Seychelles, C'est bon!

In an attempt to bring down our average turn-around time between traveling and publishing a post, and also to publicly shame Jenn into finishing her post about our trip to Thailand that we took OVER THREE MONTHS AGO, I am writing today about our mini-vacay to the Say Say, which is what no one has ever called the Seychelles.

The best part is riding the COBUS 3000

A 4.5 hour flight from Abu Dhabi can put you in lots of different places, but most of them are hot, or dry, or war torn, or India, or all of the above. A 4.5 hour flight from Abu Dhabi can also put you in the Seychelles, which are the opposite of that. Of the 115 islands that make up this tiny nation, only about 10 are inhabited, with the majority of the population living on Mahé, which is where we stayed. The people (Seychellois) speak Creole and fit about where you might expect on the external physiology gradient between the subcontinent, the Arabian peninsula, and Africa. Upon landing at the Seychelles International Airport, a place smaller than its name, I felt immediately at home due to the very Caribbean feel of the island. It had just rained and the runway was still wet and steamy. From the window we could see the nearest peaks of the island were shrouded in clouds, but the coast was quite sunny. We deplaned and got through passport control quickly, thanks to Q, then picked up our rental car and were on our way!

That was when we found out they drive on the left. Not really a big deal, but the majority of Jenn's and my left-handed driving experience was on St. Croix where the driving is on the left, but so is the steering wheel. Switching to a right-hand drive vehicle makes you do funny things, like using the windshield wipers to signal a turn and reaching to the wrong side for the seat belt. A few other factors added to the excitement: the "passing" lane was really just the middle of the road (non-passing drivers and oncoming traffic were expected to give way), roundabouts (some of which didn't have a circle in the middle, making them more like a 4-way GO), and very narrow roads. The biggest thing, though, was the shoulders of the road. There weren't any. Immediately off the edge of the driving surface lay either a concrete wall, a concrete ditch, or thin air. Jenn is a very good driver, and she didn't even lose a side mirror, but I'll admit to squealing involuntarily on nearly every outing.

We stayed in a self-catering apartment called Sables D'or situated about 10 steps from the beach on the bay called Beau Vallon. Although we are still unsure how to pronounce it, the apartment was perfect: all open space and cool tile, with a more comfortable kitchen than we have in Abu Dhabi and functional ceiling fans in every room. Of the time we spent at the apartment, we spent most of it on the porch, or whatever the French word for porch is. Spending time outdoors in Abu Dhabi right now is torturous, so being able to keep the windows and doors open was especially refreshing. Hearing waves crashing on the sand all night was an added bonus.

Looking on our abode from the Beau Vallon beach.

Sables d'Or

Making our way from the airport had been enough of an adventure for the first day, so we spent the afternoon walking on the beach and checking out the little stalls selling fresh fruits, coconuts, and grilled meats. We were soon to gain a new appreciation for these stalls, for we decided to buy things for supper at the local "super" market (about the size of a small gas station) and due to the difficulty of converting Seychellois rupees to dollars and kilograms to pounds, ended up buying some apples at what turned out to be about $7.50 each. Plus some other things that had all been imported from Paris. The apples were delicious, though.

Testing out the quality of the Seychelles' sand for building castles.

Beau Vallon Beach

The next day, we collectively didn't really make a decision about what we were doing, but all got in the car and started driving. We were, in theory at least, in search of hiking trails (which were on the map, but not actually marked anywhere we could see from the road), but after an hour and a half we had driven the 10 miles of road around the northern section of the island and found ourselves back in Beau Vallon. Q was sitting in the back seat in his new MiFold, which is less of a booster seat and more of a seat-belt re-positioning system, and had quickly grown bored with looking at the tops of trees, so we decided to try one last place for hiking. And we found it, probably mostly because the trail started where one of the roads on the map just ended, but also because there was a sign. In retrospect, and considering how ill prepared we were for what we were about to do, the whole thing turned out pretty well.

We had just driven past the big sign with the arrow and the name of the bay to which the trail led, Anse Major, when we were shouted at by a man sitting on his porch. He told us we couldn't drive any further, foot traffic only from here on in. So we did a neat 17-point turn in the middle of the tiny road and parked by the sign. When we walked back by the man on his porch, he was much more friendly, inviting us into his yard to see his pet bat. Flying foxes, as they're called, are humongous vegetarian bats, and this guy, Richard, claimed he had kept this one as a pet for 20 years. He also told us about how his first girlfriend was an American lawyer (who also defended him in court), and how foolish most of the husbands were who visited the Seychelles with their wives only to spend the whole time in a resort, leaving their wives to explore the island (and its willing male population) on their own. Anyway, Q got to feed the bat a piece of banana from the end of a very long knife.

A little like bestowing a knighthood, but upside-down.

We walked on, passing the under-construction mega-villa of some Russian oligarch, and eventually came to the trail head, marked by another sign! The sign indicated that it was 1.5 kilometers to some kind of landmark, or to a house, or to something, which seemed like a reasonable distance to hike. It was 11:30 and we had towels, swimsuits, three tiny bananas, and half a liter of water.

Believe it or not, this is post-hike.

Anse Major

The hike itself was beautiful, hugging the coastline but high above the water, crossing through tropical forests, boulder-strewn hillsides, and exposed slabs of granite dropping steeply to the sea. Finally, we reach a grassy spot and a tiny, open shack overlooking a secluded bay with a pristine beach. A few minutes of hiking later, plus an encounter with a Sri Lankan couple unwilling to hike through the woods without accompaniment, and we were there. Due to our short supplies, we only stayed long enough to get wet and sandy before hiking back. Q ate all the bananas and drank all the water, but he did hike the entire way in and out. By the time we reached the car, we were all tired and two thirds of us wanted nothing more than a cold beer and lunch, in that order. Naps were had by all.

It's amazing how much energy the little bananas provide.

He tried and tried, but could not quite move the boulder.

The next day was Saturday, and also parliamentary election day for the Seychelles, so almost everything was closed. We set out early and were the first visitors in the gate at the National Botanical Gardens, located just south of the capitol, Victoria. The gardens were an amazing collection of tropical flora with a couple of fauna mixed in for good measure. The highlight, for Q at least, was the tortoise enclosure. For a few dollars each we got to go into the enclosure and, armed with leafy plant stems, feed the giant tortoises. I'm not sure what number I would have said if you had asked me before then how many tortoises I thought of as "a lot" of tortoises,  but it would have been a fraction of the number of tortoises in the enclosure. I didn't get an exact count, but it was in the neighborhood of 50. When we walked in, a few of the more ambitious ones started making their way towards us and our tortoise treats, but, in the interest of time, we walked to them.

Does Q imitate tortoise, or does tortoise imitate Q?

"I think I'm gonna bite this. Steady. Yep. Going to bite it. Okay. Get ready..."

Tortoises are a study in energy conservation through deliberate actions; nothing they do is an accident. However, not every tortoise action results in success. There were many failed attempts to bite and ingest the leaves. Even so, it wasn't long before our leaf supply had been consumed and we were forced to flee the enclosure to avoid being cornered by the creep (arguably one of the best collective nouns out there and, IMHO, more aptly named than the corresponding "bale" of turtles.)

About a quarter of the creep.

The other highlight of the gardens, and the signature plant of the Seychelles, was the Coco de Mer. This superlative species of palm produces cartoonishly large and undeniably sexually suggestive reproductive parts, both male and female. Indeed, it makes the largest seed and largest "male inflorescence" (which I'm going to start using as a euphemism) of any plant on earth. Like if a hentai artist drew a tree. (Please do not google "hentai tree." See the link above for more info, plus pics of the parts. SFW, but might raise questions.)

Female tree with fruit

The, uh...nut.

After the gardens, we drove around the central part of the island until we were all exhausted from the terror, then spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach. Pro tip: do NOT pass a bus in the Seychelles, you will not drive as fast as it does, even uphill around hairpin curves.

How it feels to go around a corner.

A day or two earlier we had arranged a boating tour and picnic with Secret Seychelles, and so on Sunday (9/11) morning, our guide, Jean-Paul, picked us up and drove us to the harbor in Victoria. (Historical note: on this day in 2015, Jenn and I made our initial trip to Abu Dhabi.) After a last minute Seybrew purchase dockside, all six of us (Jenn, Q, and I, plus Jean-Paul, his girlfriend, and Jean-Claude the skipper) piled into a 14-foot boat with a lexan window in the bottom. We set out on what turned out to be a rough and splashy ride to the Ste. Anne Marine National Park, passing trawlers unloading tuna and the wind turbines donated by the UAE government on the way. We anchored for a bit and fed the fish, which seemed trained to come to parked boats and which may, in fact, subsist entirely on white bread.

Once they get a taste of bread, they turn into sandwich eaters.

We tried swimming, but it was pretty rough with a strong current, so we motored on to our next stop: a sand bar.

Not just any sand bar. A sand bar with rocks!

We explored the entire thing, and stayed for about a thousand pictures each, then set off again for a tiny isle (Ile Cachee) just off the eastern side of Cerf Island. The water was calmer there, so we all got out and waded around a bit. Jean-Paul impressed us all by opening an extremely dried-up coconut with a rock. Q got to drink the water inside (I was surprised there still was any) and we all nibbled on coconut as we waded back to the boat. Our next, and final stop was just a little further south on Cerf Island. We landed on a sandy beach, then crossed through a shrubby barrier to find a modest house with a covered seating area and about a dozen Chinese tourists. While our hosts set out the food, we followed Jean-Paul around behind the house and up to the shack where the meat was just coming off a smoky grill. Just behind the smoke-shack was... another tortoise enclosure!

These were no zoo animals, though. They were pets and were noticeably more active than the ones we had seen at the gardens. To be fair, though, the sun was higher in the sky, so maybe they were just more warmed up. Anyway, we got to feed, photograph, and even ride tortoises for 10 or 15 minutes while the final lunch preparations were underway. For those who are curious, tortoise poop looks strikingly like the clumps of grass you scrape off of the bottom of your lawnmower a week or so after a particularly wet mow.

Lunch was delicious. Curries, chicken wings, rice, and, Q's favorite, smoked barracuda, were all made even better by the hot pepper blend popular among the Seychellois. After lunch, we hung out in the shade of some coconuts and also swam a bit before heading back towards home. As it turned out, this was an historically momentous day for the Seychelles. The ruling party (I think of them now as Red Team), through whatever means necessary, had maintained control of both the legislative and executive branches for the past 40 years. But, in the vote held the previous day, the opposition party (Green Team) had managed to win a majority of the parliamentary seats. Although all had been quiet in the morning, by the time we reached the dock, the entire island was in public party mode. Once we pulled out of the parking lot, we were part of the island-wide celebratory parade to nowhere. Cars, trucks, and buses, all packed beyond capacity with green-clad Seychellois, honked, stopped, inched forward, and honked some more. It was like a tiny, impromptu, monochromatic carnival tramp with no direction. Q joined the spirit of things by urinating out the door of our slowly moving vehicle. It was kind of awesome, and, if we had had more beer and less sunburn, I would have enjoyed riding along in the parade for hours. As it was, though, the 15 minute trip took nearly an hour and we were all glad to desalinate and to be someplace cool and quiet at the end.

Election Day Parade

Election Day Parade

Post outing coconut water.

For our last day, we headed out in the car again, this time bound for the southern part of Mahé. Jean-Paul had marked our tourist map with a few choice destinations like "2nd most beautiful beach" and "most photographed beach," which piqued our curiosity about the ranking system, so off we went. After adding a few more photos of Takamaka Bay, the "most photographed beach," to its stats, we ventured even further south to a beach I forget the name of, but where I, too, opened a coconut with a rock. Actually it was the concrete corner of a light post. No one was impressed that time except me.

Next, covered in coconut and mosquito bites, we stopped by the home and art gallery of Michael Adams. It took us only a few minutes to select some prints to buy, but more than an hour to actually purchase them and escape the drive way. Q spent quality time bonding with Crackers, one of their 7 dogs. On our way back, we stopped by the Takamaka Bay Rum Distillery, but, sadly, it was the one day they did not offer tours. Undeterred, we bought rum and went home.

Quintus and Crackers

The next day was our last on island. We packed up, said good by to our hosts,Vicki, Veronique, and Christine, and headed one last time over the hill to Victoria. We stopped for a short walk around the market, then for a brief tour of a parking lot that seemed to have entrances, but no exit, and then for ice cream and beers on the boardwalk of Eden Island. Eden is a man-made mass of McMansions, each with backyard boat parking and was the place most like Abu Dhabi of all the places we went. There were several mega-yachts flying UAE colors and more than a few Emiratis strolling around, plus two levels of high-end retail. And with that as a surreal segue, we flew home.

UAE funded wind turbines.

A Visit to the Land of Beer and Pork

As usual, the author(s) intended to write this post 3-4 weeks ago.  Really.  We were thinking about it the whole time.  Writing that down has made me realize that the saying, "It's the thought that counts," is actually followed by an unspoken asterisk denoting several terms and conditions, one of which is that the thought must be connected with at least some action, however misplaced.  For instance, before now, I had taken no action towards writing this post.  This inaction precludes me from begging for the reader's goodwill by saying, "Yeah, but it's the thought that counts."

If you're thinking "What does this have to do with beer or pork?" you are my kind of reader.  The answer is: nothing.  Unless you were merely thinking about beer and pork without doing anything about it.

You may also be wondering "Where is this magical land?"  If you guessed Belgium, I'd say "No, a little to the reich."  *everyone groans*  No, no, not Luxembourg, a little fuhrer over. *more groaning* Okay... fine. I'll just tell you. It's Germany.

Germany!

Sunrise over the Rhine.

Maybe our perspective has been altered by six months under the umbrella of Islam, or maybe Germany is just awesome, but Germany was awesome.  The organization Jenn works for has an office in Bonn and both the flight time and the length of stay were appropriate for Q and I to tag along for her mission to the fatherland.  We left Abu Dhabi in early May, where daily temperatures had already started hitting triple digits, and landed in springtime Frankfurt.  We enjoyed a solid week of perfect weather: clear and sunny with daytime highs in the upper 70s (Fahrenheit), dropping down into the 50s at night.  We wore jackets a couple of times!  And long pants!  (Disclaimer: according to everyone there, this was an unusually pleasant week.  Apparently, both before and after we left it was more like 53 and rainy.)

Horse-chestnut blossoms (Aesculus hippocastanum)

So, after we checked into our hotel in the heart of old town Bonn, Jenn had to head into the office for the afternoon.  Q and I headed to the cafe on the square right outside our hotel.  That's right, beer and pork for lunch.  (Q had the pork, I had the beer.)  Outside.  Right in front of everyone.  Then we took naps.  After naptime, we began what would become a week-long tour of playgrounds in Bonn, Germany.  I somehow didn't take a picture of the sign explaining the playground rules: no dogs, no helmets (why?), and no beer.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but after a week it seemed that this playground was the only public place in Bonn where one couldn't drink beer.

The Markt. We stayed at Stern Hotel (first awning on the left). The white building is the Altes Rathaus.

We met Jenn for supper (more beer and pork) and then tried to find something in English on the TV. This was not as easy as you might think.  If you have never watched Orange County Choppers or Mythbusters overdubbed in German, you are not missing out.  The worst thing about our stay was the bedding. Our room came with three single beds (two pushed together for Jenn and I), each of which came with a very large square pillow and a heavy comforter that was not proportional to the mattress. The comforters were placed on the beds folded in half, the wrong way, so that you could either sleep in them like meat in a taco or unfold and rotate them, letting different parts of you not be covered.  I wondered if we were doing something wrong, or if the staff there had read a poorly translated manual.

The hotel's breakfast, however, was delicious.  Although it was relatively small, the buffet offerings were fresh and tasty in that way that food is in most of Europe.  There were only three kinds of muesli, but there were at least 7 kinds of pork.

Q and I spent the next few days wandering around town, playing on the playgrounds and other fixed objects.  Bonn is fairly small, with a decent subway, and a beer-selling establishment about every hundred feet.  The town and its outlying villages stretch along both banks of the Rhine, which serves as a major shipping conduit for everything from gravel to grain.  Bonn itself might be considered an outlying stretch of Cologne, which was only a few miles downstream, but we only passed through there in transit.  Although we didn't go inside, the Kolner Dom was right next to the train station and we got a pretty good look from the platform. 

This is not it.

One of the more permanent play structures in town. The Rhine in the background.

But it just sat there, unmoved.

They're sad cause they ain't got no body.

Perhaps the most famous landmark in Bonn is the Beethoven-Haus, birthplace of the composer.  In terms of ubiquity, Beethoven in Bonn reached levels almost as high as George Washington in D.C.  His name or likeness was on everything from street signs and statues to buildings and boats. 

The front door of Ludwig's old pad.

Beethoven had a serious head of hair.

Speaking of boats, Q and I did a Rhine cruise aboard the mighty Moby Dick.  When I asked the ticket agent whether there would be beer available on board, she just laughed.  We sat right in front, on the upper deck, enjoying the view, the wind, and the fact that the sun was at about 30% intensity, compared to Abu Dhabi.  The middle Rhine valley is lovely. We traveled three hours upstream from Bonn, passing green rolling hills dotted with the occasional castle and quaint little towns sprinkled every few kilometers along each bank.  We ate sausages and drank pints of draft weissbier and kolsch.  

Thar she blows.

Our last day was a Saturday, and our flight wasn't until evening, so we went along with Jenn and a few of her co-workers to one of the nearby castles we had seen from the river.  The castle sat perched atop one of the taller hills along the river, with easy access provided by a gear-driven tram.  The weather had turned cold and windy, so we rode up, had beers and flammkuchen (a kind of pizza-like thing topped with bacon, onions, and creme fraiche), and rode back down. 

We ended our stay in Bonn with one last beer-pork hurrah: we spent all the spare Euro change we had left on landjager from the charcuterie food truck in the Markt and sat in the hotel lobby drinking beer from the convenience store until it was time to head back to the train station in Cologne.  And then we drank beer on the train.

Auf Wiedersehen, Germany. You rock.

Cairo, Part 2

Apologies, everyone. I wrote this over two weeks ago and just now got around to adding the photos and publishing. Better late than never?

Whew! This post should probably have been more of a mini-series, but hang in there, there's belly dancing and whirling dervishes ahead!

For those of you who somehow didn't read the last post, here's the short version: DO NOT rent a car in Cairo, DO get a tour guide, see old stuff. Okay then, on to day two of the tour.

Like the previous day,  day two of our tour began when our guide Ash and strong-silent-type busdriver Zayn picked us up amid the flurry of doormen, security guards, and miscellaneous hotel staff that seemed to be ever present at the front door. We all loaded up and drove approximately 500 yards to the other side of the building where the Egyptian Museum is located. We had tried to talk Ash into just meeting us at the museum, which was not even across a street from our hotel, but he insisted on picking us up. Formalities.

The Egyptian Museum is a beautiful relic of a time before museums were about selling science and history. The building itself is old by American standards (the collection was moved there in 1902), with a dim and dusty interior packed to the gills with antiquities. Walking around, you get the sense that they kept digging up things and then squeezing them into the spaces in between the collections already on display.

Squeeze together...closer...closer. Ok, good. Now hold still.

(Silently judging everyone)

We saw wooden boats intended to carry kings across water in the afterlife, the somewhat preserved entrails of a 4000 year old queen (divided into four boxes), mummified kings, dogs, monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes, and the gilded mask of Tut. We saw the sculptural representation of monarchs progress from the perfect, athletic ideal to the absurd, grotesque reality that comes from an ultra-refined genetic pool. We saw the evolution of headdress fashion. We saw very dry dead people.

 

And lots of animal people.

Flip flops: footwear for the afterlife

Then we went sailing. Five minutes of our felucca ride brought on fond memories of putting around the west-end beaches of STX in a tiny trimaran, and although the Nile is not exactly like the Caribbean, the sound of water under the hull and the creak of the rigging is the same. This was, without a doubt, the most tranquil half-hour we spent in Cairo, despite Q's disappointment with the lack of crocodiles.

"If I had wanted to not see crocodiles, I would have just stayed home."

We spent the rest of the afternoon touring the city. For every place we went and everything we saw, Ash supplied us with a textbook's worth of historical information. My cache memory filled up pretty quickly, so most of what Ash told us overflowed directly into the recycle bin. Luckily, Wikipedia exists. We did a short walk through Old Cairo, stopping to visit the "Hanging Church" (actually named Saint Virgin Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church), dating back to the 3rd century, A.D. The narthex of this church was lined with photos/portraits of every Coptic pope, ever. This is important  mostly because it let me use the word narthex in a sentence. Based on a few hundred years of portraits, having a huge beard is a prerequisite for the job of Coptic pope.

Next, we drove to the top of Mokattam hill in the center of the city, where we saw the Cairo Citadel and the Mosque of Muhammad Ali. No, not that Muhammad Ali, this Muhammad Ali. The mosque is a beautiful structure and an impressive example of Ottoman architecture, but after seeing the pyramids and their associated temples, the bar was pretty high.

 

What's at the end of those cables, you ask?

I wish I could remember.

We ended our afternoon with a short stop at one of Cairo's street markets, where we successfully avoided buying anything except for overpriced coffee and tea. Best sales pitch: "Don't worry! All I want is your money!" To keep Q out of trouble, and to help keep us out of the clutches of aggressive salesmen, I put him up on my shoulders, where he sang to himself in Arabic for most of our time in the market. We were all ready for a little down-time after that and, fortunately, our tour schedule included a short break at the hotel (long enough for a swim and a couple of beers) before the final event of the day: the Nile Dinner Cruise.

We arrived at dockside just after sunset and just before boarding time. While orange and red clouds washed over the river and the city, we chose our table in the dim blue neon interior of the boat's dining area. The atmosphere was something like a strip club, but with a buffet and some mild, motion-induced nausea, so we ordered drinks and made small talk with the nice ladies from Ohio at the next table. The windows were so heavily tinted that it was impossible to tell when the boat actually left the dock, but we didn't have to wait long for the entertainment to begin.

Belly dancing, with live musical accompaniment, was act one. The dancer, zaftig and sequined, smiled with her mouth, but her eyes seemed to be reconsidering her career choices. Q could not take his eyes off her, or close his mouth. I think most of the adults were conflicted about where they should have been looking, and for how long. Just when we were all getting accustomed to the awkwardness, the dancer began a tour of the room with a photographer, stopping at each table to pose behind whomever she thought would be most likely to shell out $5 for a copy of the photo. At the end of her set, prints of the non-consensual photos were delivered to the appropriate tables and offered for sale. We bought it because it was ridiculous.

Act two consisted of two whirling dervishes, or more likely, two guys who were good at spinning. One was a little person who served as comic relief, the other guy was a natural entertainer, engaging with the crowd and apparently having a good time. After we had all seen about enough spinning, he demonstrated his ability to count to ten in any language spoken by any guest on the boat. Then he did the picture-at-your-table thing too, which we bought solely because of how terrible the shot was. After dinner, we all went up top to see whether the boat was actually moving. It was, and for the second time in five months, we were actually chilly.

Our ride to the airport the next day could not have been more different from our first taxi experience in Cairo. The car had air conditioning, the driver did not honk even once, and I felt, for most of the trip, like we would probably survive. We did.