Humble Opinions

From Braga, Portugal I probably didn't give Braga, Portugal, a fair chance. After all, the VirtualTtourist website lists the 800-year-old city as one of the beautiful cities in the world. It also says that in a very religiously conservative country the people of Braga are the most conservative, verging on fanatical. It certainly showed up in the city's total lack of any nightlife - I went searching for a cafe or bar where there would be people listening to music and talking. There simply aren't any. Maybe it's just that I was in Academic conference mode. The food served at the conference dinners was interesting though. The staple seems to be dried salted codfish, reconstituted in water or milk, served on beans, or inside a pastry, or on bread. And of course thinly sliced ham. That's it. Even then perhaps I'm not being fair. Salt cod (water), salt cod (milk), in pastry (three kinds), on bread, mixed into beans (three kinds), sliced ham, tomatoes, cucu...

Madrid and Barcelona were way too rushed. I spent too much time messing about making arrangements for trains and flights to and from places and too little time just enjoying the places themselves. Anyway, I did get to see some of the wonderful architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona: Park Guell, Casa Batllo, and the cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - still under construction. I got lost in Madrid trying to reach the Prada Museum via the back streets and instead found, in short order, the red-light district, some very up-market apartments, and the financial district where I stumbled into an art gallery just opening an exhibition of neo-realist photography spanning the fascist periods of Spain and Italy through to the late'50s. I should have slept on the train from Madrid to Barcelona but instead spent most of the night in the dining car with a Peruvian family man with a US green card who takes a class in Madrid every Friday for his accounting qualification, a Canadian IT specialist o...

From Last days in ... I succeeded in my first solo crossing of a Cairo street today, and I rode four times in a Cairo taxi in the last two days. So, having faced death, it's time to move on to another challenge. Off to Madrid where the Basque separatists have just announced that their "permanent ceasefire" has expired and they're all set to restart their campaigns. I'm in the cafeteria at Cairo airport. Like all airports, it's a monopolist's paradise - I've just paid the same for a bottle of water as I paid for two people to share a huge lunch earlier in the day. From Last days in ... My guide and friend, Mr Ibrahim, took me for a walk through some parts of old Cairo yesterday afternoon and today. Wonderful history of course, most of which went in one ear and out the other. Not that I was uninterested, but it's hard to keep track of which sultan built which grand mosque to honour which brother he had murdered in order to gain the sultanate ...

I'd seen just about all of the amazing temples and monuments that I could handle for the moment so I made a spur of the moment decision to change my plans and take the plane from Luxor to Sharm El Sheikh on the night of the 29 May. My booking agent in Cairo and the people at the Luxor airport couldn't have been more helpful. They cancelled my train trip and hotel and bus for the next two days and rearranged to have me collected at 12:30am in Sharm El Sheikh and driven the 120 Km to Dahab. This has saved me more than two days of travelling and sitting about, and give me more time near the Red Sea and back in Cairo. Service and courtesy towards tourists in Egypt is very good. If they could get the toilets to work it would be great. So here I am in Dahab , about half way down the East coast of the Sinai Peninsular. On a clear night you can see the lights of a Saudi city that no-one around here seems to know the name of. The Red Sea is THE place in the world to enjoy scu...

Rushed for the first part but wonderfully relaxing after. The 3:30am start to drive 300Km to Abu Simbel was a pain. Wonderful temple, incredible feat of engineering to move it up the hill away from the waters of the Aswan dam an' all, but was it worth the time and heat and fatigue? Not really. Still, I suppose I can now say that I've done it and seen it. The two day ride down the Nile in a felloucca was just magical. I was so tired after the train ride and the early start the day before that I was exhausted so time spent just lying about and watching the scenery and chatting with some very interesting fellow travellers, or learning from our host, Captain Mohammed, and his regular visits with mates along the way. An interesting side trip was a visit to the once-a-week camel markets in Darow - the largest in Egypt - where camels are brought in from Sudan 1500Km over 45 days for sale to traders, farmers, racers and butchers. (A young eating camel goes for LE4000, a racing c...

Pretty tired so I'm making this a brief one. It's end of day two and I've had a fabulous day tripping around the Saqqarrah pyramid and the Pyramids of Giza. They're old. Nearly 5000 years. And some of the paint is still on some of the relief paintings, and the hiroglyphs are amazing in their clarity and beauty. I'll tell more of the story accompanying the some of the pictures in my gallery (links to the side of my blog: http://winzar.blogspot.com)

I'll claim it a sort of farewell for me. Dennis and Robin hosted yet another fabulous party. Only a week late for the Cinco de Mayo (5th of May) celebration, we made up a perfect mole negro , Robin prepared guacamole, bean salad, salsa and a superb turkey-taco green salad. There was way too much to drink. One highlight was the piñata - well two piñata - Robin & Dennis had prepared one and then Kurt & Barbara also arrived with one. We had a ball taking turns to be blindfolded and then try to smash them with a stick. When eventually they collapsed and scattered sweets and toys and, from Dennis & Robin's creation, miniature liquor bottles, everyone dived to the grass to collect the treasures. Very childish... It all went very very late. Sunday, what little remained of it when we got up, was spent very quietly.