Finally out of Arusha

Home sweet home. Way too much time was spent in this little room. On the left you can see our peanut butter making factory and on the right, our fabulous beds.

Penner and I on our Nile felluca excursion.

Just reflectin' while cruising down the Nile.

Looking at the sheesha pipe makes me want to vomit. I still don't even know what it is exactly but I consumed way too much of it last night.

Myself, Penner, our guide, our camels and the pyramids. The one major accomplishment of the pyramid trip was the addition of next year's Canim drinking hat in the form of my new Arab towel thingy.

Just Protectin'

After another miserable bus ride we appeared in Arusha to the endless sound of the dreaded touts. Jason did a good job of explaining exactly what a tout is and how they function (http://www.travelblog.org/fred.php?id=78201) so I won't go too much into it. Needless to say I hate them, but at the same time I find myself already missing them. Ryan and Kris immediately set about organizing a safari, and sure enough left the next day to visit the Serengeti and the crater. Jas and I stayed behind in Arusha. I still felt like garbage thanks to malaria, plus I had already done my safari in Kenya, and Jas didn't want to spend the extra money, so we lay in our incredibly comfortable beds for a week. At first we had ambitions and dreams of going canoeing down some nearby stream, or doing a day hike to the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but one by one these fell off our schedules as we realized that it's just so much easier to lie in bed. I was able to use malaria as an excuse to my laziness for the first few days, but even that started to wear off after a while and by the end of my stay in Arusha I felt fairly close to 100%. After venturing out for dinner one night, Jason had his money belt swiped by some local bastard, this changed things considerably. Originally we were going to all head north to Nairobi as soon as Kris and Ry were done the safari. From there, Jason and I were going to continue up, going through Ethiopia and Sudan and finally arriving in Egypt. But, now with Jason's lost passport and his inability to leave Tanzania for at least 3 weeks, I would have to do this alone. The thought of traversing Ethiopia and Sudan by myself didn't overly appeal to me due to safety reasons, so instead I opted to fly to the Middle East, a region so reknown for its security and stability, while poor ole Jas continues his stay in Arusha. In total we spent 7 very strange days in Arusha. We rarely left our hotel due to a complete lack of things to do outside and the frustration of dealing with the touts. At least 75% of our diets there consisted of peanut butter sandwiches and the odd chocolate bar. Nearing the end I thought I was going to start developing bed sores and/or cabin fever, and for those of you who know what Jason and I are like when we have too much energy and are couped up together for longs periods of time, you'll have no problems seeing why the woman who ran the hotel began thinking we were totally insane by the end of our stay. Loud, mindless ramblings, insane cackles, Nintendo induced shouting matches and energy releasing screams could be heard echoing through the halls from our room probably every 15 minutes, frightening the cleaning woman so much that she began noticeably avoiding us.

Saturday afternoon I sluggishly crawled out of my bed and got back to actually travelling. Heading north courtesy of Ethiopian airways, I touched down in Cairo right about the time that ole Uncle Davey was tying the knot up in Edmonton. Kris had flown up here the day before so for the third time in the trip I managed to meet up with Mr. Penner. Yesterday was an action packed day and managed to bring me out of my lazy haze that developed in Arusha. Hopping on a local bus we rumbled across the Nile and into Giza, where we rented a pair of camels from an extremely shady guy a few kilometres from the pyramids. We realize now that the guy ripped us off a bit, but even still it wasn't that bad of a deal. There is no exaggeration about your stereotypical haggling Arab. Extremely nice people, but they will barter the clothes off your back faster than any other group of people I have met on this trip. Everything is negotiable and some of the prices they hope to get out of us westerners are just absurd...more about that later though. To avoid paying the entrance fee, the guy who accompanied us, pretending to be a guide, took us through the "back entrance" to the pyramids, which consisted of a hole cut through the chain link fence. Once again it was strange seeing something that you've only seen in books and on TV and as usual its a bit different than you actually imagined, but all in all I thought the pyramids were great, aside from my incredibly sore ass courtesy of Michael Douglas (my camel).

Following the pyramid tour we grabbed a felluca (the classic Nile sailboat) to go for a little cruise out on the water. It's cheap if you haggle the captains down and made for a great happy hour as we watched the sun set through the palms of the Nile. Thinking that it was Penner's last night (it actually wasn't, he forgot July had 31 days in it and thus had nowhere to go for another day) we decided to stretch it right to the limits and visit a belly dancing bar. We couldn't afford any of the nice ones at the hotels, so we mosied on down to a shadier establishment on the other side of town, getting incredibly lost on the way there. I really didn't know what to expect, but wasn't surprised to find the place pretty much like a north american strip club except all the nudity has just been replaced by shaking stomachs. Something about the undulating abs didn't really appeal to us, but the local guys seem to absolutely love it. At some point in the night after befriending some fellow sheesha smoking locals, I discovered that we were being charged waaaaaay more than the locals for everything we did at this place, which is no surprise as it has happened to us in every other country we've been too. It was still very cheap by Canadian standards so we didn't mind, but it was interesting to see just how much we were being ripped off. To put it simply, we spent easily as much as the entire rest of the bar combined, probably quite a bit more in fact. Time seemed to accelerate once we entered the place and before we knew it, it was 7am and time for us to stumble home. The ridiculous amount of beer and sheesha we consumed made for an entertaining trip through awakening Cairo.

I don't have a lot of time before heading over to India, so I'm already going to be headed towards Jordan later on tonight. This bus ticket was the most difficult purchase I've made on the trip. The station is hidden a loooong way from where we are, and me being cheap and stupid I decided to walk. There's absolutely no english or even any words that resemble english, being that it's all written in Arabic and very few of the locals speak enough english to be of any help, although they certainly try. At one point I had to cross in front of the Lebanese embassy and was greeted with what will hopefully be my first of many 'Death to America, Death to Israel' rallies, complete with armies of riot police, Hezbollah banners and these funny pictures of Bush dressed in drag. I dread finding my way back to this place tonight with my bags, so will probably go the taxi route. Penner leaves for real tonight bound for Sweden, not sure when I'll see him again, but I'm sure it won't be too long as he plans to meet us once we're in Southeast Asia. That's about all for now, adios!