Holland

We arrived at Schipol airport, Holland on the 12th of September and we met by Alex's aunt and uncle  Joke and Ari. They drove us to their house in a small, pretty village called Schipluiden. We were quickly settled in the spare bedroom upstairs, fed and watered. It was a really bizarre feeling sitting in a normal house with a kitchen and a loungeroom- it had been so long!

For the next week they very kindly drove us around Holland, showing us the sites. We drank beer in Delft, walked the canals in Den Hague, got fish and chips in De Hoek, ate pickled raw herring at a market, and toured Rotterdam.

We spent a lazy afternoon with long time friends of Alex's dad's family, Bas Hendrik and Dineika. There were platters of cold meats, cheeses, and an endless supply of wine. We again shared some of our photos and Dineika bravely tried to teach me how to ride a bike. I used to know when I was younger, and would proudly like to state that I am living proof that you can indeed forget to ride a bike, despite what the rumours say. I was completely uncoordinated, but when in Holland....

We were also lucky enough to spend some time with Alex's 101 year old Oma. She was such an incredible, strong, witty, independent woman. Her body was frail but her mind was sharp. She didn't speak a word of English and we spoke none of Dutch, but Alex got some really special time time with her showing her some of our photos of Africa.

On the 19th of September, Al's family drove us into Amsterdam, where he had booked a hotel for our last 3 nights in Holland. Amsterdam was exactly what i expected. A schizophrenic capital with too many different sides to its personality to count. It was so beautiful with all the canals snaking through the town. We did the obligatory canal boat tour which was nice and relaxing and enabled us to see a large part of the town. We wandered the streets for hours on end, ate more ribs than anyone should ever eat in one sitting, got buckets filled with testubes of Jagermeister, took sneaky shots of the ladies in the windows of the red light district... and much much more.

We had the full 'Amsterdam Experience'. But I will leave it at that and let you use your imagination. I choose to spare my family the gory details!

I really enjoyed my first European country ever visited, and to be able to spend time with Al's family, and in particular his Oma, was really special. On the 22nd of September we made our way down to the docks of De Hoek again and boarded the giant ferry that would take us all the way to England. It was a huge boat with everything you could possible want to entertain yourselves for a few hours, even a mini casino. From memory the crossing took about 5 hours and half way through we went into the mini 20 seater cinema and watched Super 8. It was a completely different expereince to our last ferry crossing in Sudan!

Next up... Ol' London Town.

The end of an Era...

Ok. So I got laaaazy!

It is currently the 29th of November, 2012 and I am sitting in our staff house on Alderney, a small island in the Channel Islands 7 miles from the coast of France. It has been a long time since I wrote an entry- to be more precise it has been 470 days. Or 1 year, 3 months and 12 days! And a lot has happened since then.
I don't really know where to start. So I suppose I will just start where I left off and take it from there, but unlike the rest of the blog I wont be able to describe day by day (lucky you!)... my memory is just not that good.

The last entry was from the 17th of August, 2011. On the 18th Alex was still doing his dive course so I spent the day relaxing, eating, drinking, sitting in the sun- you know- same old, same old.
The 19th was our last day with our truck family. It was very nostalgic, probably more so for us than them. They were continuing their journey after all and had Jordan and Syria to look forward to. We were faced with the day the we wished would never have to happen, saying goodbye to them.

That day came on the 20th. I remember waking up early to see them all off. We walked them out to the truck and fought back the tears. We hugged everyone at least once (or twice, or thrice). It felt surreal. The possibility of them not being there anymore was just incomprehensible  Finally the long goodbye came to an end and Farron started to drive the truck down the street while we stood there and waved, and our family waved back from the windows of the truck.

Big exhale.

Wiping away the tears we walked back inside to the breakfast room and sat down to eat. No less than 10 minutes later we saw The Glutens (Kate and Geoff) walking back towards us. Were we hallucinating??  If I am honest I did have a little chuckle thinking that they had forgotten something but the reality was much funnier. Turns out I was still holding one of the 'toilet' keys! If you remember from earlier in this blog, the 'toilet' is what we called the safe under the floorboards of the truck. For safety reasons there was 2 padlocks with 2 different keys and 2 different people held the keys at all times... Thank goodness they didn't drive ALL the way to the Jordanian border before they realised that I still had a key and they couldn't get to their passports, not to mention that our passports were still in the 'toilet'!!!

So I ran up to our room and frantically looked for the small key whose whereabouts was a mystery to me (I did warn everyone that I was not a good candidate for the role of 'toilet' key holder). Finding the key we ran it down the road to where Farron had parked the truck, jumped inside, opened the 'toilet', grabbed our passports (phew!) and handed over the key. We then gave everyone a final hug, and stood in the middle of the road waving them off for the final time- then we went back and finished out breakfast.
I don't remember what the rest of the day involved, but I would hazard a guess that it included eating, drinking, and relaxing.

On the next day, the 21st, I honestly cant remember what we did. All I remember is waking up and going down for breakfast and experiencing this empty feeling. Where were our friends- our family? We had spent the last 132 days with these people, and all of a sudden they were gone. It was a huge adjustment for us both. As soppy as it may sound, for the next few days we kept on catching ourselves expecting to see them around the corner, or thinking that we did just see them. I suppose it was some form of grieving that we were experiencing. The end of an era. The end of the best adventure of our entire lives, with the best group of people we could have imagined. We truly did make a new family, people that we will forever be connected to.

On the 22nd, my sister was due to have a cesarean and welcome her twins into the world. By this stage Alex had finished his dive course and we picked a nice place on the water to sit with our laptop and wait anxiously for news. Eventually we learnt that I had a new niece and nephew. Isabelle and Finnegan O'Mahoney. Finn was very small and had to spend some time in the baby intensive ward, but I can happily state that they are now very happy, very cute little people and are just over 1 year old!

I do remember feeling this overwhelming sense of homesickness when we got the news that the twins had arrived. I think that still adjusting to our truck family no longer being there, coupled with the birth of these two new angels made me feel further away from home than I ever had before. I was so happy and yet so sad at the same time. I remember it being a very exciting and very bitter-sweet day.

The next day, the 23rd, we went snorkeling the in world famous Blue Hole. It was about a 20 minute drive from Dahab in the back of a ute. It was really amazing. The water was so blue and clear, the coral was in a circular shape with a 130 meter drop down to the ocean floor. We swam around the inside and the outside marveling at the abundance of breathtaking coral and countless species of fish. I remember swimming above the scuba divers and their giant air bubbles would float to the surface. It was like being in a shower of bubbles and you could play music on some of the larger ones, smacking your hand on the top of the air bubble as it floated past you, emitting a different sound depending on the size of the bubble. We also saw some people practicing free diving which was incredible to see. They really defied what I though was possible. This one lady was wearing what looked like mermaid flippers and she shot straight down into the depths of the ocean, so deep that we lost sight of her.

We grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants on the hill overlooking the Blue Hole and then were driven back to Dahab where we, no doubt, sat and relaxed, and ate and drank. I also managed to do a lot of shopping during these last few days in Dahab, and so did Alex. He was intent on buying a real shisha pipe not another touristy one. So, thanks to google, we found out about Omar, the Master of Shisha.

Now, this was an experience that will stick in my mind. We located his shop in the backstreets of Dahab. When we walked in he didn't even look up from whatever he was reading, instead he just said "I dont sell tourist shisha pipes, I only sell good shisha pipes. And my shisha pipes are not cheap- they are good. If this is not what you are looking for, please leave". What a welcome huh.

Once we assured him that we were in fact looking to buy a 'real' shisha pipe he opened up to us. This guy is basically famous in the world of shisha's. There is even video of him on youtube smoking a shisha under water (!). He told us that what he would do for us is learn what we already knew about smoking a shisha, teach us what he knew and then, if we still wanted to buy one he could find one suitable for us.
For the next 3 or 4 hours we sat in his shop while he imparted on us his lifetime of knowledge about shisha. We smoked and talked and compared and learnt. At some stage 3 white kids, probably around 17 years old walked in. One lived there with his family and the other two were visiting him and he was good friends with Omar. So we all sat in a circle in his shop and passed around a shisha and shared some stories. We did leave Omar's shop to 'think' about whether we wanted to invest in a real shisha pipe. I put that in inverted commas because in reality we had already made up our minds. It was a large sum of money, but it was the only thing during the whole trip that Alex had really wanted to buy, and in light of all the shopping I had done, it was only fair, and I really enjoyed smoking the shisha too so it was win-win.  So, skip forward a few more hours and we were the proud owners of a real shisha. I'm pretty sure that after this we went straight back to the hotel and took the pipe for a test drive or two!
The next three days or so was spent like any other in Dahab... wake, eat, shop, swim, drink, eat, lay in sun, shop, smoke shisha, drink, eat.... you get the point. There was this one girl who followed us around and tried to get money off us at every opportunity  Over the two weeks we spent there we became very familiar to one another and at least once a day she would find us at whatever restaurant we were eating or drinking at and promptly sit down to play the games on my Ipod. Her name escapes me at the moment but it will come back to me. She really was a little ball of angst and attitude. Such a spunky little girl.

On the 27th we organised to go to a traditional Bedouin camp for dinner. We were picked up at 3pm and as usual sat in the back of a ute. A few minutes into the drive the car slowed slightly, just enough so two kids could jump in the back with us. These kids turned out to be the drivers children. He took us up to the top of a rocky, sandy hill in the backdrop of Dahab overlooking the Red Sea. There was just us, the driver, his wife, their two kids, and their cat. The ground was covered by pillows and rugs. We helped cook on the barbeque and then the man took us on a walk (read: rock climb) through the maze of rocks. we climbed up, we climbed down, we climbed sideways and upside down through these steep and narrow caverns made over the centuries. The whole time their cat followed us and it was a nimble little thing, although there were a few times it found itself up some ledge that it was not too keen on jumping down. We finally started to head back to camp when I could no longer physically keep up with Alex and the man, the things they were climbing was crazy! And although I could probably get up most of them I, like the cat, had little faith in my ability to get back down.

We ate dinner in the dark by candlelight and played some more board games with his kids. We sat around the fire and smoke shisha and showed the kids how to make cool patterns on the camera by swinging a torch around and taking a photo with a slow shutter speed. At some stage another ute with about six people pulled up. The sat around the fire, smoked a shisha for about 10 minutes then all piled into the ute again and took off, leaving us there in the peaceful camp. After dinner the man, his wife, 2 kids and us all got into his ute and he asked us if we wanted to go back to his place for a cup of hibiscus tea and a shisha. We said yes, of course, jumping at the chance to see how an Egyptian family lived and appreciating his hospitality.
We sat in his humble loungeroom, ate fresh dates and dates soaked in milk (called Balla), drank tea and smoked shisha. We learnt a lot from him about the mysteries of Ramadan. How is it essentially a month of fasting, but how everyone has their own interpretations of it. For instance, there is to be no eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset, husbands and wives are not make physical or eye contact during the hours between sunrise and sunset. There is to be no listening to music or watching tv during the hours between sunrise and sunset with the exception of pray channels. Some believe there is to be no talking between those same hours. How each individual practices Ramadan though is different. For instance, the man that took us snorkeling in the black hole considered the fact that water got in his ears while snorkeling to be against Ramadan, so for each day he had to get in the water during Ramadan, he would add an extra day of fasting on the end of the month as repentance. Shop keepers would have to talk in order to keep their business, so they would add extra days of fasting onto the end of the Ramadan month to make up for it. Children are exempt from Ramadan up until the age of 7, after which they are expected to fast along with the adults. People would suffer during Ramadan and talk openly of it, but at the same time enjoy Ramadan and the sense of spirituality and tradition and accomplishment that they got from it. There was also a three day fesitval at the end of the official Ramadan, where everyone would eat and drink and talk and be merry until they could no more.

The next day, the 28th we hired a car to drive us an hour away to Sharm El Sheikh. We had booked ourselves into a 5 star, all-inclusive hotel for two weeks. The idea was to have one final splurge before our African adventure came to an end. Well that was the idea anyway.

Our first impression of AA Grand Oasis Hotel was that it was big and nice, although kind of sterile. It was completely different from what we were used to and we found this exciting. However, that didn't last long. It was all you could eat food and drink, the hotel grounds had three different restaurants, a private beach, a huge swimming pool, and entertainment. It should have been perfect, but after the first night there we decided it wasn't for us. The food was crap, and if you were lucky enough to elbow your way through the pushy tourist crowd to the bar to get a drink all you got was a watered down beer in a tiny cup. The place seemed to be overrun by extremely rude, arrogant, rich Russian tourists. I was once physically pushed in front of in the lobby bar while I was waiting to get a cup of tea. The usually friendly and hospitable Egyptian staff seemed miserable and lifeless. We were really disappointed when we went to have a nice nighttime drink on the beach, only to be told to leave because they shut the beach area at 6pm. It was on our second day there that we called the company we had booked through to find out how much money we would loose if we were to leave early. Turns out that we if we stayed for a whole week, we would get our money back in full for the second. A much better outcome than we expected!

So we did that. We spent the week snorkeling in the ocean or swimming in the pool during the day, and trying out each and every restaurant and bar during the night. We also spent a lot of time relaxing on our balcony smoking our three apple tobacco out of our new shisha pipe. About a ten minute walk down the road was a shopping complex called Soho Square, not unlike Knox Ozone at home. They had sushi restaurants  English pubs, nightclubs and more. We spent some time down there, the most memorable of which was when we went into the ice-bar and then the O2 bar. The ice-bar was fun and a little more bizarre walking out into the Egyptian heat afterwards than it was when we went to the one in New Zealand, and the O2 Bar was... well I'm not really sure what it was. There was a breathing station where you put your money into a machine, stick the canula up your nostrils, pick your scent and then sit there and breath for 5 minutes. It was... different. We didn't spend too much time there though because the price of drinks was extortionate  with beers costing over US$6 each!!!

We got friendly with the man who cleaned our room and looked forward to the different towel animal he left us each day, it really was an art. On our last day we asked him to pose for a photo with his head inside the towel crocodiles mouth that he made us. We also ventured down into Naama Bay two or three times to get out of the hotel complex and to find somewhere to stay for our second week.

On September 4, we checked out of the AA Grand Oasis and caught a taxi down to the Halomy Hotel in Naama Bay. We immediately felt more at home in the no-star place. The people were friendly, the view was great, we had a ground floor patio area to set our shisha pipe on, and the town was only a short walk down a hill. Maybe it was that the AA Grand Oasis was so different to what we were used to, it just wasn't our style anymore! Give us a tent, or a no-star cabin or hotel room and we are happy. No 5 star for us!
We spent the next week.... wait for it.... eating, swimming, relaxing, drinking, so on and so on. We did also manage to book a flight from Sharm El Sheikh to Holland via and overnight stopover in Cairo and a very short transfer in Athens. Naama Bay was nice, a lot bigger and busier than Dahab and also more touristy, but there were lots of restaurants to choose from, fresh seafood everywhere you looked, and lots of market shopping streets. On the 8th of September we went to the dolphin park called Dolphinella. Fitting. For a stupidly low price we got 15 minutes of swimming with two dolphins called Steven and Stacey. We held their fins while they swam across the large pool with so much force and power that a few of us lost our pants on the way over. We got to be belly to belly with them and hold onto their flippers while they spun in circles 'dancing' with us. We got to stand on the ledge and hug them, and play a ball game with them. They are such amazing creatures that I don't think I ever fully appreciated until that moment. They are far more powerful than they appear, and yet are so gentle and placid. And you can really see character in their personalities, and a cheekiness and playfulness as well. It was yet another experience that I will never forget and one that I am grateful for having the opportunity to do. It was good to see that the park was well maintained, the water was clean, the pool was large, and the dolphins seemed really well cared for by competent people, something that I wasn't to confident about after seeing some of the animal parks in Thailand.

Finally the day came. The day it all ended, but not without a final hiccup or two.  On the 10th of September we had to be at Sharm El Sheikh airport at 11.30pm for our flight to Cairo. We spent the day relaxing, packing and then went out for a nice dinner and some cocktails. We thought we would do the only responsible thing and get to the airport early to leave time for things to go wrong... T.I.A. after all.  Lucky too, because we got to the airport sometime after 9.30pm minus Alex's very expensive fishing rod! He had left it in the reception of the Halomy Hotel! I stayed at the airport with our heavy bags while he rushed outside, grabbed a taxi and got driven back to the hotel to grab it and rush back to the airport again. Despite the taxi driver going at maniac speeds, it still took a fairly long time, but he did make it back in time to check in- with his fishing rod.
We made it to Cairo drama free and faced a very uncomfortable and cold night on metal benches. Our flight was not until 2.10pm the next day, so we tried to get some sleep but there were no couches and the whole place was so over air-conditioned it was like trying to sleep on a metal slab in a refrigerator. Not the best sleep I have ever had in my life, in fact, I slept better on the roof of the ferry from Sudan to Egypt in extreme overnight heat!

We milled around until we could check in at around midday the next day (the 11th September), and wouldn't you know it, as we were lining up to check our bags, the bag with Alex's prized shisha pipe fell on the floor and smashed into pieces! He was told that he would have to get rid of all of the glass fragments before we could check our luggage in. On the bright side, it made our luggage about 1kg lighter. After checking in we found couches, food, and comfortable temperatures so we enjoyed this for the next 2 hours or so.
In one final goodbye from Africa, our plane from Cairo was running late. This had the potential to be a big problem for us as we already had a very tight transfer time in Athens. Que our mini Amazing Race episode! As soon as the plane landed we raced as fast as we could to get ahead of as many people we could. We got lost trying to navigate the airport and for some silly reason we had to have our passports stamped, which meant spending time we didn't have waiting in long lines. Some nice lady found us (maybe it was the exhausted and panicked look on our faces) and after we showed her our tickets and the time of our connecting flight, she very kindly took us straight to the front of the line. More running and navigating the ins and outs of Athens airport and we made it just as they were beginning to board our flight to Holland. Big sigh of relief.

And that was Africa folks! By far the best 5 months of our entire lives, filled with more  adventure and learning and culture, and animals, and heartache, and history, and friendship than I ever thought possible. I cant wait for some time in the future when I sit down with a glass of wine and read this blog from start to finish. So many amazing memories and stories.

But stay tuned... I still have Holland, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, France and Norway to write about... and more to come...

Until then...