remove the roadblock immediately, but that’s Columbia for ya. Onwards!

going uphill on a bicycle: no problem, hitch a ride!

When we got to Santa Marta the bus didn’t even go into the city the center for some reason and I had to catch a taxi from the outskirts of town to a beach village called Taganga, where I’d stay and do some scuba diving. I booked a hostel this time, one that had a pool, but I was slightly dismayed to find that the hostel was basically all Israeli guys. I have nothing against Israelis individually, but as a group they are just so cliquey – and it’s not for lack of English either!  Anywho, I had enough time to walk around the small town, set up some diving the next morning, and get a couple of photos before the sun went down. You can get around the whole place in half an hour! The town itself was a bit shabby, most of the side roads were a jumble of stones, dirt, and broken concrete, although some very nice houses sat on the fringes, perched up in the hills overlooking the bay. And the bay was very picturesque, with sun setting right down the middle of it over the ocean.

Looking down on Taganga.

boats in the bay

el gato

The next morning was Scuba time! I hadn’t dived in almost a year, so it was nice to get back under water. It’s low season, so most small outfitters only have a handful of clients, so we’d all take the same boat out together. The diving is in a natural park called Tayrona, which you need a permit to dive in, but the one island off the coast is permit-free, so that’s where we headed. The water was so warm that no wetsuit would be needed! The diving was pretty good, better than I expected. The visibility wasn’t great, but there was lots of sea life, tons of moray eels, shrimp, sea spiders, sea caterpillars, lobsters, pufferfish, trumpetfish, stonefish, etc. So it was well worth the $50 for two dives!

navigating some little caverns

lobster party

Spotted moray out of its hiding spot

Can you see it? A stonefish

Besides the diving, there really isn’t a whole lot to do in town. The beach isn’t the nicest, but it’s somewhat interesting watching the fishermen come in with their daily catch. And I did like all the juice stands around, where there are lots of fruits I have never even heard of! Fruits named zapote, lulo, borajo, tomate de arbol, guanabana, etc. So it’s kind of fun to be able to try all these fruits for the first time! Columbia is blessed with tons of biodiversity, and this is only scratching the surface of what’s available throughout the country.

daily catch

I still don’t know what half of these are

One odd thing about this little town, it’s got some great restaurants! You would expect a little town like this to have mostly basic, no frills Columbian fare, but they have some amazing places to eat! I had a 3 course meal at one place – beef carpaccio, thai yellow curry w/seafood, and a berry marmalade topped with cookie crumbs and ice cream – for $13! And then at a different restaurant had an appetizer of melon wrapped in prosciutto and a medium rare steak served with ratatouille, potatoes au gratin, and a piece of bread topped with a pumpkin whip. This was $12! Awesome. And then fish, veggies, and couscous in white wine sauce, which was probably the least exciting of the three, but the only one I took a photo of.

I also took a trip out the beaches at Tayrona national park. You can either take a bus to entrance and hike two hours in, our take the speed boat. I opted for the speed boat. The main beach, Cabo San Juan, is actually two beaches with a thatched viewing tower built in between them. It’s got hammocks and tents to sleep in, and a restaurant. The rest of the park is pretty much untouched, with beaches you have to hike to through the jungle. It’s a very scenic place! The main beach gets a little bit crowded, but you can walk thirty minutes and find a new beach that will have very little people. You just have to be careful to make sure that swimming is allowed, because some of the beaches aren’t protected and have strong currents!

evening drizzle made a nice rainbow

the dual beach view from the tower, before the rain rolled in

dawn light

sky getting lighter

and there’s the sun

 Now unfortunately I had bought Colombian sunscreen, (Seriously I can’t stand paying like $13 for a bottle of American sunscreen!) which I soon realized on the boat over, did not work too well. SPF 50, yeah right. So I was content to lay in the shade of the trees, only hopping in for a quick dip with my SPF Zero sunscreen. What I did not realize was the shade, was not full shade! So I ended up frying pretty good in the ‘shade’. I was considering staying more than one night, but opted out after lobsterfying myself. I always have to have one good sunburn each trip, sigh. Also it’s kind of boring laying on the beach ALL day. But the scenery was indeed fantastic and I got some nice dawn and dusk photos. Back to Taganga for one more day of diving in the morning and football in the afternoon!

They loaded the boat on the way back

One more thing that’s nice about Taganga, it’s got NFL games! The bar that I went to on Sunday to watch the games even had NFL Redzone, which is a first! And I got to watch the Bears choke and the Pack beat the Chiefs. Plus the World Series game 5. Good stuff. After this I’ll spend one night in the hilltops and then start working my way towards the adventure capital of Colombia, San Gil.

I don’t have much time to write about the two nights I spent in the hilltop/coffee plantation region near Santa Marta called Minca, but here’s some photos.

the viewpoint at my guesthouse

doesn’t look sketchy at all…

one of the many mini waterfalls and swimming holes around

The town of Santa Marta and the ocean in the distance

had to stop at this hostel that is famous for it’s hammocks overlooking the valley

not a bad view from the shitter

South America: Starting in Cartagena, Colombia

The view of Bocagrande at Night

It’s been over a decade now that I’ve been to South America, and something had to be done about that! I picked Colombia because I’d heard some good things from fellow travelers and the flights from Chicago were pretty cheap! As usual I kept my research fairly minimal so I didn’t really know what I expected Cartagena to look like going in, I guess my expectations were a bit influenced spending so much time in SouthEast Asia, but they were quickly altered as our plane soared past all the high rises that jutted out on this long narrow peninsula from the mainland. Definitely more like Miami than let’s say Phuket! I was impressed. A white wall of buildings. After flying past that small section of the city, the rest looked far different, which was mostly pretty flat and sprawling – ie poor. I’d seen on the map that the old town, the walled city, was just next to where all the high-rises are, which is where most of the tourists hang out.

Bocagrande and Castillogrande from the plane. Hopefully not victims of climate change in the coming decades!

Photo of Castilogrande, the part that juts out from the rest in the above photo

After the game I had a chance to walk around the city. Cartagena has a pretty interesting history, it started as a Spanish colony in the 1500’s with only two hundred people. But they got off to a great start when they found that the indigenous people buried riches with dead, so after lots of tomb raiding they had a good amount of wealth on their hands. In the next 50 years news of their wealth had spread and the French and English attacked the city multiple times with no success. Spain spent a boatload of money into fortifying the city and it became the largest port in South America as well. It was where the Spanish would funnel out their vast sums of money from the rest of the continent. The city also became a hub for the slave trade, making people’s mansions even larger. They were able to stave off a massive attack by the English in 1741, called the battle of Cartagena, and they were the first to declare independence from Spain in 1811. I won’t get into the modern history but they had civil wars and drug  trade problems in the last 70 years, but things look to be steadying out for Colombia!

Taken from the fort walls with Bocagrande in the background

So back to Cartagena, it’s very colorful! Narrow cobbled streets painted in all shade of yellow, with doors, window sills and balconies painted in other bright hues. The very center of the city is the clocktower, El Reloj, where horse drawn carriages share the roads with cars and guys pushing fruit carts. Women in traditional outfits try to get you to pose with them and vendors sell everything from water and sunglasses to coke and weed, under their breath. It would be interesting to see how hectic this place gets in January, which is the peak season. Despite being a little chaotic, it’s got a nice charm to it. It feels fun and lively. The streets are clean, buildings look old but not run down, it feels safe. They’ve done a good job. And if you get too hot you can stop and pay .50c to the juice vendors or $1 to the ice cream guys to cool off a bit.

horse drawn carriages cruising around looking for passengers

so many colors!

El Reloj, the clocktower

Fruit vendor

the architecture

women in some traditional garb

Just next to the walled city is another cool neighborhood called Getsemani, which reminded me of what Logan Square was a couple years ago. It’s more residential, rough around the edges but some cool bars and restaurants popping up. Some of the bars were fashioned from what were old abandoned concrete buildings. It’s also the place to go for street art, with murals on just about every street.

Some interesting stuff in Getsemani

The fruit is so fresh and cheap!

Cartagena also has beaches! In Bocagrande (where I was staying) the beach is just across the street! The sand isn’t particularly nice, but you can pay a buck or two and get a lounge chair from the guys that rent them out. Vendors walk around with carts of drinks and seafood, all very reasonably priced. It’s a decent way to spend an afternoon as long as you don’t mind swatting off some of the sunglass guys and massage ladies. Apparently the nicest beach around is an hour away, but I really didn’t feel like heading out that far, especially knowing I’d be going to the beach in a few days anyway.

The real colors came out on the other side of the sky

Cartagena is also known for it’s nightlife, but it wasn’t as exciting as I was expecting. I guess in this season the big parties are really only from Thursday to Saturday, and I was there Sun-Wed! There were lots of party buses cruising around outside the city though! And definitely no shortage of places to drink. The food was also delicious! I hardly ever eat ceviche in the US, but I had it everyday in Cartagena. Just so many good seafood dishes in general. The next photo is from a nice place that was mostly columbians (so you know it’s good) and only a handful of tourists - the perfect mix! But the fish is topped with this coconut milk sauce and then had squid, shrimp and mussels on top. My favorite meal so far.

So I thought Cartagena was a pretty cool city, certainly worth visiting! Next time I’d take a cooking class! I also would probably rather stay in a hostel in the center than my more sterile, kind of boring apartment. Nicer hotels and airbnbs are more for when I’ve been on the road for a while roughing it and I need a clean, quiet place to get a good sleep and recharge, not when I just arrived somewhere new, feeling fresh! Next up I’ll be heading to the beaches further up the Caribbean coast. Here’s a couple more photos of Cartagena:

Recap: Summer in N. America pt 2

Next poker destination: Boston. So Boston had just finished up building it’s first casino in the city, The Encore Boston Harbor, exact same building as the Encore in Las Vegas. Originally it was going to be the Wynn, but after some sexual assault allegations I guess they didn’t want to attach the Steve Wynn name to it. Fair enough! So usually when they have new big poker rooms open up in cities that didn’t have any before, the games tend to be quite good (at least at the beginning!) So I was hoping to capitalize on that. I got an airbnb basically right across the street from the casino, which was sweet. ($350/night to stay at Encore) It was the type of place where you get your own room and everything else is communal. It wasn’t the nicest place, but whatever, Boston is expensive! Just one huge problem: no locks on the doors! I’m sure as hell not going to be leaving thousands of dollars unlocked in my room with random people coming and going! So I ended up carrying silly amounts of money on me for this whole trip, so annoying. I’ve really never seen a communal airbnb with doors that don’t lock!

But anyway the casino is really nice! Just like it’s counterpart in Vegas, everything from carpets to the details on the walls, to the flowing designs of the chandeliers is gorgeous. There’s a bunch of restaurants inside, but man are they pricey. In the poker room you get comped $1/hr for food (not much given the prices). You’d have to play 20 hours to pay for your cobb salad! But they do give you free drinks including alcohol, so that’s fine. The games here were also pretty soft, much better than in Chicago. I lost a few thousand the first night and was worried I didn’t bring enough cash, but I turned it around and finished up a very healthy amount on the trip. Although I did have to lose a few thousand right at the end - I just cannot for the life of me finish on a high note on any of these trips! A little bittersweet.

I also had some time to wander around Boston, which is a very walkable. Around Bunker Hill, the shipyards, North End, the Financial District, Back Bay, all very cool neighborhoods to take a stroll. Boston has plenty of landmarks and monuments from the Revolutionary War era and you can even visit Paul Revere’s house. They were doing renovations on it, so I didn’t take any photos of it though. And I did catch a game at Fenway, a 1:00pm game where I scalped some tix at gametime for super cheap (Red Sox being out of the playoffs and all). Although to be honest, I’m just not big enough of a baseball fan to really care about two teams that aren’t the White Sox, especially sitting alone, so I left after 6 innings or so, Boston having a 5-1 lead.

Photos in order: North End, Bunker Hill area, Back Bay, Financial District

So that was a solid two week trip. Then it was back to Chicago land to hang out with my parents and onto my brother’s wedding! Which I’ll get to shortly…

Recap: Summer in N. America

So the reason I came home was mostly for my brother’s bachelor party in NYC, which being the best man, I was in charge of planning. We rented a huge airbnb for 13 guys in Brooklyn and it turned out well. We did some axe throwing, rooftop bar, the iconic Peter Luger steakhouse, wandered around Manhattan, hit the clubs, had the fire department called, and needed an emergency plunger the morning we checked out. So all in all a great time!

Next I went to Vegas for a month during the World Series of Poker to play some tournaments and grind the cash games. I honestly played an ungodly amount of poker in that stretch. Tournaments usually started at noon and after I’d bust I had all night to play in the cash games. I played mostly 2/5 and 5/10, favoring the Wynn where 2/5 is a deep $1500 buy in and the 5/10 is $5,000 max. I ended up winning about $12,000 in the cash games (was up 20 at one point though), buuuuut I did terrible in the tournaments and lost like $10,000 in entries. Then factor in the cost of living, hotels/food/ubers, all added up to a lot of money, so I finished down a few thousand (net) for the trip. Pretty disappointing. I’d like to get out of poker pretty soon, and the best way to do it would definitely be to hit a nice tourney score, but sadly tournaments are not my specialty and I keep throwing away too much money in them. Sigh. There’s always next year! I was such a poker degen that I didn’t really go out and take many photos unfortunately. Just food and chip stacks!

sloppy stack

I love pork belly buns

the World Series of Poker at the Rio

tacos el gordo, best tacos in Vegas

So after playing poker all the time, not working out, and eating too much, it was time for a little break. I’d be meeting my family in Washington for a little family vacation. We did the Hanover site in Eastern Washington, spent a few days in Hells Canyon which borders Oregon and Idaho, rafted the Salmon river, and then headed NE to Glacier national park for another few days. It was cool to have the family altogether for the first part of the trip at least. And it was good to take a break from poker and get some sun and exercise!

Now after the rest of my family went home, I wasn’t done yet and did a 4d/3n backcountry hike in Glacier, then rented a truck and drove up into Canada, stopping in Calgary, Edmonton, Jasper, and Banff National Parks. The poker scene was not as good as I hoped in Calgary and Edmonton - all the good games are PLO- but the hiking was fantastic, especially in Jasper. The Banff part was a bit cloudy and rainy unfortunately.

Lots of farmland with mountains off in the distance in Alberta

Calgary skyline

I liked this bridge

Calgary Tower, closed for renovations

walking street, downtown

the bridge in to Edmonton

Edmonton legislative building

my truck in Jasper

Caribou (I think) on the side of the road

looking out over Maligne Lake

from the boathouse

boathouse in the morning

baby

Mt. Edith Cavell

About halfway in between Jasper and Banff

Columbia Icefield

Peyto Lake, impossibly blue

Lake Louise

Moraine lake, in the fog that wouldn’t clear

lots of this, clouds and drizzles

Whitefish lake in MT

And I wasn’t done with Canada just yet, I returned my truck and flew off to Montreal to pay some more poker. They were having an a World Poker Tour event there for two weeks and I wanted to check out the scene at the Playground Card Club, which is where all the tournies would be held. I got an airbnb sharing a room with a fellow hustler, a young entrepreneur (getting good Ray Ban fakes from China and reselling at full retail). It was nice location because I could just hop on the bus to the card club. Although I’d have to take taxis home, which was expensive and they didn’t allow ubers to pick-up there since it’s an Indian reservation.

The old port area

Anyway the poker there was good! I started out white hot in the cash games, winning basically every session the first week. The Playground is nice because they basically give you free food, you get comped $2/hr and they have a reduced rate menu for players, so as long as you’re playing for a while you won’t have to pay for any food. And their food is delicious! Of course I wouldn’t run hot forever, I dropped 2,000 CAD on tournaments, and went on a $5,000 CAD downswing in the last couple days (of course) but still finished up maybe $16000 CAD (12,000 USD). It’s also kind of annoying how weak the CAD is to the USD, so winning $1,000 in Canada feels like winning $1,000 in the US! but its only 75% of that. Oh well. But Montreal was very picturesque city with lots of parks, interesting architecture, a fun downtown, and a very French vibe. The main language is French of course, but almost everyone is bilingual. It’s weird hearing French speakers speak such perfect English! Everything is great besides the construction and traffic, which is just insanely confusing and frustrating at times! Oh and I forgot some excellent food: poutine and smoked meat sandwiches, mmm.

stacking chips

montreal smoked meat sandwich, melts in your mouth

would I like poutine instead of fries, yes please!

And that’s all for Montreal, next up Boston

Recap: Winter in Cambodia

So I haven’t written in this blog in a long time, but it’s time to fire it up again now that I’m back on the road. I spent my winter in Cambodia (again) to play poker. Unfortunately this year was not as successful as last year as more pros came in from China and the rake had increased (surprised thats even possible) and the cost of living went up as well due to a housing shortage. And I just ran worse against the whales in big pots in general. The town of Sihanoukville has been turned into a giant trash heap with all the construction, litter, dust, broken roads, sewage, etc. It really is a shame what’s been done to it. Maybe it can recover in a few years after the construction boom is over, I doubt it, but we’ll see.

Don’t get a hotel without seeing what’s around it!

massive trucks everywhere, wreaking havoc on the roads

Giant puddles everywhere, even when it hasn’t rained in days

Hard to avoid the potholes when you can’t see them!

just off the main beach, gross

So as you can see, the city is undergoing some, uhh, changes. Of course it’s not all bad, I bought a motorcycle and learned how to ride it (really just learning how to use the clutch) which was fun. I was hoping to find an open paved space somewhere in the city to practice, but those really don’t exist in Sihanoukville! So the first day or two I had some fairly nerve wracking experiences stalling out in traffic. But there’s always something getting in the way of traffic in cambodia and people are very used to it! A car turns out in front of you, making you slam on the brakes? A truck forces you off into the shoulder? A cow runs into the road? A delivery truck blocks the entire road? These are just all everyday occurrences on Cambodian roads, so people really aren’t bothered by a stalled bike for a couple of seconds, ha!

All black beauty, 223 horsepower

The main part of the city is mostly terrible, but of course you can still get out a little bit and find some decent places that haven’t been totally ruined! A few kilometers outside of town is Otres beach, which is lots of little guesthouses and bungalows with cheap beer and lounge chairs on the beach, and that’s still okay. It will probably all be knocked down in a year or two, so I’ll enjoy it while I can. The road getting out there is hell though. There’s also Independence beach which has a really nice tourist pier and is great for watching sunsets. Plus the pool at my gym is pretty great and I can do steam/sauna/massage for like $12 so I can’t complain about that!

next to the fancy new seaside restaurant at Independence Beach

The pier

Mango seller

Different pier where the locals live

fish fry

Can’t throw a stone without hitting a casino

the new Xifu resort and it’s spectacular surroundings

My pool

no guns at the pier anymore, so sad

Chinese clubbin

cool roads

So that’s what Sihanoukville looks like nowadays. I of course had to leave before rainy season hit, as it rains all day and everything floods. This year was apparently much worse for flooding, as whatever green spaces that were left to soak up rainwater have all been covered in concrete. It was also a terrible year for dengue fever which is caused by mosquitos, and when there’s lots of stagnant water… you know what happens. So that was my last memory of Sihanoukville, going on a massive downswing and then getting Dengue fever. It was strange I had a fever one night, some pain behind my eyeballs, and some red bumps on my arms. That didn’t last long though, the main thing was just complete exhaustion.

I literally laid in bed in for a week+ like half asleep, hardly any appetite, and every once in a while willing myself out of bed to get groceries or a smoothie. I eventually went to the doctor and after a blood test, results were in: the Dengue. He gave me some pain pills and electrolytes and sent me on my way. It’s a virus, so not much you can really do besides ride it out. After that I went to Phnom Penh for a few days to recover a bit more, then flew home, limping my way out of Cambodia with a lighter wallet and struggling health. I ended up flying to Vegas for a few days before getting home home!

Whirlwind tour of Cyprus

So from Tel Aviv it was just an hour flight to the city of Paphos, on the far West side of the island. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Cyprus. I had only learned last year that most of the island was Greek while the northeast part of the island is occupied by Turkey. Although as a tourist you can move freely between the sides. That’s important because I wanted to get over to the Turkish side to see how the poker games were! As for Paphos, I knew absolutely nothing about the city itself, except that it would have beaches. And sometimes it’s kind of nice to travel like that, not exactly knowing what to expect and just figuring it out as you go. It turns out that Cyprus isn’t particularly cheap, so I booked a hostel for the first night.

Getting through the Paphos airport was extremely easy. The swiftness at which the immigration guys were stamping passports was impressive; you’d almost think they were racing each other. Quite the difference from Israel! Once out of the airport they had a clearly marked bus stop, with a timetable even! The taxi guys around didn’t even try once to convince us that the bus wasn’t running! I liked Cyprus already. The bus was 1.50 euro and once in town I walked the 10 minutes to my hostel. What I didn’t realize was this was the type of hostel with no real reception. There was a number to call, but I just arrived and didn’t have a SIM card. Yarrgh.

To my surprise the door was unlocked and I was just able to walk right in. I found a guy staying there who told me the owner of the hostel also owned a restaurant, so that’s where I might find him. Alrighty then. That would be helpful to include on the sign outside! I found the restaurant, asked for Christos, and sure enough he came and out and got me set up in the hostel. As I would find out, Cyprus isn’t a big backpacker destination and running a hostel there is a very laid back affair! It’s basically just homeowners putting a bunch of bunk beds in a house or apartment and being like, ok, you can sleep here. They give you the key and then you’re on your own! That’s fine with me.

Paphos is an interesting little town. It’s very British! It reminded me a lot of one of the beaches in Goa that was popular with the British pensioners. Lots of pubs, older feel good music (they kept playing Build me up Buttercup by the Foundations!), soccer matches on all the TVs, and signs advertising full English breakfast, bangers and mash, and Sunday roast specials and the like. It seemed like a pleasant place. Although as a travel rule of thumb, towns that are popular destinations for retirees are generally not where I want to spending extended periods of time!

I got in a bit late so I had a gyro and a beer and went back to the hostel. The two guys in my room turned out to be British Ministers doing a quick religious holiday in Israel, Cyprus, and Turkey. They just had a wonderful day following in the footsteps of some saint that I can’t remember the name of. One of them noted that British tourists here were just absolutely dreadful! I couldn’t help but laugh at how he said it. Just so British. I wondered what they thought of my gambling related reasons for coming to Cyrpus! But they very nice guys. It did seem a bit weird they were staying in a hostel though.

I had seen some shops that rented out scooters, which I was pumped about because I hadn’t been able to rent one this entire trip. And there were supposed to be some nice, deserted beaches up the coast. I guess Sunday is a bad day to try and rent scooters because the first few shops I had found were closed. I was beginning to see a trend about Greeks, err Cypriots, and how they run their businesses… I finally found one that was open and he said I couldn’t rent one without a valid motorcycle license. Fortunately I had passed my motorcycle class in the US and my license says D (for car) and M (for motorcycle), but he only knew British and European licenses, not American ones, so he was worried if I got into a crash that he’d still be liable. So he wouldn’t rent me the stupid scooter. Not even a 50cc one! Agh. Stuff like this is why I like traveling in SE Asia! I would have been in and out of that shop in 2 minutes all set to cruise. I still could have rented a car, but that’s boring and a little expensive for my liking, so looks like I’d have to share the local beach with the dreaded Tourists. UGH! I’m kidding, but only slightly.

The nice thing about Cyprus is besides from the beaches there are lots of historic buildings around. Forts, castles, churches, monasteries, there’s that sorta stuff in or around every city you go. Paphos had a big Roman amphitheater, plus various other crumbling piles of stuff. But at this point in the trip I was pretty burnt out on ruins, so I gave them a pass. I’m sure they were lovely though! The beach was nice enough, nothing amazing, the water was blue etc. I’m kind of just going through the motions at this point. I went out that night with a massive Aussie guy and a little French girl from the hostel, but decided I wasn’t gonna stick around much longer.  

In the morning I was eastbound on a bus for a few hours and ended up in a city called Limassol. Where Paphos was a resort city, Limassol was more of a real city city, but it didn’t exactly have a lot going on. The hostel was once again a bit weird, basically just some guy’s house with bunk beds in the rooms, mostly empty. A Dutch guy and I went to the fort which is like the main thing to do in town, but it’s not very big and you can’t even go in it, so it’s pretty lame. The waterfront promenade was nice I guess. The highlight of our night was the local meat place. My meal was just a pile of sliced pork with raw onions, tomatoes, tzatziki sauce, and fries. Basically a gyro with out the pita. The Dutch guy had similar, but his was in a Cypriot pita, which is thinner, crispier, and much bigger than a Greek pita. It looked spectacular!

I was off again the next day, this time to Nicosia, the capital, where I could walk across the border into the Turkish side of Cyprus. The city of Nicosia is somewhat interesting, the old town is basically split right down the middle by a wall, separating the two halves. In one spot you can cross on foot from one side to the other. I guess back in the day this wasn’t so easy, but nowadays the border completely open. You don’t get stamped in Turkish side. The one caveat is that you have to fly in or out of whatever side you came in on, so you can’t fly into the Turkish side and leave through the Cypriot side. The Turkish side only has flights to/from Turkey because technically Turkey is the only country in the world that formally recognizes that Turkish Cyprus exists!

The crossing was easy, I meandered the streets on the Turkish old town a bit, noting the considerably lower prices, and found my way to gate where the buses hang out. I’m very glad to be traveling so light this trip, it makes things like this soooo much easier than if I were lugging my big ass backpack! I hopped on the bus to Kyrenia, which is where most of the casinos are in Northern Cyprus. I walked 15 minutes and found my hostel, which AGAIN was just a dudes’ house turned into hostel. This one was even sillier, as the dormitory area was basically just bunk beds on either side of the living room with some curtains drawn across for some privacy. And in this case the guy and his brother lived there together as well, so you’d wake up every morning to them chatting over breakfast in the kitchen which was adjacent to the “dorms”.  It definitely felt more like crashing on someone’s couch as opposed to being in a hostel.

No matter though, I was only there for the poker! The main casino for poker, which hosts big tournaments every couple of months was the Merit Crystal Cove. I had heard some good things about the cash games here, so I was looking forward to this. It was a bit outside of town, so I hopped in a dolmus (Turkish minibus) and took it up the main coastal road to the entrance (well 15 min walk to the entrance). (Only $1 for a bus ride vs $12 taxi!) When I found my way to the poker room things didn’t look so promising. There were absolutely no cash games at all! The only thing running was satellite tournament to win an entry to some sort of tournament in Bulgaria. I bought some chips and waited at the cash game table for a good two hours before calling it quits. Yeesh!

I took a taxi to another casino that I heard had poker, but I couldn’t find anything. I came all the way to Cyprus for this?! The next day I went back to the Merit casino and we ended up getting a game going 5-handed. It was an incredibly boring game, just some poker regulars who were only playing in the hopes that the new guy (me) was a fish. I ended up getting unlucky in a few spots and was a loser for the night, so I guess I was the fish! But it was certainly not a game worth sticking around for, so I left the next day.

I booked myself a flight to Bangkok, but I had two nights to kill before that, so I headed to another beach resort type city called Ayia Napa on the SE corner of the Cypriot part. This was supposed to be the big party place on the island, but October is getting into off season, so it was pretty chill. I was the only person in my hostel. Another day of hanging out at the beach by myself, yay! This was the Russian hangout, it certainly felt similar to Goa! I spent two extremely uneventful nights there and then flew to Thailand via Bahrain. So that was the anticlimactic end to my whirlwind week in Cyprus. It really wasn’t my favorite place, although I was definitely feeling some travel burnout, and more or less bee-lining it to the get the poker games. So my somewhat negative opinion isn’t completely fair. Plus the best way to do Cyprus is to rent a car and circumnavigate the island, because there’s lots of cool places around that you need your own transportation to get to. So now I know for next time! I’d spend one night in Bangkok and then back to Cambodia to start making some money, hopefully!

Into Israel

From Amman I went to the bus terminal and found a shared taxi to take me the border. On the Jordan side we had to wait over an hour to take a bus which takes us across the no-man’s land and over to the Israel side. I heard that you might get interrogated quite a bit by the Israeli security guys, especially if you’re a brown person or you’ve visited a lot of muslim countries. Immigration asked me a couple of questions about what I was doing in Jordan, why I was coming to Israel and who I was seeing, and that was all. It was a breeze! I had already met a few people so far who certainly did not have the same experience!

Once you’re across the border it’s an easy bus ride through Palestine into Jerusalem where I found my hostel outside of the old town. Hostels in Israel are really nice and well run, although they better be, for $30/night to sleep in a dorm room. Hostels are everywhere in Jerusalem, presumably because hotel prices are so high. Israel is definitely not a budget destination! Just walking around and seeing the prices it felt like being in Perth all over again! However you can find falafel and pita places on the street that are pretty cheap and shockingly good. I feel like I’ve only had mediocre falafel my whole life, so this was eye opening!

falafel in pita, not my photo

In the morning I woke up nice and early to go see the old city before the crowds of tourists arrived. Jerusalem is fantastic early in the morning! All the tourists shops are closed and the only people around are the actual inhabitants of the city, many of which are kids on their way to school, muslims and orthodox jews alike. The city has four quarters, the Muslim quarter, the Christian quarter, the Armenian quarter, and the Jewish quarter. So it’s fun to wander around and see the differences in each of these places and the various mosques, churches and synagogues. Highlights include the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was crucified, the western wall (aka the wailing wall) which is where all the orthodox Jews go to pray, and the Temple on the mount, which is the 3rd holiest place in Sunni Islam, but also has religious significance for Jews and Christians as well. It’s controlled by Jordan, but protected by Israeli security forces and technically non-muslims are not allowed to pray there. It’s only open a few hours a day to non-muslims, so it can get crowded during those hours!

Before all the shops open up

the Temple Mount

orthodox jews at the western wall

Jerusalem is surprisingly small. You can walk around it all in a few hours. Once it gets to mid morning the tourist stalls start to open up and you get these large groups of people doing religious tours through the city. It’s very popular with Christians of course, following in the footsteps of Jesus. In Jerusalem you can stop at each of the Stations of the Cross, and the groups are usually carrying around a big wooden cross from place to place and singing hymns. It’s interesting to watch! The finale is the Church of the Sepulchure. It also has the empty tomb where he was said to have been buried and resurrected from. Although nobody knows for sure exactly where he was buried. But  for Christians  there’s loads of important holy places. Walking around you can see groups of Americans, Mexicans, Italians, French, Spaniards, Filipinos, Indians, Africans, you name it! People from all over the world. There’s so many tours going on that the intersections on the main walking routes turn into traffic jams. Like in most places, once the tour groups start rolling in, I start rolling out. I’d come back in late afternoon once the crowds had thinned out.

cross bearers

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

the most random shop in Jerusalem. Roll Tide!

In Jerusalem I also made a trip to the Palestinian side to see Bethlehem. It’s easy to take a bus. The Palestinians have to go through security checks, but for tourists you just flash your passport and that’s it. The Palestine side isn’t too much different, but you can tell it’s a bit poorer, buildings are more run down, there’s no high end art stores and retail shopping like in the Jerusalem downtown. The cab drivers waiting outside the bus are annoying and leave a bad impression on some people who aren’t used it, but after being in Egypt these guys seemed almost pleasant. It’s a 15 minute walk to the Church of the Nativity and the Milk Grotto, where it is said that while Mary was was nursing baby Jesus, a few drops fell to ground and turned everything white! A true miracle! It was a pleasant place though. I wandered around town for two hours or so before going back to the bus. The overload of religious stuff isn’t all that captivating to me. A British guy on the bus, who didn’t seem to really like the Palestinian side, muttered, “That’s not God’s country, Israel is God’s country”. Sure buddy, I wonder what that means. But it obviously doesn’t have God’s people, because according to his religion, 97% of Israeli residents will be burning in hell for being non-believers. Ouch.

the milk grotto

make it rain on baby jesus

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem

One of things I found interesting in Jerusalem was that it draws in quite a bit of a different traveler type crowd than in most places, ie the very religious kind. It’s kind of awkward talking to some of these people about Jerusalem because for them it has such a deep, spiritual meaning and for me it’s mostly more sightseeing. I talked to some Americans doing a pilgrimage that they’d been planning for two years; they seemed a bit miffed that I was talking about Jerusalem in such a nonchalant manner, like it was just another place on my trip and I didn’t only have absolutely glowing things to say about everything there!

To be honest, I really didn’t like the majority of Americans I met on this trip, mostly the ones in the hostels I stayed. Normally when traveling, it’s extremely difficult to find Americans who are full-on Trump supporters. They’re like unicorns. Unicorns with lots of cognitive dissonance. Israel is a little different though, between conservative American Christians and Zionist leaning Jews, the religious right is alive and well here, so it’s not uncommon to find Trump slappies. The current state of Israel’s zionism and Trumpism are eerily similar. And with an ever frightening world consisting mostly of 3rd world shitholes and the socialist hellscape that is Europe, Israel appears to be a Safespace! It was pretty annoying in the hostels because there would always be one vocal right wing nut job who would get into an argument with the whole table, which of course would never go anywhere, and everyone at the whole table would eventually just throw up their hands in exasperation. Seriously, convincing these people of anything rooted in facts is just not worth it, might as well be talking to a brick wall. Sigh.

I spent three nights in Jerusalem and then took the bus to Tel Aviv. Originally I was going to go to the Dead Sea but I was getting a bit worn out from traveling and it seems like nobody really even swims in the sea because it’s too salty; it’s mostly just a 5 minute photo-op floating on the water. So I took a pass. To Tel Aviv it was an easy one hour bus ride. I decided to walk the mile or so from the bus station to my hostel. It wasn’t exactly the nicest part of town, but it had character. Lots of little run down grocers and bakeries and Jewish flags. It reminded me of walking around the Lower East Side in NYC. It also surprised me how diverse Tel Aviv is. I was kind of expecting to see all white people, but that was not the case!

The hostel I was staying was quite the sight, it was more like an interactive apartment complex than a hostel! It was five stories, complete with multiple common areas, a small library, a work space, two bars, a rooftop terrace, etc. Impressive! $35 for a dorm though. Nobody wants to pay for a hotel in Tel Aviv though. I met a couple cool guys in my room, an Israeli now living in London, an Aussie from Sydney, and another American that I mentioned before, the Spanish Jew from Houston. This guy was hilarious, he’s 39 and his sole intention of coming to Tel Aviv was to pick up Jewish chicks. When someone asked him if he traveled much, he was like “yea man, I was in PCB (Panama City Beach, Alabama) last year!” I almost spit out my drink! It’s hilarious because absolutely nobody outside of the US would ever know what PCB is, and that someone over 22 would actually consider going there! It really is an awful town, and I would know because I went there not once, but twice for Spring Break! But anyway, it was going to be a good couple of days with this group.

The first night we just hung out at the rooftop where they had happy hour, which meant $4 beers. Most nights they’re $8 a glass. Yikes. Another American from New York invited himself to our table and he was quick to interject when someone made a Trump joke. We later found out he thinks any mainstream news source is liberal propaganda, 3,000,000 illegal immigrants voted in California, everyone on welfare is lazy or a cheat, we need to arm the populace, Trump is a genius who also has genuinely cares about the average American, and that the sky is in fact purple. We couldn’t get rid of this guy fast enough! Need a fly swatter, jeeez.

The next day was beach day. It was 25 minutes walking to the beach. The ocean was nice and warm and it was 80 and sunny, so it was a relaxing, cheap afternoon. Tel Aviv is indeed a very pleasant city. That evening we all paid $20 to go on the hostel run pub crawl where you go to 5 different bars, skip the lines, and includes a ‘free’ shot at each place. The shot is Raki, which is a licorice tasting abomination. Beers at the bars cost something like $12 each and I don’t even want to look at my credit card to see how much money I spent, because it’s not going to be pretty. But all the bars were fun and lively with lines down the street, so the nightlife is definitely strong in Tel Aviv! I don’t know how all these young people can afford it!

The next day was hangover day and we made it out to the port and the old town of Jaffa in the late afternoon, which is the Arab area. We took it easy that night, except for the guy from Houston who was still on a mission to pick up girls, so he went out to Israel’s biggest club, as he couldn’t bear the thought of going to Tel Aviv and not going to the biggest club in the Middle East! And that was basically it for Tel Aviv for me! I flew out the next day to Cyprus for $18! They did give me a little hassle at the airport, asking me all about all the muslim countries I have in my passport, which is like 10 of them, but it was less than 10 minutes and I was free to go. Time to find some poker action and start making some money!

boats in the port in Jaffa

Jordan: Petra and Wadi Rum

I’m skipping over Cairo for now because I already had this typed up.

From Cairo I flew to the capital city of Jordan, Amman, but I didn’t stick around, instead taking a taxi to the southern bus terminal where I was able to catch a minibus to Wadi Musa, the city right outside of Petra. There’s really not much to the city, but it’s got some good views over looking the rock formations that Petra is carved out of. There’s also a little bit of sticker shock involved after being in Turkey and Egypt for so long! Jordan is quite a bit more expensive than those countries. I used to be able to eat on the street for a $1 or 2, now it would minimum $7 or $8 and $15 for any meat dish in a restaurant. Same with shisha, that went from costing $1 or $2 to ~ $8. And the beer! In Wadi Musa I paid $9 for a draft beer, my god!

Wadi Musa

The next morning I woke nice and early to get to Petra before all the crowds. It’s shocking how few people are around! First you walk 15 minutes down a gravel path which leads to the entrance of the Siq, which is the grand walkway through the rock canyon. It reminded me a lot of the caverns in Zion national park known as the narrows! 20 minutes later and you reach can see a sliver of the Treasury, peaking through a slit in the canyon walls. The Treasury is the photo that everyone has seen of Petra, the ornate columns carved into the rose colored rock. And it’s gorgeous! Like most of these famous historical monuments, I’m usually thinking something like “wow that’s pretty cool” but I’m never like completely blown away or anything like that. It is a very impressive feat of architecture though, and extremely well preserved. Also, what most people don’t realize is that the site of Petra is huge and the Treasury is only a small part of it. There’s lots of other things to see and hikes abound!

I hiked a steep uphill trail that gives you good views of everything around, and the whole time I had the place almost all to myself. On the way down there are all sorts of various tombs cut into the rock, which are kind of eery. There’s not really anything in them though. I should mention that the site of Petra was home to a group of people called the Nabateans who thrived as spice traders until they eventually were taken over by the Romans in 100 AD, who incorporated it into their empire. The city declined in power quickly under Roman rule and mostly abandoned a few hundred years later. It was mostly forgotten about by the west and was ‘rediscovered’ in 1812 by Jean Louis Burkhardt, a Swiss traveler and archaeologist. How cool would that be?! It wasn’t until the 1920’s that the site was properly excavated.

So after a full morning of hiking I was pretty tired and looped around back to the Treasury around 10am, where at this time it was a complete zoo, tour groups everywhere with their little flags, Bedouins selling souvenirs and camel rides; time for me to go! I took my afternoon siesta and returned to Petra for the sunset where I wanted to do one of the hikes to get a nice view of Petra from above. One of the Bedouins was trying to talk to me/sell me stuff and I basically just completely ignored him (which is obviously rude but it’s the easiest way to avoid dealing with these people) then where the steps to the trail started he jumped in front me and said I couldn’t go up without a guide. This was of course complete BS. I told him to move or I’d get the tourist police, but that didn’t phase him.  Eventually someone, who I think worked there, came over to intervene in our standoff. He was saying that I’d offended the dude and it would be best for everyone if I did the hike another time. I rolled my eyes at this, but acquiesced. Better than getting pushed off a cliff by angry Bedouins I guess. Although I don’t have that much time in Petra! It’s ridiculous to me that I can’t do a hike because some snowflake Bedouin can’t handle a tourist giving him the cold shoulder! But there you have it. I still got some nice photos anyhow.  

The next day I took the morning bus to a place called Wadi Rum, which is an expansive desert area in the far south of Jordan. The mini-bus takes you to the village on the edge of the desert and from there you can book a desert camp and organize a jeep tour. I booked one night in a popular camp online and I just figured I’d get to the desert camp first and organize a tour with people that were already there. But I was told the jeep tour had to start in the village (this was a complete lie, ha!) The guy tried to get me to go on a solo tour, which was very very expensive, and I asked if there were any group tours I could just join in, and he said there weren’t, just private tours. The place is not set up very well for solo travellers! Although he was being deliberately misleading about how difficult it was to group up with other travellers. I ended up waiting around in the office and eventually found an American guy and Chinese girl to do the trip with. Easy!

The Wadi Rum desert is spectacular! It has the look of a normal desert but with these massive sandstone rock formations that jut out from the sand. It’s very photogenic. They filmed the Martian here as well a few other Sci-Fi flicks. Unfortunately on the jeep tour we joined in what was basically a caravan of other jeep tours seeing all the tourist attractions, which just aren’t very impressive. So you’ve got this whole massive desert to drive around and you end up stuck in this horde. Lame! At the end you find a secluded spot for sunset at least, which was marvelous. Then they take you into the desert camp. The camps are fun, it’s a very social atmosphere, and they make a big buffet dinner and have some guys sing some Bedouin songs. Then you can sleep in your tent (it’s more like a bungalow) or take out a sleeping pad and sleep under the stars, which is what I did. Then in the morning if you wake up early you’ve got time for a little walk around near the camp, breakfast, and it’s back to the village. So it was a nice little excursion, despite some of the unsavory sales tactics.

I headed back to Wadi Musa and had one more afternoon to explore Petra. I hiked up to another rock carved edifice called the monastery and later on went up to a another viewpoint overlooking the Treasury. It’s a pretty popular spot as it’s the best place to get those perfect Instagram selfies. It was mildy entertaining watching a cute Turkish girl take photos of herself for a good 20 minutes straight. Meanwhile two Chinese girls in nice dresses were waiting and applying some make-up. After the Turkish girl finally moved one walked to the ledge and hopped over the cliff face! Unbeknownst to be me there was a tiny little ledge where you just had enough room to sit, feet dangling over the ledge, making for a nice photo. The Turkish girl, seeing the photo opportunity she had missed, got over her fears and climbed down to the spot as well. Anything for that killer Instragram shot!

The next day I was off to Amman, the capital of Jordan. It’s not known to be anything particularly exciting for tourists, but as far middle eastern cities are concerned its pretty nice looking, clean, orderly, fairly liberal and open minded. There is also a popular citadel on top of the hill overlooking the sandy colored buildings of Amman, but Google had led me astray, saying that it closed at 6pm. It turns out they kick you out at 6pm, but the gates actually close at 5:30. I got there at 5:35. Weak! Although I’d seen enough similar things in Turkey and Egypt that I wasn’t really that disappointed, as some of the others who arrived at the same time as me were. After non-stop moving around the last week the travel burnout had arrived! But no stopping yet, I would be off to cross the Israeli border to Jerusalem tomorrow!

Liveaboard Boat: A week out at sea

So when I was diving in Dahab and Sharm El Sheikh a lot people recommended that I dive down south as well, and the best way to do this is with a liveaboard boat, where you can pack in a lot of diving and get to some of the best dive locations far away from the coast. Most boats were all full but I was still able to find a boat with the itinerary I wanted (called BDE, Brothers, Daedalus, Elphinstone) just a week beforehand. Nice! That’s why I had one week to do the Nile Valley and then get back to the Red Sea coast.

So from Marsa Alam the taxi dropped me off at Port Ghalib, which is where all the liveaboards are docked. And there’s a lot of them! I was able to find my boat and meet some of the guides and crew. I was one of the first ones on board. Apparently the boat didn’t even leave until tomorrow morning (but you slept on it at night), so I had lots of time to explore the marina, which caters mostly to scuba divers and resort goers and is thus very pricey. The trip says it 8n/7d, but it’s pretty misleading as you spend the first day and night and the last day and a half docked in the harbor, so realistically its more like a 5d/6n trip. I also learned that 20 out of the 24 spots were going to be Spaniards. Yikes! If you’ve ever traveled with big groups of any southern europeans, you already know what that means. English is not going to spoken very often.

During the rest of the evening various parts our group filtered in, with the bulk being a diving club based in Madrid that were 16 arriving at 2am. My roommate was a South Korean guy, but his English wasn’t too great. The only other non-Spanish speakers on the boat were two Egyptian guys, about my age, who seemed pretty cool. One lived in Cairo and one lives in Dubai. The Egyptian guide was curious why I didn’t book with American oriented liveaboard, the Red Sea Aggressor. Not only did I not have any clue about the differences in the boats, I booked this trip last minute, so it’s not like I had a choice! I guess it was kind of lucky to be able to book this very popular itinerary so late, but the lack of English speakers was a pretty big bummer.

Then there was the equipment issue! For this liveaboard I wasn’t able to try on my equipment ahead of time, which normally an extremely easy process. In this case I had to send them my specs and they delivered the rental gear from Hurghada, 3 hours north. I asked what the plan was if something didn’t fit right (scuba masks can be tricky) and they said they’d ‘deal with it’. Well of course the mask didn’t fit as well as I’d like and the wetsuit was wayyyy too thick (the Red Sea is warm) and designed for someone who is like 6’6”. I looked like a kid in his dad’s clothes wearing that wetsuit. Ugh.

So obviously I wanted to a new wetsuit and they said that was the only one they brought. So when they said “we’ll deal with it” they really meant I would deal with it. For a whole week. Fun times. I even talked with Russian woman on the phone who was in charge of my equipment rental and instead of apologizing or providing some sort of solution she started getting angry with me for renting gear AND expecting it to fit! And this rental was not cheap! Ohh Russian customer service, just lovely. So that got me nowhere. There wasn’t much I could do but suck it up.

That morning we were off, poorly fitting equipment and all! The first day you don’t move too far, just doing some nice shallow, easy diving near the coast to make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. On live-aboards like this, most people are generally very experienced. I had about 150 dives under my belt, which seems like a decent amount, but that put me in the bottom third of experience level on the boat, with many guys (and girls) having several hundreds of dives, even into the thousands. I was also the only one on the whole boat to rent equipment, everyone else owned their own. Of course I was also the only person on the boat traveling for multiple months at a time! The others had flown to Egypt for a week or so specifically for this dive trip. The dives were good, although the groups were pretty big, but the night dive was especially cool because we saw some Spanish Dancers (coincidence in the name!) that are huge bright red nudibranches that only live in the Red Sea, and when they swim, they flap their whole bodies kind of awkwardly through the water, which is really mesmerizing to watch. All photos courtesy of my Egyptian friends.

blue spotted stingray

octopus

Spanish dancer

The boat drove all through the night and we woke up the next morning at a place called Daedalus. The reason these liveaboard trips are so popular is that they go to dive sites that are in the middle of the Red Sea which attracts big oceanic pelagics (sharks, mantas) that you don’t see too often along the coast. The big draw at Daedalus was supposed to be hammerheads. From the big boat you put on all your gear and board the rubber dinghies which then take you out the dive sites. You do what’s called a negative entry, where you have no air in your BCD, so when everyone falls backward off the dinghy you sink right away, then re-collect underwater and descend to go find some sharks.

The lighthouse at Daedalus

Unfortunately we got blanked on the sharks. We’d go down to 100 feet or so, where the sharks supposedly like to hang out, but each time we didn’t see any. Normally you’d look around for 10 minutes, swim out into the blue for a bit, and if you don’t see anything you ascend and do the rest of the dive along the reef wall. Although the reef isn’t particularly scenic, so once you don’t see any sharks the dive is a bit of disappointment. We did three dives and saw no sharks. I mean there’s still other interesting stuff, turtles barracudas, big tunas, some moray eels, what have you, but when you’re paying a lot of money to get out these remote dive sites you’re really hoping to see the big stuff! One of the guides said that 20 years ago this place was crawling with hammerheads, but now it’s much more difficult to find them. They suspect Yemeni fishermen killed a lot of them.

Next stop: Elphinstone. Once again, the boat drove all night and we awoke at 5:30 to a completely new dive site. We did three dives that day and once again, no sharks. Nada, zip, zero. It’s also annoying that all the liveaboard boats have the exact same schedules, they all leave the same day, all hit the same spots at the same time, and all return at the same time. Couldn’t they stagger these trips so you don’t have to compete with tons of other divers at the same time?! I get it, they want it so people can fly in for a week and fly out, but damn if your boat took off a day or two later or earlier than the rest of the pack, you’d have the places all to yourselves. Now you’re part of an underwater dive zoo. The reef at this site was at least more interesting than at Daedalus, and there was some more interesting things to see like the giant napoleon wrasses, but no sharkies! Mentally I was already preparing myself for the letdown of spending all this money on a completely sharkless trip. In addition to the letdown of the social atmosphere on the boat.

As predicted, being a non-Spanish speaker on this boat sucked big time. At first during meals I would sit at a table with the Spaniards, but it was mostly pointless. I would just sit there and eat quietly while everyone else spoke in Spanish. Occasionally I might pipe up and ask a question in English during a lull in conversation, which all the younger people understand just fine, get an answer, and then that’s it. Nobody really engaged me in any way, besides maybe asking what city I was from or something. Eventually me, the South Korean and the two Egyptians would all sit together at the outsiders table. The South Korean guy’s English was pretty awful, so it was mostly me talking to the Egyptian guys, who I liked. Thank god they didn’t only speak in Arabic!

Next dive site: The Brothers. Once again the boat drove all through the night to get there. The site is composed of two different columns reaching up to the surface, surrounded by reefs. One is called little brother and the other is big brother. We started at big brother, which also has two wrecks on it, from ships unprepared for incoming reef! We didn’t see any sharks at depth, but when we started getting closer to the surface there were a few oceanic whitetips that would circle around the liveaboards at around 15 feet. Finally! For safety, it’s important to stick together as a group and always stay below the sharks. If they attack (they rarely rarely attack humans, but if they do it’s always from below). If someone gets separated from the group sometimes a shark will swim up to them out of curiosity too see what’s up. You might have to try and kick them away with your fins. But for the most part they’re harmless. I stuck with the group! So that was pretty exciting, seeing the sharks for the first time on this trip! I’ve seen them before of course, but it’s always fun. 

The next day it was short ride to little brother. We awoke at  5:30am again and got the gear ready, went off in the dinghies, and headed down to 110 feet or so to see what was down there. Nothing at first. We just hung around for a while and our guide tapped his tank, pointed out into the blue, and flailed his arms out to the side, the universal signal for a manta ray! I couldn’t even see it at first , but sure enough after kicking a bit out into the blue, there it was, a massive manta gliding along. I’ve also seen mantas before, but I think this is the biggest one I’ve ever seen! And it liked the attention! It swam passed us, took a turn and swam back, and just for good measure it took one more turn and swam back past us one final time. Awesome. As we were slowly ascending we also saw a thresher shark much deeper than us. And then the oceanic white tips near the surface. Since our boat was divided into two groups we got to brag to them that we saw the manta.

The next dive we went to the same spot again. We saw some white tips at first and then one of the guys in our group pointed and put both hands into fists on both sides of his head, the sign for a hammerhead! It swam right below us, maybe twenty feet deeper than we were. For most of us (myself included) this was the first time seeing a hammerhead before, so it was pretty great. You could sense the excitement even underwater! It stayed for a minute or so underneath us and then headed back into the blue. One of the girls started doing a little jig underwater which was pretty funny. We got another glimpse of it out in the blue, and that was it. But then we also saw some more thresher sharks swimming below us, with their distinctive long tailfins. And then more white tips near the surface. So some great dives! On the dinghy ride back to the big boat some people were making the hammerhead signal to the guys back on the boat, which was met with shaking heads and extended middle fingers. We had been the lucky group again!

The Brothers, and more specifically little brother, had made up for any previous disappointment on the boat so far. Scuba diving is very similar to be on a safari, sometimes you drive around and don’t see anything at all. Sometimes you see some sporadic cool stuff, and every once in a while, it all hits you over the head at the same time.

We still had one more day of diving near the coast of Hurghada, which was nice, and we saw some more Spanish Dancers on the night dive, but it becomes a little blasé after all the great stuff we saw at the Brothers. Then we got into the port, and I could’ve stayed another night on the boat if I wanted to, but the Egyptian guys were bussing it back to Cairo, so I tagged along with them. At the bus station they hooked me up with an Uber to downtown and then we went our various ways (Cairo is huge and they stay a little outside of the horrendously overpopulated downtown area). I also got some a few pics and vids off their GoPro.  

Lots of the Spanish guys were diving with big camera rigs and multiple strobes (flashes) and I know they got some great photos, but it goes to show you how little friendship I felt with any of them that I didn’t even ask for any of their emails or facebooks at the end of the trip. Oh well. Cairo up next!

Getting to the Nile Valley

First I flew to Hurghada another resort town not far from Sharm as the crow flies, but a looong way away if you had to drive. It’s on the Egyptain mainland, meaning you’d have to bus it up to Cairo and then all the way down to Hurghada. Thankfully I flew. The town itself is pretty dumpy. You can tell it’s also been hurt by the decline in tourism. The old part of town where the locals hang is pretty neat though. I only stayed one night and took a shared taxi to the next town down the coast, Safaga.

Safaga: I arrived and the dive hotel I wanted to stay at was booked up, so I ended up diving with another company nearby, which I guess is a French catering dive company. I wandered into an apartment complex thinking it might be a hotel and I was quite a hit there for a few minutes. Lots of photos! The hotel I was looking for was 5 minutes down the road. Diving here was pretty good! But it was a handful of French people on the boat and me, so it was kind of awkward. I guess most of the dive companies around here cater to a certain nationality, Dutch, German, French etc. And with the French, you already know they’re not gonna be speaking much English.

El Quseir: The next town down the coast. I planned to dive here as well, but I after some questioning it turned out the company I pre-booked with was just trying to throw me on a boat with 30 German snorkelers, and charge me well over 100 dollars for the pleasure. No thanks. The town was pleasant though. And I ate at a fish restaurant where I had a huge fish, shrimp soup, salad, fries, bread, and a drink for about 10 dollars. Would definitely go again!

My Egypt Itinerary

Luxor: Time to get into the touristy stuff! I had to get to the Nile Valley from the coast. I took local minibuses to get there, which are shockingly cheap, especially when compared with your only other option: a private transfer. Luxor is known as the hassle capital of Egypt! You get approached A LOT! If you walk along the river everyone is trying to get you to go on a felucca ride. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the offer for drugs. Then you’ve got potential tour guides, horse carriages, souvenirs, etc. And wait till you walk down the market street! But actually it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. You just shake your head and ignore the hell out of everyone and they get the idea eventually. Some are very persistent though. 

horse buggies outside of the Luxor Temple

Luxor Temple

I ended up doing a tour with my guesthouse of the valley of the kings, which is where the tombs of many of the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried. For the important pharaohs the grave shafts reach extremely deep into the earth. It’s a shame all of them were eventually robbed. Except one! King Tut’s tomb was basically forgotten and buried beneath another tomb, which is why his was never robbed. Just imagine how much cool stuff would have been in the tombs of the great Pharoahs! We didn’t pay to see Tut’s tomb though, because it’s expensive and there’s nothing it anymore. We saw the tombs of a few other minor pharaohs, which are still pretty cool, walking down the tunnels with all the paintings and hieroglyphs on the walls. A lot of the decorations are very ornate and well intact. No photos though! Actually the guys who watch after the tombs kind of hope you try and take photos so then they can catch you and make you pay a fine/bribe.

 We also had a crazy older Russian woman with pounds of make up on in our group who was some sort of tarot reader in Russia and they kicked her out of one of the tombs because she kept touching stuff after they told her to stop. She also had huge knockers that were falling out of her top and whenever Egyptian guys looked at her too long she’d shake her tits at them and say a bunch of stuff in Russian and laugh. It was hilarious and super awkward! She spoke Russian to everyone as if they could understand it, even though obviously no one did. I couldn’t forget about her!

I will admit, I did kind of screw up by doing the group tour though! Group tours are always during the middle of the day when it’s A: super hot, and B: super crowded. If you wake up early or go late in the day you get to see the same stuff with way less people when it’s not so hot, and with much better light for photography. The next morning I rented a bicycle and woke up early and rode my bike around the valley and that was much more enjoyable! Much better photos too! When you go into the tombs the tomb-keepers actually encourage you take photos (that are supposed to be not allowed!) so you give them some baksheesh, ie a tip. 25 or 50 cents is sufficient. If I did it all over again I’d stay on the West bank, which is where the valley of the kings is located, in the village, as opposed to the big city on the East bank. A much more interesting local experience I think. And it’s its not like there’s anything much going on in the actual Luxor city.

Aswan: The other touristy city further south on the Nile. A lot people do felucca boat trips from Luxor to Aswan or vice versa. You can also take the train. But I didn’t realize the only ones you can take as a tourist only go early in the morning or later in the evening, so local minibus it was. It was pretty entertaining on this minibus ride, because I agreed to pay the driver over double what the actual rate was (which I obv didn’t know, $4 instead of $2). And when the people in the bus were collecting money (the riders collect the fares amongst themselves and give it to the driver near the end of the trip) it turned into a shouting match with the driver because lots of people in the car didn’t like that I was getting overcharged for the ride. At one point I was given the extra money I had paid back, then the driver kept yelling and I ended up giving it back to him, and then he gave me like a 10% discount or something. I obviously didn’t care about the $2, and was happy to pay $4 for a 3 hour ride, but it was entertaining nonetheless, and I was glad the other riders were willing to stick up for me!

Aswan also isn’t the most exciting city! It’s got some historical monuments, most are unimpressive with exception of the temple of Philae. I kept expecting these cities with lots of western tourists to have some sort of tourist district or something with nicer restaurants and maybe even bars, but really no such thing exists. You can’t even buy beer in any of the street shops, you have to buy it at the hotels, which upcharge quite a lot. Anyway, most people go to Aswan to see Abu Simbel which is a massive tomb cut into a hillside, constructed by Ramses II, the most prolific of all the builders in Egypt. It’s original site (along with many others including Philae) was to be flooded by the damn built in 60’s, so UNESCO raised enough money to get it moved chunk by chunk to a higher location, which was an insanely massive project. But they did it so well that you can’t even tell. It’s best to see the photos rather me describing it. But it’s very impressive!

The flooding that created lake Nasser that I described before also relocated thousands and thousands of Nubian people, who would best be described as Sudanese people living in the southern tip of Egypt. So around Aswan you also have many Nubian villages, which are also interesting to see. There’s one that specifically caters to tourists, but there’s also plenty more that you can visit, just to see what the local life is like. And you definitely feel like you’re in Sudan, not Egypt. Although I visited during the middle of day when everyone is resting, so it wasn’t particularly enthralling.

Edfu: I took the train from Aswan to this town on the Nile that is known for it’s temple of Horus (one of the more famous Egyptian gods, he looks like a eagle). But it’s rare that tourists actually stay in this town, because the vast vast majority of tourists only stop at it for an hour or two during their felucca ride along the Nile. So I enjoyed being the foreigner around town! My hotel was really nice and cost $11 or something silly. There was one cute Egyptian girl who spoke some broken English at the reception, just enough for me to understand. I made lots of new friends walking around town! But of course there always has to be at least someone around trying to take advantage of the tourist. When I was smoking shisha one guy tried to convince me to sleep on his boat, or to sell my phone to him or let him be my tour guide, and I kept shutting him down. Then when I tried to pay, he tried to get the bill for me, telling me give him $6, which of course is BS. I know from smoking shisha at many local places it should cost like $2 tops. After an argument I ended up paying $3, which doesn’t matter about the money, its just the principle, especially when you know for a fact that some dickhead is deliberately trying to get some extra money out of you, and he doesn’t even work at the cafe! Too many experiences like this and it really starts to grind your gears!

The next day I woke up the see the temple of Horus, and to my surprise it was jam packed right after sunrise at 7am or so. It turned out that all the feluccas all get there at the same time! So I was quite annoyed by this, because there is nothing worse than two dozen tour groups roaming around the temple with their little flags when you thought it was going to be empty! Even if you have a little room to yourself for a little bit one of the tour groups busts in and basically forces you out of the room. But then by 8am all the tour groups had gone back to their boats and I had the whole temple to myself, which was of course what I wanted. It’s pretty damn cool to have temples so large and impressive all to yourself!

Edfu was also great to walk around in the morning, as it’s a very agricultural city, so you can see lots of guys taking their donkeys to and from the fields. I even found a big Coptic Church randomly outside of town, but then they didn’t let me in because I didn’t have my passport. Bummer!

friendly guy who i drank some tea with

the road through the fields to the Coptic Church

Marsa Alam: My next point on the trip was the small town of Marsa Alam, back on the Red Sea coast. I had been told that I couldn’t take public transportation across the desert back to the Red Sea and I would have to hire a private transfer. Travel in Egypt isn’t always easy. The cost I was quoted from Aswan to Marsa Alam was 150 euros!! Haahah. And it was a complete lie. I was able to use public transport for the equivalent of $6. It wasn’t very comfortable, but there’s no way in hell I’d pay 150 euros for five hours worth of driving.

The village of Marsa Alam is really nothing much, it’s mostly under construction. When I stopped in a gas station to buy some food the guy asked me where I was working, because I guess the only foreigners that stay in town work in the oil and gas industry. I was just there one night and then headed to Port Ghalib, which is where my liveaboard boat would depart from. The hotel owner got me the local taxi price, which was nice of him, as the taxi driver assured me he’d try to get two or three times as much from a foreigner, but being it was his good friend who owned the hotel, he would respect the Egyptian price. Thanks broham. An hour later he dropped me off in the harbor, where are the liveaboards were docked. Nice place! Here I’d find my boat and head off for a week of diving in the Southern Red Sea!

South Sinai: Dahab and Sharm El Sheikh

So things got better once I got to Dahab. People I interacted with on the street were much friendlier. Whereas Sharm El Sheikh is very resorty, kind of like Cancun or something, Dahab is much more chill and backpackery. It’s a small town on the coast with lots of budget/midrange guesthouses and hotels, a bunch of dive shops, and wood planked restaurants that are built overhanging the water. You can walk through it all in 20 minutes. The most hassle you get is people inviting you into their restaurants. Dahab’s economy seems to be doing a bit better than Sharm’s, but once you get outside of the main part of town there are lots of very empty and hotels and restaurants with some halted construction projects and stuff.  

These nice looking rooms looked totally empty

The boardwalk outside of town, also no people

2016 was a very bad a year for Sinai’s tourism when a Russian plane was shot down by terrorists over North Sinai, which led to Russia and the UK to discontinue direct flights to Sharm, a very sizeable chunk of their tourists. Those flights are still discontinued and the region has had to pivot to more domestic tourists in the last few years (and the Gulf countries too). A massive terrorist attack also happened in North Sinai in 2017 (300+ people dead, claimed by ISIS) which even though it was very far from the tourists in S. Sinai, it certainly didn’t help the region’s reputation. 2017 was a terrible year for both Sharm and Dahab, although 2018 has seen a steady increase in tourists, moreso in Dahab.

I booked a hotel for a few nights; talked to a couple of dive shops and picked the one I liked the best. There are plenty of good dive sites around and you don’t even have to get on a boat! The majority of the diving is shore diving, so you just put on all your gear and walk right in. The most famous dive site is called the blue hole, which goes all the way down to 120 meters or so. At 60m (180ft) there is a fantastic underwater arch that opens the blue hole out into the ocean and it’s very popular with scuba divers and free divers alike. It’s also perhaps the sport’s largest underwater graveyard, as this type of depth is not meant for inexperienced divers on one tank. You need to take a technical diving course in order to go this deep (and the companies are better about enforcing it now) but I guess back in the day anyone wanting to try and do this dive could attempt it on a single tank and the results weren’t always so good. Nitrogen narcosis can be a real bitch at 60m. Don’t worry I’m not doing this dive!

did one day on the boat. As you can see it’s just desert and ocean. Brown and blue.

I ended up doing the bulk of my diving with a Spanish girl about my age and German woman in her 40’s. So it was a good five days of diving, lots of nice healthy corals, blue spotted stingrays, octopuses, scorpionfish etc. Normally it’s kind of rare to find an octopus, but we saw at least one just about every single day! They are my favorite aquatic animals to watch! I would have preferred a larger dive group, err nightly social circle, but you can’t have everything! The German woman was off with an Egyptian ‘friend’ most nights. Apparently Dahab is very popular with European women who like to mix it up with the local guys here. Similar to Bali or Goa. Of course being an Arab country, the reverse could never ever happen!

So overall I liked Dahab a lot. It has a nice homely feel to it and everyone knows everyone else in town. Dahab is also traditionally a Bedouin community so you see them a lot when you walk outside the main tourist strip, white robes flowing and all, which also gives it a cool local flair. The dive company’s driver was also a Bedouin. It was nice to do a couple dives in the morning and have the rest of the afternoon to chill in one of the waterside cafes. I stayed six nights and then headed back to Sharm El Sheikh. I opted to stay at a small dive center/hotel in Namaa Bay, which was tucked in between the surrounding massive resorts. I’d be diving with two American guys and an older British woman.

It’s really easy to not like Sharm! With so many resorts around you lose any type of local feel. And all it is the ocean and the resorts, the rest is just desert. And now that most of the tourists are Arab, there is kind of a cultural divide. The parties that used to rage into the night several years ago don’t exist anymore. There’s doesn’t seem to be a fun western oriented bar to hang out at. The divers are fewer and far between and the local dive community has lost quite a few guides who have opted to go elsewhere. Resorts are often at 30 percent occupancy. But this isn’t exactly bad for diving, as you get less divers at each dive site and healthier corals! And there are lots of excellent dive sites around. No coral bleaching to be found in the Red Sea! (yet). So I definitely would never stay here if it wasn’t for the diving!

You see a lot similar things that yo do in Dahab, but everything is a touch brighter, there’s more schools of fish around, and there’s more features to the underwater terrain. It’s also quite a bit more expensive. In Asia, normally the equipment rental is included in the cost, but here I was paying $23/day just for equipment rental, plus the dive sites are in a ‘national park’ so that’s another $8/day, then if you want to go to some of the further sites they get you for a $30 fuel surcharge. None of that is including the normal price of each dive. So it was not cheap! There was one really cool wreck dive called the Thistlegorm, which was a British ship that got bombed during WW2. It’s a big ship and contained a whole bunch of ammunition, motorcycles, and even a tank, all of which you can still see today! It’s rated as one of the best wreck dives in the world, and it certainly is the coolest wreck dive I’ve ever done!

some photos I stole from the internet

My stay in Sharm was 5 days, and besides the diving it really wasn’t too exciting. Doing three dives a day, everyday, gets you pretty wiped out! We’d have beer o’clock once we got back to the dive hotel at 5pm or so, regroup and have dinner, maybe smoke some shisha, and off to bed! Welcome to traveling in your 30’s! I was also really lazy about taking photos in Sharm. But imagine a lot of nice looking all white resort/hotels in the middle of the desert with nobody in them! Next up: Still the Red Sea, but on the Egyptian mainland. Here’s some iphone photos:

First day in Egypt

Note: I wrote this a while ago, but I’m just posting it now.

I’ve been here 15 hours now and I hate this place so far. You are literally a tourist piece of meat in this country. Right off the bat in the airport you get directed into a line to buy a visa, which you need if you’re going other places in Egypt besides Sinai. It cost $25. I get to the desk and the guy says 25 Euros. I point to the official sign on the wall that says $25. He says they don’t take dollars only Euros. What? Apparently this stupid line is a private company issuing the visa and they just pocket the Euro/Dollar difference. Cool. Off to find the ‘official desk.’ Why do they allow this kind of BS in the airport?

Next I made the rookie mistake of not having a pen around to fill out the immigration forms. Usually there are some pens available or someone working will let you borrow one. Not here! Both people I asked told me to use the pens on the tables. There are no pens on the tables! Finally someone begrudgingly handed one over. Then you’ve got the airport taxis, which are basically a cartel. No one will give you even close to a reasonable price, even if you’re just going a few miles down the road. “Only 20 Euros my friend!” they’ll say. Ha! I told them I would rather walk than pay them 20 Euros. So I started heading towards the main road and one of them followed me and I got him down a little bit, still at least double the normal price, but I was too tired to deal with these guys any longer. Then he acts like he’s my best friend on the ride to the hotel. I’m not your buddy, guy!

The next day the first thing on the agenda was to buy a SIM card. Walking down the main tourist district during the middle of the day is kind of depressing. It’s a bit of a ghost town. Some of the hotels had been shuttered, all the stores in the shopping mall were closed, almost no one was in the streets, and the heat was oppressive. A couple guys approached me to sell boat trips, but I was having none of that. I found a vodaphone stand and I handed over my phone and he slipped in the sim card. I asked him how many gigabytes of data and he kept telling me it’s 4G! 4G!. Riiiight. I asked how much. 30 Euros he says. Oh god damn it, here we ago again.

Of course they can’t just have a price list that says X amount of gigs costs you Y amount of money, you pay that and be on your merry way, like most other countries in the world. No, no, no it always has to be a game to see how much they can squeeze from the tourists. I ended up paying $15 for the SIM, which I’m sure was also a ripoff. These guys drive me nuts. I guess prices on almost anything are negotiable in Egypt, including convenience stores, pharmacies etc. Which effectively means they’ll try and rip you off on anything if they think they can get away with it. Fun times. At least the country is cheap!

Next I took a taxi to the bus station, where there was supposed to be a 2:30pm bus to Dahab. I get to the station, there is even a schedule posted confirming the 2:30 bus and I try to buy a ticket. The guy tells me to wait till the bus gets in to buy the ticket. 2:30 rolls around, then 2:45 and I start to inquire about where the bus is. “No 2:30 bus, only 5:00 bus”. I point the schedule, which says 2:30. “No no, that is old schedule, no 2:30 bus now” Arghhh. I don’t feel like waiting in the bus station, which is hot as hell, so taxi it is. 90Km (60 mi) to Dahab.

I agree on a price with a taxi driver and of course once we get there he insists I need to pay more so he can pay off a bribe to a police officer or something. I have no idea if he’s bullshitting me or not (I assume he is) and I tell him no, we already agreed on the price, I’m not paying any more. He starts getting mad at me, I’m getting mad at him for throwing in this hidden charge at the last second and eventually I cough up the extra money and storm off. How many people can try and rip me off in less than 24 hours?! It’s definitely the worst first impression of a country I’ve had so far.

About time to go

I’m getting a bit tired of this region now! I still think it’s a very interesting place, but it’s just too lonely traveling solo around here. I’ve been here for 12 days now (a few days too many I think) and have not met, let alone seen another western tourist. I can only spend so much time by myself! And it’s not like there is any nightlife. A lot of these places you can’t even find a beer anywhere. Then you got the heat, which during the day is oppressive, so you don’t even want to do anything from about 11am to 4pm. And at this point most of the touristy stuff is all kind of running together: old mosques, forts, churches, and ruins.

 I also thought there would be a more pronounced difference between Turkish and Kurdish culture, at least to an outsider looking in, but besides the language (I can’t understand either one) and some slight differences in clothing and a slightly darker, more arab looking appearances in general, it doesn’t seem all that different. I’m sure Kurdish people would take offense to that! But for anyone who is young, the only way I’d know if they were Turkish or Kurdish is to ask. The older Kurds also seem to be fond of “warrior Trump”, which annoys me. I’ll chalk it up to poor education system.

Tea and shisha

Here in Sanliurfa I was befriended by a very eager university student who studied for a year in Poland and speaks good English. He wanted to teach me more about Kurdish culture, help me get around, make sure I don’t get ripped off etc. Seemed like a nice guy.  We eventually went to visit Gobekli Tepe, which is kind of must see in Urfa, it’s an archaeological site, basically the worlds first temple built in 11000 BC. It’s about 10 miles outside of town. Rather than just hop in any taxi he calls a taxi driver that he knows, who will charge less than a normal taxi. We walk around the site for 30 minutes and then on the way back when it comes to pay the cost is 200 Lira, $40. What? There’s a taxi board right outside the Hilton where I’m at with the price of 100 Lira posted, which means a normal taxi on the street will cost much less than that. Friends don’t let friends pay double or triple cab fares! I assume they were splitting the excess proceeds. I coughed up 180 Lira and ditched my ‘friend’ shortly after that.

On the plus side, the food is really good! I’m still not tired of kebabs and Turkish pizza and baklavas for dessert. I had a pistachio baklava for the first time the other day, it was amazing! Where has this been all my life? Turkey is amazing value right now price-wise. I mean Eastern Turkey would have been cheap anyways, but now with the lira going down it’s a great deal. A doner kebab on the street is less than a dollar. A dolmus to get from one city to the next cost about two dollars. I just ate McDonalds for the first time on this trip, and it costs just over three dollars for a burger meal with fries, a drink, and a 6 piece mcnugget. A room at a cheap guesthouse costs $6-8.

Lately I’ve been staying in more higher end hotels than I usually do because at the $20-$30 price range you can get some great bang for the buck. As I mentioned before I’m staying at the Hilton (garden), it’s one of the nicer hotels in town, super plush beds, speedy wifi, blasting AC, pool, sauna, fitness center, huge breakfast buffet, etc, and the cost is $30/night. These are not my usual traveler comforts! Even in Western Turkey this wouldn’t be possible because all the hotels are quoted in Euros. So I’m sleeping well in Turkish Kurdistan!

I am ready for my next country though, Egypt. Although I have heard you will get hassled A LOT in Egypt, so I’m bracing myself. One of my travel buddies, who’s been to 50+ countries says Egypt was her least favorite country in the whole world. But it sounds like a female traveling solo in the Arab world is much more of a pain in the ass than being a man. Anyway, I think the temples and pyramids and all that stuff will be cool, but I’m really looking forward to the scuba diving, which I haven’t done for a long time now. I’ve got my flights booked now, so I’ll be in Sharm El Sheikh in two days!