Rock the Kasbah

Welcome to Morocco! This has been a very interesting week, to say the least. We have a smaller group here (there were 16 people in my group in Central America but only 12 people here). The group was 8 Australians, 2 Kiwis and 2 Americans – not a whole lot of variety! We change groups tonight so I’ll be interested to see who else shows up. Our tour leader, Jamal, is great. Here’s a picture so you can see who is keeping us safe – I absolutely love his shirt!

This part of the trip has included a lot of visiting different cities and walking around, not nearly as much activity as the Central American portion. A lot of the people were on the last leg of their trip, so we spent a lot of time shopping. The souks (shops) here have everything you could ever possibly want to buy and there are 20 different vendors next to each other shouting at you to buy from them. You get very used to saying no, No, NO! The vendors are very pushy and will try to grab you to get you to come into their shops. Or if you do buy something from them, they want you to come to the shop of their brother/cousin/friend just over this way to look at something else. You have to bargain for everything you buy and I did learn an interesting fact yesterday – they give you a different color bag based on how you bargain, to tell the other vendors in the market. If you are a sucker they will give you one color (red in Marrakech, might be different in other cities), if you drive a hard bargain they will give you black and if you’re somewhere in the middle you get green. We learned to hide our bags, especially if you happened to make a bad deal!

Also of importance, I turned 30!!! I can’t believe I’m 30 – I feel so much younger than that, but I guess age doesn’t lie. I had a wonderful day – we walked all over the medina (old city) of Fes. The group was sweet enough to get me a cake for dinner, which was really lovely. During our shopping in Fes, I bought a rug! It’s a beautiful cashmere rug and I love it – it will look amazing in my house. I’m so excited about it, here is a picture for you to see!

I have really enjoyed all the cities we have seen. I arrived in Casablanca really late and we left early the next morning so I’ll have to see that at the end of my tour. Over the course of the trip we have spent a morning in Rabat, a morning wandering around the ruins of Volubilis, a few hours exploring Meknes and an afternoon lounging on the beach in Tangier. Some of them I would have liked to see more of, but for some of the other an hour or two was plenty. I really enjoyed the night we spent in Moulay Idriss, a small village where the first King of Morocco is buried. It is a town built on two hills so the roads are tiny and narrow with hundreds of steps. I also loved the small town of Chefchaouen. It is a small laid back town with some great restaurants and it is where many Moroccans go on vacation. It is painted all blue and white and reminded me so much of Greece. In fact, many things in Morocco have reminded me of Greece – some of the tones in the music, the massive amounts of olives and olive oil found here and the colors in some of the towns. I also went to a public bath house in Chefchaouen where they put you in a sauna and scrub you from head to toe. It’s quite an experience and you leave with 8 layers less skin than you started with, but you’ve never felt cleaner in your life! Here’s a couple of pictures of Chefchaouen, so you can get a small feel for the city.

It’s also possible that I’ve become a born again vegetarian! The day after my birthday I got soooo sick – I thought my body might be giving up because I had hit the big 3-0 and it just didn’t want to live anymore. I had a horrible fever and didn’t get out of bed for 24 hours, it was so awful! Anyhow, once I did start to feel better, I wasn’t hungry at all. I would eat a bite or two and be completely full. One of the days I swore I was going to actually eat, but then we walked into a market and saw a camel head (see below if you dare). They eat camel here and this happened to be 10 minutes after some of our group went for a camel ride, so that was the end of food for that day. Yesterday I was going to try to eat some chicken, but as I was walking out of a shop, a man carrying a dead goat hit me in the shoulder with it’s dead body, leaving blood all over my white shirt from where it’s head used to be……ewwwww. There are no words to describe how disgusted I was, I wasn’t sure whether to cry or throw up. Goat blood all over my white shirt from it’s decapitated body – makes me sick just to think about it. After dead camels and dead goats, and seeing how meat is treated here, I just don’t think I can bring myself to eat it again. Guess we’ll see how the next 2 weeks in Morocco turn out!

Costa Rica and Paris

After a whirlwind few days at home, I am happy to be back on the road. I really enjoyed being home, sleeping in my own bed and seeing so many of you, but I was running around like a crazy person! I think I slept a total of about 12 hours the whole time I was home so I’ve spent lots of time in Paris catching up! There were all kinds of things I was going to do while I was in Denver, but I just never really got around to them, including writing about Costa Rica. I figured I have some time now, so why not combine it with Paris – they’re close enough, right? Sure, let’s go with that.

I really enjoyed my time in Costa Rica. There is so much to do there – it’s a mecca of outdoor activities with something cool waiting around the next corner. I wish I had more time to spend there, I can see why some people go for 2 weeks at a time. We spent 2 days in Monteverde, a city up in the cloud forest. It’s nice and cool up there which I really loved after weeks and weeks in the heat and humidity. We got to have lots of amazing food, but after a month in Central America, everything seemed so expensive. It’s partially because Costa Rica is much more developed than the other countries and they have many more tourists, so they are able to charge more for everything. It was quite the culture shock, but the sushi was amazing!

My favorite activity in Costa Rica was the ziplining. I had only been one time before on a short zipline but these ones put that experience to shame. In Selvetura Park, we got to do 15 different ziplines, some of them were 1 km long. It was so much fun! Some of them you do on your own and some you go with another person, which was what I loved the best. I always ended up with the daredevils who wanted to go super fast and never braked! At the end there was what they called a Tarzan Swing - it was a big tower that you had to jump off of and then got to do a pendulum swing. It was lots of fun but man jumping off the tower by yourself is such a hard thing to do! 

The other city we went to in Costa Rica was La Fortuna. The first night there we went to these amazing hot springs. There were probably 30 pools of different temperatures and some that had slides attached to them. It was so relaxing to just lounge in the springs after the active days and long days on the bus. The next day we spent white water rafting! I absolutely love rafting – I really should look at doing it more at home, especially when runoff is happening. I would like to understand the mechanics of it and be able to do some Class 5 rapids. We were able to do some Class 3 & 4 rapids and had a great day! The other fun thing about La Fortuna is that they have an active volcano. It hadn’t produced any lava for about 6 months but it started smoking the day we were there. I hoped the lava would start flowing (don’t worry, it goes down the other side of the volcano so we were totally safe!), but all it did was smoke. If you look hard, you can see it below!

Paris
As most of you know, I visited Paris when I came to Europe in 2009, but I really loved it and felt like I didn’t get to have enough time here. I was able to book a few days here this time, to just come back and enjoy the city. I have spent most of my time just puttering around – I didn’t spend a ton of money and see all the big sights, since I did that last time. This time I just went lots of little cafes, had afternoon coffee and chatted with other travelers. I lit a candle for a special baby named Lucy at both Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame. Sacre Coeur is a lovely church built on top of a hill and I just feel in love with it. I sat there for hours, both in the church and outside of it, listening to a local man play music and just enjoying the feel of it.

I was also lucky enough to be in Paris for Bastille Day, which is similar to the 4^th of July in America. Many of the Parisians had they day off work and there was a festive mood in the air. I went to a parade on the Champs Elysees in the morning. Their parade was similar to ours, but it was completely focused on the military! There were no beauty queens, politicians or marching bands – it was all about tanks, helicopters and fire trucks.

The thing to do at night is go to the Eiffel Tower and watch the fireworks. There is a huge concert with many bands and the feeling is just so relaxed. Everyone is having picnics and laughing and just enjoying the day off. You know I couldn’t do a post about Paris without the required picture of the Eiffel Tower or Jess doing something cheesy, so here you go!

You know it's going to be a bad day when....

There have been a few times on my trip where you just know it’s going to be a bad day. It might start off okay and then something snaps and you know the day is going downhill quickly. Other times you know the second you wake up that you might as well just go back to sleep. On the first portion of my trip there were a few of those days, which I can look back on now and simply think they are hilarious, especially because they did not actually happen to me personally. Below are a few of my favorite “Oh Shit” moments!

Ferries
As I’ve mentioned before, this trip was totally focused around boats. We went on all types of boats – speed boats for diving, pontoon boats for floating across a lake, rickety & falling apart 6 person boats for going on a mangrove tour or kayaks just for fun. However, you never want to rock up to a ferry depot where you are told from moment uno that you are going to get sick. When you buy your ticket, they give you a “highly recommended” motion sickness tablet. When you actually board the boat, they give every passenger a “just in case” plastic bag. The ferry employs people whose sole responsibility is to walk around handing out paper towels and swapping out plastic bags. Shoot, sometimes they even have to hold babies because the parents are too busy throwing up. I’m not going to go into too many gory details but I will say when they pass out drugs like candy, it’s best to take them!

Chicken buses
I wrote a blog entry before about chicken buses. These are retired, repainted school buses that cram people in, personal space becomes a thing of the past and it’s perfectly normal to see beds & bicycles on top of a moving vehicle. The drivers are completely insane and overtake trucks when there is no room and their engine has absolutely no power. The heat, the smell, the dirt roads and the oncoming traffic are enough to make you wish that you were instead running an ultra marathon through the Sahara. Now imagine doing all of this when you are drunk and hung over…and that’s what happened to one of the girls on our trip.
We knew we had to be up at 6 am for a long day of travel so we went out for a quiet dinner. Somehow the night turned into drinks, salsa dancing and a police ride home for one of the girls (for safety, not due to being arrested!). One of the girls – rock on Kelly! – ended up having quite a lot to drink, so much so that she was still drunk when we got up the next morning. She claimed it was food poisoning, but I think we all know the truth! She is such a champ and I can’t imagine how she did it, but she rode the chicken buses for 8 hours feeling absolutely terrible. At one point she thought she was going to be sick and I’ve never seen a plastic bag fly to the back of a bus as quickly as that one did. She tucked it behind her ears and proceeded to fall asleep on the shoulder of the sweet Guatemalan man sitting next to her. The best part was at the end of the 8 hour day, she thought the chicken buses were the most fun thing we had done yet on the trip. The rest of us were just happy to have escaped with our lives!

The Roommate
At some point in our lives, most of us have encountered a bad roommate. They come in all shapes and sizes – the roommate who snores really loudly, the one who steals your last glass of milk or the one who “borrows” your favorite shirt only to get a stain on it. When you’re traveling on a tour you are put in a room with a random person or three and you just get to jump in and get to know each other. Most of the time it works out well because you are respectful enough to leave hot water for the other person, to clean up your own messes or to leave the key at reception so they are not locked out for hours. Sometimes someone has an early tour or comes in really late and there is no choice but to wake up your roommate. If you are in this unfortunate situation, you try to navigate it as politely as possible – giving a quiet knock on the door, shaking their shoulder to wake them up or calling their name.
However, one of the guys on my tour got the best wake up of all time. His roommate (let’s call him The Runner) decided to go for a 6 am run and for some reason decided to wake up his sleeping roommate (we’ll call him Mr. Asleep). So what does The Runner do? Does he shake the shoulder of Mr. Asleep? No. Does he call out the name of Mr. Asleep to wake him up? No. Does he shout his name or do jumping jacks or start pounding on the walls? You guessed correctly, he does none of the above. Instead he does the unthinkable. The Runner lifts up the blankets and sheets at the end of the bed and starts tickling the feet of Mr. Asleep. Yes, that’s right – he decided it was okay to wake up someone he had known for 2 days by tickling his feet!!!! CREEPY!!! Do you have any idea what I would do to someone who woke me up by tickling my feet? No, I don’t know either, but I promise you it would not be good!

Honduras and Nicaragua

Hello from lovely Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. The last few weeks have been such a whirlwind! Since I last wrote I have been so busy, it's hard to put it into words here. I was able to visit the Mayan ruins in Copan, Honduras. They are beautiful old ruins and I liked them better than I liked Tikal, but at this point I am probably done seeing ruins - there are just so many down here! I did think this site was preserved really well. 

After Copan we transferred over to Roatan Island. Roatan is famous for diving, so of course I loved it! I went for a couple dives the first day and they were incredible. Every time I dive I get more comfortable in the water, I feel so lucky to be there, and I just want to stop traveling and keep diving. This was the last opportunity for a while and I’m so sad about that! The second day I went for an island tour, where we travelled all around the island, including some beautiful beaches, great snorkeling and swimming opportunities. We also took a small boat through the mangrove trees (they are the only trees that can grow in salt water).

The coolest part was probably meeting this guy from California…he had been sailing around the world and on one of the bays of Roatan, his boat sank. Instead of freaking out and getting home as quickly as possible, he built a bar on top of his sunken sailboat. To this day, 20 years later, you can look down and see the boat. He said it was fate that put him there, so he just went with it. If that isn’t a sign of following your destiny, I don’t know what is!

After this we moved to Nicaragua. Our first stop was Granada, which I really enjoyed. The city had a really laid back feel and I just enjoyed walking around and seeing the city itself. However, we had a couple of uncomfortable moments. I had a massage from the blind guy, and it was probably the most uncomfortable massage I’ve ever had in my life. Why on earth do I need to have my inner thigh massaged? It was so odd! Also, one of the women from Australia had her camera stolen when we were on our way home from dinner. She was taking a photo of a church and someone grabbed the camera from her hand. She had the wrist strap on and tried to grab it back but eventually the strap broke and he got the camera. I know that’s why we have travelers insurance, but I hate it when people resort to stealing instead of having an honest job! We also went for a sunset cruise to some of the little islands and we also ran across an island that had some howler monkeys living on it.  I think we’ve been on a boat every single day of this tour and I couldn’t be happier!

We’ve spent the last 2 days on Ometepe Island in Nicaragua. When I say that I spend 2 days in one place, I should probably mention that we spend most of the first day traveling. The travel consists of everything you could think of….taxi, chicken bus, truck, boat, ferry, I’m fairly certain they would use horses if we had no other options! So a travel day that would take 2 hours in a car might take 8 hours using public transportation. So we arrive at maybe 4 in the afternoon, so we generally spend the first night taking a quick tour and having some really good food. Anyhow, we arrived last night and had some good food. Today I hiked up a volcano with some of the others on my tour (2 Swiss and 1 German girl). The volcano is dormant, but it is still really large. We climbed from sea level up to 1394 meters (4200 feet). It kicked my butt yet it was so rewarding! I love seeing the different parts of the world and everything that they have to offer...I’m excited to see Costa Rica and all that it has to offerJ

Sorry for the lack of pictures in this post but the internet here is SO SLOW that it is impossible to upload them! I will post some when I am home next week.