ScottMcD
Scott McDonald Joined: July 23rd 2008
Logged in: September 1st 2011
Logged in: September 1st 2011
Travel Blog Posts
Cape of Good Hope
Well, as per usual it’s taken me awhile to post this blog, in this case though I knew this would be the final one and it was actually a little difficult for me to come to terms with this fact as I really didn’t want the trip to end. (Also I left the SD card with all my photos in the Bodrum Hilton and just got them back!) Having started back in Shanghai in May it took me ten months to make it to the Cape of Good Hope. Along the way I had great adventures and met many interesting and wonderful people…I can’t wait to get out and do the next one! ... read more
Blue Whale Skull
Namibia, named after the oldest geological desert in the world- the Namib Desert, lies just north of South Africa. It was and Administered area of SA until 1988 when it won independence. We spent 8 days touring the south and Skeleton Coast of the country. The shoreline draws it name from the numerous bleached whale and seal bones that can be found on the beach. The coast is also notorious for shipwrecks and a number of rusting hulls can be seen on the beach or in the shallow breakwater.... read more
Photo 4
For the holidays Stephanie flew out from Hong Kong and met me in Johannesburg where we spent a couple of days touring the city before headed to Simbambili private reserve on boarder of Kruger national park for a few days of safari. Simbambili is famous for its leopards and we saw plenty!... read more
Photo 8
After Tunisia I flew down to Tanzania for a two week safari with National Geographic. The journey started just west of Mt Kilimanjaro in the town of Arusha. We then toured through the famous Ngorongoro Crater. This 3 million year old crater is a World Heritage Site and represents the largest unbroken ancient caldera in the world. It is often referred to as “Africa’s Garden of Eden” - it exists as it only little isolated ecosystem with thousands of wild animals, including lions, elephants, wildebeests, zebras, rhinos, gazelles and buffaloes. I was shocked at how many animals we saw in the crater and how close we could actually get to them. Ngorongoro in no way prepared me though for 100,000’s of wildebeest we would see two days latter when drove north through the Serengeti plain in ... read more
Ruins of ancient Carthage
After my brief stop over in Europe I headed to Tunisia to visit the ancient city of Carthage. According to Roman legend Carthage was founded by Queen Dido in 814BC. For those you up on your Virgil you may remember her as the queen who gave refuge to Aeneas and his men upon their recent escape following the fall of Troy. Aeneas and Dido fell in love but alas the god Mercury reminded Aeneas that his mission was to move on and found a great city (which would become Rome). Dido heart broken, killed herself by falling on Aeneas sword, but not before she prophesized an eternal conflict between her people and Aeneas’s. Carthage was the center of the Phoenician empire and much strife there was between Rome and Carthage. The first Punic war which lasted ... read more
Beach In Sardina
I’ve come to the realization I’m really not a very good blogger. After all the whole idea behind bloging is to produce quick, relevant, little personal insights or observations and I think the expected thought to online blog publication time standard is essentially “real-time”. I’m sitting Arusha Tanzania as write this right now and I’m afraid the last two sentences, and this one, and maybe the next few, are the first sentences I will be blogging that meet this defacto time standard. I’d feel guilty about this, but F it- I’m on holiday. So here I will not try and catch you all up on the last 47 days! After Greece I flew Milan for a few days and then to Sardinia where I did a couple of days of diving off the coast of Gallura ... read more
Me an the crew
In late October I headed over to Morocco to do a 10 day Mt biking trip with Saddle Skedaddle through the Atlas mountains. I flew into Casablanca from Milan a couple of days earlier and figured I do a little exploring around. I had this naive kind of romantic or exotic Humphrey Bogart Lauran Bacall expectation for Casablanca but quickly discovered it to be pretty much just a big, and dare I say ugly, industrial port city. So I bailed and headed to Marrakech. It was great biking trip with anther fantastic group of riders. We rode through lots of little villages where as soon as the little kids saw us coming they would run down to road and scream “bon jour, bon jour” and want slap our hands as we rode by. After the trip ... read more
Lillian Preparatory School
Next I headed to Sierra Leone where my foundation (cerescf.org) is founding a school improvement program being run by LemonAid (www.lemonaidfund.org) . LemonAid was created 10 years ago by Nancy Peddle and has done tremendous work in SL. Nancy is a unflagging woman with an upbeat attitude and nearly limitless patience…and it’s patience that’s needed in abundance to survive in SL, after 15 years of civil war it exists as one of the poorest countries in the world. Basic infrastructure, power, roads, etc just really don’t exist to any manageable level- power outside the city center is rationed out, some nights you get a couple of hours…most nights not. We visited all ten schools where Ceres is founding improvement projects, improvements which range from replacing roof sand building secure library rooms, to building essentially new schools ... read more
Me and the boys
After Italy I backtracked to Greece and did a 5 day mt. biking trip around mount Olympus which is in the Macedonian area of northern Greece. The trip itinerary promised lots of sunshine and warm clear days…lets just say I happy I brought my rain gear along. Joining me on trip was a great group of four guys from the UK and Ireland. After the “ice” biking I went to Athens for a couple of days of sightseeing and then to beautiful Santorini, where I received all the sun and more I’d been promised in Macedonia, for a four days of diving!... read more
Portofino
Sun, wine, blue seas, wine, rolling hills of green, and wine. Other than the time Bruno screwed up hotel our reservation in Chamonix a couple of years back, the town was totally booked up and we had to drive to Italy for the night to sleep, this was my first real trip to Italy and I love it. I’m ready to start taking Italian lessons and buy a whole new wardrobe of super tight clothes! I arrived in Rome where Stephanie joined me and for the next two weeks we toured from Venice to Florence to Santa Margarita, Portofino, and the south of Tuscany. The pictures say more than I ever could…... read more
