Blogs from Africa - page 3356

Beach Holiday in Egypt (Hurghada) A short breakaway during winter time to Hurghada, Egypt. We stayed 1 week in hotel Grand Resort*****, a wonderful hotel! Really 1001 nights! Due to overbooking we received an upgrade to a family suite. Top! Most of the time we did some relaxing at the pool of this great hotel. Or we went to the beach of partner hotel Siva Grand Beach****, which was also a nice hotel (outside facilities, anyway). Trip we did during this holiday: A snorkling trip to Sharm El Naga. This was nice but not that impressive as our snorkling trip to Ras Mohamed National Park last year in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. ... read more

From Benin we crossed into Nigeria and we have spent the past few days driving almost non stop to Abuja, stopping only for eating, sleeping and buying food. It was a long few days! Nigeria has been great so far, not that we've seen much. The people are awesomely friendly, especially the kids, but the adults too, shouting and waving whenever we drive past, kids jumping up and down, its great!! The kids would stop whatever they were doing and run to the side of the road, screaming and waving at us. We stopped in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, stuck in the never-ending quest for visas. Our passports visited the Sudan embassy, then Chad and Cameroon. So we had to sit around and wait. We didn't get up to much, shopping, eating out (we all ... read more

Since Accra, we have been back to paradise (beach resort - good food, beer, waves, sun, palm trees...) for a few days more R & R, then we headed out of Ghana to Togo. We only had a couple of days in Togo, we only got a transit visa on the border. We did not do a lot there, we drove along the coast rode, stopped in Lome, went round the market, artisan stalls, supermarket (olive oil and wine!), a cafe for some bissap juice (yummy), camped by the beach, swum, lazed around, and drove on to Benin. Togo was ok, Lome is a dump, crowded, hot, sweaty, dirty... A bit of a short entry, but we wanted to try and have at least one entry per country!... read more

Burkina Faso is a pretty small country and we didn't get to see a lot of it. We headed south from Ouaga through some national park (didn't see any wildlife except the usual ant and mossies) to the Ghana border. Again this was a quick crossing. Initially the border guys wanted to see us individually with our passports, but when 23 of us showed up outside his rather cramped office, he changed his mind! For those following on maps, the nearest big town is Bolga something. Ghana again appeared different from BF pretty quickly. More trees, friendlier people, the kids would jump up and down shouting and waving at us as we drove by, things unbelievably got even cheaper, and best of all, the official language is English - we could understand people and signs again! ... read more

Tunis and around The last couple of days of this journey I visited some places in and near Tunis. But before I start writing about what I saw and did then I will write about two things that happened in Tunisia that were not so fun. In 2002 Tunisia was a very nice and safe country to travel in. People were friendly and I enjoyed myself a lot. But when traveling even at the best of times things can happen that are not fun. Usually we write nothing or only very little about the moments when it sucks to travel. Here I will make an exception and write about one near robbery and one near death experience. One day in Tunis I was approached by a man who wanted to befriend me. Oh yes, I am ... read more