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Run For Home: When COVID Began
Many travellers faced a panic run for home as the world shut down as the seriousness of the pandemic began to sink in. This is our own story of March 2020, when COVID began…. We walked hand in hand back from the deserted seafront and past the desolate locked hotels, trying to eke some romance out of the ghost town which surrounded us. Murky grey mists hung over the flat calm sea dotted with idle tour boats anchored out of harm’s way. As we turned the last corner towards the hotel, a figure in the street ahead was gesticulating wildly, arms waving in the air, his movements frantic. It took…
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Travel Stories: Pedro And The Strange Bed
The bus station was quiet as we alighted in Santa Cruz, no passengers to board our bus, the cafe empty and, most notably, nobody hawking rooms. Close by was a map of the town: there were no hotels marked on it. The tourist information office was, helpfully, closed. Next step in these circumstances is usually to enter a bar and ask if they have rooms available; even if the answer is negative, they will normally have a “cousin” with rooms to let. Except, it seemed, in Santa Cruz, where all such enquiries met with blank faces and that all too recognisable shrug of Spanish shoulders. And so our backpack laden…
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Nudity, Numpties & Numbers: Back Home Once Again
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Travel Stories: Under Pressure In Turkey
As I switched on the ignition, dashboard warning lights, instead of fading out after a couple of seconds, stayed shining and winking like an aeroplane cockpit. The first of these said flat tyre. “Not problem, not problem”, said the car hire guy, waving his hands dismissively and pointing me towards the vehicle exit. Even as I walked around studying the four tyres, each with no obvious sign of defect, he continued to bark the same phrase. “Not problem, not problem”. Hire car boss man came over to intervene, helpfully grabbing Google translate on his mobile and pointing to the word “tyre”. I held my palms upwards to show the international…
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Travel Stories: Camels And Khaled
Having already handed over the money for the camel ride, we weren’t unduly worried by the fact that Khaled was now negotiating a fee with the animals’ handler and obviously taking a cut for himself, what concerned us far more was that Khaled appeared in the midst of a deal with a boy aged about eleven. “Come” said Khaled, “we are ready.” As we mounted the camels, Khaled was clearly giving the boy directions back to our camp, which, given the expanse of empty desert between our current location at the Lawrence Spring and Eid’s camp several miles away, was another worry. But in the flick of a camel’s eyelash…
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Tanzania Tales #4: Welcome To Dar
By now we were nearing the end of our Tanzania and Zanzibar adventure, looking to spend the last few days exploring the bustling and chaotic former capital city of Dar-Es-Salaam. The crossing from Zanzibar back to Dar had been noteworthy mainly because at least half of our fellow passengers were seasick on a journey where we had simply enjoyed the movement of the boat and certainly didn’t think it was a rough crossing. Dar, hot, dusty and humid, isn’t a place where traipsing around loaded with backpacks and struggling to find your hotel is an attractive prospect and we were just getting a little fractious when a skinny, swarthy individual…
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Tales From Tanzania #3: Hamadi
“Wait”, he said, “I come with you, till you have tickets”. And so Hamadi walked with us into the ferry terminal, acted as interpreter as we bought return tickets to Zanzibar, and only bid farewell when he’d seen us safely through the ticket barrier. Such actions were completely in character. Over our eight days together, Hamadi had become so much more than our driver and guide, and by now we felt a real warmth and friendship as we said our last goodbyes. He was also probably one of the most handsome men either of us had ever seen! Hamadi scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper. “Call me…
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A Small Change
Just to say we’ve made a small change to the site here. There’s a new heading above: “Travel Stories”, where you can now find the stories we’ve been remembering from previous travels, in one place, which we are posting whilst there’s no current travel to post. There may be some you missed…
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Travel Stories #2: Into The Unknown
Sitting on the rocks at the top of the waterfall just at the point where the river drops over the top to cascade to the plateau way below, hundreds of square miles of flood plains and sugar plantations stretching out to the horizon, seemed like as good time as any to ask. After all, Hamadi had made it very clear that we could add anything to our itinerary. “Hamadi, we’d like to see an ordinary African town, if possible”. “Really?” He was surprised. “To see what?” “Just to see a different way of life, to learn culture”. “OK, Johnson will take you. He knows his town well”. As if on…
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Travel Stories #1: Bush Routes
“Are you Phil?”. He’d appeared from nowhere in the darkness but his friendly smile was a big relief at such a late hour. The airport at Dar-Es-Salaam is not your standard terminal, with half of the seating area positioned outside of the building and surrounded by concrete, plastic and glass, only a handful of features recognisable as a Terminal. It was somewhere around 2am, we’d disembarked our flight from Istanbul and all other passengers had scattered quickly. Within minutes it was just the two of us milling around the concrete areas, shrouded in deep darkness, the night as silent as the airport itself. I looked at Michaela, the worry in…
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Lightning Strike
With our travel adventures for 2020 complete, and our plans for 2021 on hold until there’s more clarification around travel restrictions, we have nothing current to write about. We do, however, have a load of stories from past travels, which we hope may be interesting or amusing. Such as…. Kuala Tahan, Malaysia, September 2018. After several days in Kuala Lumpur, we’d headed northwards in our hire car towards the wilds of the jungle and settled in Kuala Tahan on the edge of the Taman Negara National Park. Here the jungle trekking, both guided and independent, had been fabulous, the humidity absolutely sapping, the wildlife spectacular. The food, however, was distinctly…
