Category Archives: travel

city, travel, USA

Chicago briefly

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So I’ve been back in the land where everything is big, bold brash & in-your-face unsophisticated for a couple of days now & I still love it. The streets take twice as long to cross, the trucks/lorries/semis are the proper size, I still recognise the different-to-Euro-spec cars, one can buy root beer & pink lemonade and most of all, it’s warmer than home. Needless to say, this two day stopover in Chicago has been a great start to a holiday that is much needed & promises more.
This will be just a brief post as I’ll soon tire of my phone keyboard and most of my photos are on a real camera. Landing at O’Hare it was no surprise to find it’s huge – being one of the world’s busiest airports. The L runs all the way into town and its trains are delightfully all stuck in the late seventies as far as decor & finish go – even the new ones.

Chicago is not as easy to walk around as European cities due to the vast amount of space that was available to take up all the people – but with a 3 three day CTA pass I had a pretty good go at walking my feet off. Highlights were going up the Willis (Sears) Tower on Sunday morning before the crowds, admiring the architecture & the parks, riding the L a bit out of town to Wrigley Field (home of those perennial losers, the Cubs) and eating an awful lot.

With a six hour time difference from home I’ve been sleeping & eating at weird times, but that’s all part of the fun. I had most of today before I had to head out to O’Hare, so spent almost five hours at the Field Museum (and saw about half of it)- which has quite a natural history collection. In the Museum Precinct on the shores of Lake Michigan it is vast building displaying only a small part of the collection. The taxidermy is extensive and very impressive considering it’s mostly a century old – although never as good seeing animals alive in the wild. The Tsavo lions are there, as well as a fascinating exhibit about wolves in Idaho. There’s a fair amount of Egyptian relics, but after the Christmas trip they failed to capture my imagination. The replica and exhibit of the Lascaux cave paintings is really good too, especially since you can’t even go in the real caves in France anyway.

They also have, in the atrium, the biggest T-Rex skeleton ever found. The biggest surprise however was stumbling across a wharenui (a Maori meeting house) all the way from the East Cape of NZ via Hanover in the nineteenth century.  So that’s enough about Chicago for now – here are some of the few photos I did take on my phone:

I ordered a burger and got this – it was fantastic

My fascination with old signs painted on buildings continues while riding the L

The wharenui at the Field Museum from Tokomaru Bay

city, Europe, family, food, travel

Windy, chilly Amsterdam weekend

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When I booked a weekend away at the end of March with cousin Trish, I was expecting winter may have been receding for a few weeks.  Alas, winter had not loosened its grip on the UK & western Europe last weekend.  But it was still a good weekend to be away, as however bitterly cold & windy it may have been in Amsterdam, it was dry and therefore better than being at home.

Flying in from Southampton, it turns out Schipol Airport is massive if you’re in a little turboprop that takes an age to taxi to the terminal.  With only a vague idea of which trains to take to our airbnb accommodation (go to Central & get the metro), we fortuitously got off the train at the first stop (after overhearing advice given to other tourists) and eventually managed to get on the metro and cut quite  a bit of time off our journey.

The first thing noticed while walking in the dark was of course all the bicycles still out at that hour of the night.  We managed not to get knocked over by any and find the apartment OK.

After a good sleep, for me, and the start of mass-cheese-consumption-Saturday at breakfast (bread, ham & cheese) it was a short metro ride in to town, then a walk west admiring the old buildings and canal towards the Jordaan area and Anne Frank House.  It was well worth waiting for over an hour (we got up a bit too late) in the wind and occasional sun to get in to see such a reminder of those dark times in Europe’s recent past.  The warehouse and offices do well to hide the small annex at the back in which eight people managed to hide for two years with the help of Otto Frank’s office staff.

The rate (number over time, not price) of admission was such there was sufficient space to linger and contemplate without feeling rushed or that there were too many people around.

Royal Palace from Dam Square in the centre of the city

The front of the Anne Frank House complex

We spent much of the afternoon wandering around the old suburb of Jordaan following a walking tour, popping into various little squares hidden in the centre of blocks of houses, looking at the rather higgledy-piggledy skinny houses. When the cold got a bit much – popping in to various cafes and bars for beer, lunch, hot chocolates and gargantuan pieces of apple pie.

Note the protruding beams at the top for lifting furniture up, to circumvent the narrow staircases

A city with the wisdom not to rip up its tram tracks, there were still plenty of trams around.  As dusk started to draw in, we jumped on the first tram we saw as we walked out of Central Station to rest our legs and generally speed up the wandering.  I think we went all over looking at canals, bikes, and whatever street scenes happened to pass by.

The third, final and best cheese meal of the day was the three-cheese fondue served in yet another bar somewhere in town.  Walking back to the metro there was that often-present lingering smell of weed before we inadvertently wandered through the red-light district copping much too much of an eyeful.

Excitingly, there was even a bit more sun as we took the tram towards the National Museum.  The guide we were using told us that it was under renovation & only partially open.  After walking all the way around, we can confirm that it is completely closed.  At the least, I got a token photo of the sign below.  We followed the red rope up at streetlight level to the van Gogh exhibition at the Hermitage.

The small part of the van Gogh exhibition that is temporarily housed at the Hermitage was well worth seeing – even if I was a little underwhelmed by Sunflowers.  We crossed the Amstel a few times over the course of the afternoon before more food – I had delicious snert (pea soup).

Trying not to look too cold above the Amstel

A great weekend away from England, the first for quite sometime – since late January I think.  Unfortunately back to a four-day week in which I tried to cover three different roles at work and went in to Easter exhausted.  So my first weekend at home in five weeks is much needed – thankfully only one more week until a proper holiday.

Africa, city, history, travel

Egyptian Museum & Khan el Khalili

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I don’t think I slept quite as well on the train overnight as the previous journey, but it was a much calmer drive back from Giza Station to our last hotel – Friday morning is the start of the weekend in Egypt so the traffic was quieter.  Although, we were told that there are many more road accidents in the weekend’s reduced traffic as Egyptians aren’t used to driving at speed – so they do the same crazy things going five or ten times faster than normal & wreck.

With the mandatory carols still playing in the hotel lobby, we once again got an early check-in & settled into our rooms.  All the hotels we stayed in during the tour were of a high standard, but this one was another step-up – with a pool the like of which I have not seen in a hotel before.

Late morning it was back on the road again for the short drive into the centre of Cairo, for the first time, to head to the Egyptian Museum.  Once again we had to leave our cameras in the bus or check them in – so all I have is a few sneaky phone photos.  The Egyptians don’t appear to be overly proud of their flag as it was almost a week in before I found one to snap a picture of – this is on the front of the museum.  The building looks rather European – designed by an Italian apparently.

Being right on Tahrir Square, it wasn’t too far away from all the revolutionary activities two years ago.  This is no more obvious than by looking next door at the burnt out shell of a building of a Ministry of the former regime.

To no-one’s surprise, inside the building is packed with just a small part of the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities.  Construction of an astoundingly large new museum has begun just down the road from where we were staying in Giza.  The footprint and piles of sand point to this being a massive undertaking – Lafarge will be pleased to have that concrete contract.  Only nine-hundred-odd days to go until completion – or so the big sign outside told us every time we drove past.

Far & away the highlight of the museum was seeing that recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb – which I’d been in the morning before.  Considering the size of the tomb, it’s staggering that so many things fitted in there.  It took Carter twice as long to empty & catalogue the tomb as it did for him to find it (five versus ten years).  The golden shrines (outer coffins) are there and they get progressively smaller from very large boxes (at least two metres tall & even longer) a smaller box – still big enough to hold a sarcophagus.  I think Russian Dolls have much greater value as a childhood amusement than having one’s own set of Egyptian coffins to play with.

Now that I’m at the point of describing the room that held the most valuable and spectacular of Tutankhamun’s possessions for afterlife, I’m running out of superlatives.  So much gold, so many jewels.  The most famous, and most spectacular, piece is of course the Gold Mask – eleven kilograms of gold and so intricately detailed; it really was worthy of a lot of staring and inspection.

It was good fun wandering around the rest of the museum as it really is quite old and has the old, dusty museum feel to it that makes one feel like the clock has been wound back or you’ve been dumped into a film.

Through the building traffic we set off for a bit of a shopping afternoon.  First off a perfume factory, where I wasn’t in any way tempted to spend the last of my Egyptian pounds.  Our journey took us past the huge Citadel (originally built by Saladin to keep out marauding crusaders) and the quarries where the stone for the pyramids was excavated.  Our destination was Khan el Khalili, a market in the Islamic part of the city dating from the late fourteenth century.  With plenty of warnings of how persuasive the shopkeepers are and knowing not to be lured away from the main streets, we set forth with our undercover bodyguard/Tourist Police Officer.  It was great fun looking in (from the narrow alleyways) all these shops as the salesman tried everything approaching physical contact to entice you to buy their particular piece of Chinese-made tat.  Unfortunately there wasn’t enough exotic foodstuffs to hold my interest for long, so I just wandered feeling generally bemused at the banter of the shopkeepers until I found the meeting point.  The rice-pudding at the cafe where we met was worth the effort – it was scrumptious.

We had our final dinner together as a group that night & said a lot of goodbyes.  Six of our group departed for a few more days beside the Red Sea in Dahab, while the remaining four of us slept through their early morning departure.  With postcards hurriedly sent and the last little while spent by the pool, it was off to the airport.

So that was my Christmas week in Egypt – absolutely fantastic, a fair dose of third-world craziness, a mind-boggling amount of history and, nicely, much drier & warmer than the UK in December.  If anyone has the inclination to head over that way, I recommend it – we had no safety issues and the country could really do with more tourists to get back to where they used to be.  I’m glad I took my first tour, as I’m sure having to deal with transport in Cairo would not be too much fun independently.  I can also whole-heartedly recommend on the go tours and, in particular our guide Hesham, as well organised, professional and very knowledgeable.

Africa, history, travel

Luxor and Valley of the Kings

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By dawn, the landscape had changed dramatically to sugar plantations – one of the main industries in these parts

Off the sleeper train a little later than scheduled at around eight o’clock it was a much more pleasant and quicker drive through downtown Luxor to our hotel. Most of the hotels are on the east bank of the Nile, as was ours, and we were able to check in early. That provided much needed shower & napping facilities.  The rest of the day was free-time that was spent by the pool, looking out over the Nile, reading and walking around parts of Luxor.  With tourism so lean, the vendors were their usual pushy selves but easy enough to get past – so long as you didn’t utter so much as a syllable to them.

It wasn’t much of a walk to get to open fields and donkeys from the hustle of the main hotel district

The optional trip that night, that everyone went on, was to view Luxor Temple all lit up.  We spent a good hour wandering around and the yellow light really did well for the temple and its sandstone – it was quite a sight.  As always, the history behind the columns, statues, colossus, multiple sphinxes (there were so many, they formed an avenue – in the past stretching all the way to Karnak), carvings and other artwork was transfixing.

Four of the group opted for the super-early wake-up call to go ballooning over the Valley of the Kings.  The rest of us only had to get up at six to breakfast and then cross over the Nile again to drive through the sugar plantations (with their own narrow gauge railway spreading throughout) to meet the ballooners.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly visiting Valley of the Kings.  A barren valley on the west bank of the Nile (burial sites were in the west as that was where sun god Ra went to sleep each day), I could easily see why dig season is only winter – the summer heat and lack of shade must be something horrendous with all that rock around.  The kings started having their tombs hidden in this valley after the pyramids were obviously too easy a target for grave robbers.  So far, sixty-three tombs have been found and three of the ones I went in stretched well into & under the hillside – staggering to think of the effort that went in with only hammer & chisel (the same goes for almost all of the sites we saw).  Out of the elements, a lot of the funerary and mythology works are well preserved and easily hold one’s attention as the tunnels stretch steeply further and further down to the tomb.  Unfortunately, no photos in here.

Back to the logic of probably never coming back, I paid the extra to see Tutankhanum’s tomb – only discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter.  As the king died so young (in his late teens), his tomb is very small compared to many of the others – but plenty of possessions to take with him to the afterlife still managed to fit in there.  The sarcophagus and mummified remains are still there, but most of the rest is in the Egyptian Museum.

The many colonnades of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple got more and more impressive as we walked closer to it (it’s not far from the Valley of the Kings) – still plenty of statues to see there too.

Back in Luxor, the last temple of the day (east bank) was Karnak – which is a huge complex, where you enter under the watchful eyes of these rather curious ram-headed sphinxes.

The most impressive part of the complex, I thought, was the Hypostyle Hall in the Precinct of Amun-Re of over five thousand square metres with one hundred and thirty-four massive sandstone pillars – mostly elaborately carved.  Most are ten metres tall, while some are twenty-one metres tall with a diameter of over three metres.  The underside of the caps of the pillars still have some of the original colour on them, so that was interesting to see and try to extrapolate and think what the whole complex would have looked like when it was recently completed.

The huge single-piece obelisks are also worth beholding.

It was back on the sleeper train for the night back to Cairo and a far more hectic pace – although arriving on Friday, it would be the weekend and a little quieter.