Singapore

God I love Singapore. Let me count the ways. There are footpaths, it's clean, the street food is safe, no one cares if I buy anything, they have trees, and grass, there are no wild dogs or cows, they have public transport, they have a functional government, most people speak good English, clear signposting, nothing smells bad, no one urinates in public, the zoo doesn't make you feel guilty...

So anyway suffice to say Singapore is the anti-India, and long may it continue. We landed early in the morning and after retrieving some cash and filling the void with some Mickey D's we took the metro into town. We checked into a wee hostel next to Chinatown, just three strip-mall shops joined together, but very well run and terribly clean.

We proceeded to wander the streets of Singapore which are of course terribly clean and more tree lined than you might expect. Although there was still a lot of leftover barriers and light scaffolding around from the recent Singapore Grand Prix. Unfortunately the streets were also terribly hot so we tried to make as much progress as possible while wandering through the numerous gloriously air-conditioned malls scattered around town. We visited the famous Merlion statue on the waterfront, although as fas as icons go it is fairly underwhelming.

But of course Singapore is a bastion of not only good manners, but culture so visits to the Asian Civilizations Museum, and the Art Museum were executed. The Asian Civilizations museum in particular was outstanding with excellently presented displays from all over South East Asia, including the immigrant cultures that make up so much of Singapore and Malaysia. The Art Museum was good as far as my appreciation for art stretches, but I think our favourite display in the whole place was the enormous light fitting in the stairwell. Although we could tell it was definitely an installation as every time we tried to get a close look at it a loud buzzer sounded and we had to jump away lest we earn one of the infamous Singaporean instant fines.

Actually fine posters seem to make up a large percentage of the modern Singaporean psyche, not only were they everywhere: No Littering $500, No Smoking $1000, No Chewing Gum $1000. But they got quite specific: No Durians (on public transport) $1000, No Urinating in the Elevator $1000. And of course then every tourist that wasn't wearing an OK-la T-shirt was wearing one with the full set of fine posters so it was actually pretty easy to remember to behave ourselves.

We got a chance to head out to Singapore Zoo which we really enjoyed despite the afternoon drizzle (it was a British colony remember). The zoo was incredibly lushly planted with tropical vegetation which went a long way to making it seem much more like a well-organised jungle than a zoo. The highlight for me was the proboscis monkeys which were much bigger than I had expected, and even managed to maintain some self respect despite their ridiculously large floppy noses. Obviously I have a thing for animals with odd noses as we also spent quite a while peering at the shy Malayan tapirs. Unfortunately pygmy hippos seem to be just slightly too large to keep on in the bath-tub so I may have to get a spa. They also had a walk in enclosure with a large family of bats, strutting brightly coloured birds, ring-tailed Lemurs, and the odd large rodent which all took turns darting out across the path or appearing a few feet away at head height.

Food in Singapore is incredibly cheap, both absolutely and relatively, with most people seeming to head to one of the hawker centres for every meal. The hawker centres are just large low rent food courts decorated with innumerable ceiling fans where you can buy pretty much any 'Asian' food if you look hard enough. There were two right besides our hostel so I don't think I actually managed to digest my way down to hungry before it was time for another meal (although the heat did certainly help to suppress our appetites).

Chinatown itself just seemed to be a collection of small street stalls and restaurants with nothing much to differentiate it from the rest of town, but it did host a beautiful, and very popular Buddhist Temple which was ridiculously clean and shiny (all Buddha's should be shiny) despite the bus loads of Chinese package tourists (complete with flag-waver and identical baseball caps) who arrived throughout the day. Its always hilarious for us to creep round one of these temples trying not to disturb anybody only to have a bus load of full volume Chinese tourists tramp past us occasionally pausing to light incense.

After our long delay in India we were feeling the need to move onward, so after just a couple of days we took the bus the oh so convenient (and fast) bus up the coast to Malacca in Malaysia.

India: Hates You

Having finished up our time in India we jumped into a taxi to Chennai airport eager for all the civilization we could handle in Singapore. But alas fate had other things in store for us. We successfully negotiated the armed guards at the door that demand to see your tickets before you are allowed in, then look stunned at the temerity of someone actually using electronic tickets in this day and age, and just ask you again as if you will suddenly have sprouted tickets as part of the natural ageing process.

But we made it inside, checked in, and waited for the emigration queue to wind its way forward. At last we reached the desk and the disaster started to unfold. It turned out that contrary to what the Jordanian Indian Embassy told us, the Visa we had was not valid for three months from date of entry but three months from date of issue so we were about a week overdue having spent only six weeks in India. At this point things still seemed OK but it should have been obvious that this is not the kind of country where you make any kind of mistake. Unlike say a modern open nation like Myanmar where overstaying a tourist Visa is punishable by a 3USD/day slap on the wrist, the Indian government in its infinite wisdom saw to the heart of the matter and decreed that overstayers shall be punished in the most dreadful way imaginable. By not being allowed to leave.

They pulled our bags from the plane and told us to go visit the Visa office in Chennai on Monday. Of course they couldn't even get that right as we had to wait from Saturday night till Tuesday morning for the office to be open. Then it was a matter of completing the Indian bureaucracy scavenger hunt. We had to provide a bank cheque for the hefty fine, because obviously the Indian government would not be able to accept something as ludicrous as Indian cash as a means of payment. We had to provide a letter stating why we had overstayed which makes a small amount of sense in a schoolyard "say you're sorry" kind of way. We had to provide a signed letter on hotel letterhead from our hotel confirming where we were staying, cos if it was the wrong place we definitely couldn't be allowed to cease staying there. And of course new passport photos and photocopies of passports and visas, because that's what all the cool countries ask for, right?

So another day lost to the scavenger hunt, then another day for 'processing' and we had a hopefully unique half page stamp in our passports and there was only the ritual shaking of dust from our feet (well my feet, Jacquie is more forgiving) before we jetted off to Singapore, and let me tell you organised authoritarianism never smelled so sweet.

PS: Luckily I still love India due to every second ad on the telly during our stay in Chennai being paid for by the Indian Ministry of Tourism.

PPS: The Singapore Airlines staff in Chennai are awesome helpful people, who never gave us an ounce of crap though they definitely could of.

India: Ooty to Mahabalipuram

Continuing our ascent we reached Ooty (that's short for Ootacamund which is short for Udhagamandalam). Ooty was one of the hill stations that the British retreated to, when the lowlands got too hot for them. Getting into the mood of things we started splurging immediately and checked into Kings Cliff Hotel way up one of the hill sides. Once I saw it had an actual bona-fide shower cubicle I couldn't walk away. Of course it also had a fireplace in the room and was about three feet away from a great restaurant so we were pretty happy (except for when it was really cold and we tried to actually use the fireplace and we were completely smoked out so that we had to open the windows and let the cold back in (but that was just a blip, honestly)).

We did a government run tour around the near by lake and hills etc. Not only was it cheap but it was also very cheap. Attractions included driving around various hotels for an hour picking up people who weren't ready yet, visiting pungent lake Watapu (not its real name, but terribly descriptive), and trawling around some hills covered in tea and trees and the occasional botanic garden. The last bit was actually really fun, as tea plantations (and hills) are naturally very scenic, and watching all the middle-class Indians on the tour take photos pretending to be borderline poverty stricken tea picking Indians was fairly amusing (apparently 75% of bollywood filmi music videos have at least one scene in a tea plantation).

With the lack of insufferable heat (and occasional genuine cold) we found ourselves doing strange things like walking places (we walked the half hour from our hotel to town just for the fun of it), and being able to buy bag loads of home-made chocolate which they gleefully sell all over town. Of course the second bag made us sick (the Indian kind, not the ohh I just ate two bags of chocolate kind) but it was probably worth it just to get Jacquie a much needed fix.

Regretfully we had to make our way out of the hills to Kochin for the next leg of our trip. But in a fit of unprecedented oarsomeness the Indian government laid on a steam powered rack rail train down the hill. The cars were old-school (with no internal access), dinky, and packed. So much so the guards reallocated our seats so they could pack another partition with additional (fun-sized) locals. Having been moved we found ourselves sitting opposite another couple of NZers, and proceeded to jam a large amount of kiwi catch up into all the bits of the journey where I wasn't hanging out the window looking at the steam train or trying to take photos of the hilly tree-clad panoramas sweeping past on our right.

But of course all good things come to an end and we had to catch a bus, spend the night in grubby old Coimbatore and then catch another (dull diesel) train to make it to the port city (and old Portugese colony) of Kochi. We found quite a nice hotel in the new town and set off to explore the old town aka Fort Cochin. Getting there we got to take one of the local ferries which puttered us sedately across the harbour in half an hour but gave us a great view of all the various inlets, small islands, and waterfront buildings.

The symbol of Kochi are the numerous 'Chinese' fishing nets lining the waters edge. These large wooden contraptions involve big square nets being pulled in and out of the water flat-wise by long cantilevered poles and a team of half a dozen men. I was tricked into helping them out for a few catches, hauling on the ropes and acting as twice the ballast of any of my co-workers. Apparently they only operate the nets just so tourists like me can give them miserly tips, as there aren't enough fish most of the year to make up for their trouble. After this I needed a little bit of a sit down, so we pulled up a tree root and watched a lively game of cricket contested by some local lads. Jacquie even tried her luck as the international umpire in a contested run out, although I'm not sure they believed that tourists should know anything about cricket.

The other thing Kochi is known for is its Antiques shops. A long way back there were a whole lot of Jews in Kochi and being Jews they did very well for themselves, but with the creation of the state of Israel the vast majority of them packed up shop and headed for the holy land. Only there is only so much shop you can pack, so many house loads of high-grade furniture and artifacts were offloaded onto the local market and continued to be onsold for many years afterwards. Of course all the original items are long gone but the shops remain and were a wonderful source of things that were much too heavy for us to buy, although we did find a few small things. We also got to visit the local synagogue which was the first one we've actually been allowed into throughout the whole trip. And it was worth it as it had a very informative display on the history of the Cochin Jews and the synagogue proper was tiled in very nice hand painted blue-on-white Chinese tiles, which made for quite a cultural contrast.

We had much better tour luck in Kochi and took to the back waters behind Kochi with a random assortment of other foreigns and even another kiwi. We took to the big wide waterways on the perfectly flat water and headed out amongst the islands, not that you could tell what was an island and what was the main land. It was all uniformly flat and palm tree laden. We had to navigate around old men is small boats carefully scraping small shellfish from the river bottom with long dustpan like devices. We soon arrived at our first destination, a combination palm sap farm and lime factory. The aforementioned shellfish are way too small to eat, so they just burn them to lime. The palm sap is entirely more interesting as someone would shimmy up a tree, whack a hole in it, and then set a clay pot underneath to catch the sap. The clay pot is important as if the sap is placed in anything else it starts to ferment and six hours later you have palm toddy (and a little while after that you have yucky palm vinegar). So of course we bought some and immediately lamented that six hours was far too long to wait for my tree blood to become an intoxicant.

Soon we were divied up to two smaller boats and started cruising the the tiny canals that criss cross the area. This was actually quite the wildlife trip as despite motoring past a lot of homes, we saw kingfishes, lesser racquet tailed drongos (according to Jacq), and even an itty bitty water snake. We also got a demonstration of coir rope making. Coir is the hairy husk of a coconut and its the fibre that typifies the brown hairy door mat. The rope is made with a small motor which the rope makers feeds a few strands into and then backs away feeding strands into the end of the growing rope as the motor twists them all together.

The main culinary feat of Kerala as far as I'm concerned is Meen Pollichathu. I discovered it by accident ordering pretty at much random, and it is a fantastic dish of steamed fish flavoured with tamarind cooked in banana leaves which makes it fantastically soft and aromatic. I will definitely be on the lookout for a supplier on my return to Auckland.

Further down the coast is the traveller ghetto of Varkala. Just a collection of hotels, restaurants and used book stores perched on cliffs above the ocean. There is supposedly a good beach here, but the huge surf must have washed it away (as it had part of the promenade). I managed one swim although Jacq didn't make it all the way in, it was like Piha on a biggish day with very shifty sand and no life-guards. So mainly we put our feet up, read, ate, and caught up on our feed readers.

By now we were feeling the full effects of the rubbish buses in South India. It took us the whole day to negotiate the three different super-slow buses to get down to Kanyakumari, the Cape Reinga of India (but all upside down). Unfortunately it lacks the hills, and the mixing oceans, but it does have a 40m statue of a Tamil poet-saint built onto an offshore islet. We got shuttled around between that island and another temple-clad island by a very dodgy old ferry and spent most of the time trying to work out which bits of rock had been out of the sun the longest and were therefore the coolest.

Heading back north again and we had an even worse run with buses with huge waits for buses to just start moving. But we got to Madurai a few hours after nightfall and stumbled our way into a somewhat decent hotel that somehow managed to seem entirely disreputable. It wasn't the accommodation, which was classic Indian two-star, clean, dull, and basic, but all the staff seemed to pause at odd times during conversation, trying to pay for breakfast caused all kinds of confusion, and we never allowed to use the lift by ourselves. We were in Madurai to visit the enormous and of course very old temple with its incredibly detailed brightly painted entrance towers. The towers are 40-50 metres tall, and consist of layer upon layer of various plasterwork Hindu deities, making for quite an eye boggling spectacle. We managed to show up on the day of a major festival so the place was packed and we (as non-Hindus) were barred from quite a large amount of the temple. Although this is quite normal for the larger temples in India where there is usually a more holy enclosure in the centre reserved for the devout, while a larger area surrounding it is open to all and (appropriately dressed) sundry. The outer area in question this time had a music and dance performance stage, bangle shops, and children running all over the place, while others prostrated themselves before, burned incense for, and circumambulated various idols. Oh and there was an Elephant.

Temple Elephants have got to be the very bestest part of all Hindu religion. The deal is basically that you search the temple your in until you find an elephant. It may be hiding behind a pillar or another statue of an elephant (or an elephant shaped deity). You ensure you have correct change, elephants do not give change. You join the back of the queue and shuffle up respectfully (queues in front of elephants are the only ones in all of India that follow the traditional western notion of a slow moving single line of people). Upon reaching the front of the queue you offer your money to the elephant. The elephant takes your money with the tip of its trunk which though circular has a top and bottom (or front and back) that can easily grasp things much like a person wearing mittens. If your offering is a coin it slips the coin backwards slightly into the pile of other coins it is holding in its trunk-hand. If your offering is a note it will surreptitiously hand off the note to its trainer. Then the elephant taps you on the forehead and you are bless-ed. What could be simpler.

Actually it gets better because the elephant is even kid-friendly. If you were to guide a terrified looking two-year old towards the elephant it will lower its trunk to the childs level, and then very gently and slowly accept its coin (with and almost audible "taa") and perform a gentle head tap, and then its back up to speed for the next applicant.

Bla bla bla, monstrous buses, bla bla bla, Thanjavur. Thanjavur was a quick stop to have a look at the old palace grounds which were not very palatial but did have an extensive collection of Chola bronzes and a tower. With a whale in it. The bronzes were, well bronze and they were mostly of a lady with many arms standing in a circle. I understand people who are knowledgeable on such things could probably break it down a lot further but it was hot and Hindu art was starting to run together a little. So we climbed a tower, it was big and square and breezy with tiny little stairways and on the third floor there was a complete whale skeleton. Maybe 20 metres long and looking a little lost.

Pondicherry next. An old French colony it promised access to middle quality baked goods and a certain sea-side charm. It got there on the baked goods but the sea-side was pretty barren, and no french charm was in evidence. In fact we had another odd hotel experience, after trying hard to choose one of the few that was not associated with the nearby Auroville commune we indeed wound up at a lovely boutique hotel with the least friendly manageress ever. If in fact I cared what a hotel manager thought of me, I would have been quite offended by the disdainful looks and the look of disappointment when we announced that we were quite happy to stay in a non-smoking, non-drinking establishment and would even promise to take off our shoes at the door. OK I was actually a little offended, but I stayed there and paid for it just to spite her (and yes I am sure that was an effective retaliation).

Mahabalipuram is actually quite nice, even if it is largely unpronounceable. Its claim to fame is having been a stone-carving mecca for many hundreds of years. The town is tiny, about eight streets in a grid but has all kinds of stone monuments scattered about allegedly as advertising for the work of the previous occupants as the town is not at all sacred. So we had a good time, paid our 500 rupees a piece to see the famous shore temple, and then had a good time looking at all the stuff that is in the local park.

India: Goa to Madumalai

Crikey. We went to India. Again. For quite some time.

It started with the flight into Mumbai and procuring some onward tickets to Goa from the airport. I'd never bought tickets from an airport before, who knew people that weren't criminals or travel show contestants did that sort of thing. The prospect of dealing with the swirling maelstrom of Mumbai had overwhelmed us and we decided that what we were much keener on relaxation than fighting for train tickets or worse yet succumbing to the windy overnight bus trip. So pretty soon we arrived in the mostly military airport at Dabolim and headed out to our old stomping ground at Benaulim beach.

We had arrived during the tail end of monsoon season and our taxi driver had to make several calls before we established that none of the hotels at the north end of the beach were open yet. On a whim we ducked into the Royal Palms resort for some comparative pricing and were offered an apartment for a mere 1000 rupees a night. (~30NZD). Little did we know we weren't actually staying at the resort but in an unoccupied privately owned apartment, but once we got through the confusion and the language barrier, it seemed that as long as we didn't bug the pool boy for towels we'd be fine.

There are many fine beaches to stay at in Goa, each catering to a different set, there are big five star resorts and beach shacks with the menus printed in Cyrillic. There are hippy markets and villages notorious for their chemically amplified British revellers. But Benaulim is pretty sleepy tucked in the middle of it all, and during monsoon it is even sleepier (and quite a lot wetter). Half the restaurants weren't open so we ended up at the same places repeatedly tucking into the fresh fresh and feeling my way around the Indian classics I'd forgotten about. Jacquie of course was lamenting both her inability to tolerate spicy food and Indian chefs inability to implement simple "No Chilli please" instructions, but with food so cheap most of the time we could get more than enough to please both of us.

I'd picked up an all in one copy of Lord of the Rings at Mumbai airport and this was a great aid to our initial relaxation. As was the good sized pool where we both practised our swimming to the point of sore shoulders (not particularly hard to achieve for me). The only hindrance was the complete lack of tolerable internet, the computers were from the 90s, and the shops only opened for a few unusual hours each day. But pretty soon we accomplished our goal of doing absolutely nothing for several days and even joined the dinner circuit making friends with an Indian-American and his English wife who we ate with several times.

Soon though it was time to start moving a little and we hired a couple of scooters and took to the streets. Not only did this give us access to some more restaurants up the beach but we explored nearby Madgoan town (busy and dull), raided the local used bookshop (a lot emptier when we left) and generally tooled around the tiny lanes between palm trees and decaying Portuguese cathedrals.

Of course all this zipping around could only lead to the inevitable monsoon downpour montage. We had driven about half an hour from home when the sky's opened with a ferocity, we sheltered for a bit but the rain really had set in for the afternoon so we proceeded to drive back to the resort through the rain. It was slow, and it was very very wet, wet to your undies wet, there is no distinguishing you from someone who just walked into the swimming pool fully clothed wet. But for obvious reasons Indian money is waterproof, and the camera was looked after, the only casualty of the incident was Jacquie's 20 year old pocket alarm clock which now tells time much more cryptically than before with only about 75% of its liquid crystals, umm crystallizing.

After our vacation we headed off for our adventure into the real India. A long train ride with a fantastic view of the waterfalls in Eastern Goa took us up to Hospet, the town near the Hampi ruins. The various temples and things that make up the Hampi site are spread over a large area and while we walked a lot we ended up taking several rickshaws around the place. Some of the temples are very well preserved and/or restored but they all seem to have that great blight of archaeological sights everywhere: the jigsaw puzzle section. This is the area located suitably out of camera shot where all the random bits of intricately carved stone that the archaeologists can't stick back together reside. In Hampi the areas were extensive but were much loved by the local population of squirrels and lizards. All the regular indistinguishable greyish-brownish lizards were there but we were also treated to to seeing a couple of glossy black topped red undersided foot longs which looked very poisonous but probably weren't.

As for the rest of the site there were atmospheric sunken and half-flooded temples, kilometre long boulevards of pillars, holy cisterns of scary green water, elephant stables and the occasional tiny palace-lets for hanging out on the lawn without touching the lawn.

Unfortunately on our first day at Hampi we discovered that our battery charger had burnt out due to the continual power cuts in Goa and none of our 3 batteries actually held any significant number of electrons. So we were forced to merely enjoy the sights with our eyes.

While we really enjoyed Hampi, Hospet the town where we were staying was that 'Real India' I mentioned before. The night we arrived it had rained and the streets were slick with a layer of cow-poo-mud, a very special mud made from the poo of cows that survive on a diet of rotten vegetables and concert posters (seriously all the poster covered walls have the posters ripped off to cow head height). There were no footpaths to mention, and the road space was crammed with cantankerous trucks, downright dangerous buses, cows, rickshaws, wild dogs, cars, and a whole lot of people. Needless to say I had a fairly good bout  of culture shock and needed to go hide in our hotel for a bit. Luckily on this trip to India we have roughly tripled our accommodation budget and we were staying in a fairly decent $40 a night humourless business hotel complete with glorious working A/C.

It wasn't until we arrived in Bijapur that I could address the problem of the busted battery charger. The town is pretty weird for somewhere the size of Hamilton it seems to be built along one long dirty road lined with all manner of small shops. Luckily fairly early on I found a shanty electrician. Tucked into a corrugated iron shed about 2 metres square a couple of small Indian blokes ran a shop re-winding starter motors, repairing VCR's and generating huge amounts of unclassifiable spare parts. I was a little worried that he had any idea what I was asking him to do through the language gap but once he whipped out his prized multimeter I thought I was on to a winner. Then when I returned that afternoon he showed me very clearly that the heart of my old charger had actually physically cracked in two with a teeny-tiny crater in the middle, it was fairly obvious why I hadn't had charged batteries for a while. He then explained that he had gone down to the market to try and find a replacement part but they were unavailable, and he had bought me an entirely new charger.

At this point all my conman warning bells went off, I was gearing up to listen to speech about how hard it was to get such western luxuries in India and how his services were in high demand etc. etc. and wondering how little money I was going to be left with by the end of the day. But instead I was presented with the enormous contradiction that is India. In a country where you have to crack heads to get checked into a hotel, and can't walk anywhere without a hundred people trying to sell you stuff you don't want, this guy wanted me to repay him the $5 dollars he had spent on the charger at the market several kilometres down the road and then leave him to winding his starter motors. Of course he wouldn't accept the (somewhat larger) tip I tried to give him either without some serious coaxing, but that seems to be par for the course too.

The reason we were in Bijapur was to look at their big dome. Gol Gumbaz is the tomb of one of the old shahs, and its about as minimalist as it comes. In the middle of an enormous large dome there are some some graves. There are doors and some towers you can climb to the gallery at the top of the dome. That is all.

We were blessed with a terribly moody sky for our other archaeological stop in town. I don't know its name. It's just those ruins behind the market as far as I'm concerned. But once again NZ shows its deficit by the fact we were easily amused for a half an hour wandering around the broken arches, occasionally spotting a crow or a squirrel.

We arranged an overnight sleeper bus to Bangalore, and were whisked away in what passed for quite a high level of comfort. The bus was divided into two levels of beds, singles on the left, doubles on the right. Air conditioned well and with decent curtains blocking out the lights we both slept pretty well all the way to Bangalore where suddenly you have to wake up at 6 in the morning and try and work out where you are and where your desired hotel is. Not surprisingly this is a very good time of day for taxi drivers.

We didn't actually end up doing much in Bangalore other than eating at fine western chains stores such as Pizza Hut, Cafe Coffee Day, and The Donut Baker. But we did visit the Lal Bagh botanical gardens with its Crystal Palace-esque glass house.

Mysore is famous for its sandalwood product and its "Bob Marley" cafes if you beleive the shady young men who made a havit of introducing themsleves to us as we wandered the streets. We visited the huge Palace in the centre of town, with its colonial era relics, fantastic stained glass and beautifully painted walls (a whole room was taken up with paintings of different elements of the royal Dasara celebration procession).

We intrepidly took an actual public bus out of town to the old fort at Srirangapatna. Notable for being the place where Tipu Sultan was finally overwhelmed by the Britsih in 1799. The old fort, built on an island in the river, still contains several temples, a lot of walls, a mosque and the old summer palace. The palace was very shabby-chic set in large half maintained grounds and with its paint peeling badly on the outside. But inside it was all historic murals of battles, and portraits of dignitaries and was well worht a wander.

Not far from the fort is Rangantittu Bird Sanctuary on the same river. We paid our officially inflated foreigners prices and waited for our row boat to fill up and then we were whisked out amongst the birds by yet another tireless 40 something kilo Indian. As far as birds went there were a whole lot of black faced ibises perched smongst the trees of the wee islands, and not a whole lot else. But hiding carefully in place sight were four marsh crocodiles sunning themselves on the rocks. All though they didn't appear harmless in the slightest, our boat-wallah certainly treated them as such and rowed nice and close so we could all get some good photos.

Heading into the hills we stopped for the night in Madumalai National Park. Famous for its elephants we saw one right by the road into the village from our extremely shoddy local bus. Further transport and several hours 'netted' us only one more elephant but a whole lot of monkeys, spotted deer, and some bison. Far better than all that driving around was feeding time at the local elephant camp. Home to about a dozen working class elephants we first got greeted by a thorough snuffling from the three year old. At about 5 and a half foot it was far too big to hide behind its trainer, but it still tried in-between bouts of sniffing and fondling people with its trunk. The true baby that had recently been found in the bush was kept a little bit away from people but it too seemed very interested in us, resting its head on its window sill and sniffing at us with its disproportionately short trunk.

The big boys (and ladies) didn't disappoint either. They all lined up for dinner behind a spindly railing and shuffled around looking bored and hungry till their trainers bought them two or three footballs worth of sticky rice with extra elephant nutrients. Each ball made only a mouthful but apparently they also browse most of the night in the forest by themselves.

We couldn't really stay in the government run hostel more than night, as though we had paid for a room with a private bathroom, all the water was sourced directly from the river and was much much browner than I was. So we got another infinitely slow public bus and bounced our way up to Ooty.

Bulgaria

Sofia is just one long bus trip from Istanbul. While travelling from one big city to another is not much of a way to see the sights we were only after a diversion to soak up some spare time before our flight to India. What we got was a lot better, and so different from the rest of our trip. Bulgaristan (as the turks refer to it) is a recovering ex-communist country with a huge amount of history and culture, and also very cheap beer.

We traveled through a good portion of Bulgaria to reach Sofia and the countryside was green and pleasant and seemed quite empty. Only occaisional towns appeared on what seemed like a fairly major highway from the maps.

Our first impression of Sofia was of the contrasts of new, the old, and the older, the shiny new bus station led out onto a decaying sunken plaza and across the road to the industrial dirty orange gothic trams which traverse the city streets screeching and dropping the sparks. But some of the streets the trams traverse are lined with beautiful classical architecture and gold tipped russian orthodox churches. Our first choice of hostel was noisy with young backpackers when we arrived and busily serving the free pasta dinner. Needless to say nothing pleases young backpackers more than free pasta dinner and there was no room at the inn. So we walked north and eventually found our second choice, perched on the first floor of an apartment building. It felt like all the walls and floors were suspended plasticated faux-wood, built inside the original concrete walls but we were gladly received by the enthusiastic manager, and proceeded to occupy the three bed dorm. Three bed dorms are awesome as you almost always get smiled on and the hostel will leave that last bed free till the last minute to avoid disturbing you, and if you do have to share if you have a distinct home ground advantage.

I should mention the two different blokes that shared the running of the hostel fell into certain Eastern European stereotypes all to easily. You could easily imagine both in wife-beaters, sprouting stubble as soon as they turned away from the shaving mirror. But like many people we met in Sofia they were both verging on sweet, very warm and welcoming and made a huge effort to work around their limited English to get across all the things we needed to know and several pleasantries besides.

The are we ended up staying in was fairly residential and fairly light on restaurants, but eventually we found our local and over several nights worked through the menu of fried cheeses, sausages, salads with cheese and/or sausage, and all manner of fried and casseroled meats (and did I mention the cheap beer). Suffice to say, we were comforted (and occasionally tipsy) and looked forward to the two meals we could squeeze in each day.

Our first big tourist attraction was the stunning St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, occupying a large stately round-about surrounded by genuine handicraft stalls run by authentic middle aged peasant women (the kind that I imagine proudly replying "Da! Me Peasant!" if queried). The cathedral itself is not as impressive close up  as the wikipedia photos look but the inside is incredibly painted covered with soot stained orthodox iconography and is just incredibly striking and moody.

We moved on to the nearby Natural History Museum not expecting an awful lot but were fairly stunned by the massive collection of stuffed and displayed wildlife. While they lacked the enormous exhibits of British Natural History Museum (notably the fake whale), I think it actually does better on depth and breadth and we spent a full afternoon wandering through several floors of exhibits. The geology exhibits too were much smaller and therefore more interesting than wading through the cases and cases and cases and cases of rocks at British version.

The Art Gallery we visited too surpassed my expectations hosting the finest collection of Indian sculpture I have seen (including our subsequent second trip to India). It seems to be one of those odd maxims that often you will see the best pieces from a region outside that region.

By this time in order to survive we had rapidly taught ourselves Cyrillic pronunciation as signs and maps are almost exclusively in the native tongue. But luckily many words are borrowed from either English or Spanish (or maybe the original Latin who knows) so we could often decipher menus by just sounding out the Cyrillic. Of course all that learning has completely faded now and all I can remember is that R is P and P is N (or is that vice versa).

On our last day we made an epic trip by tram and bus to Boyana Church in the wooded hills of the city outskirts. The church is about a thousand years old and beautifully painted but its so small that we ended up waiting for nearly an hour for our number to be called for our brief look inside.

Near by is the enormous edifice of the National History Museum. With its bunker like exterior and a random helicopter gunship parked outside it certainly evoked a sense of the communist past right from the outset. The inside too was filled with exhibits from the archaeological to the recent past, and more than giving me any sense of what Bulgaria has been like just made me think that it would actually require a whole lot more time learning about Eastern Europe in general before I'd be ready to come to grips with the expanse of Bulgarian history.

While I've written mostly about the older stuff in Sofia, it has a distinctly modern side to it as well. With several streets of ludicrously expensive high fashion stores, western fast food chains, and several malls about town. Also gone are the crappy old Ladas that Nick remembers from his trip to Sofia.

So we headed back to Istanbul and managed to spend a whole day catching up on Internet consumption before flying out to Mumbai and beyond...

England

With a some spare weeks up our sleeve we picked up some nice cheapish EasyJet tickets from Istanbul to London. After a little hick up where the immigration absolutely would not let us in without a contact address, but did not care whatsoever what it was. It's incredible just how backwards and proud (of it) first world nations can be.

On making our triumphant entry onto British soil we were met by Jacq's long lost cousin Ben (who never quite made it home from his OE), and were whisked away to exotic Woking. I think I would have to be have been born there to work out in which contexts Woking is part of London and in which its not. I think its mostly not as there are a lot of trees and the sense of green is very pervasive, but with decent train service its only a half hour from Waterloo so not nearly so far removed as say Torbay.

We spent most of our time there in good old whanau time, catching up/getting to know Ben, his wife Trixi, and their two kids, breaking only for me and Jacq to run outside and stare at the first rain we'd seen since Morocoo. On Friday we squeezed everyone into Ben's sensible family car and went out for a look about Windsor Castle but with an almost twenty pound price tag for entry we decided we could make do with a look around the outside and a poke around the ships and down to the river Thames for a spot of swan feeding.

The next day was Saturday and Ben, Jacq and I headed into the city to watch an ill-fated game of rugby at the pub. Jacq and I were both terribly excited as the most rugby we had had all year was a highlights package in Bolivia, and the occasional snippet on BBC World. But with a poor showing from the AB's we were left a little bit mopey but went put and visited the queen anyway. Buckingham Palace is actually not that exciting but I quite enjoyed the statue in the roundabout (aka the Queen Victoria Memorial) with its Greco-British angels (in gold or white marble) was quite fantastic not to mention that most of it was covered in people just hanging out on their favourite lion or hippogriff.

Sunday we transferred into Stu and Leah's lounge and then we all rushed off to Yum Cha with a whole bunch of people I used to work with in Auckland (and associates). Yum Cha was pretty good and was served on a floating restaurant in the old Dock district and certainly brought back old times. This was then followed up by a trip for spaghetti shaped ice-cream over at Leicester Square.

On our own on the Monday we headed off to the Natural History Museum along with every other Mum and child in London. The queue was convoluted but involved more exhilarating rain, and was entirely worth it as the (free) museum was pretty damn awesome. Dinosaurs skeletons, life size whale models and stuffed large mammals make for a very good day out. And then to top the whole day off  Jacquie made her world famous lamb cous cous, all be it with inferior British lamb (all the supermarkets proudly declare that they only stock 'fine' British Meats), and we went out for another remarkably green walk around the local park which of course was the residence of  the bishop of London for 900 years, history, history, etc, etc.

The next day we hit up the (free) National Gallery and I tried very hard to make up for 30 years of complete disinterest in art by forming opinions on many fine classical works. I officially like Van Eyck, and some French bloke called Seurat, both of whom must have been teased horribly at school.

We also took the opportunity to spread the misery of hosting us around by turning up at Thomas' flat and we immediately astounded at just how small a flat someone can live in and still be generous enough to let two people crash with him. The flat was built into the attic space of a big old townhouse and so had only one vertical wall with the rest being the inside of the roof and therefore pitched at about 45 degrees. While perfectly adequate to the needs of a young bachelor about town it was a pretty tight fit to get the inflatable mattress down in the 'lounge'.

We made it out the to the British Museum over a couple of days. It is gargantuan but luckily its free (seeing the theme yet) so you can take it all in bite sized chunks. We immediately sought out the supposedly superior Egyptian artifacts but they were pretty similar to what we say in Egypt (I'm not sure why I thought they would be), but the Babylonian stone gates were awesome, I particularly liked the fact that the winged horsey centaur things had extra legs so that no matter what direction you looked at it from it appeared to have four legs.

The subtle problem we found with London was that as the temperature was quite cool we could quite happily walk for miles without passing out from heat exhaustion, unfortunately this meant that we soon learnt we had been avoiding walking in the foreign heat and subsequently had quite sore legs the whole time. The upshot of this of course is that London is a cool town to just wander round, lots of little churches, old buildings, random monuments and the occasional interesting shop too.

Our last couch stop in London was with Mike, another old software development friend of mine. We very generously had a whole bedroom to stay in, and were very impressed with the view from most of the way up a rather lonely apartment building. One thing we had never realised about London is that while it may be densely built up the vast majority of buildings are under 5 storeys so we could see London laid out before us pretty well.

The last cultural edifice on our list was the Tate Modern. I was quite keen as I quite like some modern art but it's fair to say my tastes are not nearly modern enough for the curators and I was lift pretty unsatisfied with the days visit. I was in fact slightly more impressed with the building itself, some kind of old warehouse with a vast space left open for no apparent reason.

We finally had a chance to meet up with some of Jacquie's friends on our second weekend so we packed some filled rolls and headed off to Greenwich. It has a large park as well as the small Royal Observatory which had some very interesting displays regarding the race for accurate time keeping couched in terms of Britain's naval superiority.

Having worn out our welcome in London we took a bus out to Oxford to see Jacquie's old uni friends Shane and Mel and their new boy. We spent our time fairly evenly between just hanging round and talking, eating, and wandering the lovely green lanes of Oxford. With a little side trip into Christ Church, one of the largest colleges that make up Oxford. It was pretty much as advertised, old Gothic stone architecture, and beautiful lawns with the odd hurrying student who stayed too long in yoga class and was late for lunch. Unfortunately with lunch on we weren't allowed into the dining hall which they used for all the Harry Potter movies and is apparently quite something.
Jacquie reminded me that my other first while in England was getting stung by a Wasp. We had been walking by the canals when a large bug had flown into Jacquie's hair which of course fell in my manly sphere to remove. Unfortunately it turned out to be a Wasp and I now know that I'm not allergic and that it is quite a good idea for me to immediately remove my wedding ring from the affected finger as I got quite a good swell going on.

Thanks a heap to all the folk that put us up on our stay. Ben & Trixi, Stu & Leah (and flatmates), Thomas, Mike, Shane and Mel for all putting us up while we were there, we had a fantastic time.

Turkey

Our border hop into Turkey was really quite short (at least if it wasn't for the sloooow Turkish authorities) and soon we arrived in Antakya (aka Antioch). Antakya is a pleasant small town built on a river nestled amongst nicely wooded hills, and with plenty of kebab shops ready to supply us with required nutrition. The main drawer in town was the small museum specialising in roman mosaics before moving on. The museum was quite something as every floor and wall was covered with relocated genuine roman mosaics, naked gods and goddesses, animals and plants were everywhere, all in delicately shaded patches of stone about 5x5mm. The other highlight turned out not to be the courtyard of randomly stacked amphorae and assorted roman column bits but the gloriously air-conditioned inner room with a fantastically carved roman marble sarcophagus. With hunting scenes intertwining in 3D around the outside, while a full-size likeness of the occupant reclined lazily upon the lid.

After Antakya we made our way into the heart of Turkey heading for the little village of Goreme in Cappodocia. The place has been a bit of a tourist mecca for years due to the unique 'fairy chimney' rock formations of the region. But getting there turned out to be a real mission. We caught a nice overnight coach most of the way from Antakya , but the idea that anyone would like to get any sleep seemed to be really foreign to the staff as anytime one or two people got off, they would turn all the lights on and wake up the entire bus. When it was our turn to get off it was about 4am, and we were both supremely shattered. We were put off at a junction with a massively overpriced roadside diner (no one does locational overpricing like the Turks), and left to flag down any passing bus headed in our direction, luckily we didn't have to wait too long and as the sun was coming up we squeezed onto a luxury coach, only to have to alight and take yet another bus to finally get to Goreme.

We decided to shake off our morning fog and walk up to our chosen hotel, where we were shown to our very own lovely cave room. The town is famous for its pointy rock formations and all the cave houses that past owners have chipped into them so the most natural thing in the world for all the local hotels is to continually dig themselves new rooms. It was quite pleasant as several feet of rock is remarkably good for keeping the room cool, although the ceiling above the shower had a habit of disintegrating on me which was a little worrying.

The main tourist spot in town is the so called Open Air Museum. This is a cluster of preserved cave dwellings and temples built by early Christians to hide away from the authorities (before the Byzantine empire eventually became officially Christian). A couple of the caves had some very good paintings of saints and the like although most of the art was in fairly poor repair (look this good when you are 1600 you will not).

We headed all the way back to the coast pretty soon and stopped in a small seaside vacation town called Kizkalesi. We arrived in town and wandered through the narrow streets trying to find a recommended hotel and ended up asking directions from another hotelier. He didn't speak English but immediately summoned a nearby shopkeeper we had the best room in the hotel with a view over the castle in the harbour for a 40% discount and were left feeling quite confused by the sudden outbreak of hospitality. The following day we got to explore the landward castle and had a very good time exploring the ruins alone except for some local tourists who kept reappearing from unexpected directions.

We broke up the trip along the coast to Antalya by stopping in Anamur, but were so confused by the local buses and distracted by high quality internet provision that we couldn't even be bothered going to the beach (but we did have good kebabs). Our trip really did need breaking as the coastline is incredibly windy but incredibly picturesque. It's steep hills crashing into Mediterranean waters with the occasional town surrounded by miles of banana greenhouses for variety.

Antalya is a big tourist town and quite developed, but manages to remain a certain amount of charm with a relaxed old town by the remains of a roman dock. We just wandered the streets for a fare while before venturing out to find some of life's little comforts (namely Internet and Burger King).

Where I really started to enjoy myself in Turkey was when we arrived in Olympos. The day was looking dire after another three bus mission in Turkish heat, involving confusing Antalya buses to the mall outside of town, and then discovering that the mall was enormous and that the required connecting bus stop was at the far corner (perceived pack weight is directly proportional to ambient temperature). But two cheap bus trips later we were in the tiny seaside village of Olympos and things were looking up. The accommodation in the village is divided between backpacker oriented party hostels and more turk oriented camps. Always wanting to avoid the party crowd we found ourselves a wee free standing cottage in the camp nearest the beach and immediately rejoiced as the breakfast and dinner buffets we had bought with our accommodation were fantastic.

Getting to the beach at Olympos is a bit of a walk beside a small river between two hills scattered with ancient Lycian tombs. We did have a proper explore later but on our first day we headed straight down to the pebbly beach for a dip in the water. Quite unlike anything at home the hot stones make for hard walking, and the water is incredibly calm and clear. So after finding us a spot on the packed beach we immediately jumped in for a cool off. Not being much of a swimmer at all I'd been trying to practise whenever I've had the chance on this trip and I can't recommend the Mediterranean enough for learning to swim, calm and buoyant it made my life very easy and by the next day when we took a day cruise out to some of the nearby islands I was able to do short bursts around the boat balanced by a lot of lying on my back. The cruise itself was great, pottering around the bays and islands and anytime it was getting too hot it would be time to jump in the water again.

The other thing we did in Olympos in the five days we ended up staying (other than swimming and eating (a lot)) was a trip around to the next bay to the eternal flames at Chimaera. After a hike up a decent sized hill with the rest of our van mates we could eventually smell sausages and just after we arrived at a barren patch of ground from which foot high flames spurted. The quite believable story goes that these methane fires have been present in more or less the same spot for at least the last 2000 years. And sure enough some enterprising turk had brought a long fork and a pack of pre-cookeds and was proceeding to have a cook up.

Next stop was the larger town of Fethiye where again we booked a day cruise and headed out into the islands. My swimming had improved to the point where I was quite relaxed in the water now and could swim back and forth between boat and land pretty happily (although both of us were left with pretty sore shoulders the next day). Again it was a great day although we had less luck with our boat and ended up on a bigger and much more crowded vessel.

We did two more day trips out of Fethiye. One out to Saklıkent Canyon where we joined the crowds wading past the freezing clear water springs and up the rocky canyon river. The other was just over the hill to a nearby swimming beach. The odd thing was that our bus passed through a quite sizable British holiday enclave plastered with signs like "£5.50 Chinese buffet", and "Every FA Cup match LIVE". The british seemed well entrenched but our bus driver often wouldn't even stop for them as they obviously annoyed him immensely seeming to expect to be able to pay for everything with British coins and for the bus driver to speak perfect english. Turks are helpful and generally want to understand you when you mispronounce the name of your intended destination, but most of them don't speak any English beyond basic counting. Once we got to the beach the cultural contrasts continued with a bunch of skinny english girls gleefully wandering around topless. The Turks quite rightly pride themselves on their tolerant secular society, that is to say almost all of them are observant Muslims but don't expect other people to be, but when one of the aforementioned girls plonked herself down next to a motherly Muslim women covered head-scarf to ankle I thought there was at least going to be words exchanged. But instead the women just turned her head and looked incredibly embarrassed for the young girl and waited for her to leave before going back to splashing her feet in the water.

Further up the coast Bodrum, is the party hard version of Fethiye. The hotel that we checked into immediately announced that they were just across the road from the loudest disco in Europe and then proceeded to demonstrate the sound deadening powers of their double glazed windows. Also home to the former wonder of the ancient world, the Mausoleum of Mausolus unfortunately most of the mausoleum was recycled into the fort guarding the harbour and now just a hole remains. The fort itself was worth a look though as it had passed hands so many times, it was quite rambling and had one tower built by each of half a dozen different European nations. But apart from just strolling amongst the the square white houses overgrown with Bougainvillea (they apparently have very strict building codes) there was not much else for us here and we soon headed further north.

Northwards was the small town of Selchuk and the ruins of the roman city of Ephesus (as in Paul's letter to the Ephesians). Selchuk is small and actually quite friendly, we had very pleasant hoteliers and the general tone was quite good but by this point we had seen so many roman ruins that the great city of Ephesus (largely talked up as the greatest roman ruins around) was a little underwhelming.

Which was OK as our next stop was a short look around the Gallipoli peninsula and all the emotions that entailed. We stayed at a nearby town over the Dardanelles from Gallipoli and took a morning ferry across to join up with our tour group. The ferry was so busy that the crew abandoned the attempt to collect money from walk-on passengers and just focused on the traffic. About midday we set off around the peninsula under the guidance of a young local turk who did a very good job of explaining the history of the area to everyone. Most people on the tour were Australian, Kiwi, or British but somehow a middle-aged West Virginian couple wound up on the tour too. They seemed completely confused the whole day as not only did they have no idea what the tour was about (they had been to Troy that morning and thought it was more of the same) but they had absolutely no idea what our guide was saying at any point. I won't say much else about the day except that I really felt it was worthwhile and that I can see exactly why everyone has been advised to stay away on Anzac day, there really isn't a lot of room (it's hardly the kind of a place that suits a crowd) and any more development will just further degrade the site.

After Gallipoli we made our first of three trips into Istanbul. I will write about them all here rather than chronologically for my own sanity. Our first visit we stayed in a dorm room downtown in the old city right near the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, but it was really quite unnecessary as Istanbul has a good public transport system with regular trams with connecting funiculars (cable cars) along the normal tourist route. And if we had wanted to go further afield we could have taken one of dozens of overworked ferries across the harbour (to Asia), or up the river.

As it turned out my aversion to dorms was again proved well founded as we had a very interesting night. Jacquie and I were sharing one bunk in a twelve bed dorm with me at ground level. As the night progressed the person I was sleeping head-to-head with gradually advanced their arms and their pillow into space I was fairly fond of keeping my head in. But with plenty of spare bunks I decided to just relocate rather than excerpt my territorial claims. Crisis averted right? Several hours later the door I was now sleeping next to opens and in wanders a young shirtless man who proceeds to have a slow wander round the dorm and then started interfering with my pack. Needless to say I was less than impressed and hauled him bodily out of the dorm and into the reception where the startled nightwatchmen had to try and make sense of the whole business. The interloper claims he was trying to go to sleep in his bed (which had been issued to me earlier in the day) but luckily he was erratic enough for the nightwatchmen to simply pronounce "You don't stay here more" and I could return to bed for a few hours sleep.

The Hagia Sophia itself was damned impressive. A huge enclosed space with an enormous dome, and also quite impossible to photograph properly. It was under renovation when we were there (as it must be most of the time) and so unfortunately there was a neat blue scaffolding structure built inside the dome about 15 storeys high complete with elevator. The Hagia Sophia started out life as the chief cathedral of the state church of the Byzantine empire back when Istanbul was Constantinople. But shifted over to use as a mosque in the 14th century when the Ottomans took over. It was converted to a museum by Ataturk soon after the Turkish republic was founded, to ensure its accessibility to all Turks but with Muslims never being particularly shy about where they down their prayer mats it seems to still get a lot of use by the local Muslim population. The upstairs mezzanine allowed a great view of the structure as well as some of the gold leaf covered Byzantine mosaics that had been restored so far. Apparently the whole inside used to be covered with them but when the building was converted to a mosque they were just plastered over rather than being destroyed, an enlightened principal that would have gone a long way amongst the early Egyptian Christians.

The Blue Mosque facing the Hagia Sophia across the park, is still however very much a mosque. We were allowed inside to have a look but the majority of the space was roped off for use by the local parishioners. But we got a good look at the fantastic Islamic tiling and plaster carving that decorates the interior. The rest of town is pretty lively and we managed to spend quite a bit of time just walking around the harbourside and through the near by shopping areas.

We had a spare three weeks up our sleeve at this point so we flew to London and back, and did a bus loop out to Sofia in Bulgaria too but those are the topics of other posts.

Syria

Our entry to Syria was pretty odd, we had to catch a shared taxi to the border then another specialist border crossing taxi across it (the drivers passport was awesome), and then a bus from the border to the Damascus bus station and then yet another taxi to get downtown to where the hotels are. The only problem was we had no Syrian currency, we bought some biscuits from a shop at the bus station and tricked the guy into changing 4 Dinars for us, assuming there'd be ATM's and things in the big city. Unfortunately 6 ATM's later we discovered that the banking network seems to take the day off on Friday's (it is the Islamic weekend after all). But after wandering around for a bit looking very worried about how we were going to be our taxi driver, we were approached by a not terribly dubious character that spoke some English and offered his services as a foreign exchange dude. Of course this involved walking past the closed exchange office to his fabric shop where he whipped out an enormous brick of cash and gave us exactly what Jacquie had calculated as the fair exchange rate for our remaining Jordanian funds and sent us on our way. So far Dubya's Axis of Evil spiel was looking pretty thin.

Damascus is a pretty run down, busy sort of place. So busy the locals actually use those overpass bridges that optimistic governments often erect over busy thoroughfares. We had some trouble finding a hotel as the guide book recommended ones had suffered from both recent high inflation and a glut of guide-book reading tourists. But after getting lost trying to find a backup option I found a reasonable room on the 2nd floor of a startlingly non-right-angled old courtyard house. Every time we climbed the two flights of stairs there were terribly amusing head bending and body leaning episodes as we tried to stay aligned with the escheresque floor, wall, and ceiling angles.

While I am not really a fan of bazaar's as a shopping destination, having gotten over the exoticness of it all quite a while ago, I had read a herald article about the Damascus Grand Bazaar, and I was surprisingly undisappointed. It is probably the oddest placed Victorian building on the planet with a long long central mall with heavy cast iron arches crossing overhead with the occasonal hole in the opaque panellng (probably glass) between the arches letting in spots of light, it was one of those rare buildings that actually made me happy. Of course there were a whole mess of shops and people desperately trying to sell us all manner of junk, food, spices, and even the occasional knick knack that you might like to take home with you.

Passing through the more warren like section of the bazaar you eventually come to the Umayyad Mosque, one of the few mosques we've actually been allowed into throughout the middle east, they go so far as to provide goofy grey robes for all the inappropriately dressed females (basically anyone not already wearing robes). The building is actually really significant as it is one of the oldest mosques around, started being exclusively Muslim in 706 after being a shared use church/mosque since pretty much the start of Islam. It also supposedly houses both the head of John the Baptist and the remains of the great Arab General Saladin. Beside from that it is actually quite attractive and family friendly place. With kids running around, people resting and talking around the outside men and women praying in adjacent sections the same mosque (it seems that mostly if there is actually a women's section to a mosque it is above and out of sight of the men's section).

Continuing on from the Mosque there is more bazaar then the old town opens up into the Christian Quarter which is a little more well to do, is decorated with the occasional original nicely preserved roman column, and even sports the odd liquor license. Why do Christians get their own quarter in the heart of a very very Muslim country? Obviously because they're in the bible (t00). Unfortunately the Chapel of Saint Paul was all closed up tight when we eventually found it, but it commemorates the spot where the Apostle Paul got lowered over the city walls in a basket to flee his persecutors.

We are the worst tourists ever when it comes to buying souvenirs, but we almost always manage to sample the local food stuffs and in Damascus we were pretty keen on the local take on soft jubes, which appear to actually be made with fruit but will congeal into one sticky uber-jube if you leave them in the heat. This led to one of my finest hours as I devoured an apple sized sticky monstrosity with Jacquie looking on in horror (now how often does that happen).

We also visited the National Museum of Damascus on what was a scorcher of a day. The musuem was unusual in that they'd taken the front of some fortress or another and reconstructed it around the doorway so there was a big faux castle gate welcoming you in. The museum had quite a good collection of statues and things from around the region but all was forgotten when we discovered that there was a reconstructed Byzantine family tomb underneath the building that was at least 15 degrees cooler than anywhere else. Not just that but all the little drawers that the various people had been interred in all had a nicely carved portrait of the occupant on the front.

After Damascus we hit the road out to the finest Roman ruins in Syria at Palmyra. We were there before the tourist season and it was insanely hot, but we had the place pretty much to ourselves,and could wander around the ruined roman road and baths through all the columns and arches chasing lizards to our hearts content. We had our first motorcycle souvenir seller as a local fullah drove right the way across the site to try and sell us some arabic 'tea-towel' headwear. Apart from the reasonably standard roman ruins, there is a fairly rare Temple of Bel (or Ba'al) on site, but apart from the (closed) tunnel for bringing the sacrificial animals it was pretty standard too. Big stone walls closing off a courtyard, and a small better decorated inner shrine for the priestly fold to do their thing in. Unfortunately by this time we were pretty much cooked and all the local taxi drivers were smarter than trawling the deserted ruins for fares so we had to walk back to town in the 40 plus heat. Luckily there was a small restaurant where we loaded up on fluids and were provided with samples of local fruit by the owner.

Making it back into Palmyra town we headed to the bus stand where we had left our backpacks, until we were cut off by an approximate facsimile of the American Army. Smoke was pouring out of burning oil drums, as a huge crowd of locals gathered to watch some heavily armed jeeps race up and down the streets under the watchful eye of several movie cameras. But by the time we got there they seemed to have gotten their shots and we cam become much more interesting to the assembled children than the movie making.

That same night we made it into a small town called Hama famous for its oversize all wooden water wheels (aka norias). Hama is actually quite a pleasant, quiet little town and we had a good time wandering around on foot. Down the river we passed several of the norias that are kept turning for the tourists. They were built to raise water from the river into several aqueducts leading away from town. The really distinctive thing about them is actually their noise as they continuously creak along on their wooden pivot, but don't seem to be terribly effective at moving water.I wouldn't want to own a farm relying on them.

Out of Hama we did a day trip in a van to two near by crusader fortresses. First up was the smaller fortress of Masyaf situated in a small village it looked the worse for wear but turned out to be quite a fun explore with just me, Jacq and the japanese guy and three random eastern europeans we had brought with us. The fort is quite twisty and as you climbed up or (indeed down into the depths) you were never really sure where the next door would pop you out.

After Masyaf it was onto the main event, Crac des Chevaliers. Before tackling it though we braved the tourist trap restaurant our driver recommended. Against all expectations we had an enormous and reasonably priced mixed mezze lunch served by definitively the most camp man we had met in many months. Fortified we wandered into the castle, and up the huge broad entry ramp. The castle featured a broad wall between the keep and the nearest hill which had spectacular views across the valley, while the keep itself was damp, cool, and many arched and felt like you really could shelter quite a sizable army safely under its thick stone walls and roofs.

Next (quick) stop was Aleppo where the main thing to see was the citadel in the centre of town. Somewhat conical with a huge broad base you enter up a causeway and then find that someone left a small village up the top. There were narrow alleyways, unoccupied shops and homes, a small palace and even a small roman style theatre (they really are everywhere, I think we need one in Dargaville).

Latakia is a very (culturally) western town on the west coast of Syria up near turkey, full of students and bad attempts at western food. But it was somewhat relaxing and we took off on a fairly long walk along the promenade along the cliffs above the Mediterranean Ocean. We were there on the weekend and it seemed like a very popular place to be, loads of families lined up to buy fresh boiled corn, and occasionally heading into the expensive restaurants thereabouts. We spent a while watching the sunset and looking for Cyprus before taking a taxi home and thinking about getting to Turkey the next day.

Jordan

Our trip into Jordan had been pretty frustrating, having had to wait for the largely disinterested fairy folk to meander us across the glassy smooth gulf of Aqaba for about three and a half hours. But immediately on arrival the Jordan effect kicked in. While chasing down our sequestered passports we were just told to take a seat while our entry stamps were procured and someone would bring our passports back to us. Our mob of tourists were then hurried past the waiting line of unfortunate Arab looking folk at customs (it seems there's no international port, air or otherwise where it pays to look too Arabian), and out into the night air.

The Jordan effect looked shaky for a second as we were surrounded by incredibly excited taxi drivers, but reasserted itself as we realised we seemed to be standing in a magic anti-taxi-driver field that kept them all at arms length. The field seemed to emanate from a couple of serious young policemen standing near by, enforcing the 'no taxi drivers on the footpath' rule much to our amusement.

A short taxi ride into downtown Aqaba later we were left to ourselves to try and find a cheap hotel for a nights stay before we headed into the interior. And there we had our first disappointment, it turns out that the price of civilisation is, well, price. The Jordanian Dinar is currently just about level with the English Pound (not to be confused with the Egyptian Pound at around 3.7 to the NZD, or the Syrian Pound at around 30 to the NZD), and prices while not British are certainly not consistently low.

We wandered the streets of Aqaba the next day, searching for guide books and hiding in McDonalds to avoid the heat of the day, before taking a bus north to the small town of Wadi Musa, gateway to the magnificent ruins of Petra. The sole image of Petra most foreigners are familiar with is a brief glimpse of the very first building from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but in reality the site spans an entire valley and we spent two happy, exhausting and very very hot days traipsing around climbing the surrounding hills and inspecting the huge number of carved facades, ruined temples, and even yet another Roman theatre. Half the fun of the site though is the entry through the long narrow gorge at the entrance. About one and a half kilometres long and only 3 to 6 metres wide and still mostly paved courtesy of the Roman empire, it makes stumbling upon the Treasury building at the start a fantastically atmospheric experience.

After our days at Petra we headed north to the crusader fortress of Al Karak, in one of those sublime travel moments we exited our hostel took about two steps toward the bus station before the bus we had just missed trundled round the corner and the bloke driving it leaned out the window and asked if we were heading north. That bus dropped us at a motorway junction and we had to flag down a passing local to take us the rest of the way. Its important to note that hitchhiking in a lot of the middle east is not just extremely safe but often the preferred option. You always have to pay your way (costs the same as a bus) but if you strike a friendly local, like in our case you will get dropped at the top of the hill you were worrying about climbing, way way above the bus station. The Jordanian effect continued with our orange juice vendor taking charge of our backpacks while we explored the castle (free of charge due to it being someones birthday).
The castle itself was pretty impressive, many stories, large vaulted halls, built on a huge stone glaice and with impressive views of the dead sea valley (if not quite the dead sea). It was a left over from one of the more successful crusades, when the Europeans set up their own little Kingdom of Jerusalem in the holy lands and kept the whole thing from falling apart (immediately) by building or expanding castles all up and down the region. So sure enough the castle featured a small ruined chapel, but also a mosque from the period after it had been captured by Saladin, and its subsequent use by the Ottoman empire.

So even after all that we still managed to get to Amman before dark, found a cheapish hotel and settled in for what turned out to be a reasonably lengthy stay. About the first thing we did was go for dinner and some fresh juice. But while Jordanians are almost flawlessly polite the same can not be said of their food hygiene, and after my two helpings of melony goodness cried freedom later that night I was laid out for a little bit of TV and sleepy times while Jacq tried to work out how were going to manage our needed Indian and Syrian visas.

The Indian visa form was extensive and had great fields like Father slash Husbands name, but reassured us that the visa would be produced within three working days. Of course the Indian bureaucracy being what it is when we turned up, cash, bank statements and photographs in hand it turned out to take 7 days (which turned out to mean 8 days when we went to pick it up). But in the end it was procured and it even worked as I am writing this very blog from the International transfers lounge of Mumbai airport.

So what did we do to entertain ourselves for a week in Amman, well not actually that much. We visited the local roman ruins, bet you never expected there to be Temple of Hercules in uptown Amman aye? Next door was a fairly small archaeolgy museum with a whole load of Greco-Roman stuff, some of the dead sea scrolls, and a couple of glass cases that the Jordanians would have you believe are the oldest surviving statues anywhere, clocking in at 8000 years old, and only vaguely humanoid. Its amazing what you can dig up (or fall over) in these kind of countries.


Our big excitement for our stay in Amman was our day trip out to the Dead Sea. Not only that but we got taken to two of the more significant of the thinking man's holy sites. Up Mount Nebo there is not a huge amount to see, but it is asserted that this is the spot that Moses climbed to view the promised land immediately before his death. The view was not perfect the day we went up but on a good day you can see well across the dead sea and into the country the locals refer to with absolutely no hint of irony as Palestine. We then got trucked down to the Jordan River to the point (that the Pope has declared) John the Baptist baptised Jesus. Oddly sandwiched between two countries that are a lot fuller of Muslims and Jews than any Christians, there is an awful lot of construction going on. Pretty much every christian group, catholic, protestant, or orthodox has brought land is building a cathedral cum visitors centre in the middle of nowhere.


The Dead Sea itself did not disappoint although it started off pretty dear, as you have to pay an entrance fee to the tune of about 30 bucks. But it turned out to be well worth it as the experience of stalwartly attempting to march into the sea was repeatedly foiled by our feats failure to make contact with the bottom. This turned out to be quite fortuitous as a near by australian learnt the hard way after determinedly paddling their head under water, getting any of the 10 times concentrated salt water anywhere near your eyes really really stings. Its so caustic that once you have had your fill of bobbing like a cork while giggling unmanfully, you immediately proceed to a fresh water shower lest the drying salt burn your skin.

Once we had discovered just how long the Indian visa would take we decided to try some parallel processing and borrowed our passports from the Indian embassy and headed out to the Syrian embassy. Unfortunately while the Syrians eventually turned out to be welcoming hosts, visa availability is not exactly standardised and the Syrians advised us to send our passports to Australia for a Visa, which wasn't really high on our list of things to do.

Pressing on we took a day trip up to Jerash, which is a reasonably spectacular set of Roman ruins in the north of Jordan. One of the things it is noted for is its largely intact and partially restored Hippodrome, which was quite evocative of Roman festivities and 'sporting' events even without waiting around for the legionnaires and chariots show. Otherwise it was the usual mess of picturesque columns, plazas (unusually oval), roads, temples and theatres. But with hardly anyone about it was quite a pleasant day out even in the scorching Jordanian sun.

On our last day of waiting we did head out to Royal Automobile Museum which houses the late King Hussein's extensive collection of cars and motorbikes collected over the 47 years of his reign. Everything from an extensive collection of enormous American classic sedans, to brand new top shelf European super cars. Even Jacquie was interested as there was a lot of Jordanian history on display, from multiple cars that King Hussein was in during assassination attempts, to his BMW rally car, to the Land Rover he used to show the Queen and Prince Phillip around Petra.

We did eventually get to leave both Amman and Jordan and immediately bolted for the Syrian border, after a tense moment where the border guard looked a little confused about whether New Zealanders lacked sufficient representation to be eligible for an at the border visa (New Zealanders are served by the Australian embassy) we were charged a 60USD welcome to Syria tax and onward we made it all the way to the Syrian capital of Damascus by mid afternoon.

Egypt

We again arrived in a new country at the godless break of dawn, exhausted and disoriented. Egyptian customs was easy enough once we paid our 15USD for a 'visa', i.e. a vaguely holographic piece of paper to stick in our passport. I'm not sure but I always had the feeling the visa system was somehow associated with keeping out undesirables not just collecting government taxes a the border.

Anyways we found a cab and headed into the centre of Cairo. It was while driving out of the airport that we discovered just how ludicrously thick with things historic Egypt is. The roundabout at the exit of the airport is decorated with a 4000 year old obelisk. A little while later we made a second discovery, our cabbie had absolutely no idea where along one of the biggest roads in Cairo our hostel was. Luckily Egyptians are more than happy to offer directional advice, and we had bargained for a fixed price at the airport. Several sets of differing instructions later our cabbie spotted a Fed Ex guy and made a bee line for him, turns out wherever you are in the world no one knows what's on the 7th floor of decrepit apartment/office blocks like your local courier driver.

Cairo is the base for seeing the pyramids, and in fact the Giza pyramids (the big ones with the Sphinx) are smack dab in the middle of Giza (think Glenfield but a whole lot drier (and with pyramids)). They seem to have kept the area behind the pyramids free of construction giving it a nice photographic backdrop, but if you stand behind the Sphinx and look at it, you can see as much of suburban Cairo as the smog will allow.

The pyramids themselves are as impressive as you would expect for 5000 year old man made geography, but unfortunately you're not allowed in them or on them these days. Luckily that's where the Dahshur and Saqqara sites come in. Dahshur has three pyramids but only one of them is accessible as the land is now controlled by the military. The interesting inaccessible one is the Bent Pyramid which changes slope about halfway up, when the engineers realised they were building at too steep an angle and the whole thing would collapse if they kept going the same way. The Red Pyramid is the accessible one, and notable because we were allowed to descend 200 feet into the very centre of the pyramid. The length of the tombs are strung with fluorescent lighting but on the day we visited they weren't working and Jacquie and I and about 8 other tourists descended all following the light of our wonderful little LED torch (thanks Tiff).

Not only is the entry corridor quite long but it is very low and at a reasonably steep angle. But after squat walking down we were rewarded with three vary dark, quite imposing corbel vaulted burial chambers, the second of which is apparently at the dead centre of the pyramid. Interestingly enough traversing the entry corridor uses muscles that neither me or Jacq have used much of late and we were unable to climb stairs without groaning for a good two or three days afterwards.

Saqqara's main pyramid is Djoser's Stepped Pyramid which was built earlier than any of the others we'd seen and was under some fairly heavy restoration when we visited. But the stand out here was the tomb of a minor official with a lot of very nicely preserved hieroglyphics often with a lot of the original colour showing. The thing that Egyptolgists never mention is that the ancient Egyptians were not the classy minimalist decorators that the ruins may lead you to believe, but instead the original temples were so heavily painted in bright colours that dark sunglasses would have issued at the door had all the original colouring survived.

The other big draw in Cairo is the Egyptian Museum which is at once astounding and hilarious. It is the back alley junk shop of the museum world, except the junk happens to be priceless, and irreplaceable cultural treasures. The building is two large floors with about 50 areas laid out on each floor. Each area is stacked with enormous amounts of carved stonework, statuary, funerary offerings, sarcophagi, and even a couple of rooms of mummies. Nothing is labelled, but everything is worth looking at, in fact if it became a text heavy museum it would take infinitely longer than the 4 hours we spent to peruse its halls. The really fantastic stuff is Tutankhamen's. At the back of the top floor there is a room dedicated to the objects found with him, the centrepiece of which is the fairly famous funerary mask, made of 11kgs of solid gold. Apparently as impressive as all of Tutankhamen's things were they probably weren't that great compared to other Pharaohs, it was just a fluke of another Pharaoh building his tomb almost directly on top of Tut's that meant it was discovered completely untouched by the ubiquitous grave robbers that put an end to the whole pyramid building thing in the first place.

After having had a big rant about Moroccans in my previous post its probably important to say that by Egypt was pretty much what we were used to, people would call out to us a lot, and follow us trying to sell whatever they had, but they got to the point and told us what they were selling and even how much it would cost a lot more readily than their Moroccan counterparts. Cairo in particular had a lot of cheap places to eat, including a specialist pigeon restaurant (don't bother they're all stuffing). The hotels were a bit more expensive than the food but of quite a good consistent standard. In fact we were never even offered an unairconditioned room which was a good thing as most of our afternoons were spent close up to the air-con trying to cool off from a morning in the sun.


We also got to visit old Coptic Cairo, their church of Saint George and a couple of small shrines. It was really interesting to see how much of a tradition the local church has about the two lines in the bible where it says Joseph, Mary and child packed off to Egypt for a few years. They have a purported itinerary and lots of holy sites along its length. We did discover that we quite like Coptic art (especially Jacq). They're churches tend to be pretty much covered in gold haloed icons and dark wood which make them pretty attractive.

After Cairo we were convinced to get a tour loosely organised for us, as independent travel is made quite difficult by the Egyptian authorities. We weren't going to be travelling on a tour bus or anything but we had our transport and day tours arranged for us which worked out pretty well. We started by catching the foreigner only sleeper train up the Nile to Aswan. The train itself was pretty nice but I made the mistake of brushing my teeth in the drinking water provided on the train and was very very sorry shortly thereafter. But to make up for it all for the first time in my life someone was waiting for us at the siding to take us to our hotel. Shame it was just a dude in a t-shirt and there wasn't even a car, just a short walk to our hotel, but I felt special anyway.

That afternoon we headed out the High Damn and to Philae Temple in a wee van. The damn is remarkably unimpressive for something that pretty much revolutionised farming in Egypt, breaking the annual cycle of Nile flooding, and creating an enormous amount of hydroelectricity. It also managed to displace a huge amount of the Nubian population of Egypt while creating the largest man made lake in the world, and for all that it was kind of lame, not perilously vertical reinforced concrete just a whole lot of dirt with a road across the top.

Philae Temple was more interesting as it was one of several temples in the area to be moved following the construction of the damn. Now adays you jump on a little boat and motor around to the island before wandering through the many columned courts and the hieroglyph laden inner temple. Unfortunately for the carvings, 1500 years before the site was dismantled and moved by the Italians, the burgeoning Coptic Christian population defaced most of the carvings while they were using the building as somewhere out of the way to have church. Always a shame when people taking their religion seriously gets in they way of a good photo opportunity.

Our second day we got up at 3 in the morning to catch a police convoy down to Abu Simbel. Egyptian Police Convoys along with the tourist only trains are the Egyptian version of security theatre, they stick a couple of cops with guns and funny helmets at both ends of the convoy/train, wave a wand and declare you safe from the sporadic but quite real terrorist attacks that have been carried out in Egypt. I don't know about everyone else but I think I'd feel a lot safer unguarded with half a dozen other tourists in a van, than packed into a 100 foreigner jihadi piñata guarded by the exact same guys who guarded the convoy the day before.

However Abu Simbel was worth the trip, another moved temple they managed to fake the new one quite nicely into the side of an existing hill, and the carvings were the biggest and most colourful I think we say in Egypt, and we saw a crocodile hanging around the edge of the lake waiting for an unsuspecting tourist to get hot and go for a dip. Apparently the damn also keeps the crocodiles out of the lower Nile.


The next day we took to the Nile on a Felucca, along with a couple of Aussies, an Argentinian, and two skinny Egyptian wannabe rastafarians that were purportedly the crew. We criss-crossed the Nile quite merrily and were treated to some very good home cooking by our hosts. And anytime we parked somewhere we were treated to a bit of Bob Marley as well on an old beaten tape player. The hardest part of the whole trip was having to rotate on the mattresses lining the deck every time the boat tacked and watching the expert boom lowering as we made our way under a badly planned bridge.


We got off the boat the next morning and proceeded to Kom Ombo on our way down the Nile to Luxor. The Kom Ombo temple was notable for it being (half) dedicated to Offler (umm I mean Sobek), and nothing much else really. But you can't really go far wrong with a guy with a crocodile head now can you.

Further down the road we reached Luxor home of Karnak, and the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens. Karnak is fantastic and was the highlight of all the temples for me, upon entering you are surrounded by a field of enormous columns, impressively carved and well, enormous. It is one of those really very impressive places that its hard to describe.


The Monarchal valleys were also quite interesting as they were the result of the complete failure of the Pyramids as secure resting places for past pharaohs. As most of the pyramids were ransacked by tomb robbers at some point the priests packed up all the remaining sarcophagi and built new tombs in a secret valley out in the hills. Later pharaohs got in on the act too, and this is where Tutankhamen was buried. Our ticket let us into three tombs of our choosing. Two of which were very straight forward hieroglyph lined shafts, while the last was a little twisty fullah designed with a false floor and hidden burial chamber. Of course none of this helped as almost all of these tombs were also eventually robbed.


We caught our train back to Cairo and from there caught a bus out to the Sinai peninsula (the triangular bit) and to laid back Dahab. We spent a whole week there, the highlight of which was a snorkeling trip out to a diving spot called Blue Hole. When I was not sucking in water through my nose I was watching big schools of little bright fish darting around and through the reef. Not many big fish but I did spot a fluorescent parrot fish out grooming the coral. Unfortunately Jacquie got a very sun burnt back from that day out so we spent quite a few days lazing round, reading Lee Child thrillers and eating regularly.


Fully rested we took a bus up the coast to catch the ferry to Jordan. While amateur geographers may realise that one could simply drive from Egypt to Jordan via Israel, the presence of an Israeli stamp or even an Egyptian exit stamp for an Israeli crossing would have prohibited us from entering Syria. So instead we paid 70USD each and waited 3 and a half hours for our much delayed ferry to arrive and whisk us across the glassy waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and into Jordan, land of politeness, civility and helpfulness.

Morocco

Every time I go to write about our time in Morocco I am struck with a certain amount of confusion. I look back on the month there as reasonably well spent but when I try and recall individual experiences, the ones that spring to mind are often negative. This is largely to do with the nature of the people in Morocco that speak English. Morocco was under French control for some time so most people speak both Arabic and French, along with varying amounts of Berber in the south and Spanish in the far north. As such English is some kind of distant fifth place language and is only known to either the well educated or those that make their living from extracting cash from tourists.

This would be OK if the average Moroccan tout had taken a course in effective western selling techniques. The almost universal approach to selling something to whitey is to ask what country they are from, how long they have been in morocco, possibly what hotel they are staying at. All before even announcing what it is they would like to sell you because mostly everyone sells everything. They likely have a shop of their own but are just as happy earning commission by guiding you to a local hotel, or restaurant or even just by demanding baksheesh for directions or a pro bono history lesson when in site of anything vaguely historical. And while we've been to several countries with a haggling culture we've never seen such counterproductive and zealous attempts at overcharging as in Morocco, where as in most countries if you know the 'right' price you get the 'right' price, many Moroccans will not bat at an eyelid at not making a sale if it means lowering the price to something a local would consider. And then once you have hardened to the nonsense that goes on, some of them will even act offended when you ignore (or even just refuse) their unsolicited attempts to sell you things you don't want.

Wow that's an especially long paragraph describing the short comings of Moroccans, but the worst is yet to come. Once you've come to the decision that no Moroccans are to be trusted, or even talked to you get your rental car stuck in the sand (it looks an awful lot like dirt down south) and every single person that drives past in the next few minutes stops their car, leaves their air conditioning, rushes across the road and bodily shoves your car until it is free of the bunker. AND THEN wander off without expecting a handshake and a smile let alone exorbitant baksheesh. You can understand why it was so traumatizing right?

Our route around Morocco was pretty much clockwise starting in Tangiers and heading southwards through Tetouan, Chefchaouen, Fez, Meknes, Azrou, Errachidia, then west through the desert and Tinerhir, Boulmaine de Dades to Ouarzazate, South to Zagora, and N'Kob before heading to the west coast Agadir, and Essaouira, and then finally our outward leg through Marrakech to Casablanca.

Our second stop after Tangiers was Chefchaouen, a pleasant small town, with windy alleys painted pale blue, where everyone wanted to sell us drugs. Not in that furtive shady guy walking the other direction whispering '¿Dak Bro?' kind of way, but in the well dressed young men reclining in the public square openly offering high quality, low price marijuana and derivatives to all and sundry. I'm pretty sure we received five separate offers the first day, and to be honest the 'pushers' were a lot more relaxed and polite than the guy trying to sell you brass lamps, or carpets.

We stayed in another really nice budget hotel, and spent some time wandering the alleyways before heading off to climb a near by hill to a ruined mosque (the only kind of mosque non-muslims are allowed into in Morocco, bar two). The climb was green and goat strewn but on arrival there wasn't much of the mosque left but there was a nice man who sold me fanta and espoused considerably on the quality of Morocco's (and therefore his) hashish and its deserved dominance in the european market.

Chefchaouen was also a firm believer in the standardized Moroccan breakfast, with all restaurants in town offering almost identical renditions of toasted fresh bread, apricot jam, fresh cream cheese with mint tea. I should note at this point that mint tea does not ever on pain of death involve a tea bag in Morocco, nope you take your glass or your tea pot and stuff it with as much mint as you can manage, add as much sugar as will dissolve and then add your boiling water and stir thoroughly.

The big cities in Morocco all blur together somewhat, large old quarters threaded with impossibly confusing, historic and/or smelly alleyways. Market stalls piled with fresh foods, public cats begging at butchers just big enough for one cow to be delivered and dismembered. Many closed ornately carved mosque doors, and small boys lurking in the windy bits waiting for us to get lost enough to require paid guidance out.

And then the burgeoning Ville Nouvelle's, full of faded colonial buildings, mad traffic and male-only coffee shops where all the chairs point outwards so the men can look at all the passers by. Perhaps my favourite image I have is of the McDonalds in Meknes with a huge mural in the drive-thru of head-clothed Arabs riding horses, while brandishing rifles above their heads. Very Middle-East meets West I thought.

When we were in Fez we joined a random crowd lining the cordoned off main road only to see three black audis blast past us at way over 100kph bound for who knows where. Turns out that it was either the king or a royal decoy, and the real king caught up with us a couple of days later when we arrived in Meknes. The hotel we had chosen from the guidebook turned out to be completely inaccessible due to crowds lining the streets, and we were completely stuck in the throng with our backpacks for a good five minutes before King Mohammed VI cruised past in one of the afore mentioned Audis.

Our time in the south around the Dades and Todra Gorges was pretty good. First we took a taxi up the Todra Gorge, which was steep sided, had a small river flowing through it and was absolute party central for all the local young moroccans. Big groups of people sat on the pebble islands in the river and banged drums and tambourines and shouted and sang like you wouldn't believe. The swarms continued all the way up the narrow section of the gorge, but seemed to disappear immediately as we rounded the corner and headed up on a day hike over the saddle above the gorge. The land is really barren with little scraggly shrubs holding doing their best to hold the rocks together. On the way over we graciously allowed a British bloke to catch up with us, and proceeded up the hill and down the other side together. Turns out he was a producer of a mini-series being filmed in Ourzazate, and was out for his day off hike cum location scouting. The geology didn't disappoint as the hills provided text book views of distorted and upended sedimentary rocks that left us all terribly impressed, and in the end we even got a free ride to the next town in a clean, safe car.

The next day we headed out of Boulmaine de Dades by taxi again, and headed up the Dades gorge, and the valley of roses which was more an architectural trip than the previous day. The gorge carries a river and is lined with both palm trees and aging mud brick kasbahs (aka forts). We stopped several times and wandered down around the river, while admiring the bizarre rock formations on the other side. The river in the Dades gorge was much swifter and deeper than the day before at Todra, but this didn't stop some locals trying to convince us that we should cross the river and join them (probably so they could sell us a carpet).

On our second day in Ourzazate we succumbed to peer pressure and hired a car and spent the next three days alternately being excited about driving a car on the wrong side of the road, remembering how to drive a manual, getting stuck in the sand, and occaisionally exploring the palm lined river that led south to Zagora, and the desert east of there out to N'Kob. Before we booked the car I was very careful to note which roads we were allowed to drive on, as paved roads are at a premium in the south of morocco, and I was quite surprised that we were allowed to drive to N'Kob as it is a chicken road, one paved lane with broad gravel shoulders where anytime you meet someone coming in the other direction you must half leave the paved strip to make way. The main point of all the driving was the scenery on the way, and several times we just stopped and wandered off into the palmeries, amongst both the date palms and the fields of wheat which were being busily harvested while we were there.

We used our last day with the car to drive up to Aït Benhaddou which is probably the most famous of Moroccos kasbahs and has been in the background of a lot of movies. It was quite an interesting climb thorugh the still inhabited houses inside to get up above the valley and the river and see the town by sunset.

The other thing to do around Ourzazate is visit the film studio sets, Atlas studios was the big one and we got a cheap guided tour around several parts of the fake ancient world. The neighbouring studio had a huge double sided castle used for Kingdom of Heaven (and several movies since) which is at once the city of Jerusalem and Crac de Chevaliers in Syria.

After we returned the car we headed out west to the coast and the towns of Agadir and Essaouira. Agadir was a big modern town with a beach quite unlike anywhere else we'd been in Morocco. We had a bit of trouble finding a hotel with room, but when we found one, they immediately offered us a discount for us to take the biggest room we'd ever seen. If I had been feeling more athletic I could not have just swung a cat but my entire wife around the empty space available.

We visited the beach which was weird as Moroccans try hard to be modest but aren't experienced enough to realize that cotton is just not a modest seaside fabric. The other big news was trusting our lives in the hands of a strange hair dresser. Between a bad smattering of shared English and French we somehow both ended up with good haircuts, and the hairdressers floor ended up with at least half Jacquies hair after an extended thinning session.

Essaouira was different again with an old town perched on the coast, decorated with Portugese battlements and a lively port cum fish market. We didn't stay long but actually felt less stressed when we left, which had to be a small miracle.

Marrakech would have been just another big Moroccan city if it wasn't for our new found devotion to juice bars. The nearest one to our hotel would happily murder a punnet of strawberries to order and server them in a pint mug. No ice, no water, no milk. Just blended strawberry goodness for all of 2NZD. Needless to say we ended up heading over there just about every time our stomachs felt recovered from the last dose. Its other draw card was its main square which plays host to numerous BBQ stands, tassel headed drummers, and under appreciated snake charmers (never pick up a tambourine in Morocco you never know whats underneath it). The only act that actually drew a smile though was the kids corner were a much picked upon old man displayed a hedge hog trained to run around inside a mans hat, several tame pigeons and the most inert lizard you have ever seen. I was entertained even before a young girl made a break for it with the hedgehog and the poor old fullah had to chase off after her. He still seemed quite surprised when we passed him a few coins.

We didn't have high hopes for our day in Casablanca as it is the financial center of Morocco and not much else (apparently all the exoticness from the movie was based on Tangier). However we knew we were able to visit the enormous King Hassan II Mosque and so like obedient tourists we lined up and bought our 20 something NZD tickets stood by the English speaking tour sign and were issued with a plastic bag for the storage of our shoes while inside. And what a lot of inside there was, the main hall was rugby pitch big and cathedral tall but built as one large columned rectanguloid with marble everything, and a retractable roof. The roof is essential as mosques are never air conditioned and once you load the place with 25,000 worshipers the heat could get dangerous if there wasn't some serious airflow allowed in.

And then we left. Another month down and not a souvenir to show for it, but the flight to Egypt was quick and relatively painless and we did our best to charge straight into the Egyptian experience.