Author archive
8 August 2015
Breakfast at the hotel included what looked like a yummy beef stew. It turned out to be liver. Eeewwww! Along with coffee and tea, there were three kinds of drinking chocolate, namely Milo, Ovaltine and Cadbury’s! Tanzanians must be cocoa connoisseurs as I noticed that in other places there was more than one on offer! […]
7 August 2015
After breakfast we set off for the airport allowing plenty of time due to the traffic jam we experienced on the way in, two days ago. We go a taxi from the hotel. On the way, we confirmed our earlier observation that Toyotas rule in Tanzania. Most cars in the country are Toyotas. Just from […]
6 August 2015
Recovery Due to retiring at 2000 last night, I woke around midnight but managed to sleep till 0400 then doze till 0645. That’s nearly 11 hours of sleep compared to the usual 6 that I make do with. My body must have felt traumatised from yesterday to have needed all that recovery. Getting a taste […]
5 August 2015
Leaving Dubai We set the alarm for 0640 and had banana, yoghurt and muesli before taxiing to the airport around 0800 for our 1050 flight. We had been issued our staff travel boarding passes already online; Emirates processes these 6h before the flight unlike our own airline which does it about 1h before the flight. […]
4 August 2015
For breakfast I made muesli and yoghurt with a fruit salad from the supermarket. We taxied to the nearby Sheikh Zayed Mosque (named after the man who united the seven emirates into one country) but the route was quite circuitous due to the one-way system (and coming back wasn’t that straight forward either). It was […]
3 August 2015
Today was Kim’s big day at Ferrari World. I had as much interest in that as I have in Hello Kitty Land or Lego Land. Incidentally, Lego Land is opening up in Abu Dhabi but I think it might melt away in the 45 degC heat during summer. The hotel had a free shuttle to […]
2 August 2015
We allowed ourselves to sleep in, in order to adjust to UAE local time which will hit us tonight. That didn’t quite work as we still woke around 0715. We had breakfast at our now “regular” place and went shopping. There was little that I needed but it’s always nice to be tempted; we looked […]
1 August 2015
After breakfast, we walked out of the old city to a taxi stand in order to have better competition and bargaining power for our ride to Dakshinkali. We managed to get a price slightly lower than that asked for by the hotel’s taxi driver. The ride took about 45 minutes. Once we left the valley, […]
31 July 2015
After five nights in Kathmandu, we still hadn’t walked around Durbar Square yet. The weather was dull but dry so we made our way there after dropping laundry off (NPR50 per kg) and having breakfast. The destruction at Durbar Square was really bad. Key stupas are gone; the wooden structures have fallen leaving leaving behind […]
30 July 2015
Having experienced a taste of the monsoon yesterday afternoon, we decided to repeat our early start in case the afternoon was wet and gloomy. We taxied to Patan (Lalitpur) which we didn’t visit last time. The taxi dropped us at the north end of Durbar square and where the ticket kiosk wasn’t (it just happened […]