So, it’s been a few years, since I posted something here. I actually think my last post was in 2011, but don’t quote me on it. Look it up if you can be bothered. I think it was around the time when I arrived in India on this trip. Well, almost 2 or 3 years later, and I’m still here. Again, really. I went to many places since. Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and South Korea, just to name a few, but I have always returned to India at some point.

India has had a kind of magical attraction on me for a while now. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s not the spiritual part, cause I’m about as level-headed as they come and have been successful in avoiding shady ashrams and dodgy gurus until now. It’s not the hippie allure, neither. I’m still running around in my blue jeans and still trim my beard after all. And it definitely isn’t the drugs. I like my booze, but charas, acid or that new crap from Goa is something for a younger generation.

It might have been the freedom India afforded me. The freedom to live my life the way I chose without the major restriction of having to work too hard for a living. Not having to deal with society and peer pressure was just an added bonus. Well, I’m sad to announce that I don’t feel free anymore. I feel normal. Being in India is just like being in Germany or England now. It’s become routine. I know the people. Know how they react. Know what I can get away with and know what will cause a scene. Even just being a tourist, I’ve become part of the system and I don’t like it.

The solution is mindboggelingly simple. I need to leave and, thankfully, my visa does expire in about six weeks. My options are kind of limited, though. Sri Lanka was a complete disaster and it’s kind of locked in anyways. Nepal almost feels like India to me, I’ve been there so much. Bangladesh only allows visa applications submitted in the applicants home country and Southeast Asia is the wrong direction. I am on my way home after all and let’s be honest, SEA is like a gap year students first wet dream by now. It’s become seriously ridiculous. Or maybe it’s always been like that and I’ve just gotten older.

So, what’s left is either a flight to China or Pakistan. And I do hope that the Pak embassy gives me a visa. That country excites me a lot. Has way before I went the first time in 2009. And who knows where to from there. A mate of mine just started working for an NGO in Jallalabad after all…

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To get to Abu Simbel, you can either fly or take a bus, private car or mini van and join the road convoy. The road trip takes about 3 hours, there are 2 convoys leaving Aswan each day – one at 4am, the next at 9am. The 9am one sounds like a better option, but be warned it will be so hot, you may not enjoy wandering around the temple area as much. Catching the 4am convoy will mean a super early start, I was up at 3am!

The convoys are escorted by police, as the road is long and deserted and gets quite close to the border of Sudan. I imagined travelling in a convoy would mean all vehicles had to stay together, but once the convoy starts, it’s basically every bus for themselves as they speed along and often overtake other vehicles. The police vans will be at the front and rear of the convoy but other than that, there is no set order.

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Arriving at Abu Simbel, it’s about a 10 minute walk from the carpark down to the temples themselves. Once there, I gazed awestruck at the sheer size of them and the magnificence of the carvings on the outside walls and entrance. Seeing photos just doesn’t do it justice, you really must see it yourself to realise just how massive and beautiful they are. My guide explained some of the history behind the complex, then I had about an hour and a half to wander around.

You can take photos of the outside but not the inside of these temples, the guards will confiscate your memory card and give you a fine if you are caught taking photos inside, so not worth the risk. There are plenty of touts selling books and postcards if you want keepsakes.

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What totally blew me away about this place was the fact that between 1964–1968, the entire temple complex was relocated to avoid being submerged during the creation of Lake Nasser. This project was organised by UNESCO and involved cutting both temples into massive blocks, dismantling the temples, then relocating them further away from the river. Two new hills were constructed and the temples reassembled exactly as they had been, even down to the details of the sun shining into the temple and hitting some of the statues on certain days of the year. The visitor centre has a video and images of the relocation process, which was an essential stop in my visit.

All in all, I’d recommend a trip to Abu Simbel, it’s a long trip, but the temples are probably my favourites out of the ones I saw in Egypt.

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When we arrived it was late in the evening so we camped in a peach orchard. We thought it would be beautiful, peaceful and private. The orchard lay on a terraced plane three meters above a tiny trickle of a stream that was fed from the Dam about two kms up the valley. The next morning after a frightening night of thunder, lightening, howling winds and pelting rain we awoke to a raging river next to us. We quickly packed up in the rain and went looking for a new place to camp. We found a walled up rock overhang nest to the road. After waiting out the twenty hour torrential downpour we were on the hunt for another cave. It had been a trying day and night since cars kept driving up and high beaming us in the cave. FYI do not camp downstream of a dam, it is a bad idea. We ended up wandering around an olive orchard and found an old Campasinos cave. We spent two weeks in this cave.

The rock climbing was down the road from the cave, town of Margalef was only forty minutes away, and the hiking was everywhere. The rock climbing is great in Margalef on a type of conglomerate covered with calcite rock, yielding small pockets for grip and pebbles for balance. The climbing was so great it was hard to leave. But it became freezing cold at night and we spent a few nights shivering. So we decided to move south to El Chorro in Andalucia. Our third cave we found to live in was a step up. We came by this find by way of a gruelling two km hike fully loaded with forty five kilos each of gear, water, and food in the dark. The next day I searched around and found our next cave stay, with doors and windows. We put a pad-lock on the door and moved in. The Cave living basics are; lots of candles, water, blankets, a comfy sleeping pad, the desire to not shower every day, and good rock to climb otherwise why would you live in a cave.

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In my house, a six feet long shelf was dedicated to books on dolphins which I mooned over like a love-sick teenager. I became a mini, amateur ‘expert’, avidly soaking up and collecting every written account of dolphin interaction with humans from all over the globe. I trawled the Internet for the latest stories. My head told me that the likelihood of my dream ever becoming a reality was at best remote but my heart told me to believe. So believe I did. Having no money for reaching the dream destinations which would make my ambition a reality seemed surmountable but there was something else. Wild dolphins swim in the ocean and I had a severe phobia of the water. Tricky!

Years passed and a chain reaction, which began with a personal brush with death, resulted in my partner and I selling our house, giving away all we possessed and embarking on a quest for healing, peace and adventure in whatever corner of the globe we could find it.

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By now I was a surfer.…..of sorts. Surfing may seem a strange choice for someone with hydrophobia but perhaps that was what it was all about initially. I could only surf in spots where the beach profile allowed surfing in shallow water. I had progressed but I was still really scared all of the time.

One of our first forays into the world had brought us to New Zealand – a major destination for swimming with wild dolphins. So dolphin rich are these waters that it is impossible to sit on a beach for longer than a few hours and not catch sight of at least one pod of dolphins. I would do just that, watching these incredible creatures that seemingly held my destiny and wonder if I would ever find the courage within myself to fulfil my 30+ year old dream. I felt both shame, impotence and almost heart-breaking frustration. Shame at a fear which I had let rule my life; impotence that I now finally had my dream in my grasp but was being prevented from seizing it; frustration because I knew only I could change anything, my destiny was in no-one else’s control but mine but I couldn’t move beyond the terror which gripped my insides every time I considered the seemingly insurmountable obstacle I was facing.

Every time I saw a dolphin fin break the water, the sun glittering on the creatures back, my heart leaped with pure, child-like joy at the sight and I felt my whole being suffused with blessings of the gift I was being given. But the devil on my shoulder prodded and poked until sadness, and the return of shame and frustration replaced my joy.
Then one day on our New Zealand road trip I picked up a leaflet in a visitor information centre which advertised dolphin swims. It insisted that even non-swimmers could participate. I wasn’t a non-swimmer (though only one step removed from it) but surely there might be something here for me? It was time for me to see if I could do this. Would I stay sitting on the boat like a pathetic loser or would I get in the water? At the critical moment would my panic be so great that I would allow my dream to slip from my grasp? I needed to know once and for all whether I needed to face the fact of letting go of my life-long dream.

Fast forward to me bobbing about like a cork in the freezing ocean off the Bay of Plenty on New Zealand’s North Island. I was wearing an enormous life jacket, one hand being held by the incredibly patient tour operator and the other by my wonderful, long suffering partner (whose fish-like nature made him more at home in the water than he was on dry land). I was hyperventilating so badly that I thought I might faint at any minute and my blood pounded in my ears like a whole percussion section of an orchestra, deafening me. Everything in me screamed to be let back on the boat and then I saw it.…… a fin was cutting through the water and making straight for me. At the last moment it veered off and was gone. And just for a moment, a split second, the crashing orchestra stopped and time stood still.

Then I burst into tears.

That was the sum total of my first dolphin swim but the memory of it became instantly one of the most precious things I owned.

Interestingly, my partner Chris, who had thought a dolphin swim would be a fairly cool thing to do but had no great expectations for this day, was completely overwhelmed by the experience. He now sat in the boat back both speechless and struggling to overcome the profound, surging emotions within him.

Sampling every single dolphin swim that New Zealand had to offer then became a bit of a thing for both of us. On that trip and the two subsequent trips that followed over the next seven years we swam with Bottlenose dolphins, Common Dolphins and Hector’s dolphins – the world’s smallest and rarest marine dolphin found exclusively in New Zealand waters. I progressed from life jacket to a wide variety of flotation aids and from clutching at Chris like a person drowning to allowing him to swim at least a couple of metres away. One tour operator excluded me from their numbers as they couldn’t encumber themselves with such a weak-swimming hydrophobic but at the other end of the scale I found many more who wanted to do everything they could to help me achieve my goal.

One of the proudest moments of my life came in 2008 when I entered the ocean without a flotation aid and played for a whole hour in icy waters with Hector’s dolphins. I danced and sang in the water like a woman possessed much to the great amusement of the boat crew and the other swimmers. My mind held a picture of a girl looking at pictures of dolphins in a book and dreaming. Now, as every time I had been in the water with dolphins, I wept.

Yet again travelling had forced me to face my demons and take for my own a dream that had only ever been at best distant. In so doing I had been enabled to finally emerge from a mantle of shame and fear that had shadowed me my whole life.

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For me, travelling is about discovering the hidden depths inside you that may never surface if you don’t leave comfortable shores; about understanding and living the true concept of ‘once in a lifetime’. More than anything else travelling urges me to seize my opportunities – you never know, some of them may just be miraculous.

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As part of an organised tour through Morocco, we had an overnight camp in the Sahara Desert. Arriving at an auberge or inn, we had a chance to offload our bags, collect overnight gear and sip mint tea before climbing onto camels for an hour long ride through the magnificent dunes of Erg Chebbi. The views as we were riding were amazing — rolling dunes of a beautiful orange gold colour and so peaceful. The camels seemed so placid, happy to stay in formation, and did as they were told. I’m sure they would have found their own way to the camp, but we had a guide leading us.

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The camp was a great setup — about 4 individual tents with thick blankets over timber frames on the walls and roof, all connected with an open area containing low tables and comfy cushions in the centre. Each tent looked like it could sleep about 6 people, we had a small group of only 7 and apart from our tour leader and the guide, had the place to ourselves.

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After settling in and picking tents, we decided to climb the dune behind the camp to watch the sun set. It was a tough climb, the dune was massive and the sand was so soft it was hard to get a footing. There’s just no way you can progress by trying to go straight up, so it was a matter of criss-crossing and climbing at the same time. Even climbing sideways across it was tough. There was no point wearing shoes, as they quickly filled with sand. I took off my shoes so I could climb more easily, But I then had to carry my shoes and was almost crawling a lot of the way. At the peak of the dune it was not as difficult, but still hard to get across. We maneuvered along the peak by putting one foot on either side of the peak and progressing that way. Finally we got to the top of the dune and sat in the wind and the cold to watch the sun go down. It was worth the effort though as it was a spectacular sight and one of those moments to always remember. The only bad thing about the whole experience was the sand constantly blowing everywhere — got in your eyes, nose, ears, mouth, clothing, even in my camera lens.

Coming down was much easier, I think it took well over an hour to climb up, but only 10–15 mins to get down.

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While we were away, the guide had prepared dinner. We were joined by another group who were camping a short distance from us. Dinner was chicken and vegetable tagines all prepared using the simplest of cooking tools. We enjoyed our delicious meal sitting on the cushions around the tables. Desert was fresh oranges, then we sat around an open fire while our guide and tour leader played bongo drums – it was such an excellent way to finish the day.

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I was a little worried that it would be too cold to sleep in the tent, but with the thick blankets around the walls and a sleeping bag to cover me, I had one of the best night’s sleep of our whole trip.

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Strolling around in Seoul in 2009 we found this facade made of old doors on a building of the Seoul Women’s University.

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If you haven’t done so already, please sign the petition on One.org to help kickstart our governments into action. Help is desperately needed in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia and every little helps!
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We often wander directionless on our travels but other times, like now, we are on a mission. The destination is a little place called Playa Guiones on the western, Pacific side of Costa Rica. We have focused specifically on this goal based purely on a rumour of world class surf.

The mission was proving a little trickier than we had bargained for however. There is no easy way to get to Playa Guiones and the little dirt roads that snake through the jungle are impassable at certain times of the year – like now. So, here we are bucking and lurching 2000 feet above the jungle canopy in a tiny 10 seater plane and waiting for the dirt landing strip to be cleared of wandering wildlife. (Apparently if we circle round long enough some-one will get fed up with the noise and come and do the clearing.)

I have personally found it a little disconcerting to be able to see every little thing the pilot is doing; watching every light that flashes on the control panel and wondering if it’s anything important.

We share the plane with three Texans, as excitable as tiny children. All of us, it would appear, are surfers. Texan Tim was almost a surfer without a surf board. As our flimsy, toy plane started taxi-ing up the runway at San Jose Tim suddenly spotted something leaning against the flight departure building (a grand name for little more than a shed). “Hey, that’s my board! Stop. STOP! That’s my board, I can’t go without my board man!” Texan Tim was frantic, the pilot obviously annoyed, his friends unsure whether to deride or console. Me? I was already glued rigid with fear, eyes staring straight ahead and trying not to hyperventilate. I have a terrible fear of flying and the thing we were seated in now looked rather insubstantial and in my book barely qualified as a plane at all. It didn’t help that the pilot and co-pilot looked more like two young boys out for a jolly rather than the responsible conveyors of travelling surfers to the back of beyond.

Anyway, Tim got his board and the three Texans resumed their excited jabbering, making untiring efforts to engage me in conversation. For most of the flight everyone else was glued to their windows, the Texans tumbling over each other in their eagerness, arms and legs becoming jumbled until they resembled one large, multi-limbed beast. Everyone but me was oohing and ahhing over the endless waves below us, all going unridden. (I wanted to look but I was fairly sure that any movement from me would tip the flimsy plane into a spiralling plunge.) Names were exchanged and surf tales were told. It was impossible for me to join in, I had a very important job to do. I had to keep my eyes fixed on the instrument panel because it was obvious from the outset that no-one else was going to, the pilots included. Surely they should be paying some attention to that alarm going off and that red flashing light? I wondered at what point I should draw the very distracted pilot’s attention to the fact that we might be in imminent danger of crashing.

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Landing was something I have tried to erase from my memory. It was neither smooth nor completed in such a way to alter my opinion of the pilot’s competence. My dignity was laready somwhat in tatters but I did manage to restarin myself from kissing the solid earth beneath my feet.

We managed to hitch a ride on the back of a truck going into Playa Guiones. Quite how we knew this was where it was going I’m not sure. Both Chris and I suffer from that embarrassing English affliction of speaking only one language. The Texans were no better. (A joke we would later be told by our Costa Rican buddies went like this – what do you call some-one who speaks three languages? — trilingual. What do you call some-one who speaks two languages? — bilingual. What do you call some-one who speaks one language? — Gringo.) Still, a truck ride to somewhere seemed preferential to baking in the midday tropical heat so we allowed ourselves to be shaken half to death sitting on the bed of a truck that obviously had no suspension, slowly but constantly choked and cloaked by dust that covered us from head to foot, each of us hanging onto our surf boards for dear life.

Arriving in Nosara felt like stepping onto the film set of an old Western. The ‘main’ street was just a dirt path and, because of the time of day, not a soul stirred. Insects chirred wildly but a little drunkenly as if the midday heat was too much for them too; strange, brightly coloured birds swooped and disappeared into tree canopies; somewhere, very faintly Bob Marley was playing.

We were to learn very quickly that everyone called this place Nosara. We never could find out exactly why. Nosara is the name of the village six kilometres inland. Playa Guiones was actually a few kilometres up the coast. The place we had arrived in didn’t seem to have a name of its own so it had borrowed one.

As the days progressed we were also to learn why when we arrived there was a certain feel about the place. Nosara, in more ways than one, is the end of the line. It was peopled with one of the most eclectic and eccentric mix of people I have ever come across. Most of the people here were surfers but there was also a sprinkling of yoga enthusiasts come to learn a deeper level of their craft from a guru who ran a shrine-like place in the jungle. Most of the people were running away from something and had stopped running here. There was a mixture of Costa Ricans or Ticos and Americans. We were the only Brits.

We ended up spending four months in this strange community, living in a house which saw fire, flood, earthquake and scorpion infestation. Nosara lures you in with its turquoise waters, endless waves and tropical paradise air and then refuses to let go, tightening its grip to a vice like stranglehold and casting a spell that makes extrication impossible. We were surrounded by people who had surrendered to this hypnotism, arriving many years ago with the intention of staying just a few days. We escaped only with some difficulty. I guess that’s another story.

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