Problematic wedgies!
Things have warmed up a bit here. The difference between -30 and -12 I have learnt, is quite a bit. At -30 I need a double layer of thermals and socks while at -12 a single layer is fine. One thing I did notice with double thermals is that it is almost impossible to discretely clear even a mild wedgie!
Bring on spring!!!
There was a heart-stopping moment for about a dozen morning commuters last Tuesday in a pedestrian underpass in central Minsk, Belarus. Shortly after 10am the peak hour rush was in frozen animation for several seconds while a projectile about the size of a 1/2 litre thermos flask ricocheted loudly in different directions down into the underpass. The object came to rest near 8-10 startled people. One bystander later said it was like a slow motion scene from an action movie!
Later in the day a slightly embarrassed expatriate worker came forward claiming that it was actually a Thermos knocked out of his backback bottle holder by the hand railing as he was maneuvering his bicycle down the ramp. He added that the thermos survived the heavy fall and still works fine even with a few dents, scratches and a slightly oval shape.
Bloddy Ozzies!
I don’t know what happened but I just saw this assignment topic on CNN called ‘Eye on Azerbaijan’. With my two years of experience way behind me in the 90′s I thought I’d go through a few of my old photos to see if there were any worth sharing. What a trip down memory lane that was sorting through to find something decent to post. Anyway, I got some together and posted my first ever iReport at CNN. It ended up being the 2nd most read post in the assignment series right behind one called ’10 surprises about Azerbaijan’ and with a title like that of course it’s gunna get clicked!
Check out my Eye on Azerbaijan – An Expat’s Life
More and more people are beginning to be able to support themselves from income from their personal web presences. Photography is one area that has recently stood out as one that can generate income for all levels of photographers. While I’m still struggling to monetize some of my better images others with only a few years in the photography business are making an excellent living while really taking the time to actually live! One such person is Trey Ratcliff who with only a few years taking photos his site Stuck in Customs has 150,000 of hits per day on his photos! Yes per day! Monetizing that sort of traffic to some extent can’t be difficult but the way Trey has gone about it is truly admirable. His doesn’t accept paid advertising, he doesn’t endorse products and doesn’t do contract photo shoots. All he does is provide plenty of free content, personally interacts with his massive online community and then sells his stuff at reasonable prices. Go check out what he has for you!
With a long dreary three day weekend on the weather charts for Minsk and the only hope for some sunshine being a little cloud seeding by the government for the May 9th celebrations I thought I might pop over to Warsaw in Poland for a looksee. The 8.40pm train looked great getting me in at about 6am. As usual I cut things a bit fine before travelling and attempting to purchase my ticket 15mins before the train didn’t pan out so well. Negotiating my way to the front of the line with 5mins to spare the cashier said “you have to buy that ticket from the international cashier” pointing towards other windows with zillions of people waiting. Weighing up pushing my luck any further I decided I’ll settle for a dreary weekend and headed home.
While pottering around feeding on the last of the pelimeni and sour cream, surfing the internet and chatting on Skype with home (who btw thought it was hilarious that I missed my train) I noticed that there was one more train to Warsaw. This time it was just after midnight arriving at 8ish in the morning. With the trip back on again, bag still packed and family taking even more piss out of me I flew out the door with yet again time pressure to not miss my second train for the day.
My experience from earlier in the evening I managed to go directly to the correct cashier in the adjacent building to the main terminal (important information for catching a train from Minsk to Warsaw) where this time there was no line at all. Just one single cashier dimly lit in her booth alone in the huge building. Great I thought as I approached her again with only about 15mins to spare. Of course nothing is that simple in Russia or even Belorussia. It was her break!!! The dreaded ‘technichki perireef’ sign clearly noted on her window that from 1155pm to 0010 she was on technical break and not going to serve me. She did manage to tell me that there would still be plenty of time after her break and before the train to purchase the tickets and indeed there was, I finally made it.
Train wasn’t the newest but it was nice enough. Strange design almost European in design with three seats facing a wall with a small sink in the corner. The bottom row of seats turns into a bed as to be expected and the top bunk was permanently out. I didn’t mind the configuration as I didn’t have any surprise travel buddies to accommodate for my third train ride in a row. The one unusual, obviously soviet inclusion that I did get a kick out of was the apparent vanity cabinet above the sink. Upon opening it I found as to be expected in such a cabinet a mirror and a shaving outlet which came in handy for charging the notebook. The kicker was the neatly arranged and snugly clipped in vodka decanter and three shot glasses obviously carefully thought through to match the number of seats in the compartment.
The ride was pretty uneventful just the border crossing was a bit of a pain. It takes a good two hours with customs and immigration on both sides pretty intense as you could fairly expect crossing from the Russia to Europe. The worst is the 45mins of jolting and banging as they do some pretty serious work to get the wheels the right gauge for the tracks on the other side. I managed to get about three hours sleep after doing some urgent work as is usually the case as I head anywhere for days off or vacations.
More photos from a ‘Weekend in Warsaw’ can be found here.
Arriving at 8am Warsaw time I headed out of the terminal to the nearest 5* hotel. Not to stay of course, just to
If you happen to be traveling from Monterrey, Mexico to Moscow, Russia in low season and you have a US visa DO fly Delta via Atlanta. The small plane we had to Atlanta was very new, so smooth and far from full, I thought we were in a private jet. Then on the 767 to Moscow I had at least 15 seats to myself which meant I could catch the Atlanta city views leaving, have dinner watching the movie (which was somewhat fittingly, Greed is Good) from a comfortable seat, nap in the center three seats, have breakfast watching the sunrise over the artic somewhere and then see the Moscow city sights on the way in. Really very good and probably even better than business class. I couldn’t stop thinking how nice it would have been with all the family there too! Richard would have loved it, James would have explored the whole cabin, plenty of room for Ryan to sleep, Babuliya could have made nice beds for everyone out of the abundant pillows and blankets and while they are all happy Mum and Dad were certainly going to be happy.
After so many days getting up before 6am today it would have been just nice to stay in bed for a while and catch the later flight. Given that tomorrow is the beginning of the school week there was also a full week ahead of early starts. Oh well I guess the good thing about an early flight is arriving home early! This proved to be spot on. Our flights were on time and ok. We got stuffed in the last row from Bogota to Monterrey with nowhere to recline seats to escape from the guy in-front’s reclined seat so it wasn’t all that comfortable.
With the prospect of ZERO food at home we made use of our 3 hours in Mexico City to have a Carls J. burger. It was surprisingly good actually. The taxi was easy to catch as usual from Monterrey airport to home and we found the doors still locked, no forced entry, no water leaks, no gas leaks and as expected, ZERO food. A quick trip to 7-11 to get some milk was all that I could face and enough to get us through the night and off to school in the morning.
More showers and everyone crashed out by 8.30pm. What a great week!
Well the mozzie net wasn’t needed. As it turned out the only mozzie in the room took plenty of blood from me while we were having dinner earlier. The room without the fan after midnight was also pretty cool and when the now regular thunderstorm kicked in around 3am it was really nice. Again the rain continued well into the morning enough to wet us but not soak us on the way to the boat. While we were waiting on the jetty we were attacked by a vicious mob, flock, pack, whatever they are called of mozzies. They were tiny but fast and left a huge welt the size of a dime after they were done.
Although we had 11am seats booked for the return boat to Leticia we took the 7am boat after yesterday’s delay we decided better to make sure we were in time for our flight otherwise we would also miss our connection to Mexicio city in the morning and get hit with huge expenses for late bookings and cancelations. It took the lady on the boat a few minutes chatting with their base to accept our tickets but she did so we were set.
The boat was a lot bigger than the one we arrived on with 48 seats now and only about 15 people travelling. Most of the tourists who had arrived with us were also leaving, probably they also got hungry with the restaurant closed! Funny on the boat there is a big sign saying to use the life jackets which are hung over every seat but in reality they just add extra padding to the back of the seat or the odd person uses them for a little wind protection. This was evident by the rather large spider making her home between one of the jackets and the seat infront.
Sights along the river were of course excellent. . .
We arrived in the metropolis of Leticia just after 9.30 and made the trek through the now very muddy and slippery trail which was continuing to become
Rain continuing was a bit worrying with our 3k walk out of the park. We scoffed breakfast pretty quick, wrapped our packs in plastic and headded out. Once we got going under the canopy the rain was less than 1/4 of what it was out in the open, really quite amazing. This made for an easy walk listening to the sounds of the very alive jungle.
Just over half way we came accross about 15 of the students from the main group who had been camping out in hamocks overnight. They were just packing up camp having a cup of tea when we passed by. They had obviously not had a good nights sleep by the looks of thier faces and drenched clothes. A group the night before had been complaining about the cold night they spent in the top of the tree but these guys definately suffered worse.
We had about an hour to wait for the boat and in this time all the students had made it to the boat ramp as well including the ones who had camped out. Their boats arrived before ours but they were still busy passing their packs down the very slippery and steep river bank as ours arrived. Most of them had found good footholds on the bank so helped us down too.
Our boat was packed full with us taking the last two seats one of which wasn’t actually a seat but part of the isle. We made a couple of stops along the way to Puente Nior one of which was to drop off a lady aparently just on the muddy banks. There was some conversation about which side of a small inlet to drop her off and it looked like the boat driver wouldn’t take her to the side that she needed. I’m guessing she had trouble carying all her stuff much further than she had planned.
Arriving at Puente Nior it looked a little more advanced than the other places we stopped but not too much. A little kid asked us where we were staying and
Roberto our guide woke us as promised at 5.30am but we were already half awake after an alarm of one of the teachers who was on an overnight excursion phone alarm went off at 4am. It only stopped about 15 minutes later when another teacher who realized what it was called the phone.
We have a full card today with Monkeys first, breakfast, canopy tour, lunch, fishing, dinner.
Monkeys I thought was going to be a bit ho-hum, tourists feeding monkeys type trip but actually it was very cool. We paddled (well at least Roberto paddled) across the lagoon in deathly still waters stopping at an overhanging mangrove type tree. A few monkey calls later and the little fullas came from everywhere. The jump from the tree to the closest point in the canoe was me so I was the landing pad for 1/2 a dozen hungry monkeys.
We fed them small bananas which they helped themselves to while posing for photos with us. They were pretty wild jumping skittishly at any small move with a limb that didn’t contain a banana but not aggressive at all. Richard got a little scratch but then he should have given over the last of the banana and it probably wouldn’t have happened!
Breaky was bread, watermelon, pineapple, eggs (which we didn’t try) and round bread things that Richard tried but they were really hard and not edible. Once it was done we headed out for our tree climb which was exhausting but excellent. Richard made it about 10m up then got hauled the rest of the way by the guys while I was on the other rig that didn’t have that luxury option so I had to muscle to the top. Pity I didn’t have more muscle because it was 38m up in the hot, hot jungle and at about the 20m mark the sun was on me and it got doubly hard. I think I lost about 3kg which was all collected in my shirt and baggies. I was completely soaked through, what a workout! We had a 10min rest at the top to take in the jungle canopy and then zip line to a nearby tree (about 80m) and then abseil down. Really excellent and a must do even if it isn’t included in the park or resort fees. 50,000 pesos we paid, I hope this was what I should have paid! 
After this it was lunch time with the schoolies. We lined up for rice, fish, beef, carrots, beetroot (a bit of a pattern forming here) and some deep fried corn tortillas. Nice all up.
We started the afternoon with a fishing trip which got cut short because somebody ‘didn’t go before we left.’
Quick breaky today to met the morning taxi by 9am. Internet was the worst it has been today. Hotel staff said it was unusual but I didn’t believe them!
We arrived at the Airis Counter in plenty of time but they sent us to the cashier to verify the cc details. This is where the dramas started. There was one cashier and she was working with one arm, the other one in a sling. By the time we were one person away from the front of the line some cow pushed in saying she just needed to pay for her tickets and that she had made the liner earlier in the day. Myself and one guy behind became a bit vocal but it didn’t help much, the one armed girl still kept helping her. Finally it was our turn and we got what seemed to be halfway through and the power went off in the entire airport. They didn’t stay off long but the systems took ages to start up again. By the time we were done they rushed us to the web check-in counter and told us to run to the gate.
The flight was jam packed but good it was just two hours long. Richard was dissapointed anyway because by the time the food service started we learnt that none of it was for free and also didn’t look appetizing at all. Lucky we had our muesli bars and water with us.
Arriving in Leticia was reminiscent of arriving in Christmas Island with a tiny little arrival hall. Tourists were separated from the locals and had to pay 17,500 pesos each which is something that i didn’t read about before we came. No big drama, that was coming because I’d forgotten the telephone number in Bogota of the guy we were supposed to call to meet us. Some guy helped us in the end saying there is an office for our resort in town so we took a cab and waited for siesta to be over to make some progress. While we waited we tried to use the Internet at a phone station across the road but after 7mins, 500 pesos I only managed to get three pages open and none of them had the phone number that I had found in Monterrey before leaving.
