jean-claude van damme nice place u got here

hey kiddies,
jus about 2 leave brussels 4 the big bad massive of london.
our short stay in brussels has reintroduced us 2 first world costs (actually the euro makes the aussie $ feel pretty scummy), and reminded us that sunny days (literally only, in shallah) are over.
our hostel, from within which i now pen these words (sorry, i'm reading "the fatal shore"), was a jump of 1500% on our dahab lodgings and for a moment panic set in. it's very nice tho...


however yesterday we discovered that you can pay for a good meal in brussels and actually get what u pay 4. gastronomes rock!

also, u can actually drink belgian beer in the multiplicity of quaint pubs aropund here 4 less than u would in that overpriced belgian joint in bris city. oooh, now i feel sleepy.

catch y'all on the other side of the channel.
love, leon n ash

this one goes out to the ones we love

Hey you mob. Even ıf your pıc doesnt appear here, you know who you are. Im sick with chic flu. Its the flu only girls get which is why Leon is so sickeningly healthy. Thıs flu is making me homesick. So here are some photos of all the folks we know and love so well. You are all so damn good looking! And so youve got something to read along with these pretty pictures I may as well update you. Today I tried for the last time to get a cheque in pounds sterling so I could pay for my registration as a teacher ın Scotland. No bank here, including HSBC, wants to take my money. So it will have to wait until we reach UK. After that, Leon & I went and sat in a park. I tried to sleep & he tried to read. I desperately needed somewhere to be ill & sleepy and didnt want to impose on our friends by sneezing, coughing, wheezing & being generally completely fucking miserable and bad company in their home. I also didnt want to offend our friends who have welcomed us to stay in what little space they have by choosing to get a room in a hostel instead. So we went to the park where I tried to chill out & relax. This plan backfired dramatically when I ended up balling my eyes out because I felt so sick and so homeless. Leon came to my rescue, got me a cup of tea and a simit (Turkish bread snacks - excellent!) and then he went & found Deniz at her offıce. She escorted us straıght back to her house, gave me some paracetamol (on top of all the Nurofen+ Ive been munching) and some pseudoefodrıne (whateva) and put me to bed. Thankyou very much Deniz! I hope one day I can look after her as well as she has looked after me, twice now, in health and ın sıckness. Leon is now in the kitchen cooking up a big feed of spag bol, all these guys think he is a legend (& as we all know, he is). Burak (Denizs boyfrıend) walked ın the door from work and offered to take me to hospıtal. Im about 100% sure he was takıng the pıss. Maybe he wıll catch my flu and then I can offer to take hım to hospıtal.

ah-hah!

gotcha. we love u mıcko.

apologies for the posting cavity...

this computer sucks arse for uploading photos (and it's a bummer for skype also; pentium II? what IS that?) so hold tight for attempt no. 2 tomorrow, when attempts will be made 2 rectify this situation. i don't want 2 sound anal, but i demand the latest cheap and nasty technology.
oh, and for yr information: Unlike our recent dead sea canadian friend and a certain well known ABC journo, neither leon or ashley were invited to participate in any cavity work by the (in)security dental arsistants associated with the israeli national airline. in shallah indeed.

Back in The 'Bul

It's been a while. Sorry to all our dear readers, but we have been snowed under here in Sultanahmet. Snow is so pretty.

Although the last rambling post (the one that goes on about moses or summat) covers our last days in Dahab, it doesn't cover the football, the last supper at Seabride, our farewell to the boys (waaaaaahhhhhhh!!!), our lift back from the border to Tel Aviv, or our last days in Tel Aviv (phew). So we will have to backtrack yet again, and the story will be told, albeit jumbled and out of order. Really, how else could it be? When the camera has batteries and no helpful friendly people are hovering around distracting us or wanting to use the computer, we will put up photos etc. Probably in the next few days when we are hanging out with Deniz.

True to her name, the Recidivist has quit again. Yes, Ashley has been a non-smoker now for a whole week. Look'n good, and pulling it off with only the very occasional complaint or homicidal moodswing. What a woman. She has been enjoying the odd glass of red wine, having found 1ltr bottles available at the supermarket for a very reasonable 8YL (that's 8 yeni lira, or new lira, for the uninitiated. They came up with some new money when they heard Ash was coming back with her old lira). Ash is reading a ginormous Beatles bio that makes her wrists ache.

Leon, you ask? Well, Leon is living large in a very swish new winter coat that makes him look just like Kemal Attaturk. Women swoon in the streets as he walks past, waggling his cigar [thats no cigar- Ed.]. Seriously, it is a very nice coat. Ash too has purchased a new long black cardi with a hood, and a hot pink trackie jacket with a hood, and a hood...it was only 1C the other day and snowing hard, so we felt the need to build up our wardrobes a bit.

It is soooo wonderful to be back in Istanbul. I love it here, and happily Leon is also enamoured of the place and suggested we come live here for a while after our exit from UK. This long-term forward-thinking is unprecedented and called for a bottle of wine post-haste. Things have gone up a little in price (like, some things have actually tripled!) since I was here last, but my 5 Turkish phrases are standing me in good stead, and slowly growing. It is truly excellent to see Deniz again, she is giving us the royal treatment, arranging free tours for us to all the must-see things in Sultanahmet (Aya Sofia, Topkapi) and we are going to spend the weekend with her family, then the plan is to stay with her in Kadikoy for our last week here.

The Sultan Hostel has been very comfortable since we upgraded out of the dorm room to avoid the pervy man who was masturbating [no, not me - Ed.] and causing all the bunk beds to rattle against each other. Pervy also had a penchant for collecting people's email addresses and phone numbers. Yuck. Thankfully Pervy checked out, and soon so will we. Stay tuned.

moses was a poser

so with only two more nights of the joyously laid-back dahab to endure, the decision was made by ashley, micko and leon (dave having roots manuva-d 2 rastas-electric boogaloo; i dunno the real name, ask dave) to climb a mountain; in the dark, wee hours of the early morning; for a laugh.
after nana-naps and the best pizza in egypt were taken care of, we boarded the van at 11pm, keen for the 2 hour hoik up 2 sinai. enroute everyone else in the darkened, speeding van looked like they were getting at least the most primitive forms of sleep except me (relegated to cushion duty), but micko assures me he got none so i feel better.
after a near escape of the 50% "baksheesh" (tip) the driver was asking just 2 walk 5 metres and buy our tickets 4 us, we entered via st catherines monastery.
walking through at night, surrounded by (a fuckload of) tourist types (ooh, ain't we so superior) the consensus was to sans the monastery and head straight up the the large rock form that carries the name of the tour.
the first 100 metres of the walk was well eerie. imagine a stretch of very dark, rocky terrain(i believe the partly full moon was blotted by the big hill) silent but for the gentle breeze, with large white boulders piled along either side of the walkway. now imagine that, as yr eyes accustomise it gradually dawns on u that the huge white boulders stretching out 10 across on either side and off ahead into darkness are all enormous, dead silent...afghan camels (two humps, dahlings)! holy shit! anyone seen "the birds" here? well lemme tell u, seagulls got nothing on ships of the desert! (is a lot of camels an armada?) the bedouin, not having realised we're part of the oncoming horde, haven't given the game away with rapid fire chants of "camel ride?! camel ride?!", so we got the full benefit of their surprise tactics. in retrospect, in can't believe we couldn't SMELL that mass of camels, but we were still a little sleepy, i guess.
to save u the boredom of a blow by blow retelling of the ascent (and cos i just realised micko's stolen my thunder and added it to his last blog entry), lemme just say that climbing up a mountain in the dark with a few friends is less easy and more enjoyable than climbing down a mountain in the early daylight surrounded by mongoloid tourists (no offense to genghis and co). those big rocks sure are pretty tho...

it was definitely the highest, and the coldest i've ever been up on top (that xmas-style red nose aın't from 2 much eggnog). we got there before the hordes and paid a bedouin too much for very neccesary mattress and blanket action. the great globby mass of the milky way was splayedacross the heavens for our teeth-chattering enjoyment. then we settled in to wait for sunrise, killing time by relating stories each of us knew about u, gentle reader; how u were our favourite and always managed 2 work such magic through yr evryday life...ahhh.

by the time sunrise came the three of us were well fucking chilled and suddenly surrounded by a seething mass of goof. a small body of lunatics off to our right suddenly burst forth with the speaking-in-tongues thing that is so much a hallmark of their illness. an angular, goateed white man (u know the type - look! there he is in the hood!) burst into semi-operatic singing in a language unknown 2 me (other than the occasional hallelujah). ash shushed me several times when i tried to add my own barney gumble style version of "modern major general" to the mix. not to be outdone, a japanese man surrounded by his countryfolk up on the outlook took up the amateur-pavarotti gauntlet with his own soliloquoy. for the 20 mins previous this fella had been making regular gruff, bruce-lee-movie type grunts that seemed (to my expert eyes) to be directed towards making the sun come up beyond the horizon. the rest of us were all very grateful for his moses-like (mosaic?) effort because, sure enough, the cute little pink ball u can see in micko's previous post began its adorable ascent.
i guess when u go somewhere that most other peoplego to because of who was (supposedly) there rather than what is now there u have to expect a little divergence of philosophies. ash, micko and i were philisophically entwined in our agreement that our fingers and toes had passed on, it was too cold and crowded and time to go.
the lazy saunter back down (after we'd put some distance up and got a little blood back into yon extremities) was very akin to the pleasantly washed out feeling of having mixed intoxicants adeptly the previous evening and stayed up til dawn with charming company. pleasant.
and now home 2 bed please driver...

guest blogger - michael berkman

Hello, hello, and thanks to the eternally hospitable virgin and recidivist for inviting me onto their blog. This is only one half of 'berkman' reporting, but, as Ash has already mentioned, you can feel free to treat us as a single entity for all purposes on this trip.

Dahab. What can I say? We've been looking forward to this stop for quite a while now. Having missed the entire summer back home, a little sun, sand and pseudo-surf is a welcome treat. I have finally been able to bust out the shorts and flip-flops I've been carrying around for two months. As far as I can tell, Dahab is all about snorkelling, drinking, doing nothing, scuba diving, drinking and doing nothing. We're pretty good at all of the above after a weeks practice.

The scuba diving was a raging success. After a few days of umming and ahhing about where we would do it, who would be doing it and what size wetsuit I would need after the last couple of months of cullinary debauchery, Dave and I began in a group of four with anoither aussie, Steve, and an American, Brad (affectionately nicknamed Matt Damon - imagine the docile voice from team america). You'll all be pleased to know that neither facet of 'berkman' drowned and we are both officially qualified to don a sexy scuba outfit and blub... blub... blub... the hours away. It was all fairly routine stuff, until this morning when our instructor got us all to take off our fins underwater. This is when we got our training in moon leaping, back flipping, handstanding and some underwater break dancing. I'm convinced this is how Stanley Kubrick pulled off the moon landing video - underwater with a blue screen.

Insert 24 hour pause...
Anyway, now that I have harnessed the technology to put photos in cyberworld, here's the rest of the last day's story.

Climbing Mt Sinai seemed to me like a pretty standard activity when staying in Sinai (hey, if it's good enough for Moses, it's good enough for me), but we could never have expected the turnout that was there for the sunrise this morning. Sure, the sunrise was pretty and all, but it's hard to look past (quite literally) the hundreds of people there, many of whom were right into their chanting and halleluyahs, the faarken freezing wind blowing over the mountain, the fact tht we had to climb for two hours in the middle of the night to get there, and the intimidating number of camels and touts to fight past in the dark. All the same, when you're playing the game of tick-the-box-tourism, it's important to do these things just because. It must be said that the sunrise and the surrounding mountains in daylight were spectacular.

And just like that, Dahab has drawn to a close. 'Berkman' is about to head to the south of the country for more whirlwind touring, while the V & R are back off to yehudi land to fly out of our lives for while. Dougie, however, is staying right here and doing what you do in Dahab until it's time to head back to oz. All that's left to say is that I hope the virgin has been broken in nice and easy, and that the recidivist will continue to expunge whatever it is that keeps dragging her away from us. Now for a big night of farewell seafood and drinking...

See yez in a coupla weeks!!

the islands - blub-blub...

about a 15 minute walk up the beach to the right of where we're staying is a place known as the islands. after a bright and early breakfast with the berkman brothers we left them to their elitist diving antics and sauntered down to the aforementioned bodies of land surrounded by water...
i can see u nodding yr heads knowingly at this point, but wait: i've been d(f)ishonest! in actual fact these so -called islands are submerged bodies covered in coral reefs...oh, u knew that? well, anyway...
after my usual 5 minute tantrum about snorkel, mask, salt water in every orifice, unfashionable flippers, the fact that flippers are meant to be called fins, and my speedos being too tight, we blub-blubbed our way out into the "delicate ecosystem". some fish we saw looked like these other fish snatched off of random websites (yoink!)


a fish we didn't see was this one:

the elusive lionfish (y'know, like out of naked gun - "byootifool...an' diddly!". also hard to spot. 'parently they don' like thi coolder weether, jew knaw? ash reckons in the warm period of the year (like when she was here last) they're as prominent as the flies.
hey, saw one of these:

pretty handsome, eh? the one we saw was only a foot or so, but they get reeely fuking big, or would if people didn't keep pulling them out of the water. bad humans!
i do think i'm definitely having fish tonight, however.
hey! check back soon for a deep sea blub-blub update from a mystery diver (or two).

Desert Oasis

The weather here has been unpredictable, as you would know if you read Leon's link to the news about the sunken ferry. 3 days ago, it was superb, sunshine, flat ocean. We went snorkelling at the blue hole with the brothers Berkman. We affectionately refer to them as 'Berkmen', or just 'Berkman', and although Michael asserts that they are discrete entities sometimes things get a little hazy...

The day after our blue hole snorkel session, there was a massive storm, with thunder and lightning right on top of us. It was one of Dahab's 4 annual rainfall days. I got an electric shock off my clothesline. Then we lost power for the night. Luckily I still had a candle from Tiberius in my bag, and was able to finish reading Dan Brown's prequel to the Davinci Code. I was up to the last chapter, and needed to satisfy my curiosity and see what ridiculous heights of unreality the author could take it to for the finale. I wasn't disappointed.

The blue hole is much better than the brown hole, especially if you're diving ;-) but Leon and I have decided to forego the dive experience for some above-ground desert action. With this mission in mind, we headed out into the desert in fine weather yesterday on a 4wheel driving/hiking/climbing/sand-sucking trip. Our driver was a very experienced Bedouin man with an uncanny likeness for Snoop Doggy. He was a complete legend, taking us down wickedly snakey trails and across soft sand dunes. He had to rescue the other car in our convoy when it got bogged. He was the man.

We visited the coloured canyon, the 3rd largest canyon in the world, akin to Petra with it's swirls of iron oxide, lava trails and the signatures of wind and water written all over it. We went canyon diving, sand in our shoes, fossilised coral hanging off the top of the dry cliff faces. White canyon was different again, chalky and pristine, and as we emerged we found ourselves at the oasis (*sigh*).

The oasis was beautiful, though freezing as soon as the sun went down. We didn't really have the 'cultural experience' we'd been lead to expect. Instead of 'meeting a real Bedouin family', we met other tourists and peddlers. Yes, we are tourists, not travellers, and this is defined by our strict itinerary, and the pre-digested standard group activities we find ourselves signing up for. And that's just fine. For now. Real adventure is surely just waiting around the corner...but meanwhile this trip gave us an idea of what life is really like out in the Sinai desert.

the photos

So here are some images from our last post. Michael's new haircut (Angie, he looks fine don't worry).

Berkman sunning themselves at the Blue Hole, and a posse of no good bums returning from a secret mission where we had a near miss with Egyptian authoritah.


Ash & Leon's trip to the canyon, and some desert driving...

The Oasis...

and (from left) Ken the cool dude we met on the trip, our guide (smoking the shisha), the drivers (ours is the one with the Snoop Doggy looks, wearing a blue towel on his head) and some local Bedouin having a tea party by the fire with a girl from Sweden. It was freezing once the sun went down.