Bored. Snapped a few pics in the airport. 3 hour layovers in terminal 1 are toooo looong. Happily the Red Rocket supplies us with beer. 2 pints of Rickards – an outlandish $19 after tax and hefty tip (hey, I’m on vacation and happy). Looking forward to $3 bottles of Argentine Red!! Next up, the hung for Chester Cheetah’s Cheese Corn! Rumour has it that Nacho Libre is slotted for the next flight. THe Notebook is also on tap, but luckily, it’s later on so I won’t have to stay up.
The first excursion I signed up for was a ‘Caliente Night’ with Go Travel Direct. As you can imagine, this night was supposed to be hot and spicy. So what exactly is Caliente Night you ask? Well, simply put, it was a pub crawl of northern Dominican. We were set to hop on a converted school bus, and tour around for the night. This bus was no normal bus though. It had a thatched roof, and.. wait for it… a bar at the front! Yup, the Go Travel reps would be serving us from the free-flowing rum onboard. To start, we were heading to Puerto Plata to view the sunset at an old prison. From there, supper in a typical restaurant. Then, the bar hopping began. We would stop at a road-side disco at one point. Next, we were heading East towards Sosua, and ultimately ending up at Cabarete. These are surf towns. Cabarete has the distinction of being the site of the Kite surfing world championships. Neat-o. So, just how did the night shape up? Well, read on, dear friends.
Wow! I can’t believe I’m finally writing up this post. This will be my final post dedicated to talking about the African Adventures that we recently had. There really isn’t all that much to share in this post either, as the day was dominated by a really long shuttle ride to the airport and then whoosh, we were off! However, it will give me a chance to perhaps close out with a few of my final thoughts on the overall trip. I’m not sure how that’ll turn out yet as it will possibly just make me want to pull out my credit card and charge up my next adventure right away. Isn’t credit great? I’ll try to resist the urge for a little longer, but rest assured, there will be many more adventures by ActiveSteve in the coming year(s). No map to share either, but I can at least point you to a few photographs that were put up onflickr. Read on if you dare for the rest of my tale.
08/02/08
Hello friends from around the world. Today I made my way over Haast Pass, the lowest of the passes from west to east over the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Whew, it had some tough parts. Although the overall pass was only 564m, the first section was a killer, as everyone I encountered has agreed. I’m glad that I opted to do it in 2 days rather than only one, as now I can enjoy a leisurely ride in to Wanaka, and hopefully be there by mid-day. I’m hoping that once there, I can find a bar televising the Coast to Coast race, and I’ll then proceed to drink and cheer on all the local athletes rather than competing in it myself 🙂 I chose to play a bit of a tourist myself today, opting to do all the side trails on the way to Makarora, in order to break up my day and not finish off too early, which believe me, would be boring here in Makarora. Know what’s here? Nothing. Just the ‘resort’ I’m staying at, and a DOC information center, which I spent 40 minutes at already chatting about tracks around here. Anyway, read on for a bit more about the day and what it held for me. I also have a pile of pictures on the map for you to check out.
Good news everybody. Today I can finally write about getting out of the safari vehicle and actually doing some real hiking. Mind you, I’m not talking about a multi-day challenging trudge or anything, but at least the dust in my nose would be from kicking at the dirt rather than by driving through it, so that’s something. Our first foray into the hills was a hike up Mount Lemagrut, which is one of 9 craters in the Ngorongoro conservation area. Although we’d be trekking up to 3100m this day, we were starting out at about 2400m, so the overall altitude gain and loss wasn’t going to be that great. This would however serve as our first acclimatization hike of sorts, and give us an idea how we might do as a group on the more challenging days ahead of us. This is also the first time I’ll be sharing a nice map of the trek with you all. As you might expect, I carried a GPS with me for most of the trip, and made a number of maps to show you where we went. Along with the map you can also head to flickr and check out the set of pictures and videos from the day. Once you’ve taken all that in and set the scene, come on back and read the rest of my tale!
