"Uncle you are so great!"

In case there is someone out there in cyberland who is reading this and doesn't know who is who, here's a hint" Bernie is the short one.


Stefan on the other hand is quite tall, over 2 meters! but most people around the world are polite and pretend not to notice. True, in Europe and southern africa there was the odd lady who would tell Stefan he was the tallest person she had ever seen, but it wasn't until we got to Asia that people started pointing and giggling and calling out.

"Getting Wasted" on Green Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia

9 days in China and no rice!

Well, almost no rice. We had rice porridge the night we arrived in Beijing (Bernie's came with liver!), fried rice as part of our breakfast once at the Mao'er Hutong B&B, and a casserole of rice with preserved duck leg and spare ribs. But absolutely no white steamed rice, and we didn't see many Chinese people eating rice either. I guess that's northern China--they like dumplings and fried breads instead.
There's lots of stalls that sell crazy food to tourists both Chinese and international, like seahorses and silkworm larvae, but we weren't into that gimmicky stuff. Stefan enjoyed some squid on a stick though!
And we went to a restaurant in Shenyang in northeast China (aka Manchuria). No English menu, no pictures on the menu, we smiled and pointed to our menu and to the other tables and to the waitress and asked her to pick for us. She chose three dishes and they came out one by one: a small plate of cold sliced green vegetable, a large plate of diced silken tofu swimming in butter. And finally a huge bowl with a large fish swimming in a clear liquid. Soup? No, when she skimmed off the dried red chili peppers covering the entire top of the bowl we saw that the fish was in a gallon or so of bubbling hot oil sprinkled with mouth-numbing Szechuan peppercorns
People say that real Chinese food isn't as greasy or salty as what we get in the US, but they're wrong!
Other

Nice Goan

Our last week in India was spent in the chill zone of Goa (this is the type of lingo they use in the Lonely Planet). Stefan used to think that Goa was a city when he heard about it in his electro music days during the mid-nineties, but quickly learned that it is actually the smallest state in India. There are several towns that are slightly inland from the ocean, and that is where the majority of the Indians are. We spent a day or so exploring the biggest city known as Panjim (or Panaji), which has a Portuguese past and is also close to the abandoned Portuguese city of Old Goa which is little more than a collection of old churches nowadays.
We then headed off to Anjuna beach, one of many beaches in Goa, where we chillaxed for several days. Bernie got stung by a jellyfish our first time in the water, but it was pretty minor. We can highly recommend this beach of anyone is thinking of goan to Goa.
Our last day in Goa the surf was really big due to a tropical storm (05-A) in the Arabian Sea.


Before leaving India, we spent one more evening in crazy Mumbai before our flight to Seoul (connecting to Beijing) left at 4:35 am! We took a taxi to one of the beach areas called Juhu beach where we ate some Bhel Puri and cocunut water and drank a cold coffee.

Some photos you may wish to enlarge

Did you know that if you double click on one of the beautiful photos in our blog, it will open in a new window in a much larger size? try it, it works for us at least!

One of the pleasures of travelling on Air France is passing through Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and being packed into shuttle buses from terminal to terminal, from main terminal to remote terminal, from remote terminal to plane etc etc.

Here's a sign that caught our eye while we were stuck on a bus--can anyone translate it? The top part is French, but the bottom half starts out in English and then switches to...Latin??? Is this the famous Gallic wit? Some comment on the new Europe? Please explain.

I think we all can agree that the French know a lot about cheeses and wines...and it turns out they know where to find good beer too--in Milwaukee of course! This self-service bar on our flight from Paris to Mumbai (Bombay) was picked pretty thin, but it still had a warm can of tasty brew on the top shelf!

More dust in northern India

After a few days in dusty, crowded, and did I mention smoggy Delhi, it was a relief to get on an air-con train for a 20 hour train ride west, almost to the Pakistan border. (and while we were on the train there was a bombing in Karachi, Pakistan that killed 130 or more people: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/27/pakistan.bhutto/?iref=mpstoryview

The four of us (Stefan, Bernie, Bernie's father John and John's partner Sue) had our own private compartment, so what if there were a few cockroaches crawling about? For more on train travel in India, see this site that was a great help for us: http://www.seat61.com/India.htm

Our destinatation, Jaisalmer, was once an important stop on a trading route, and is far smaller than any other city we've seen in India: a good part of the 60,000 or so residents live inside the old fort, and you can see the town ending and the desert beginning just a couple km away.

After a day chilling in the desert, it was back on the train for another 13 hours, heading east to Jaipur. But we were so tired of dust and crowds that we didn't explore too much of the city: John and Sue went to a temple outside town where there are separate bathing areas for men, women and monkeys, while Bernie visited the City Palace of the maharajas of Jaipur (they were expert polo players), and Stefan stayed at the hotel and worked on his thesis!

Delhi

Delhi is very different than Mumbai. It's all spread out and transportation is via bicycle or auto-rickshaw instead of by taxi. There are far more touts and harrassment in general. We visited the spots where both Indhira Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi were assassinated. We went on a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, we saw India's largest Mosque and spent a lot of time trying to navigate various modes of transportation and haggling with autorickshaw drivers.

Mumbai

In typical Indian fashion we arrived late in the evening in Mumbai, and our one checked bag had not made our connecting flight from Paris (I guess a long connection is just as dangerous as a short connection for losing luggage). After some strange customs formalities regarding the missing bag, we were now in India. There was bumper to bumper traffic at 1am in Mumbai, perhaps partially due to Ramadan, but probably just generally the way things are. It was hot and humid all of the time in Mumbai.

We spent several nights there and were led around town by Rafique Baghdadhi, a Hindi film critic who writes for an Indian economic magazine in Mumbai. It was sort of a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing. Rafique showed us all around town, and familiarized us with the joys of drinking at the Press Club, and eating Mughlai (muslim, non-veg) cuisine in the muslim quarter of Mumbai after dark during ramadan. We also tried some Paan, a sort of fibrous, chewy concoction made up of the narcotic beetelnut, which was sort of gross. After a few days we took the overnight train to Delhi and met up with Bernie's father John at the train station.

Mauritius

Sorry for the long delay in postings.

We left Cape Town around October 1 on our marathon journey to Mauritius via Amsterdam and Paris. Of course, this would not go smoothly as we only had a couple of hours for each layover and upon arrival at the airport in Cape Town we were informed that our flight from AMS to CDG had been cancelled. Not too big of a deal, we were put on the next flight to Paris which left us with a short one hour layover at one of the world's most absurd airports, Charles du Gaulle. Long story short, we missed our flight to Mauritius and spent several hours working with Air France to get us there on the next flight which was operated by Air Mauritius. Luckily, we got seats on that flight and were on our way to the Indian Ocean with only a 5 hour delay. We found the service onboard Air Mauritius to be superior to that of Air France.

After arrival, very little time was wasted with Stefan jumping into his open water scuba certification course. He did the entire course in three days (including reading several hundred pages of text) and his german instructor Larissa did a great job even though she was suffering from a cold. After Stefan finished his class we rented a car and drove around the island a little, visiting the central highlands and a Hindu holy lake with a gigantic statue of the god Shiva the destroyer.

We later went on a dive together (Bernie's first dive in nearly 10 years) and saw lots of beautiful coral and sponges.

We said goodbye to Mauritius after one short week on the beautiful island and flew back to Paris where we would spend the night before flying the next morning to Mumbai. As our 747 was about 150 meters above the runway at CDG, our jumbo jet aborted the landing in what was the most knucklebiting flying experience of our lives. For several seconds we weren't sure if our jet was going to be ripped in two or not. Apparently these are called "go-arounds" and are relatively common at large, busy airports when the runway hasn't been cleared fast enough of the prior aircraft. In my mind, that is a near-miss.

A touch of the Colic

One of our friends is about to have a baby, and I guess Stefan was feeling a mystical connection with her, because at 3 am in the morning he woke up in excruciating pain, He wasn't crying or screaming but he may as well have been, he had a sharp pain in his back or left side that didn't feel like an intestinal thing, he was inconsolable and nothing could make it stop. And Bernie had to watch and couldn't do anything to help, it was the middle of the night and we were at a national park campground in the middle of nowhere. Finally we found the manager's house and woke him up--he was quite helpful but told us that the nearest doctor was 150km away. He let us use our phone to call Stefan's emergency medical and evacuation insurance helpline, which wasn't much help at all (the first person wanted his email address to send us info, and we finally got to talk to a doctor, he just said to go see a doctor). Luckily we had some ibuprofen along with us, and we had made friends with a couple of South Africans who gave us another kind of pill. By 8 am we decided to head for the doctors office, which took about 2 hours. We weren't kidding when we said the nearest doctor was 150 km away--we didn't see a house or any kind of building until we had driven 60 km, and we didn't even see another car until we had gone another 10 km past that. The pain lessened and then came back during the drive, but by the time we were sitting in Dr. VonSchauroth's office Stefan was feeling much better. It was a little oasis of calm in a dusty and spartan grocery store building. Of course he had to wait an hour to get actually see the doctor, but after she heard his story and had him pee in a cup, she gave him the good? news that it was very likely a kidney stone that he might have already passed. Just as Bernie claims to have suspected right from the beginning! And the pill that the South Africans gave Stefan was exactly the right painkiller, and she gave him 12 more of these, and some anti-imflammatory pills too. All this for only 182 Namibian dollars, or about US$26!
What a terrible experience but oh how great that it's over and that it wasn't something worse. And by later that afternoon, we were recovered enough that we went all the way back and finally saw the Fish River Canyon--"second only to the Grand Canyon in Arizona"--you be the judge.

Orange River and Fishhikers

In case you can't tell from the pictures, southern Namibia is a lot like the Mojave desert in California, especially around Death Valley. Except maybe not quite as vast...but very impressive. We took the less travelled way out of Luderitz to the Fish River Canyon National Park, driving on a newly paved road as far as the town of Rosh Pinah where there is a thriving zinc mine (the mine's original prospector was Jewish and he named the town).
Next we followed the Orange River which has its headwaters in Lesotho and is one of the major rivers of South Africa flowing west across much of the country before forming the border between South Africa and Namibia and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. It was so beautiful and green and remote, with just a few fishermen visible on its banks from time to time. We never stopped for hitchhikers in the rest of the country, and maybe felt a little guilty about it, but these two guys looked so desperate and there was almost no one else driving on the road, so we agreed to take them as far as the turnoff to the national park. So far so good, but then they said--wait, we need to get our fish! and they ran off into the bushes and returned with two huge bundles of dried fish. Except it wasn't completely dry--and they got a little fish water in the back of the trunk! Just a little, but it sure does stink, even 3 days and several shampooings later. Now we know why there are big signs saying "No Fish Cleaning" in every campground and parking lot on the Namibian coast.

Like San Francisco in 1850

Lüderitz (glad that we've resolved the spelling issue!) is probably our favorite town in Namibia: it's on the coast but isn't routinely covered by a thick marine layer of fog like Swakopmund and the northern coast. We had enough of fog in Santa Barbara!!
It's like a boom town that fizzled out. It's supposedly the oldest German settlement in Namibia, and it's named after a Herr Luderitz, but it's one of the few places in the country where you _can't_ tune in the German-language radio station. (Speaking of which, Stefan just loves that station. There is a woman named Uli who must work 15 hours a day preparing and hosting her radio shows. She intersperses festive German "Schlagermusik" with interesting tidbits about lemurs in Madagascar and how to make your onions taste milder. But the best part of the day is "Hallo Kinder!" where she plays happy songs about brushing your teeth and hosts a call-in for small children to talk about subjects like their allowances, their diaries, or if they ever make a "Liverwurst Lip" when they don't get their way!)
Luederitz, and the nearby town of Kolmanskop, both got their wealth from diamonds which were just sitting on the thin gravel soil waiting to be picked up! They say that on a full moon, the diamonds would shine the brighest, and the mine workers would have to collect them by crawling on their hands and knees with a can tied around their neck.
Summertimes are supposed to get very windy in Luderitz, and although our time there was calm and mild, our tour guide was certainly dressed for extreme weather!

Hi from Luederitz

Just like home

We left Northern Namibia after spending 3 nights in Etosha Nat'l Park, where we saw Black Rhinos, tons of Elephants and Giraffes, DikDiks, Steinboks, Springboks, Impala, Gemsboks (Oryx), Kudu, Red Hartebeests, Wildebeests, Warthogs, Banded Mongoose, Lions, Black-backed Jackals, Spotted Hyena, Scrub Hares, Ground Squirrels, Pearl-spotted owl, Bataleur, Tawny Eagle, Helmeted Gunea Fowl, Ostrich, Bustards, tortoise, and more that we can't remember. At one of the night-lit waterholes we watched a Jackal examining a Python that was waiting in the water on two seperate nights.

After Etosha, we went back to Tsumeb to spend one last evening with Stefan's 87+ year old Tante Dorle, and her son Klaus and his family. It was great to see Dorle in relatively good health, and Stefan believes she could live to 100 if she wanted to.

Klaus and his wife Wendy were very gracious arranging accomodation for us in Etosha and for the rest of our time in Namibia. If anyone decides to visit Southern Africa anytime soon, they should be sure to check out their travel reservation website at http://resafrica.net/.

After leaving Tsumeb yesterday morning, we drove across southern Damaraland and then across the desert to the Skeleton Coast town of Hentiesbai. We spent the night in a chalet with good facilities, and spent a short while on the beach yesterday afternoon. It's just like California with it's cold current offshore causing unswimmably cold conditions and cool fog. The only difference is that the beach doesn't really end right at the coast, instead the beach merges with the expanse of the Namib desert for at least 100+ km inland.

We have spent this morning in an internet cafe in the coastal city of Swakopmund, which almost everyone in Namibia has told us we should be sure to visit. Grease is playing over the radio and we are drinking coffee, a small bit of home for us. Speaking of home, Stefan has enjoyed missing 4 months of the eternal US presidential race, and the lack of 24 hour cable news is quite refreshing (although we do occaisionally get to watch BBC world, Deutsche Welle, or CNN international). Stefan thinks for profit cable news in the U.S. is a big downer and does as much harm to American society as good.

Anyway, tonight we stay just south of Swakopmund in the former South African enclave of Walvis Bay, then tomorrow we drive back into the interior bush of Namibia spending the night in a place called Solitaire, then the next day to the largest sand dunes in the world at Sossusvlei, then another night in the bush near Helmeringhausen, then a night on the southern Namib desert coast town of Luederitz, then a night at Ai Ais. After that, a few more nights in South Africa before heading to Mauritius!

Thanks to everyone for reading and posting comments!

Namibia

Hi everyone,

Wish we could be more thorough, but internet access is limited. We rented a car in Cape Town (Stefan had to learn quickly how to drive on the wrong side of the road), and spent 3 nights driving to Tsumeb via Grunau and Windhoek, Namibia. We are spending the weekend with Stefan's relatives in Tsumeb, then 3 nights in Etosha national park, then several nights in the bush traveling through western Namibia back down to South Africa. We are having a great time, Namibia is a beautiful country.

South Africa

South Africa is great so far. We have been in Cape Town for 2 nights, and already we have seen ostriches (not sure if they are feral or wild), babboons, some sort of antelope like creature, penguins, whales, seals, lots of birds, and lots of rabbits.

On Sunday we drove down to the Cape of Good Hope, which has the fuzzy geographic distinction of being the most southwesterly point of the African continent. We hiked around the stunning scenery and huge crashing waves for a couple of hours. There is a world atmospheric station of some sort there (one of the global network that measures carbon dioxide concentrations), and it was interesting to imagine that there was nothing but ocean in between us and Antarctica.
Tuesday we went to the newly reinvigorated Cape Town waterfront where we embarked on a ferry ride to and a tour of Robben Island (now a world heritage site), where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were held for many, many years. Part of our tour was led by a man who was a prisoner on the island for seven years. His crime (for which there was no trial) was "terrorism", and apparently he was involved in some of the education riots which Stefan thinks he has read about or seen a movie about. It was a very interesting experience which included Nelson Mandela's jail cell on an island covered in introduced rabbits (tens of thousands?) and native penguins. The ferry ride included the largest ocean swells that Stefan or Bernie have ever experienced, estimated by us to be at least 20 feet (if there are any geographers reading this perhaps they could get ambitious and get a buoy report for Monday, September 10th around 13:00 UTC). We can understand how our friend Seth got into surfing in his formative years spent in Cape Town.

Tomorrow we leave Cape Town for the drive north to Namibia. We will take about 4 days to drive the 1900km to Tsumeb.

The pontiff is everywhere..

Coincidence would have it that we are currently in Regensburg, Germany which is where the current pope Benedict XVI is from. We are traveling by train later this morning to Vienna, where the pope is currently making a visit. Weird.

Royal Socks

Bye bye Troy, hello Wolfgang

On Monday morning we said goodbye to Troy in Vienna at 4AM. We then went back to bed and slept a little longer, then got on our train to Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart. Actually, we've been on a bit of a Mozart pilgrimage on our European odyssey. Mozart was very successful in Prague, where Don Giovanni debuted and the Marriage of Figaro was very successful. We all know about Mozart in Vienna (Troy and Stefan went to one of Mozart's apartments in Vienna while Bernie was birding), and Salzburg is all about Mozart. In Salzburg, we went to see the Magic Flute performed by marionettes and then to see Mozart piano concertos in the Mirabel palace the very next night! The Belorussian pianist performed both concertos from memory.

Oh, we forgot to mention that Troy and Stefan went to the catacombs under the Stephansdom in Vienna where they saw piles upon piles of black-death infested bones and the important organs of the Habsburgs

Salzburg was filled buckets of 45 degree (F) rain, and we haven't seen the sun since we left Vienna.

Never to fear, tomorrow evening we travel to Amsterdam where we will leave for sunny Cape Town, South Africa on Saturday morning. I don't think we have mentioned it yet, but one of the primary reasons we are flying to South Africa is so that we can drive to Namibia to visit Stefan's great aunt Dorle who lives in Tsumeb.

Martin No. 2

On Sunday, Bernie went off another Martin he had never met before--this one was a birdwatcher from the BirdingPal website. We spent the day in idyllic countryside near the border with Hungary and Slovakia (its capital city Bratislava is on a hill and was in sight for most of the day).
Martin says this is the westernmost part of the east--of the steppes of central asia--and we saw some great falcons and eagles. But the only bird I got a picture of was this pigeon near where we stopped to each a lunch of wild mushroom salad.

Martin No. 1

After days of castles and museums we decided it was finally time to meet a real Czech. Well, too late for that, since we were already in Austria! So, we settled for an Austrian--and asked Bernie's sister Anne to arrange a meeting with her friend Martin. Martin went to graduate school at Michigan State with Anne, Anne's husband Gustavo and lots of other people we know thru Anne and Gustavo.

Anyway, Martin is a great guy and got on his bike and rode downtown (Vienna) to show these three american strangers around. He thought we should go to a traditional place and eat some heavy food, so he took us to the 12 Apostelkeller which has these brick-arched basements that go down several levels below the sidewalks, and it makes you wonder why the city hasn't caved in yet!

I wonder if Martin is a vegetarian--he encouraged Troy to get Schnitzel and us to get the Houseplatter of porkbelly, bloodsausage, ham, liverwurst, meatdumpling, saukerkraut and a hotdog, but then Martin just got some light cheesenoodle for himself! Then he said we had to have the prunedumpling for dessert, and then he took us to an ice cream place, and he didn't have any of this himself!

Maybe it's just his sense of humor?

We have seen the rest of Europe since our last post!

Well not really, just more of Vienna and then Salzburg and then Regensburg, Germany. We can't possibly write about all of it at once, so here are some nice pictures for you to enjoy!

Sticker Shock...

Ouch! Vienna is expensive! Every museum costs 10 euro, and when we checked our bank account to see how much we were charged for the three one-week transit passes, the total came to $57!! Oh well, we will skip the $5, 300ml Coca Cola and drink beer instead, it's cheaper than mineral water.
It rained all day so we decided to make it a museum day, but not before Stefan and Bernie went to the US consulate to drop off their passports to get extra pages put in. They will pick them up tomorrow morning before heading to Schoenbrunn.
We went to the Schatzkammer (crown jewels, royal socks, etc), and the Kunsthistorisches museums today. We were exhausted and went straight home afterwards to eat leftover Bratwurst with pretzels and Radlermass, then naps.

Welcome to Vienna!!!!!

OMG we just got to Vienna
and they have all these touts in period dress (like this guy) in front of the Stephansdom (cathedral) and all over. They're trying to sell you tickets to a classic music performance or something I guess, we never wanted to get too close. We passed a couple dozen and then we were in front of the Staatsoper and this wench out of Amadeus was yelling "Hey you, come over here! Want to go the opera!" and when we didn't even look at her she goes, "Hey gays! Oh sorry I mean Hey guys!" :-( Hah-hah very mature Stefan said.

Good thing Troy didn't hear her he would have had a choice rejoinder ready! but actually just now he said, since I didn't hear her, she must have been referring just to the two of you! Sorry, I don't think so Troy. :-)


But not to worry we are happy in Vienna we have this great apartment with a view of the cathedral on the 7th floor of an office building, and Stefan just cooked us this lovely dinner! He was complaining all thru Czech Republic that he never got to eat any vegetables, so he decided to cook this healthful meal!