saleensteve

I'm in the 'backpackers paradise' town of Dahab, a little ways north of Sharm el Sheikh on the east coast of the Sinai. It's a very cute town with a seaside stroll about a kilometre long which has endless restaurants/bars/sheesha joints hanging on the oceanside and hotels/dive shops/tourist shops on the land side. It's sooo layed back, the sun is endless and the sinai mountains create a pretty funky backdrop. There are sooooo many dive outfits here it's rediculous, I just went with the one in the hostel i'm staying in which by the way is $4 a night to stay at. The cook at the restaurant there always has a cool dinner going, think tonight is shark steaks, and charges unbeatable prices for the budget minded travellers staying at the hostel. I did a warm ... read more

Been a whirlwind of a couple days. Yesterday a few of us from the hostel hooked up a driver for the day and toured Giza and the great pyramids, then went to a couple other locations with pyramids including one which you can still go down to the burial chambers. It was tough going, small tunnel at a steep angle doubled over trying not to hit my head too often for a couple hundred feet until you are in the middle of the pyramid. Felt kinda creepy and cool at the same time. Boiling hot inside it and my quads were killing me. Spent most of the evening walking along the nile until sunset, then the rest of the evening smoking shisha and drinking tea until my 9 pm train to Aswan. Ugh. 12 hour train ... read more

Well, that sure was a wirlwind trip. I can't believe it;s pretty much over, one more day to play around in Lima before a midnight trip to the airport. I spent the past few days in Puerto Maldonado, a little ramshackle and hectic jungle town in the south east of peru. It was sure nice to be back in the rainforest, forgot how damn hot it is in there, three showers a day and you still felt gross. I did a couple day trips into some of the reserves along the river. Saw among other things, way more monkeys than I thought, they were everywhere, big and small, some of them even started throwing stuff at us from the trees. We went fishing for pirhanna's and managed to collect enough for a nice lunch, and ... read more

So, the famed Inca Trail was all booked up for the month and next, we took a look at the alternative trips, and decided in the end to just make our own Inca Trail adventure. Starting in Cusco in the early morning we grabbed a collectivo (one of those minivans they pack full of locals) to the town of Pisaq in the Sacred Valley. There they had a great sunday market going on and a huge tourist market you could easily get lost in (which we mostly avoided). Climbing up the hill behind the market are a whole whack of Inca ruins that we were able to see once the ticket guy realized the peruvian entrance prices were a bit rediculous and gave us a 3 for 1 offer. It was quite a hike to ... read more

Wow, so, ok, it´s been a few days since i´ve found a computer that doesn´t crash when you hit the enter button. It´s been a great weekend, we took that overnight bus to Araquipa, a really nice city, friendly people, very clean, lots to see, but ultimately, our main goal was to find a good company to take us on a Colca canyon trek. It worked out perfectly, and we were set for a 3:30 am pick up the next day. The colca canyon was absolutely fabulous, it would be hard to describe in words the beauty of it. There was a little bit of adjusting to the altitude (5000 meters), but our trek actually took us to the bottom of the canyon a couple thousand meters below. The first night we stayed in a little ... read more