Click here for pictures from Salta. Geez, I totally forgot to mention. So, on the great football game day, not only did our team win, but Air Canada scored a small victory. When we returned to the hotel, the missing bag had shown up! If it could write a blog, I’m sure it would be interesting, but sadly, we can only ever guess at the route it took to get back to us. But it did. Fully intact. Huzzah, vacation angst spared. One more thing to note, if heading to a football match, shirts are 30pesos before the game. Afterwards, you can score the same one for 20 pesos (7 bucks), so I’m now sitting in my ‘away’ jersey for river, a nice adidas tech shirt (well, let’s be honest, Adidas has no idea this shirt exists, hence adidas with the lower case a). Till next post, stay cool (while I stay hot!)
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Hello everyone! I figured it was time to give you all an update on the happenings of me over in Saudi Arabia. As you likely pieced together from the last couple posts, we had a very smooth arrival in the Kingdom. Unfortunately, the Internet connection from here is rather slow, making it difficult to fire off too many emails or do other things. In spite of this, I’ve still managed to post quite a few pictures on our flickr page, so feel free to head over to our sets page and check out the latest while we’re over here. I will also attempt to give a little insight into our first few days over here in Riyadh and the Diplomatic Quarter. I’ve decided that although these are the same physical place, life is much different in the DQ than in Riyadh. Namely, I am on ‘Canadian soil’ when I’m at the embassy and in the house here, so we have a lot more breathing room in terms of what we can do while here compared to traveling around the city. I’ll try to keep this post on the short side, as we are leaving shortly for the camel souq and the horse races, and I’ve only got a little time to sort out my thoughts. Read on for the details.
Welcome to the second post detailing some of the awesome experiences Deanna and I had in Morocco. This time, I’ll take you a bit off the beaten path, and talk about two particularly awesome experiences. Namely, the high of trekking and climbing in the High Atlas mountains, including sumitting the highest peak in North Africa, as well as the lows of heading to the depths of the deepest caves in North Africa, the Friouato Cave system. For Deanna, these were particularly fun, as she had never climbed a mountain before or gone cave exploring. In another post, I’ll visit a first for BOTH of us, but this time, it’s all about Deanna’s firsts. If you check into flickr, you’ll eventually find pictures from both, but for now, only the Atlas Mountain pics are up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the collection though. For now, I’ll just give you a bit of the blow by blow in written words. Enjoy!
Click here for pics from the last 2 days in Buenos Aires and the flight home. Hi all… the time has come to look back on the final couple days of our trip to Argentina. When I last wrote to you all, I was seated in an Internet cafe in Mendoza writing about that great city. I was about to hop on the overnight bus to Buenos Aires, a trip lasting 13 hours or so. In order to prepare for this, I picked up a litro of cerveza, and some snacks at Norte, a local grocery strore. Funny enough, I got searched by the security guard. Guess I looked shady. Of course, all I had were some chocolates I bought at the local chocolate factory. Tartufo. If you’re ever in Mendoza, I recommend you stop by there. They are an ice cream, as well as chocolate factory. Mmm delicious. I dragged some of the gang there, and the only person who wouldn’t buy anything was Sabine, our little Swiss miss. She felt it would be unpatriotic to buy chocolate in Argentina. Oh well, I couldn’t convince her otherwise. But I digress. We got to the bus station, and I headed to the bar with my new South African mate Allen for a quick Whiskey. Yup, somewhere along the line, he sort of convinced me I should start drinking whiskey. And you know what? It’s not half bad. So, we had a quick Johnny Walker Red Label, then boarded our final overnight bus. It was a pretty sweet ride as usual. The on-board attendant was a really nice guy, and popped in a DVD called ‘The Classic Project’, which was a music video collage of hits from the 80’s. We all had a great time just guessing the songs and singing along. We figure most of the other passengers didn’t really enjoy it as much as us, but that’s life. Suffice it to say, it was yet another long bus trip where I didn’t sleep too much. That’s where the beer helped me though. I managed to squeeze in a couple quality hours of sleep anyway. I wanted to be somewhat refreshed for our last full days in Buenos Aires. Read on for more about the last day.
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!