New Delhi

Now that we are over 5 months into our international travels, Jeff and I have had to do a lot of planning and research on the fly. Via social media it looks (hopefully), like we are living this carefree life of a never-ending holiday. Most of the time it’s like that, however there is are a lot of logistics we have to account for every time we travel to a new country. Knowing we would soon be in India, we have been following the Indian Rupee crisis closely. A girl’s got to eat!!!!

Cliff’s note’s version: the Indian government decided to print new 2000 and 500 Rupee notes, making old 1000 and 500 void in a very short time with practically zero notice. This is to crack down on corruption, which will hopefully be a good thing in the long term, but created a huge crisis currently. Realizing that we might have trouble getting usable Rupees once we landed in India, we took a tour of the Dubai Airport trying to find a currency exchange that had valid notes. As a rule, we NEVER use currency exchanges due to the large fees. We always pull cash from an ATM once we land since we don’t have any international transaction fees. As it turned out, losing $30 at the money exchange was a really good decision. We have been here for 6 days (I’m currently writing this on train ride) and have not been able to use an ATM yet! Many shops and restaurants are closed as there is no money in circulation. People have been waiting in lines for a minimum of 2 hours to get cash, if there is any left by the time it is your turn. Locals can only pull 2000 Rupees at a time (about $29), while foreigners can pull 5 times that. 

Jet Airways gave us decent Indian curry on our 3 and half our flight to Delhi

Jet Airways gave us decent Indian curry on our 3 and half our flight to Delhi

Anyway, we had an uneventful flight from Dubai to New Delhi. We had decided a few months ago that we would book a tour through the Australian company, Intrepid Travel. We both weren’t comfortable with the idea of figuring out how to navigate India by ourselves, and wanted to just be able to show up and have someone show us the ropes. As a bonus, we wanted to be a part of a travel group instead of traveling by ourselves. Yay new friends to talk to! We signed up for a 23-day tour of Northern India.

A pre-arranged driver picked us up at the airport in Delhi. We walked out into an extremely polluted atmosphere. We had also been reading about the air pollution in Delhi (they closed the schools a few weeks ago because it was so bad). We had prepared by buying face masks in Dubai, and to my surprise, no one was wearing any protection once we landed in India. We were later told that we were seeing a pretty clear day compared to what it normally is. (Note: my lungs were still kind of burning.)

The ride to the hotel was a culture shock in itself. We were in a car down a 3-lane highway. There were 4 to 5 lanes of traffic on one side of the road at a time. From what I can tell there are NO RULES when it comes to driving in India. Miraculously, buses, tuk tuks, cars, motorcycles and bikes all seem to use some sort of intuitive road rules and (for the most part) people actually get where they are headed without an accident. (Accident is defined as ‘totaling the vehicle.’ Scrapes, dents and playing bumper cars doesn’t count.)

The day after arrival, we met our 7 other tour group members and our guide. Get ready for a cast of characters in the next few posts! Jeff and I have our own private hotel room for this tour, but we are not staying anywhere that we can cook for ourselves. I see lots of rice and curry in our future.

On the first day of our group tour, Shakti (our guide), took us to Old Delhi via the metro. 18.5 million people live in Delhi. It has a population density of over 29,000 people per square mile which is one of the highest in the world. There are people EVERYWHERE! The metro was no exception. We threw our personal space out the window and successfully made it (with a transfer) downtown on the metro.

From there we toured the Wedding Market street, a mosque, and Sikh Temple.

After lunch, we grabbed our luggage and headed to the train station for our first overnight train ride to Jaisalmer.

Jeff and I shared our bunk space with 6 strangers, and while it wasn’t the best nights sleep, we made it safely and on time to our destination.

-Cara

P.S. I’m not sure how to describe my first impressions of India…I have never been to Asia before and I didn’t really have any preconceived ideas about this place. I did think that it would be more developed than the areas we have been in so far. Right now, the places we visited in Africa have had more infrastructure that we have seen here. Right now I'm reserving judgement- more to come soon!  

Dubai

From Dar es Salaam, we had a direct flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The Middle East probably wouldn’t have made our list of top places to see in the world, but when a friend from Virginia recently moved there for work, we weren’t going to pass up a chance to visit her!

I had spent a whirl-wind 24-hour layover in Dubai 2 years ago, and I remembered the city as elaborate and excessive. Which is exactly the stop Jeff and I needed between Africa and India! There is nothing to compare it to since it is over-the-top luxurious. Oil = $$$$, and although there hasn’t been as much oil production as there has in the past, people are still living large!

We spent the week in our friend Sara’s posh apartment. The building had a beautiful pool, gym, restaurants, grocery store, cinema and a mall (complete with Lululemon- what more could you ask for?!) so we never really had to leave. We spent much of the week relaxing and travel planning- it was absolutely wonderful. Sara and I were able to get some quality pool time in also!

 We did manage to see some of the city- Sara took us to explore the Spice, Gold and Textile Souk’s. We also had some delicious Lebanese food!

Of course we went shopping. Poor Jeff. I dragged him through multiple malls. We were both entertained by people watching and we stopped to get our first hamburger in months! The photos below are from the Dubai Mall (hamburger, ice rink, waterfall, Jeff at Coldstone), and the Mall of the Emirates (ski hill and grocery store decorated for Christmas- read below: huge expat community):

While traveling, we always try to learn more about the local culture. Most of Dubai is currently inhabited by expats, as neighboring Abu Dhabi is the emirate that is the seat of the government. You find some Emiratees in Dubai, but everyone working in the service industry is a forgeiner. Anyway, the UAE is a Muslim country, and there seem to be multiple mosques on every corner. Islam is not a religion that we knew much about, so we spent one morning taking a tour of the Jumeriah Mosque.

The tour was about $6 each and included some snacks before it started:

Arabic tea and coffee were served with lentil crepes (I think), camel cheese, and some form of delicious donut that I ate with date syrup. Breakfast of champions!

The call to prayer can be heard throughout the city (even in the shopping malls). The call to prayer happens 5 times per day, the number of times a Muslim is required to pray each day. After washing their legs, arms and face outside the mosque, men will enter to pray. (Women pray at home as they are not allowed inside the mosque at prayer time.) Once we covered up, we entered the mosque.

Note that everything in the UAE is heavily censored by the government. (Great- now no one in Dubai can read this post). We received some great information at the mosque, but we could tell that it was heavily censored, and the woman giving our presentation had excellent (government approved) answers to our group’s questions. Even the Imam’s (Muslim religious leader) talking points during their Friday prayer are dictated by the government. This would be the equivalent of the government giving every pastor or priest an outline for their Sunday morning sermons that they have to follow. Friday is the Muslim day of observation, so in Dubai their weekends are Friday’s and Saturday’s.

We lived it up on Saturday night and took the metro to the Dubai Mall. The metro is extremely cheap in this fairly expensive city, and really easy to use! The metro gets bonus points because it is air condiditoned- important when you are in the desert! At the Dubai Mall, there are fountains in between the mall and the Burj Kalifa. The Burj Kalifa is the tallest building in the world. I went up to the observation deck when I was in town before, and we elected to skip it this time around. But we did see the fountain show, and the light show on the Burj.

We recently hit our 6-month mark since leaving Virginia, and spending time with a friend meant so much to us. Thank you so much Sara for hosting us and teaching us about your new corner of the world. We can’t wait to see you again soon (I’m already missing that pool), and we are so happy that you are loving Dubai!

-Cara

Modes of transportation: Uber, metro, water taxi

Total amount spent in Dubai (including flight into Dubai): $968.01

Avg.: $138.29 per day

Almost half that expense was the flight, however it was actually cheaper for us to buy a ticket to Dubai and then from there to Delhi, then it was to buy the ticket from Tanzania to Delhi.

Bonus Post!!!! As we near the end of our time in each country, we try to get ourselves down to zero in that currency. We've been pretty good at playing the guessing game each time we go to the ATM, but normally we can't avoid having small change as …

Bonus Post!!!! As we near the end of our time in each country, we try to get ourselves down to zero in that currency. We've been pretty good at playing the guessing game each time we go to the ATM, but normally we can't avoid having small change as we get to an airport. The change we don't spend usually goes into a donation box. In Dubai I scored a granola bar with my remaining 6 AED! It was a change from the usual chocolate bar and we left the UAE with zero Dirham left!

State of the Bank Account Address

We are now 6 months into this journey, and I figured it might be time for us to give an update on how we’re doing financially. We had originally planned on traveling for about 1 year, and that has been extended slightly due to us planning on meeting some of our best friends in the Bahamas next summer, which, as of right now, will be the closing part of our trip.

Based on the original timeline of a year, things are looking great as we have recently also crossed the half way point in our available funds. You might say ‘but Jeff, if you’re traveling for longer than a year, aren’t you in trouble if you’ve already spent half your money?’, however the response would be that we have already been through the more expensive parts of our journey (at least for a while) as we hit Europe over the summer and did the expensive activities for the trip in climbing Kilimanjaro and going on Safari. Our next several destinations are relatively cheap, as India and Southeast Asia won’t cost nearly as much, so we should stay well ahead for the next several months. Also, in our total spent for crossing the half way point of our budget, there are quite a few things that haven’t happened yet, as we already paid for our 3 week tour of India (just need to buy food while we’re there), and we have bought quite a few of our upcoming flights and paid for lodging in Singapore and a few nights in Vietnam. Due to us booking with a budget company in Tanzania and ending up with quite a bit more free lodging in Europe than we had planned, we are well under budget for where we thought we would be now.

Now for some cold hard numbers (as of 11/18/16):

Our average spent per day: $117.91

Days since we left Virginia: 184

Days since we left the USA: 153

Difference in budget and actual expenses: $3,639.51

So where is the extra money that we haven’t spent so far going? If I had my way, it would roll into our return savings and give us a little extra cushion until we get jobs again. Cara doesn’t agree with that so much, so we’re going to keep it available for the rest of the trip and treat ourselves a little as we go, including Cara doing her scuba diving certification over Christmas while we’re in Singapore and me doing some mountain biking while we are there too.

Hopefully we stay under budget for the rest of the trip!

-Jeff

Road Warrior Update from Dar es Salaam

Not every day on the road is rainbows and butterflies for us. Please try spending every waking moment with your spouse for 6 months and tell me its smiles and unicorns all the time. Most of you reading this at your cubicle right now are probably thinking, ‘Cara, shut up! I’m here grinding 9-5 and you are off prancing around the world.’ Touché, sir.

As I write this, we realized that it had been exactly 6 months since we left our jobs in Virginia. While we have absolutely zero regrets about it, some aspects of traveling on the road are much more challenging than we anticipated. Take this morning for example. We left our hotel in good spirit and took a taxi to church. I got a little frustrated when the service ended up being at 9:30 instead of 9 am like we anticipated, and it also ended up being in Swahili instead of English as it was advertised.

After a beautiful service, complete with 5 baptisms, I was still in a cruddy mood. ‘Happy wife, happy life,’ right? I guess the opposite is true also. Jeff and I were pretty fed up with each other- I was mad that his social anxiety got in the way of asking someone about the church service before it began, and he was peeved that I didn’t step in to help. After stomping around town only talking to each other in grunts (Note: I do not recommend this in a third world country), we got something to eat. HANGER IS A REAL ISSUE. I think today taught us that when we start to get frustrated with each other, the best way to calm down is to talk about it while eating. It’s amazing how an attitude can change once you have a little food in you!

6 months in, and we are still figuring out this whole co-piloting thing. I wish I could say that we will have it all figured out by the end of the next 6 months, but I have a feeling that this is the adventure they call ‘marriage.’ If you have all the marriage answers, please leave us advice- sometimes we all need a little help! And if you are looking for a good read about marriage and travel, check out ‘Married with Luggage,’ by Betsy and Warren Talbot.

Anyway, days where we feel burned out on travel are to be expected. But we have so many AMAZING travel days that make it all worth it. Like the other day that we spent visiting with friends. We are so blessed to know so many wonderful people around the world. I got to know a few Tanzanian’s very well during my summer here 7 years ago. It was great to catch up with them and their families while we were in Dar es Salaam!

Before leaving for Dubai, we capped our 5 week stay in Africa with a few days in Dar. Besides visiting friends, we had some great eats, and visited the National Museum of Tanzania. 

We were fortunate to learn kidogo Kswahili (a little Swahili) while we were here. We probably know more Swahili than any other language from the countries that we have previously visited. That’s the benefit of slow travel and staying in one place for longer! We feel like it took a few weeks, but we are pretty comfortable here- whether we are the only wzungu (white people) in a packed church, or a packed bus, and we can order food in Swahili (as long as it’s beef, chicken or bananas haha). Of course, once you get comfortable, it’s time to move on again! We’ve had a great stay here, but we are both ready for the next adventure- and we’ll be taking our positive attitudes with us!

-Cara

Tanzania in Total:

Modes of transportation used: Plane, bus, taxi, rickshaw, safari jeep, feet

Total amount spent in Tanzania: $7635.30

Avg.: $238.60 per day

While this is by far our highest average per day for any country, we knew going in that Tanzania was going to be expensive for us based on our chosen activities (safari and climbing Kilimanjaro). That being said, we finished way under budget as I had budgeted based on some of the higher end guide companies we had found online while still in the States, and we ended up going with a budget company and having a great experience. As we are 6 months into this journey, I’m going to get a post up on the overall state of our finances soon, so keep an eye out for it!

-Jeff

Hustled

Well, it was bound to happen. And I guess we can call ourselves lucky that it didn’t happen until we got to Africa. We got hustled. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good hustle as much as the next gal, I just prefer to be the one doing the hustling.

To be honest, I’m not even that mad about it. It took us 4 weeks to figure out that we got ripped off, so the money was already long gone. It all started back in Dar es Salaam when we were buying bus tickets to get to Moshi and the base of Kilimanjaro. We were each charged extra on the bus tickets because the kid selling them wrote down the city after our stop and we (like fools) paid for the extra distance, not knowing there was an extra price difference. Then once we were on the bus, we were conned into ‘paying for our bags to be stored under the bus.’ You can read more about that trip here. Anyway, we figured out that this was all a ruse when we bought tickets from Moshi to get back to Dar, where we were charged less than the original ticket and there was zero bag storage fee. In total, Lim Safari (the bus company) got an extra 40,000 shillings out of us. Aka a whopping $18.34. Hey- it may not seem like a lot, but that will get both of us 2 decent meals here!

The real African hustle came once we were on the bus back to Dar. But I’ll let Jeff tell that part, since I tuned out and pretended to sleep.

-Cara

After the 10 hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Moshi at the beginning of our Africa trip, Cara and I were dreading the return journey. We were hoping that we could fly back to Dar, but alas tickets were out of our budget pricing. However, this bus ride was so good (not sure that’s the right word, in fact I’m sure it’s wrong) that I started taking notes on my phone and when I finished and copied it into Word to edit it, I had almost 2 full pages. 2 pages of single spaced, size 10 font, normal margins (aka not all the cheating stuff we did in college to make a paper long enough when there just wasn’t anything else to say) notes on the ridiculousness of the bus ride. I have added a precursor here and decided to just post the rambling note taking, as it was way more entertaining than anything I could edit it into.

We were told our bus would leave at 7am after coming from a different town, but knew that it wouldn’t actually leave at that time. After watching quite a few busses barely come to a full stop in the station to load up with new people, we knew we would have to be on our toes for the arrival. The guy that sold us our tickets the day before told us he would make sure we got on the bus, but really wasn’t paying attention. I saw them pull in and asked him if it was the right bus, and he looked up (barely) and said nope, but at that time our bus wasn’t visible, so once they cleared the other busses I asked again and he jumped up and took off. Great start to the day running after a guy through a crowded bus station…again…

Getting on the bus and getting rolling was uneventful, even though it was 45 minutes late. About a half hour after rolling out of the station, a random passenger started walking up and down the aisle passing out puke bags and asking people to buckle up. After watching 36 children and 5 adults roll up in a dalla dalla a few days before, this safety talk was quite the surprise. In all fairness, at a random traffic stop a cop did board the bus and check a few seat belts, so maybe they are trying to encourage safety in some situations. But enough post trip additions, everything after this are the notes I took directly during the bus ride:

Buckle up and pass out puke bags, then yell a bunch in Swahili.... Going to be a rough ride? Wave a book with a foot on it... Home podiatry? Then an herbal remedies book? Then diapers??? Including a demo pouring water on the diaper. Now newspaper... This guy has been yelling for 45 minutes and shows no sign of stopping... Uric acid is bad? Yells that and points to stomach and joints and other gestures. Hard to figure out what he's selling now... Back pain I think now, walking up and down aisle holding back.... Something about tomato sauce and chips and lasagna, this is getting weird. Cell phone waving and sodium benzoate and electronics. maybe I could offer him money to shut up.... Science experiment time... Big bottle of white liquid and mix in little bottle of red drops. Shake it up and yell a bunch more... Punch a hole in the lid and let people taste it by squirting a little on their fingers. More about sodium benzoate. What the hell is going on? Something more about tomato sauce... Maybe it was red concentrated tomatoes? Half full water bottle from the diaper experience gets waved around again... More gesturing and trying to get people to raise their hands for something. No one does. More yelling and gesturing at his stomach and this time the guy across the aisle raises his hand and seems pretty into the pitch. I have no idea what is for sale right now though. Is this worse than the crappy movie and music videos we watched on the way here? I think so. Eat something and it will go to your stomach and that deserves more yelling and gesturing. More looking for raised hands, but the guy across the aisle is into his phone again and not participating. Doesn't discourage the yeller. SODIUM BENZOATE!!! showing something on a cell phone, makes it to the back and it's an article about 5 reasons to kick the habit of drinking diet soda. What. The. Hell. Live click bait? Whatever is going on now a few people raise their hands. Still haven't seen him sell anything to anyone. Over an hour of yelling now... Now there is a laminated newspaper page and the only thing I see is a roasted chicken taking up most of the page. Maybe chicken is bad too? Something about the heart and the head and yells with his eyes closed a bunch. More eating gesturing and this time it seems the topic is effects on the head. Another newspaper laminated this one front page and another huge chicken picture. Doesn't hold it up long enough for me to get the headline into Google translate but the only word I get besides ‘chicken’ is ‘formed,’ so maybe ‘malformed chicken.’ Now a picture of a kid with a giant swollen head in a hospital. Maybe because of the chicken? Inspects someone's gum. I think it's the poison he's been talking about? After and hour and 15 minutes seems to be getting a bit horse but he's not slowing down... Now the gum is getting shown seat to seat pointing at ingredients. He found something.... It was quiet for a bit while that happens, now back to the regularly scheduled yelling. Now onto getting sores or something on your face. Another newspaper article, I think it's pictures of tumors and growths, but really not sure. If you eat raise your hand? Couple of hands after some very passionate talk. Maybe now on to the topic of bowel movements? No one raised hands for something about Ariana and it seemed to throw him for a loop. Not for long though, back into the bag of tricks for another newspaper article. Can't see anything on this one though. Now getting some feedback from someone or at least an answer to a question... The water bottle is back. Something about lips now.

It was a pretty passionate pitch from this guy.

On a side note there is a baby with pierced ears and drawn on eyebrows 3 rows up. Weird.

Another newspaper and looks like a photo of a protest. More yelling with eyes closed. The label gets torn off the bottle and the bottle handed to someone. Now adding some white drops to the bottle. Cap on, shake it up, turns white and cloudy. Something else added and now it's clear again. It smells, based on his face when he opens it, now the rest of the bus gets to smell it seat to seat. Guy almost eats it going back up the aisle when we hit a speed bump. More drops go in the bottle. Now it's purple/pink. Something for the ears or affecting them? Asks a question and gets some hands, and then drops his speech to answer his phone and stand in the aisle and talk on it. Hooray quiet for a minute. Phone call over and back to preaching the evils of who knows what. Another newspaper about I don't know what. The back of it is up now and shows a hamburger and cigarettes. Message I get is 'this shit will kill you' but I don't think that's quite right. The herbal remedy book is back! As is the pink liquid in the bottle. Gets a full water bottle from a passenger. Adds some to the pink stuff and returns the good water back to the passenger. I think something like "you need this book or you'll die a painful death" is being yelled.

Another side note. Two people have gotten off without the bus fully stopping now. Slow down enough to disembark at a run and take back off.

1 hour 45 minutes and still going strong. Problems with sinuses and the heart now. Is this pill bottle the point of all of it? Is this the real sell? Maybe it's a powder or liquid not pills. Some sort of laminated letter is out now. I feel like it's the guarantee of purity and/or quality. A certificate is out now. Nice and colorful. Stuff must be legit. Oooh a certificate from a college is out now. Laminated for officialness. He has all the certs and letters, super legit. Rafiki gets yelled a few times. I hope this is the closing speech to his friends... Nope. Although it may be recap phase time as tomato sauce gets yelled some more and the passion has been renewed. The pink water is back. Bottle gets flipped around a few times. The medicine gets added and the liquid stratified, shake it up, and now it's yellowish. And I think some stuff precipitated out.

One lady doesn't care at all, the other is on the edge of her seat. Literally. Pretty sure she bought two bottles and made the guy with her buy 2 more.

Two hours in. Still yelling, but he counted some hands and seems to be joking now, so maybe it's almost over. Not holding my breath though. Books are back out, I think it's time to make some sales! Lady behind us really wants one and is waving her money around. Makes quite a few sales, so I think the money to shut up would've been expensive... One sales trip down the bus isn't good enough, another couple minutes of the hard sell and he makes another trip and sells some more. Another last call? This shit will save you! Trip number 3 down the aisle. More about eating and the dude isn't even tired. Another trip down the aisle. One or two more sales. Still not enough, more yelling. Now he's talking about malaria and typhoid. This shit must be really good. Almost two and a half hours in. Still stuff in the bag so still selling. People are still buying. Some people are buying another bottle. Now just the bottles are 5000 shillings. Book and bottle was 10000 and people are nearly jumping out of their seats for the chance. Must be a good pitch. Still not enough. 2.5 hours and the hustle continues and people are chomping at the bit to get more.

2 hours and 45 minutes and he seems to have milked every sale he could. Music videos kick back on as he sits down. Jumps off at a bus stop rest area likely to get back on a bus going the other way

Fucking snake oil salesmen.

*And that my friends was all I wrote. Despite the snake oil salesman preventing me from napping, I enjoyed Africa immensely and would recommend everyone go to Tanzania if they can. Just don’t climb Kilimanjaro.

-Jeff

At least we got a last view of Kilimanjaro on the ride out of town...

THE BIG 5

We spent 5 days on safari and we were lucky enough to see all of the ‘Big 5’- or the 5 most coveted animals to see in the wild:

Simba/Lion

Chui/Leopard

Tembo/Elephant

Nyati/Buffalo

And the most coveted, Faru/Rhinoceros! We didn’t get any photos of the 1 rhino we saw (but it still counts!) In Ngorongoro Crater, we drove up on a few safari vehicles looking into the brush and they told us that they could see the rear end of a rhino in the distance. We waited around for about 15 minutes and didn’t see anything until all of the other vehicles left. Then a large elephant came crashing through some trees and scared the rhino from where it was laying down. So we ended up seeing the rhino take off to get away from the elephant about 200 feet away from us. Pretty cool!

We spent the first morning of our 5 days getting from Moshi out to Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area. Once we dropped our cook off at the campsite on the rim of the crater, we took our boxed lunches and went on an afternoon game drive. I had been to the Crater the last time in Tanzania, but since now we were there in the off-season, there weren’t many other safari vehicles, so we had the whole crater practically to ourselves!

After seeing the rhino, we came up out of the Crater around 6pm in time to shower and eat dinner at the campsite. Our guides had warned us that animals liked to hang around the campsite. And we’re not talking about small rodents….

A little hard to see, but that is an elephant that comes every night to drink out of the cistern at the camp. We kept a reasonable distance...

Yup- there are resident elephants at this campsite that come up and drink out of the water tank ever evening at dusk. Later that night, I saw zebra hanging out near the bathrooms. We were tent camping, and no matter how bad I had to pee in the middle of the night, I was NOT leaving the tent. With my luck, I would have walked right into a buffalo or something.

The next day we headed the 2-3 hours beyond Ngorongoro Crater to Serengeti National Park. I hadn’t been to this park before, and if you ever go on safari, your itinerary NEEDS to include this park! It was by far our favorite. We had 2 nights here, and you need that long to do it justice. During our 2 days there we really only covered half of the park. We also tent camped here:

Serengeti is home to all of the cats!

We ended up seeing so many lions (and lots of cubs!) that we became pretty desensitized to them. You think you are in a zoo and almost forget that they are wild….until you see one try to take down a zebra…

After our 2 days in the Serengeti, we headed back out through Ngorongoro Conservation Area and stayed our 4th and final night in a nice lodge. On Day 5, we visited Terengire National Park. It was a little anticlimactic compared to everything we saw in the Serengeti, but this park is known for its Baobob trees and elephants.

-Cara

Food on a budget safari

We have not been going hungry in Africa. In fact- we ate wayyyy to much on safari, especially for sitting in the car all day. A huge thanks to our amazing cook, Hezron.

My mind was blown with our cook's presentation! 

We had told our safari company, Kessy Brothers (out of Moshi, Tanzania), that we didn't want to eat bread. We also didn't want to eat Ndizi after Kili. Ndizi are bananas....we ate way too many cooked bananas on the mountain and it ruined them for us for awhile. Anyway, Hexron took the 'no bread' to heart and understood that we didn't want any sort of wheat flour. So he made us delicious lentil cakes to have with our soup instead!

Lentil cakes and soup for the 1st course

Each morning we had a full breakfast. Usually this consisted of eggs, hot dogs, potatoes or pancakes, fruit, and as much tea and coffee as we wanted. Lunch was either a boxed lunch on the safari trail, or a full hot lunch at the campsite. Our boxed lunches were: mango juice box, piece of fruit (banana or orange), piece of chicken, hard boiled egg, lentil cakes, piece of boiled potato, peanuts, and a chocolate bar! Are you full yet? Before dinner we had tea with popcorn. For dinner, the first course was always soup. It was pretty hot outside to have soup, but we had amazing pumpkin soup in the Serengeti. I wrote down Hezron's recipe and will try to recreate it someday- it was so good! Second course was meat with veggies and some sort of starch. Then for dessert there was fresh fruit! One night we also got fresh banana fritters. Delicious!!!

-Cara

Cara's Account of Kili

Warning: In an attempt to give you an authentic piece of our Kili trek this post contains many strong exclamations and many photos of pit latrines.

Since we spent so much time working up to our Kilimanjaro climb, I thought it would be a good idea if both Jeff and I documented our experiences. Read Jeff's account here. Climbing Kili has been Jeff’s baby, and he has been the most excited about this part of our trip, which is AWESOME and I fully supported him. I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t do much research on the hike, because if I had known what we were getting into, I might not have wanted to go.

I knew this was going to be the ultimate physical and mental test, possibly the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. There were always little doubts playing in the back of my mind, but once we paid $966 each at the gate in government park fees alone, there was no way I was NOT getting to the top. Funny how spending a huge chunk of money gives you motivation to follow through.  

Let’s get this straight- besides not having real bathrooms and showers, we were definitely ‘glamping.’ As we arrived to the campsite every day, our tent was already set up, bedrolls unrolled, and all we had to do was show up for afternoon tea in our mess tent. Each morning we received a wake-up call, during which we were served hot tea. Tea before I even get out of bed??!!!!! Now this I can get down with.

Some meals we were served by our waiter. Yes, we had one person in our crew whose job was to wait on us….

Something else I am a fan of? Pit toilets. For those of you who don’t know- I spent my entire senior year of college studying ventilation in pit toilets. AND. I. LIKED. IT. No joke!  I tried explaining this to our guide, but he just looked at me like I was a crazy person.

Studying a pit toilet in Houghton, Michigan (aka frozen tundra) makes it a little difficult to correlate the data to sub-Saharan Africa (which is what we were trying to do). However, I found a place where our research was validated!!!!!! On the top of Kili!!!! It was so cold that most nights I slept in 2 pairs of pants and a winter coat.

Along with the cold, came Mountain Fever. Altitude sickness is one mean Mother. I was hopped up on Advil and Excedrine all week trying to battle the headaches and nausea. I can’t tell you how many times I mentally flipped the bird to the summit as we were slowly climbing. Climbing Kilimanjaro is like those annoying Sour Patch Kids commercials…It pisses you off so much as you are climbing that you can’t even remember why you thought this was a good idea in the first place. Then as soon as you go downhill a little bit and get some more oxygen, you just want to hug the mountain and tell her she’s the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. The ultimate bitch playing mind games. Like this:

On Day 6 of our climb, we started toward the summit at midnight. I did extremely well for about the first 5 and a half hours in the thin air. I took super deep breaths and kept repeating mantras to myself. I was pretty much in a meditative state for that long. Once the sun came up, things started to go downhill (figuratively- remember we already paid all that money and I wasn’t going to quit?!). My steps got even slower and each time I closed my eyes I felt like I was going to pass out, fall asleep, or throw up. Fortunately, none of those things happened.

As we got near the top, I tried to dig deep. My legs burned all over from the bazillion baby steps, my heart was racing and my lungs were tired from the lack of oxygen. You always have a little bit left in the tank, right?! Wrong. I can always push through, but that day it was like I didn’t even have a tank. I would take 10 baby steps, then stop and breathe. 10 more steps then stop. It was painfully slow. Poor Jeff, he was doing great, and just wanted to get to the summit. Jeff was awesome- he and our guide, Paul, ended up taking me by the arms and walked me the last 600 meters to the peak. The Roof of Africa!!!!!

I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer about our whole Kilimanjaro experience- we are so happy with the company we chose to use and we were treated so well. But when you are sick and not feeling yourself for the whole trip, it puts a huge damper on things. The most impressive part of the whole hike were the porters. These guys are amazing. They carry all your stuff, their stuff, and any food or gear the group needs for the whole week. The first picture below is our porters getting their bags weighed. They are only allowed to carry 15-20 kg of our stuff. Everyone gets their bags weighed before heading up the trail. We ate watermelon on the 5th day. That means that one of these guys carried a watermelon on his head for 5 days before we ate it! 

Talk about some strong neck muscles. I calculated how much money the porters earned in the 7 days they were carrying our stuff around the mountain. I used to make that much in about 3 hours behind my desk. It definitely puts things into perspective. We are so thankful to our crew- we definitely couldn’t have done it without them!

Kilimanjaro gave Jeff and I a lot of ‘First’s’ together:

1.       Summiting above 19,000 ft.

2.       Not showering for 7 days

3.       Camping for 7 days together

4.       Not cooking for ourselves for 7 day

The good news is that we still seem to like each other- even after not taking a shower for a week :) On our last day, after the peak, our group sang to us:

-Cara

Safari Sneak Peak

We went on a 5 day safari after our Kili climb. Here's a sneak peak of some of the photos!

Cheetah

Giraffe 

It's so dry here, that everything is dusty- as proved by the photos below as we were trying to take a selfie at the Serengeti gate. Our cook, Hezron, is in the white shirt, and our guide, Kweka, has the striped shirt on:

Longest 5K Ever

What is the longest you could possibly imagine taking to go 5 kilometers? It’s only 3.1 miles right? My best 5k time ever is just over 20 minutes (didn’t bring all my old training journals with me, so I don’t have an exact time), but I now have a PR for the longest 5k of my life.

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was way more of a challenge then we thought it would be. We’re in decent shape and you just walk to the top, right? While that is technically true, it was a little more complicated than that. I’ve been at what I thought was a high altitude in Colorado a few times, but the effects there held nothing on the effects crossing 19,000 feet. Except for the summit day, the day we had lunch around 15,000 feet was the roughest, and neither Cara or I were counting on feeling the altitude as much as we did.

We did a 7 day hike on the Lemosho route, and the options range from 5-8 days from most guide companies, although the record climb and descent is less than 7 hours. People are really crazy. You have to hire a guide company, which means that you get roughly 5 supporting people for each person going on the trek, between the porters, cooks, waiters, assistant guides, and guides. We ended up with 11 total people helping us, 7 porters, a waiter (who also carried a bunch of stuff camp to camp), cook, assistant guide, and guide. If you ever decide to come to Africa and climb Kilimanjaro (more on my opinion if that is a good idea or not later) you can usually join a group of hikers, which doesn’t save you a ton in the cost of the trip, but since all of these support people rely on most of their income to be from tips, you can save a lot if you have more people to split the tips with. We were very happy with our company (Kessy Brothers Tours) and our trip was definitely on the budget end of things when you compared our gear to the high end companies, but based on what we heard from people and prices I looked into before getting here, we paid less than half of what some people were paying and we still felt like we had incredibly good service. For example, we had our own private “mess tent” where we were served 3 hot meals a day and received better service than I have in a lot of “nice” restaurants. Not really the “camping” we are used to…

The first few days we settled into the pace of hiking, and the favorite saying of the guides and all the porters passing you on the trail is polepole (spoken polay polay) which means “slow”. They really mean this as you feel like you are barely moving, but it makes it much easier to deal with the large altitude gain each day. We couldn’t believe we would be walking that slow for the next several days on day 1, but by the summit day it was tough to move at any pace. We like to try to learn a little of the local language wherever we go, so of course we had to learn how to say “fast” and joke with everyone that we would start going “haraka” or that the porters were “haraka”. A common response from the porters was “me haraka, you polepole!”, or “hakuna haraka” which means “not fast”.

Skipping the boring first couple days where we just walked all day, often going higher up the mountain than we would be sleeping to help acclimatize, lets get to where it got real, summit day. We spent the morning of day 5 hiking up tobase camp and then you get lunch, have the afternoon to nap, have a good dinner (although neither of us had an appetite from the altitude but you force yourself to eat), and then try to get a few more hours of sleep. There are a ton of people in base camp, moving and talking and this makes it really hard to sleep so when wake up came at 11 pm neither Cara nor I had slept much. We got a little time to wake up and get ready, a small snack, and a little before midnight we were on our way to the top. Our guides told us that it wasn’t a very busy day to summit, but we felt like there were headlamps in a constant stream from the camp to the top, I can’t imagine what it is like in high season. Most people are all going at relatively the same polepole pace, so you just settle in and keep walking. It is really cold, which is another thing we weren’t quite ready for mentally, although our tour company gave us all the winter gear we needed since we aren’t lugging that around the world with us (this was a nice bonus because most companies either charge for gear or you have to rent it separately from one of the outfitters in town). We were very tired from the start, but you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Because of the low temps, they discourage many breaks, so you might stop just long enough to eat a granola bar or to try and catch your breath, and then you’re right back at it. It is an incredibly long night, and because its dark it’s really hard to judge your progress. Eventually the sun comes up, which just like in GoRuck events I have done, sunrise is a huge mental boost. We were still a ways from the top but we did pause for a bit and enjoy the view. Not too long after that our guides told us we were only about 25 minutes from the top, which was a bold face lie. We did make it to the top of the ridge we were climbing and there is a nice sign for Stella point, but it’s not actually the top. We were still almost an hour away from the true peak…

After a very short break, we started back at it and the last hour wasn’t very steep, but it was an incredible hard grind. Cara was about to fall over and for most of it our guide held one arm and I held the other and we nearly carried her. She did make the last 100m or so on her own, and definitely wasn’t the only one being supported across the top, although I don’t know if anyone else had the visions of small mice or chipmunks running around our feet that she did… To say I was scared for her but impressed by her will to go on is a drastic understatement. We made it to the summit, snapped a few quick photos, and then its time to get going back down as they don’t want you to spend much time at the top. The way down was much faster, but still pretty grueling. We had lunch at basecamp, but I didn’t eat anything except a slice of watermelon as the effects of altitude had a delayed effect on me as I was throwing up and had a pretty bad headache, but we got to sleep for a little while before packing up and heading further down the hill, about another 4 hours down to the next camp. By the time we got there my head was clear and I wasn’t nauseous anymore, and we got our best night sleep on the mountain as we were both exhausted. We got an early wakeup, a big breakfast (although we didn’t eat a ton as we were both starting to get the effects of what we assume was contaminated water). We made the last 2.5 hour trek down to the gate of the national park and piled into a van from the tour company.

It was a rewarding experience, but unless you are really into mountaineering or this is at the top of your bucket list, I don’t recommend it. You have to be ready to be dirty for the duration of your trip (no showers, and you get a bowl of water to “wash up” before dinner most days, so except for the big group of Germans that had no inhibitions and washed literally everything at camp, everyone just smells and is pretty gross by day 3, with a long way to go). This coupled with the fact that nearly everyone gets altitude sickness (summit day it was common to see someone pull off the trail, vomit, and get right back to walking) makes it hard to justify feeling bad for 7 days (more really since we’re both now sick back at our hostel) just to say you made it to the highest point in Africa.

Oh, and what is my new PR for longest 5k of my life? 7.5 hours. Yes, that’s correct. Seven and a half hours to go the 5 kilometers from base camp to the peak, and only 2.5 to get from the peak back to the base camp.

Bet you can’t go slower.

P.S.: I found out how to make my wife slightly happier to be woken up at 6 am: Have someone bring her tea along with the wakeup call. 

-Jeff

Jeff's First Cup of Joe

October 19, 2016 just became a very important date. It was the day that Jeff had his first cup of coffee. That’s right. In 29 years, the man has NEVER had a cup of coffee.

Part of our day trip to Marangu included a visit to Babu Coffee Plantation. Aka Mr. Babu’s 3-acre yard covered with Arabic coffee plants. Get ready for some FRESH coffee:

We were first greeted by a baby goat that had been born that morning!

First Babu showed us his coffee plants. The plants grow best in shade, so they were all located underneath banana trees. He told us that there are 7 varieties of banana in Tanzania. Some are used for making the local banana beer and wine. Some are used for cooking and others are for eating the fruit raw.

Babu picked some red (ripe) coffee beans and then showed us how he separates the fruit from the bean. After the bean is removed from the fruit, it is washed and then dried for 3 weeks.

(Fast forward 3 weeks…) Once the beans are dried, the outer shell needs to be removed from the bean. This can be done by hand with a giant mortar and pestle. After the shell is removed, we are ready to roast the beans!

Babu started a fire and we roasted the beans on the spot! After they turned a dark brown color and made a sound over the fire similar to popping popcorn, we were ready to grind the beans.

We returned to the mortar and pestle. Apparently, singing is necessary!

The translation from Swahili to English is something along the lines of ‘Grind, Grind, Grind, and Drink the Coffee.’ Sounds better in Swahili!

The grounds were so fresh we even ate a little bit mixed with sugar- yum! Then Babu asked us how strong we liked our coffee. I took one for the team and told him, ‘very strong!’ He added all of the grounds to a small pot of water over the fire. Our coffee now looked like chocolate pudding.

After it boiled, we were served in cups. I am not an avid coffee drinker anymore, but now I will always appreciate all of the work that goes into making it. I was also a little wary, because when we roasted the beans over the fire they smelled a little burnt. I was expecting to drink something along the lines of motor oil- especially since the liquid was so thick.

This was hands down the best cup of coffee I have ever had.

Jeff thought so too! Although he didn’t have anything to compare it to, he enjoyed it!!!!!

This may have been Jeff’s first cup of Joe, and unfortunately, I think we ruined him for life. This first cup was just too good. Nothing will compare.  

Mzungu in Moshi

Swahili recap: Mzungu means ‘white person.’ People aren’t really concerned about being politically correct here. We get ‘wazungu’ (multiple white people) yelled at us all the time here, in a friendly manner (I think).

We spent our first 3 nights in Moshi at a place called ‘More than a Drop.’ It was a very nice compound that consisted of a hotel and a hospitality school. The school is teaching the young ladies everything about running a hotel and restaurant, and they get to practice on site!

More than a Drop B&B

After 3 nights, we transferred to Rafiki Backpackers hostel around the corner so we could do some cooking for ourselves. They also provided free eggs for breakfast and they do our laundry for free. A backpackers dream!

Pimpin' bed sheets at Rafiki Backpackers

During the days, we walked into town to visit multiple tour operators that Jeff had researched to get quotes for trekking Kilimanjaro and doing a safari. Along the way we got plenty of advice and most importantly, restaurant recommendations! We finally decided to book a climb and safari with the Kessy Brothers. Thanks to everyone who gave us guide company recommendations- we had a great selection to choose from! Jeff used his master negotiating skills and got our trips under our budget- and they threw in a free day trip to experience local culture.

We took our day trip 2 days before we left to climb Kili so we could visit a town that was at a higher elevation and acclimatize a little bit. Kessy Brothers picked us up at the hostel around 8 am and we drove 1 hour to the town of Marangu. Marangu is at the base of Kili and was more lush and green than Moshi town. First we met Edward at the Marangu village museum. He showed us how the Chaga people used to live. The Chaga are native to the Moshi area,

After the museum, we hiked to Ndoro Falls. Beautiful!

We then headed to check out some Chaga caves and tunnels that were 3 centuries old. They were dug out for village defense and as a hiding space against the invading Massai tribes. After the caves we had lunch with our guide and driver, then headed to a local coffee plantation and made our own cup of coffee. This was so much fun that it gets its own blogpost- stay tuned.

From the Chaga caves:

Our final stop in Marangu was one of the gates to Kilimanjaro National Park! We were getting excited to climb the mountain!

Before dropping us back at the hostel, we asked to go to the bank so we could make our final payment on the climb and safari. We now know what it feels like to cart around a bag full of cash:

High rollers with 2 million shillings…. For a few minutes at least...

 

-Cara

Arriving in Africa

After a few day delay, we left Greece and had a layover in Istanbul. The flight from Athens to Istanbul was uneventful, although we did get a full meal on a 1.5 hour flight- pretty cool! We had a few hours in Istanbul and boarded our Turkish Airways flight to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

A layover in Istanbul means you get to try Turkish Delights at all the Duty Free shops! I was not impressed...

Not long after the flight took off, the Turkish Airways captain made an announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking. We left Istanbul a half hour ago and are still in Turkish airspace. Our flight will take us over Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and finally into Tanzainian airspace if everything goes as planned (long pause) we will land at two thirty in the morning.’

I’m pretty sure his script was supposed to read: ‘Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking. We left Istanbul a half hour ago and are still in Turkish airspace. Our flight will take us over Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and finally into Tanzainian airspace. If everything goes as planned, we will land at two thirty in the morning.’ I’m not the grammar police, but punctuation placement means a lot. After the hilarious announcement, this ended up being the most miserable flight we had been on. It was probably 80 degrees (no joke- there was no A/C), and even though it was fairly empty and everyone seemed to have their own row to themselves, the flight attendants were pouring drinks freely. A group of guys sitting behind us spent the whole red-eye flight in a belligerent state and didn’t allow the rest of us to sleep. While going through Tanzanian immigration, one of the drunk guys had to hold on to a wall in order to stay upright. Good times.

Anyway, we arrived safely, if sleep deprived, to Africa!!!! We spent 2 days in Dar es Salaam. I had a great birthday in Dar. We got to catch up with my friend Divina, whom I met when spent a summer in Tanzania in 2009. For those of you interested in my 2009 experience (or are just that bored at work), I found out that my old blog is still online! Click here to relive my college days.

My birthday sunset in Dar!

My birthday sunset in Dar!

The day after my birthday, we woke up early and headed to the busy Ubungu bus station in Dar es Salaam to travel to Moshi- and Mount Kilimanjaro! Here's a quick refresher on East African geography. Point B is Moshi, and Point C is Kilimanjaro.

View Tanzania in a full screen map

Mzungu (Swahli word for white person) guide to surviving an African bus station:

-Arrive with a friendly taxi driver, but no pre-purchased bus tickets

-Keep a death grip on all belongings

-Blindly follow a random man (running) through hundreds of buses because he says that he will take you to the bus that you want

-Arrive to the bus that you want to take, only to be told that the 7am is full and you have to wait 3 hours for the next bus

-Make a game time decision to buy tickets for the slightly shadier looking bus next to the ‘luxury’ bus you wanted to board because it supposedly leaves soon. Note: ‘luxury’ means it has A/C.

-Store luggage under bus and find assigned seats.

-Find out that the bus ticket dude sold your seats two or three times over, but just get moved to different seats.

-Cara pops Dramamine like it’s going out of style (this stuff is seriously my lifeline on bus rides)

-Get told that you have to pay extra for the 2 bags you stored under bus. Ask if you are paying extra because you are white. Give man ~$17 for bags. Never got an answer on the ‘mzungu price’ question….

-Bus leaves 30 minutes after it is supposed to, but makes a slow lap around the crowded bus station trying to sell the rest of the empty seats.

-We finally leave 45 minutes later, once a few more seats are sold.

-Commence 10 hour bus ride with 1 lunch stop, full of African music videos, poor Swahili soap operas. They did play the movie ’13 Hours’ which was a very strange action movie choice for a bus ride…

We finally made it to Moshi 10 hours later!!!!! And the bus ride was not as bad as I made it sound. (Read above: Dramamine).

Our view of Mt. Kilimanjaro from More Than a Drop B&B! by the time you read this, we will be on our way to the top!

Our view of Mt. Kilimanjaro from More Than a Drop B&B! by the time you read this, we will be on our way to the top!

-Cara

Exploring Athens

We traveled back to Athens from Skopelos and were excited to spend 3 more nights in the city and explore the Acropolis before traveling to Africa.

One evening we went to a rooftop movie theater! The view of the Acropolis, or the movie....which was the real show?

First we stopped at the Acropolis Museum. The Museum has some of the sculptures and some of the friezes that adorned the Parthenon. They brought it all down the hill and inside for preservation. The museum was worth the 5 Euro entrance fee, and there were nice displays. However, the Greek collection is nothing compared to the collection of Acropolis artifacts in the British Museum in London. British Lord Elgin was a real gem in the early 1800’s when he was the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and took the best of the sculptures and friezes from the Acropolis and sent them back to England. We were lucky enough to see the ‘Elgin Marbles’ while we were in London, and if you ever travel there, we highly suggest it! Unfortunately, Greece is left with the sadder looking parts of the Acropolis and is still pursing the recovery of their ‘stolen’ artifacts from the British government.

We also went up the hill and saw the real deal! We listened to a Rick Steves audio tour while we toured the Acropolis. There are a few labeled signs in English near some of the ruins, but if you visit, we suggest having an audio tour to listen to.

We also did a Rick Steves walking tour of Athens which gave us good information about modern Greece. Below are photos from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, changing of the gaurd, and 2 Greek Orthodox Churches. The larger looking cathedral is the Greek Orthodox equivalent to St. Peter's Basilica. 

While we were in Athens we received an email from the State Department warning us of a Greek Airtraffic Controller strike that would ground flights at the airport. Not good news for our flight to Africa. In true Greek fashion, the strike was called off at the last minute. However, we had gotten an email for a flight change to Africa. Long story short- we ended up staying in Athens for 2 extra days as our departure to Africa got pushed back. 

Below are photos from around town. There are random archaeological sites in the metro stations. When they were updating the metro system for the 2004 games, they uncovered ancient aqueducts! 

With our extra time in town were able to visit the Panathenaic Stadium- the birthplace of the modern Olympic games! Read the previous post for more on that. We also visited the American Embassy in order to mail our absentee ballots. 

Greece grew on us after our 3 weeks there. It was a great ending point to our European tour. It is less developed than the other countries we have visited, and was a great place to get ready for the third world. Africa- here we come!

Here are the places we visited in Greece:

View Greece in a full screen map

Greece in Total:

Modes of transportation used: Metro, taxi, ferry, car, bus, plane

Total amount spent in Greece: $2513.13 USD

Avg.: $119.67 USD per day

*This is for 3 weeks, and we didn't pay for lodging for about a week of it. You could do it cheaper still though, as we stayed in a pretty nice hotel for most of our nights in Athens, but based on our experience there are some really nice and cheap AirBNB's available there. We also went scuba diving and spent more on travel then you would have to in order to get to some of the other islands as Skopelos was kind of far and therefore more expensive to get to.

Running in the Footsteps of Legends

While we were in Athens Cara and I had an awesome opportunity to use the track at the Panathenaic Stadium. This stadium was originally built to house games in ancient Greece, modified during the Roman times for gladiator battles, and eventually passed into ruins. When they decided to start the modern Olympics, they rebuilt the entire stadium in the late 1800s for the 1896 games. Today it is open for tourists and they have a pretty good audio guide talking about the history of the stadium and the Olympic Games. 

We had the place to ourselves. It was incredible.

Not advertised anywhere overtly is the fact that you can show up before they open up for tourists and run on the track (provided you still pay the 5 euro entry fee). Cara and I were the first people in the stadium and did some (roughly) 400 m repeats and a trip up the stairs to cap it all off. We got some great photos in the morning before anyone else joined in and also a great workout.

Quite the view from the top...

It was amazing to get to sweat in the same arena that so many other people have before us, and once again we feel truly blessed to be on this adventure!

For the record, Jeff's fastest lap was 1:26 today, and Cara's was 1:30. The fastest in the 1896 was also an American, but Thomas Burke won the gold medal in 54.2 seconds that year. 

Greece for Foodies

Before traveling to Greece, we didn’t have many expectations for Greek food. We have been pleasantly surprised by everything we have eaten here! We have had so many delicious meals, that the food deserves its own blogpost

We actually didn’t have any gyros until we had been in Greece for about a week. After that we wanted at least 1 a day!

The first gyros we got on Skopelos. At about $2.50 each, you can't go wrong!

Our favorite dish has been eggplant salad. Both of us were never fans of eggplant; apparently we just hadn’t been eating it right! There are no rules when it comes to eggplant salad. It is made differently everywhere we have ordered it. If the salad includes eggplant, you can call it eggplant salad. Two options are below, in the right photo it is the dish in the back.

The most consistent thing we have eaten is Greek salad (picture above on the right, closer dish) which, unlike eggplant salad, is pretty consistent everywhere. It is tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, a few olives, a block of feta cheese, lots of olive oil, and usually a little oregano sprinkled over it. It’s a refreshing serving of vegetables and something we order almost every time we eat out.

I (Cara)think that I like Greek food culture so much because they share my beliefs in dessert. We were treated to ‘dessert on the house’ almost every time we went out for dinner. Anything from dessert wine to Greek yogurt with honey, to cake soaked in liquor, to grapes. Or sometimes you just have to make a separate trip for an extra treat:

Lukumades in Athens - donut balls with chocolate sauce and cookies and creme ice cream.

We ate really well while on this trip, so here are a few more food photos:

My My, Here We Go Again

After an amazing time in Leonidio and taking a bus back to Athens for a night, we hopped on yet another bus and rode to Volos where we caught the ferry to the island of Skopelos. We spent 7 days (8 nights) in a wonderful apartment in Skopelos Town on the island of Skopelos. We try to stay in apartments when we can, as being able to cook for yourself (at least one meal a day) is a great way to save some money and keep the diet under control at least a little. Cara had booked this apartment a very long time ago (March? Maybe earlier…) based on the fact that Mamma Mia was filmed on this island. Supposedly she read that it isn’t super touristy and it’s the greenest/lushest Greek island too, but I’m wary that the research went past Mamma Mia haha. Cara's note: 'Skopelos' means rocky. It is the greenest of the Sporades. I did NOT book this apartment based on it's association with the movie. It was just a convenient benefit. And you're welcome because now ABBA will be stuck in your head all day. Photos of Skopelos Town:

Regardless of her research, the apartment is nice and the island has been great to us. We have tried most of the restaurants that are either recommended in guidebooks or highly rated on TripAdvisor (which we use all the time, and recommend for finding places internationally, seems more consistent than Google reviews), spent plenty of time at the beach, walked a ton, went scuba diving for the first time, and rented a four wheeler to see more of the island.

One of our last nights on the island we headed out to dinner and had planned on going back to the first restaurant we visited, as the food (mainly the pork and prune dish) was fantastic, but we walked up and found it to be closed. We definitely caught the tail end of the tourist season, and it seemed that each day another shop or restaurant was closed for the season and another tour boat wasn’t tied up at the pier anymore. Since our first choice was closed, we began wandering our way down through the windy streets of the village looking for another option. We ended up in a little square eating under a tree. The food was still great and we realized that we hadn’t had a bad meal since arriving in Greece.

We have also fallen in love with eggplant salad, which is usually either diced and sautéed or pureed eggplant with olive oil, bell peppers, and loads of garlic. Each place does it a little different, but they have all been delicious. That night the eggplant was good, but not our favorite, but the fresh (and we mean FRESH) pita that it was served with was amazing.

Fresh Pita!

We had hoped to do a sailing trip and maybe some snorkeling, but we waited too long to try to book anything and the tour boats had all closed up for the season by the time we tried. We were looking for something else to try instead and decided to give scuba diving a shot. The local company gave us a pretty good deal because it was after October 1st and I think they were just happy to have any business at all. After some basic instructions on hand signals and what all the equipment we would be using was, we drove over to a beach on the other side of town and got into the water. We had to do 3 basic tests before diving, and these were clearing the regulator, recovering our regulator if it got knocked out of our mouths, and clearing our masks of water. After that we set off to explore a rocky area and spent about 40 minutes swimming around. Cara loved it and thought it was extremely relaxing, while Jeff didn’t really enjoy any part of it. 

Another day we rented a 4 wheeler and drove all over the island. We had planned on renting scooters and touring around, but the rental companies wanted us to have motorcycle endorsements in order to get them. Instead we rented the quad and it worked out way better as we took quite a few “roads” that would have been very difficult if not impossible on scooter. We got to see nearly the entire island, passing through pretty much every other village and making quite a few stops, including the light house at the northern end of the island and the little chapel out on a rock that is in Mamma Mia. One bonus of being here past the normal tourist season is that we had the stops all to ourselves. Also, we were extremely grateful for GPS and offline Google maps, as we took all kinds of back roads/trails to get from place to place and would have been really lost without it.

We really enjoyed Skopelos, and it is very different from the other parts of Greece that we have been to. It is definitely worth the long trip out to if you are visiting this country, and a gorgeous place to see.

Random note on visiting Greece: Always be nice to your waiter/host at a restaurant. We have gotten spontaneous dessert on the house multiple times and the only thing that seems to set us apart from other tables is our smiles and desire to make conversation and learn something from the staff. Might be something small like the sweet prunes above, but its a nice touch when you don't know anyone else in town.

Oh, and how could we forget? Skopelos is also the place we got our fist gyros in Greece! And we had to try the local delicacy of Skopelos Pie (fried dough filled with cheese) 

Peloponnese Monastery

The other day on the drive to the mountain village of Kosmas, Sherry pointed out a small white dot in the cliffs. She told us that it was a monastery, accessible from a road through town. Jeff and I immediately planned on doing the hike- we need the training for Kilimanjaro!

Sherry also told us that all Greek monasteries seem to have the same story of how they were built. Let’s see if I can get this right: Workers began construction on the monastery, but every day when they returned to the jobsite, they noticed that their tools had been moved. After the mysterious tool moving happened multiple times, the workers took it as a sign from God that they were not building on the correct site. Instead, God was telling them to build the monastery on the location that the tools were moved to. Once construction started over at God’s chosen site, workers would find an icon painted by Saint Luke.

According to local information, this monastery, St. Nikolaos Sintzas Abbey, is named after a fig tree that is located in the cavern that the Abbey was built in. The fig tree was a sign that there was a sacred temple where Dionysos was raised.

It took us about 2 and a half hours to walk from the beach in Plaka to the monastery. We were first greeted by the resident goats, then walked up a few more switchbacks to reach the door of the monastery. The first door was open, so we let ourselves in. The second door was closed, so Jeff used the big brass knocker to announce ourselves.

We were let in by the monastery’s lone resident. She was an extremely sweet old nun, and invited us to sit and rest. We were extremely sweaty after sluffing it up the mountain, and I hope she couldn’t smell us. We sat with her for a few minutes and served us some sort of gelatin covered in powdered sugar. I would compare the treat to about 20 marathon running goo packets squished together and covered in powder sugar. Anyways, you never say no hospitality, especially in a monastery! She also sent us home with fresh oranges and a pomegranate!

The nun and I exchanged pleasant conversation and she said some very nice things to us. Or at least I’m assuming she was saying nice things- I didn’t understand one word. And she didn’t understand anything I said. There were a lot of hand motions involved.

View of Leonidion from the monastery. Our starting point was way on the other side of town!

View of Leonidion from the monastery. Our starting point was way on the other side of town!

Even though we couldn’t communicate with words, Jeff and I couldn’t stop smiling on our way back down the hill. For this nun, we were 1 of 2 parties that day who visited (we witnessed 1 other couple driving up the road past us as we wiped sweat from our foreheads). I think that this was our first experience where we were completely alone with someone from a different culture and we couldn’t really use our words to communicate. And it was comfortable. The world didn’t stop. Nothing bad happened. In fact- we were sent home with treats!

-Cara

Life's a Beach

We were sad to leave my (Jeff's) parents in Rome, but it is still always exciting to go to a new place so we were pumped to head to Greece. We left Rome super early in the morning, but we lost an hour coming to Greece so we ended up arriving mid-morning and by the time we got our bags, figured out where we were going, and waited for a train into Athens; it was about noon when we got to the hotel. We are very lucky that in planning this trip we have found that we either know someone or know someone who knows someone all over the world! Thank you all for sharing your friends and friends of friends with us! This was another time that came in handy. Cara’s parents have a friend that spends a lot of her time in Greece, owns a small beach house, and used to write guide books for Greece, so who better to get advice from? We are so thankful to have gotten to know Sherry while we were in Greece! She recommended the wonderful hotel we stayed at in Athens, and the great spot we went to for lunch while we were waiting for our room to be ready.

Sherry, Cara (post-swim) and Jeff on the beach in front of Sherry's place! 

We spent the night at the Attalos Hotel in Athens, and while it is slightly more expensive than we would normally book, it didn’t break the bank. Most of their rooms have balconies with a view of the Acropolis, and since Sherry had some pull as a guide book writer and put in a good word for us, we got the best room in the house for the night! We got some takeout (kebobs of course) and had dinner on our balcony and went up to the rooftop bar for a drink. A pretty good thunderstorm rolled through that night so we watched a lot of the lightening from up there too.

View from our balcony at the Hotel Attalos

The next day we hopped on a bus (warning if you visit Greece: the public bus system is pretty hectic and very strangely organized to an outsider. Once you figure out who to talk to- it’s not bad) out to Leonidio which is where Sherry lives. She had us checked into the one little hotel just up the beach from her house, and we went to lunch and dinner with her. Another pretty big storm rolled through while we were at dinner, causing the power to flicker a few times and the restaurant owners to scramble to drop awnings and close up the outside of the patio as fast as they could. Luckily, it was pretty much done when we headed back to the hotel. The next day Sherry drove us up into the mountains to see a monastery and have lunch at another village, where we tried some excellent goat.

We had a lazy day about the village and the next day we moved from the hotel into Sherry’s little beach bungalow as she was off to Santorini to celebrate her husband’s birthday. Her place was awesome and we felt we got a real Greek beach holiday experience. One day we did a long hike up to the monastery outside the village where only 1 nun is left (more on that later), and we spent most of our time at the beach or just relaxing. We frequented the same little restaurant in town many times, and if you ever find yourself at the beach in Leonidio (Plaka area), you must go to ‘Michael and Margaret.’ Margarita, the proprietress, will take care of you like family and the food is fresh and fantastic. They normally ushered us back to the kitchen upon arrival to tell us what they had cooking that day, and then sent us home with fresh fruit or vegetables!

After a great 6 days at the beach we took the bus back to Athens and spent another night at the Attalos, had some more awesome food, and finalized our transportation plans to get to Skopelos, the island where we would be spending another 7 days. A million thanks to Sherry for playing tour guide and welcoming us to Greece- we are so grateful for your hospitality and so glad we got to spend time with you!

One night while we were in town, there was a wedding. What's a wedding without fireworks?

-Jeff

Four Months to a Lack of Fitness

I have discovered something about myself. A little over 6 years of CrossFit has allowed me to feel fit for about 4 months of inconsistent and not super intense exercise. That window has just about closed now, and I’m itching to feel like I am in shape again. I probably shouldn’t have waited this long, as we are heading to Africa next week to climb Kilimanjaro, and even at our best that would likely push us to our limits. Still, better late than never as they always say!

While I have leaned out quite a bit since leaving Virginia, mostly due to not eating as much or as often, I have lost an alarming amount of muscle since we don’t lift heavy anymore. I think I have lost at least 2 inches on my quads alone based on how some of my pants have changed in the way they fit. Enough complaining and lamenting though, what am I going to do about it?

For the two weeks we have been here in Greece, we are doing our best to work, out pretty hard. While visiting the Peloponnese and staying at the beach we did a quick burner in the morning of burpees, box jumps on the wall by the beach, and flutter kicks in the morning and some sprints in the sand and squatting each other in the evening. Another day we went for a longer run along the seaside road down to the next village and back, probably about 4 miles round trip. We also did a long hike of about 5 hours round trip up to a monastery and back down to the beach.

Here are a few more of the workouts we’ve done lately:

5 rounds: 40 double unders, 30 squats, 20 pushups.

Original P90X stretch series followed by squatting each other (Jeff 6x5, Cara 6x4)

Tabata: Double Unders, Squats, Pushups, Lunges with a 100 double under cash out added as we finished by Cara. Went from feeling kinda awful to really bad.

2 hour hike across the island

Tabata plank followed by 3 rounds of 50 double unders, 30 jumping lunges and 10 burpees. Later in the same day we squatted each other, sets of 3, 5, and a max set in which we both hit ten.

I know I need to hold myself accountable, but I’m putting these goals out there so that hopefully I’ll feel more pressure to work towards them and keep myself motivated:

1.       Climb Kilimanjaro

2.       50 pushups unbroken, chest to deck, no worming or breaking at the hips

3.       Freestanding handstand for 30 seconds or more

4.       150 unbroken air squats

Hopefully I’ll put up some workouts and updates on progress about every two weeks here, but right now it’s a beautiful sunny day in Greece and I’m going to try and fix my farmers tan.