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Saladman posted:Got my visa for Algeria today, which got approved after something like 10 business days of processing time, exactly as they said when I dropped off the application. Everything was very much on time and efficient, I didn’t spend more than 5 minutes in the consulate either time. A guy in front of my deposited his passport for a tourist visa and was told he could get it back this afternoon; not sure if my 10 days is because I’m a US passport holder, or if that visa liberalization that just hit in the last two weeks also means consulates can now directly issue tourist visas without having to contact Algiers. If it’s a half day turnaround generally, that would be huge… or if the entire process could be done by mail, which maybe is the case for the US and larger countries, but not here — I asked, albeit a couple months ago. I've been to Algeria twice if you have any questions/want any suggestions. First time I did Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Ghardaia by plane. Second time I rented a car and drove from Algiers to Annaba, stopping at Setif, Batna, and Constantine again. Fantastic trip and you'll have the whole country to yourself.
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Jan 26, 2023 18:50
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Ramms+ein posted:I've been to Algeria twice if you have any questions/want any suggestions. First time I did Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Ghardaia by plane. Second time I rented a car and drove from Algiers to Annaba, stopping at Setif, Batna, and Constantine again. Fantastic trip and you'll have the whole country to yourself. Awesome! I was not expecting to find anyone who has actually been around the country at all, anywhere -- not just in this thread. We just bought the tickets for the 22 days my visa is valid. Our current plan is this, which is moderately fixed, in that we have to go to Skikda and to Darguina, where we're each spending one night with friends' parents. We're also definitely doing a 6D/5N tour to Djanet, and for the north we are going to rent a car and drive around, and then probably 2 or 3 full days in Algiers itself to bookend the trip.  Anything you found particularly interesting that wasn't on the very short list of Things To Do in Northern Algeria, which is pretty limited to: (A) Timgad, (B) Djemila, (C) Constantine, (D) Algiers - quite a bit of detail here - and (E) Tipaza? The only other thing I could find that was a specific detail that I'd really like to do is the monkey peninsula in Bejaia (Cap Carbon / Gouraya Park). Beyond those five specific things, plus the tour to Djanet, our idea was kind of just to drive and walk around and see what we stumble across. We're big fans of landscapes and interactive ruins, with interactive meaning where it kind of blurs the lines between urbexing and traditional ruins tourism. Also a big fan of restaurants or cafes that have good views. We like good food but we've been told not to expect good food, except maybe in Algiers, so we'd settle with bad food with a good view. Even that seems kind of hard to find online and we'll probably have better luck scouting out in person. We're also fit and would be into day hikes, but trails seem generally not so well-developed except in a handful of places like Gouraya park and possibly Taza National Park. We're mostly going just for the general atmosphere, no real expectations. We've been all over Tunisia and have been around most of the Mediterranean from Spain to Egypt, except obviously not the Syrian part, so scenery-wise I don't think it will be surprising, but we will love it anyway. E: Also Mobby, are you on a ... Ukrainian passport? Yeah the visa process can be a pain in the rear end for people from poorer countries. Algeria is seemingly doing it entirely out of reciprocity spite, which I guess is good for national pride, but not much good for anything else. At least do it like Bolivia does, where they charge you a crazy amount but you still get a visa on arrival and don't have to deal with the paperwork. Then you're getting money but without actually stifling travel. This is the fifth visa I've had to apply for, but two were immigrant visas (Switzerland, Germany). The other three were China, Cameroon, and now Algeria. China was all done by mail, Cameroon was walk-in, deposit documents, pick up visa the same afternoon. E2: I have noticed also that there is a lot of misleading information about "visa required". Like Cuba supposedly is a "visa required" country, but in reality it is issued on arrival to everyone. Similar for US citizens for Bolivia, Wikipedia lists it as "visa required" but really you just electronically submit documents online and then get a visa on arrival, so it's essentially eVisa. I guess there are also weird cases like Ethiopia where you get a VoA in Addis airport, but any other port of entry requires a visa in advance from a consulate/embassy. Also someone seems to have defaced the visa requirements page for US citizens wiki page, showing Cuba as "travel ban imposed by the US federal government" which is... not accurate at all. Saladman fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 19:49
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The Gambia: The Final Chapter The next part of the trip was getting to Sanyang to chill for a few days before flying back out. This involved catching a ride to The Turntable, then Tanji, then Sanyang, and finally walking to the beach, though if you're more patient, there are also minubuses available at certain times. I broke my phone during one of these trips, the screen probably got whacked on the edge while it was in the pocket, so the bottom 2/3rds didn't work. This really sucked and it's still in service lmao. Sanyang is the town you can see on the map, and the actual beach is like 30 minutes walk down a dirt road. There's a small fishing village at the end of it with a fish market and allegedly some bars and restaurants which I haven't visited, and a shitload of fishing boats  Unlike the beaches in the Serrekunda area in the north, there aren't any big resorts here and it's either single floor motel type accommodation or bungalow or tents. I did book one of the tents but had to change it because of the Dakar diversion, and later my new dates were full. The place I ended up in, at the bottom here, had only like 5 rooms total so it was very quiet and relaxed.      There were a few things that show up on recommended PoI that I left for the last day, as my flight was at 1am. The Abuko reserve and Lamin lodge, which were both near the airport. You can get a minibus at the Serrekunda market:  The Abuko reserve isn't huge and you can walk through it in a few hours. There are some monkeys, lizards and birbs just running around, and a giant turtle and hyenas in enclosures. Not worth a special trip but if you have some time before the flight, no reason not to check it out.    The Lamin lodge is... a lodge on the river just opposite the reserve, but you have to go through a pretty sprawling village to get to it. It seems to be a popular spot for fancy sailboats to park. There's another spot just nearby with local fishing and tour boats and some bars/restaurants. The Lamin lodge is just over the bridge on the right side of the third shot here    Then I walked back to Birkama Highway and caught another ghelle-ghelle in the direction of the airport. Just tell them to stop when you get close to the intersection. Since the flight was at 1am and it was still like 8pm, I was going to walk the 30 minutes to the terminal, but a taxi that was on the way to pick someone up pulled over and gave me a ride. You need to pay  to leave, and it's better in Dalasi due to the exchange rate. There is an ATM and two exchange places at the far corner in the shot below, but the rates suck compared to the city. There are some restaurants and free wifi on the second floor, where the last photo is taken from. There's also a bar with some snacks in the waiting area after the customs.   That concludes the trip, the flight to Lisbon was uneventful but unpleasant because you depart after 1am, then they bring out some "breakfast" an hour into the flight so it's really weird and I got no sleep as usual. mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 18:27
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Gonna just shamelessly double-post to keep the non-trip stuff separate. I updated the OP with links to The Gambia overview and trip posts. Just saw this extreme take on a capsule hotel in Dahab:  I'm a cheap bastard but this might be too much lol. Has anyone been to Sharm El-Sheikh? I have a trip coming up at the end of February but no idea where is a good area to stay. I've been to Dahab before but Sharm is relatively huge. Saladman posted:E: Also Mobby, are you on a ... Ukrainian passport? Yeah the visa process can be a pain in the rear end for people from poorer countries. Algeria is seemingly doing it entirely out of reciprocity spite, which I guess is good for national pride, but not much good for anything else. At least do it like Bolivia does, where they charge you a crazy amount but you still get a visa on arrival and don't have to deal with the paperwork. Then you're getting money but without actually stifling travel. This is the fifth visa I've had to apply for, but two were immigrant visas (Switzerland, Germany). The other three were China, Cameroon, and now Algeria. China was all done by mail, Cameroon was walk-in, deposit documents, pick up visa the same afternoon.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:40
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mobby_6kl posted:I'm a cheap bastard but this might be too much lol. Has anyone been to Sharm El-Sheikh? I have a trip coming up at the end of February but no idea where is a good area to stay. I've been to Dahab before but Sharm is relatively huge. I'm sorry, sir, but I think you're lost. The Asia thread is over there. *points*. Wait, actually we don't even have a West or Central or South Asia thread. More seriously: no idea. I've been over most of Egypt, but not to Sinai. The only thing I know is my wife's friends in Cairo preferred Dahab since there's an actual town there. There's not actually any city in Sharm el Sheik, it's just a really long chain of resorts. That can be totally fine or potentially even preferable if all you want to do is dive and eat in your hotel's restaurant and tan. In any case it's not like Dahab is an amazing cultural experience. Just pick a resort hotel that you want to stay in, and don't expect to go anywhere except that hotel. I don't mean to sound judgey about it, I'd love that for like 4 days or so and I never really quite understood why people liked Dahab for being "more authentic". It's not like anyone in the universe would go to Sinai to experience Egyptian culture, with the exception of Saint Catherine's, like if someone said they were going to a Buffalo Grill while on vacation in France, because it's "more authentic" than going to McDonalds. But, not speaking from personal experience.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:17
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Saladman posted:I'm sorry, sir, but I think you're lost. The Asia thread is over there. *points*.  We only have a Southeast Asia thread which is really the Thailand thread. I could start a Central Asia thread but I've only been to one country. I was in Dahab for a few days on a trip from Eilat, and it does have like a small town feel to it, even if it's not like authentic culturally or whatever. Since my trip to Roatan was canceled I mainly wanted to do some diving so the choice of hotel is probably not that important. Could do a few days in Sharm and a few in Dahab even.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:35
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mobby_6kl posted:I was in Dahab for a few days on a trip from Eilat, and it does have like a small town feel to it, even if it's not like authentic culturally or whatever. Since my trip to Roatan was canceled I mainly wanted to do some diving so the choice of hotel is probably not that important. Could do a few days in Sharm and a few in Dahab even. The diving is supposed to be way better at Sharm, but I guess you already know if you like Dahab. We dived at Aqaba and I thought it was pretty meh, although the sunken ship and tank and the incredibly large number of lion fish were cool / scary. I've heard the further south you go the better it gets though. I'm sure the diving at NEOM will be amazing :eyeroll_emoji.jpg: Ramms+ein posted:I've been to Algeria twice if you have any questions/want any suggestions. First time I did Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Ghardaia by plane. Second time I rented a car and drove from Algiers to Annaba, stopping at Setif, Batna, and Constantine again. Fantastic trip and you'll have the whole country to yourself. Still curious to hear what you did and what you liked, if me double-quoting your post gets it better coverage. I know a lot of Algerians, many of whom were born and raised there, all of whom know gently caress-all about anything in Algeria. On that note I have noticed that the upper middle and upper class of middle income countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Panama, Indonesia, etc., increasingly seem to put more emphasis on visiting their own countries, or at least more than I remember 15 years ago when it was all about going to Paris and Rome and ew why would I go to Tabarka or Bocas that's for weird backpackers and for the local lower-middle / middle class. Not that anyone said that out loud, but when asking people from these countries about what to see there, they knew way more about France or Italy than they knew about the place where they were born and went to school until age 18 or 22 and to which they go back for a couple weeks almost every year. Anyway, back on subject, that trend of recognizing that your poor-ish home country has cool stuff too apparently hasn't yet gotten to Algeria. My history and my wife's means we know a lot of the top 5-10%-ers from poor-ish countries (e.g. from working in the UN), so this is all anecdotal but it's a pretty decent sample size. That comment is probably not so relevant for actually poor countries like most of sub-Saharan Africa. If I were a top 2%-er from like, Niger, I probably wouldn't know anything outside of Niamey either.
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Jan 31, 2023 15:16
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Saladman posted:On that note I have noticed that the upper middle and upper class of middle income countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Panama, Indonesia, etc., increasingly seem to put more emphasis on visiting their own countries, or at least more than I remember 15 years ago when it was all about going to Paris and Rome and ew why would I go to Tabarka or Bocas that's for weird backpackers and for the local lower-middle / middle class. Not that anyone said that out loud, but when asking people from these countries about what to see there, they knew way more about France or Italy than they knew about the place where they were born and went to school until age 18 or 22 and to which they go back for a couple weeks almost every year. Anyway, back on subject, that trend of recognizing that your poor-ish home country has cool stuff too apparently hasn't yet gotten to Algeria. My history and my wife's means we know a lot of the top 5-10%-ers from poor-ish countries (e.g. from working in the UN), so this is all anecdotal but it's a pretty decent sample size. To be honest, I think that's more of a covid change than anything else. A lot of people in those countries still have the means and resources and inclination to travel, but thanks to fluctuating border controls, opaque vaccine/testing requirements, and sky-high flight prices a domestic holiday suddenly becomes a lot more appealing. I know that down here in Oz the domestic industry has boomed since we literally couldn't leave the country for 2+ years. I noticed it when we spent a couple of months in Mexico early last year, and again when we did three months across South America in southern winter as well - the overwhelming majority of tourists (even at places like Rio and Cancun) are domestic, rather than international. I just got back from a trip to New Zealand and it's really noticeable there - international travel hasn't really returned, and they don't have a big domestic tourism market. So everywhere is surprisingly quiet.
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Feb 9, 2023 07:29
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Saladman posted:The diving is supposed to be way better at Sharm, but I guess you already know if you like Dahab. We dived at Aqaba and I thought it was pretty meh, although the sunken ship and tank and the incredibly large number of lion fish were cool / scary. I've heard the further south you go the better it gets though. I'm sure the diving at NEOM will be amazing :eyeroll_emoji.jpg: As someone kind falling into that group I feel it's down to a few factors:
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Feb 20, 2023 11:21
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We made it to Algiers today. Can already tell that our independent road trip part of this trip is going to be quite an experience. We fly to Djanet for a week on Tuesday with a guide (mandatory for all), then we have two weeks driving around the north. We got "randomly" bumped to business class on the flight in, which now makes me 3/3 for getting bumped to business class on flights to closed African countries where I’m like the only Westerner on the flight (Zürich - Douala - Yaoundé; Lisbon - Luanda; now Algiers). I think I was actually the only non North African on the entire flight today. After landing we spent 30 minutes in the passport queue, only to be told we needed a landing card. My wife had asked when we got in the line but the guy said we didn’t need them. Turns out Algerians don’t need them, and asking in Darja meant the guy assumed we were both Algerian, I guess, not that more than 1/1000 Algerians look like me. Then we got the boarding card, the staff changed at that exact moment, and they closed down the line we were in because it was the consular line and it shouldn’t have been open before. So, back to the queue of another line for another half hour. Then we get out to get our bags - poo poo, the bag treadmill stops as we walk up to it, no bags nearby. I find a handful of people on our flight still waiting there, then suddenly the treadmill comes back on. Then someone else from the flight walks up and says some bags are going to this treadmill, and some are going to a bag treadmill on the opposite side of the terminal, a ~5-6 minute walk. I go over there, find our bags, cross a bunch of people from our flight going back and forth between treadmill 1 and treadmill 12 since bags are randomly going between them. Fortunately our one hour wait going through the border didn’t matter since the bag unloading was such a mess. On exiting customs, a guy whispers if we want to change money. I say sure, €100, he whispers to another guy who disappears and slight of hands a wad of 10 notes into my hand and I shake a €100 into his hand. Interestingly they don’t even have a single official change office there - since you’d have to be an idiot to use the official exchange rate of €1=145 instead of €1=215. (Or €1=200 with the airport guys.) Then, nice easy taxi to the hotel. Probably paid double what it should have been, but hard to know! Not sure I’d recommend Algeria to someone looking for a casual, easy travel destination, but let’s see how the next 3 weeks go. Saladman fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 22:33
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Welcome to Africa  Sharm El-Sheikh first impressions: Airport was (almost) a breeze, grab an entry card and scribble your name and date of birth etc, I don't think the guy even looked at it because I didn't fill in the local address and messed up the name. They scan your bags on entry though, no green corridor. Some guy was asked how many beer bottles he was smuggling in lol. Got picked up by a driver arranged through booking, like $5. You could probably bargain down locally but eh it was evening. First impression is that it's the "Las Vegas at home", huge empty highways, giant resorts, tacky casinos, all that stuff. No as many guns though. I ended up in Naama Bay which is a bit lower key it seems, though obviously 100% tourist trap stuff. Shop vendors are extremely annoying, and apparently discovered a new tactic: ask for your help with something, like identifying a currency or translating something. You not being a dick and presumably more likely to agree to go into their store. The weather is pretty much perfect when it's not too windy, then it can get cool if you're wet. Diving is way more expensive than it was in Dahab. E: another fun part is the changing security situation, when searching how to get to St Catherine some security concerns came up and apparently it's now an issue in the area, which wasn't the case before. Though not so much the touristy areas. quote:The FCDO advises against all but essential travel to the northern part of the Governorate of South Sinai beyond the St Catherine-Nuweibaa road. This excludes the coastal areas on the western and eastern parts of the peninsula: between the Suez crossing on the west and Taba on the east and thewith the southern part of the Governorate of South Sinai. You’ll need a permit from the Travel Permits Department of the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior if you travel in a 4x4 vehicle from mainland Egypt through the Suez crossing. Excursions for activities outside of resort areas should be booked through approved agents or tours operators. mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 09:40
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The rest of the time here went more smoothly. The cash exchange worked super easily at a mobile phone shop downtown, and everyone is really friendly. Sometimes kind of overwhelmingly so, like lots of people saying "Welcome!" randomly on the street, and not just shopkeepers. Interestingly they say welcome in English, not bienvenue. Signage in many of the museums is bilingual Arabic and English too; often no French. So far the Bardo was the only place to not have English signage. Not sure how well people actually speak English, but often people do ask "English? français? Arabi?" when they first start trying to communicate so I guess it’s reasonably common. The Algerians just released a new 2000 note (€10, highest denomination) with English on it, and the far left French presidential candidate idiot lost his poo poo that Algeria was abandoning the language of Molière. Algeria last had French on its bills in like, 1966. There also seems to be some secret Russian-American international meeting going on in the hotel we are staying at. The parking lot is jam packed with CD cars and there have been police posted at the vehicle entrance since yesterday, and they weren’t there on Saturday when we arrived. Lots of Russians and Americans in business suits we’ve run into in the elevators and downstairs, and the chatty guy at the gym confirmed there was something with Russia, America, and a lot of diplomats going on. No clue what, as all I can see related is that Algeria announced it was reopening its Kyiv embassy on Sunday (the first day of the week in Algeria). I guess Algiers would be a good and extremely discrete neutral ground to meet up in. But really no clue what’s going on. There is probably no one high profile here or I am sure there would be more security than a single police vehicle at the hotel entrance. E: Speaking of security there are a lot of bizarre vestiges of the civil war. For instance are VERY few restaurants in Algiers, and even fewer which serve beer and wine. We went to one for lunch today and it’s in a discrete barely marked door off an alley, with a like 5 inch thick blast door and a button on the outside to ring. The door was ajar and we just went in, but I imagine 20 years ago they took things a lot more seriously. Also a fair number of less fancy dining places have separate dining rooms for men vs women. We went to a sandwich shop downtown and the guy made us move to a different room - even though the room we sat in was empty - because we were in the men’s room and my wife couldn’t eat there. (Men can eat in the women’s room if accompanied, but not vice versa.) I took a couple photos of other places advertising their "salle familliale" for dining. Literally I have never seen that anywhere, and we often eat in informal places in working class neighborhoods in Arab countries. Even Kairouan wasn’t like that. I haven’t been to the gulf states. The polarization here and conservatism is way way way beyond Morocco or Tunisia, and I imagine it will only be more noticeable once we leave Algiers. Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 21:14
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Everything has gone pretty smoothly since the first day; we got back from the Tadrart Rouge a couple days ago, absolutely beat after a 4am flight back to Algiers. I'll post more photos later once I get stuff off my real camera, as most of the photos I took on my phone have either myself or my wife in them, but we had a great time with the three (!) Touareg for the two of us; a guide, a driver, and a cook, which seems kind of excessive. Apparently it is always one guide and one cook regardless of the size of the group, with only the number of drivers changing according to group size. We got super lucky with the weather and we slept great; it was high 20s in the early afternoon, then dropping to low teens at dawn. Two weeks before it was like 20° at 2pm and like 4° at dawn, which would be pretty uncomfortable when waking up. There was also a lot more greenery than I expected, some of it permanent but a lot temporary. The grass sprang up again because it rained heavily in October, for the first time in 4 or 5 years, so all the surface / near surface reservoirs had filled up again recently. All but one of the ones we visited for surface water were dried up by now - but you wouldn't have to dig very far to get water in a few of the other places. You really see how easily the Sahara would turn into savanna with some decent rain.  - surprisingly, green tea with sugar, not mint tea.Also Algerian food is like... a food desert. There is not a single large supermarket in the entire country -- both Carrefour and an Algerian company tried, both failed. Restaurants with anything other than shawarma and pizza or skewers are few and far between. Restaurants with women sitting in them in anything other than rich or upper-middle-class parts of the big cities are non-existent. We can eat anywhere (some places will just sit us in the "family room," but not always), but fortunately my wife does not look very "Arab" in the context of when she is next to me. We just look like foreign tourists when we are together, but I bet it is oppressive as gently caress if you are an Algerian or Algerian-looking woman, so it's a good thing we're visiting at the end of winter when her tan is at zero. Our Touareg guide also lived for years in Algiers, he said he would get all the time people asking "Where are you from?" "Algeria." "No, where are you really from?" "Algeria!!", because apparently Algerians in the north don't realize there are black people who have lived in Algeria for a thousand years or more... kind of like what Asians often get in North America, or anyone who isn't white gets in Europe.
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Mar 7, 2023 19:59
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Saladman posted:Everything has gone pretty smoothly since the first day; we got back from the Tadrart Rouge a couple days ago, absolutely beat after a 4am flight back to Algiers. Interesting about the food situation. I've been to a few Arab and Muslim countries and I don't think I've encountered anything quite like that. Though I'm sure like the Saudis won't led women eat out by themselves either.
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Mar 9, 2023 18:09
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mobby_6kl posted:Thanks for sharing your experience, it's really fascinating. Do post more photos! Did you spend the whole time just camping around the desert? The closest I've got was a few nights in Wadi Rum in Jordan and it was definitely pretty incredible. Yeah, it's a minimum 3 night trip to Tadrart Rouge from Djanet -- it's a 3 hour drive to the military base at the entrance, and then another 2 hours to the interesting parts from there. I guess if you paid someone you could probably do a 2 night trip but that sounds awful. 5 nights would probably be perfect; 6 nights meant we took one day pretty slow, although that was appreciated too. 7 nights is the maximum for normal tourist expeditions; they have a hard time supplying food and water for more than that with a normal number of vehicles. There are 2 main locations in that part of Algeria; one is the Tadrart Rouge which is on the Libya-Niger-Algeria border and is 4x4 accessible and famous for its landscapes. The other is the Tassili Plateau which is only accessible by donkey/camel train (+ foot) and is famous for its ancient cypress trees and for its psychedelic prehistoric rock art. Tadrart Rouge also has a ton of rock art, but it is all representational of giraffes, rhinos, cows, elephants, etc. The Tassili Plateau rock art is like... super bizarre and unique like the Tassili Mushroom Men, some of which are like 6 meters tall. We didn't go to that part, as it is a separate minimum 3 (usually 5) day trip, but https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychedelic-mushroom-algeria gives a good summary. Anyway, the desert was appreciably different from Wadi Rum, although of the deserts I have been to that one is by far the closest in terms of landscapes and vegetation (have also been to the Western Desert of Egypt, Morocco south of the Atlas, all around Tunisia, around most of the Namib desert, all around Bolivia, all around northern Chile, all around southern Israel and Jordan, around most of the US Southwest). What the Tadrart has that Wadi Rum doesn't is massive dunes, and it is way, way, way more remote feeling and isolated. Our guide said there are maybe 10-20 cars in the Tadrart Rouge at any given time (except Christmas-NY where it can be 5x that). The Tadrart Rouge section of the Tassili NP is very nearly exactly the size and shape of Luxembourg, at 1000 square miles, so 10-20 other cars means you will occasionally see another vehicle as there are about 10 "hot spots" that everyone would go to but like... maybe not for a couple days too, like we saw zero cars over the nearly full 24 hours we spent at Tin Merzouga, which is one of the principle attractions of the area. I grabbed some photos off the phone, not the best ones but to give an idea.  - Campsite; our tent is just visible, the 4x4 is just to the left behind the rock. Try to get a good sense of scale on this photo -- it is super hard to tell how big anything is or how high we are from a quick glance. - The stereotypical Sahara; very little of the Tadrart actually looks like this. This is at Moul Ennaga  - All groups get firewood from picking it off dead trees -- this is 100% absolutely not sustainable for an increase in tourism to this area that Algeria (and the NYT) is trying to promote. Even at 10-20 cars/day it is probably very very borderline sustainable. Our guys were good with trash - but a lot of other groups were obviously not good with trash. The area will be an absolute ruin if they get up to the 100-200 cars/day the government would like. Cooking was done with gas, wood was actually only used for making tea and one very particular dish that requires it. The Touareg guys were constantly lighting fires every time we stopped, even for lunch. - The view of the Tin Merzouga dune from our campsite made a nearly perfect Ukrainian flag.  - A lot of the valleys -- really wadis -- looked like this, with more vegetation than you might expect for the central Sahara.  - Similarly, these gueltas still had rain from months ago. The Tadrart does dry out 100% with zero surface water or near surface water available after about a year of no rain, so no one has lived there in ages, but we did encounter Nigerien (illegal) immigrants herding goats there. Nigerien Touareg are paid pennies by the local Algerian Touareg to take care of their animals, including way the gently caress out in Tadrart, like 150-200 km from the nearest settlement. The Algerian Touareg will take care of camels, but not really goats or sheep anymore, since they can pay Nigeriens almost nothing to do it for them. - Cats everywhere, except obviously not Tadrart. This cat this morning would absolutely not move when a guy wanted the newspaper under it. He tried to roll it a bit and it was unwilling to let him have the paper. He took a different paper. Will do a writeup later and add better photos at some point. We got stopped by police today for the first time -- secret police even. On leaving the Abd El Kadr mosque in Constantine a guy at the shoe area asked us if we liked it. We said yes. He said "journalist?" we said "no, tourist." He said "police, I need to see your papers". It was all fine, there were some people in the mosque filming with professional gear... but I imagine they had permits as they were interviewing some official looking imam-esque guys in classical Arabic. Otherwise we have had no interactions with the police, and while driving around we saw a LOT of abandoned police checkpoints, and the handful that were still manned were waving everyone through except occasionally a heavy goods transport. But, you get the feeling here in a LOT of ways that the civil war only ended within the past 5 or 6 years. For instance, every city at 16:45 is packed, families out, groups of girls, etc. At 18:00, every city completely emptied except of groups of boys aged 15-25. By 19:30, every street, even central Algiers, central Constantine, is completely and utterly emptied of everything except stray cats. It is truly bizarre. Also nothing is open before like 10am, so shops and museums seem to work from like... 10am-noon, then from 13-16:30. Saladman fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 23:00
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I'm going to skip around a bit - to our 4 days in Kabylia - because it was just so nice there. Bejaia is without even a vague remote contest our favorite city in Algeria - although we haven't been to Oran, which we hear is also supposed to be very nice. Not only is the city in an amazing natural setting, but the people there are so nice. Even better, if you're just walking around the street no one ever says anything to you, ever (not even "welcome" which is nice but gets tiring). If you go in a shop or restaurant or wherever, then people are just insanely friendly. People also couldn't stop giving us food everywhere we went. Trucker at a lighthouse? Small bag of walnuts and dates. Two bus drivers sitting at a 1000m col and chilling with beers? Beer (declined; seemed like an awful place to drink - at the top of a narrow and extremely steep col). Walking towards a closed military outpost in a park and stopped by two random girls pic-nicing? Here's an orange and a chocolate milk. Buy something in a shop or restaurant? Here's something else random on the house.  - One of the many random gifts of food.Getting around seems like it would be very very very difficult if you don't speak Arabic and French, and a LOT of stuff is closed. Information on Google is SO bad, hotels closed, restaurants don't exist, roads don't exist, even big restaurants that have been there for years might have 10 reviews total on Google Maps and zero anywhere else. Like we tried to go to a resort hotel area today, and suddenly it's a military zone with a bunch of concrete barriers and we have to zigzag our way through. I can see it dead ends in a closed checkpoint, but I figure better to go to the end rather than sus as gently caress try backing up. We get there and the guy confirms yes, the entire hotel area is closed. Zero indication on the resort's website (which does actually exist!), it is only open in the summer. Also like in Bejaia, a city of like 250k people and a major tourist site for Algerians, has literally zero hotels on Booking.com. No one ever picks up their goddamn phone; we had tried calling the resort before, but we also called several other hotels too and they didn't pick up, but were open. Hours on Google are rarely listed and even if they are, never correct. You basically just have to show up everywhere and see if the restaurant exists or if the hotel is open or if the museum is open. On the plus side, if there is someone there, and you can communicate, you can often get into stuff that is closed. For instance we went to the casbah of Bejaia, which our 2019 guidebook says is great. Turns out the place has been closed for renovations since 2010 (lmao). The door was cracked open, the night guard had just arrived at 5pm. We asked him if we could peak our heads in -- he ended up spending an hour giving us a tour of the entire place and watching the sun set over the mountains. The casbah has been almost fully restored, signs everywhere, bathroom, etc. In fact it looks like it has been restored for so long that parts of it are starting to deteriorate and they need to renovate the renovation (e.g. reprint signage), ffs, they could open it literally tomorrow but it will probably remain closed for the next 5 years.  - Bejaia port, from the KasbahSimilarly, many tourist sites, restaurants, and even hotels are open ONLY in summer. Is this indicated anywhere? Of course not. We went to the "Grottes Merveilleuse" at the border of the Kabyle and Arab speaking areas on the Gulf of Bejaia, but some guys there just opened it up for us and let us walk around, albeit with all the lights inside the cave turned off. The caves were super lame, I guess if you have never seen a cave in your entire life before it is marvelous.  - A dog horrified to learn it had just eaten cat treats, at the (super lame) Marvelous Caves.In other cases, we were not so lucky. We had a relatively short driving day from Jijel to Bejaia, so we decided to do a loop detour in the Petit Kabyle mountains to see the Gorges of Kherrata and a waterfall. Turns out the Gorges are closed, they are re-engineering the road so there is just a tunnel that passes completely by it. It is not possible to even walk into it; we tried and a construction worker came and told us no way sorry. We then tried to go to the nearby waterfall. We drove following Google Maps through a small village, and got to a complete dead-end where the only route was a goat path. My car does not fit on a goat path. We didn't want to walk 1km, and asked a guy and he said yeah you can drive to it -- but it's like a 10 km (30 min) detour completely the other way. Still, we got some lovely views of the area going over the K'Frida col, on one of the steepest roads I've ever driven, chugging up in first gear. The whole area would be an absolute shitshow driving in snow -- and it snows there regularly, including three weeks ago. Those villages on the K'Frida pass must be inaccessible to motorized transport for like 2 months of the year.  - Petit Kabylia, town of Darguina (~600m elevation)Bejaia was by far far far far far our favorite city in Algeria. Not only does everyone only welcome us when we interact with them, but the city is not conservative as gently caress and full of salafists. Women are maybe 70% unveiled. Alcohol shops exist and are clearly visible from the street. There are actually some goddamn restaurants serving something besides mediocre pizza and tacos. And by "tacos" I mean this:  - TacoAlgeria has no idea what a taco is. Sometimes it's a panini. Sometimes it's a wrap. We've ordered them a couple times, both times it came as a panini. We saw one place today that said tacos and it had a picture of an honest to god taco, but we did not try to order it. Algeria appears to have the "neutral evil" idea of "what is a taco", like that meme of "what is a sandwich" with "a poptart is a sandwich" and "a hot dog is a sandwich". There are also monkeys the entire coast between Bejaia and Jijel. Bejaia has the most famous site for them, at the suitably named Pic des Singes (Monkey Peak). We nearly got the Rage virus from them.  - Outbreak of the Rage virusActually they ignored us, except for one little one that jumped on my wife when two of the males started fighting. There are signs everywhere saying DON'T FEED THE drat MONKEYS and I guess people largely follow it. We saw some 'offerings' left out for them when we showed up (baklava etc) but all day we never saw anyone directly feed them and the treats were left out before the monkeys showed up at like 11am. They seem to sleep in pretty late.  - Macaque male with babyUnfortunately, this is a third world country. There is trash absolutely everywhere. Every beautiful mountain side, full of rubbish. Every river, full of rubbish. Every square inch of beach, full of rubbish. This poor monkey grabbed a coke with a few mL of coke at the bottom and it kept trying to drink it by flipping it over, not understanding the cap.  - Macaque with cokeI got a much better photo with my real camera, but I have no SD card reader so it'll have to wait. Much of Algeria is beautiful - but it is only beautiful from far away. The closer you get to literally anywhere in the countryside, the more trash you see. Algeria would be an absolutely hellishly bad place to go for summer beach vacation in July/August -- the beaches are crowded, dirty, and the hotels are expensive (in summer -- roughly Italian or Spanish prices) and lmao lol at trying to actually organize anything effectively. What is also interesting, and we were told this several times, is that Kabyle are very very very much into NOT being Arab. Almost every single time my wife spoke Darja to someone, they would immediately switch to French, even if she continued for a couple more sentences in Darja. She speaks Darja (and French) natively. She addressed a Kabyle shepherd in Darja to see if she could pet his sheep, he grunted "salaam" but ignored her until she asked in French, after which he was very polite. Guarantee he spoke Darja, almost impossible not to in Algeria. Two different people that we chatted with compared it to speaking French to the Flemish in Belgium and they will switch to English (which was an oddly specific comparison for them to know; one was an older wealthy doctor - the dad of a friend, who we stayed with - but the other guy was a 25-30 year old bodega owner, although he had been to Belgium), in that yes they speak Darja but it is an oppressive colonial language from the invaders so they'd rather speak French, since at least the French aren't currently occupying "their" country. Kabylia was also the only area in the country where nearly everyone we interacted with spoke fluent French, including mechanics, people in mini bodegas, security guards, shepherds, etc. In the rest of Algeria it is only spoken fluently by educated people, people over like 60, plus a few random younger people. A lot of people in the Arab parts of the country have like an A1/A2 level of French, which is about equivalent to my level of Darja. We're still here for another week, but for my next post I'll wait until we get back and get photos off the SD card and do another writeup. Algeria definitely has a lot in it for the adventurous traveller, but ideally one who speaks Arabic (classical or Darja), or at least with French. A lot of people don't speak French, but there's likely always someone around who does. Hoping to find someone who speaks English seems like a much iffier proposition. There is a LOT of need to talk to people to get around effectively, as Google is about as useful for finding anything as using the Internet was to get around Europe in like 1997. Useful? Yes. Extremely far from complete or up to date? Also yes. This is hands down the most complicated country for information I've ever gotten around in over the past decade, including Ethiopia and Cuba. Information on forums is all conflicting, and the vast majority of Algerians know absolutely nothing about their country that is more than 10 km from their home town, and they are (somewhat justifiably, given the history) terrified of their countrymen from "over there" [referring to anywhere that is not where they are]. Algeria surprisingly has very little in common with Morocco and Tunisia, except the language. Maybe the landscape of the Rif is similar, but even the landscape of here vs. Tunisia has nothing in common, like if one compared the landscape of England to Italy. Also everything is produced locally, basically zero foreign products besides soft drinks. We went to a couple small supermarkets, could not find even one single product not produced in Algeria or Tunisia. Fortunately for them, autarky works better than in Cuba, where you go to a grocery store and there is a pathetic selection. The selection here is actually okay. It would get old if you were used to Europe or N America but... not like Cuba, where you have a supermarket that has two aisles that just have the same one brand of peanut oil. Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 21:24
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Just wanted to say awesome thread, keep up the great trip reports. My wife is South African and we visited 5 years ago for a month and it was the best trip of my life. Cape town, safari, wine. I know south Africa is different than the rest of the continent but I can't wait to go back. We are thinking Botswana or Zambia in a few years for a safari and some touring.
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Mar 15, 2023 03:17
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Alright, here's a photo summary of stuff I haven't posted before.  - Tadrart Rouge rock art, some engraving and some painting. All representational, in contrast to Tassili Plateau. Some Tifinagh writing, so I guess it can't be that old, although I'm unsure because I don't think giraffes lived in the central Sahara during the time that Tifinagh writing was in use, but maybe the writing was added later. - This is the Tassili N'Ajjer plateau, seen from near Djanet. We drove way to the south of it, but it looked impressive from the air and from the land. Maybe some day.  - More impressive landscapes from the Tadrart Rouge. This is the "Tamazguida Cathedral", a huge stone archway.  - Preparing tea in front of a huge dune - Chasing goats foraging on the "fresh grass" in the Tadrart Rouge, 4-5 months after rain, watched over by a Nigerien goatherd paid peanuts by the local owner.  - Climbing the Tin Marzouga dune. It is crazy windy at sunset, and we are still finding sand everywhere, weeks later. It's about 160m above the level of the sabkha that you can see in the background.  - Sunset view from the top of the Moul Ennaga dune, a little couple dozen km south of Tin Merzouga.  - The Roman ruins of Djemila, north-central Algeria.  - A Mauritanian tomb, about an hour and a half north of Constantine. Cleopatra's daughter was buried in a similar one in coastal Algeria near Tipaza, and Octavian/Augustus apparently liked the style so much he had himself buried in a fusion Mauritanian-Roman style tomb, the ruins of which were reopened in Rome recently ("Mausoleum of Augustus") - although that one is in such disrepair it doesn't look so similar anymore as it's missing the distinctive dome.  - I didn't talk about Constantine, but it is on the CRAZIEST natural setting. The city is on the left, it is surrounded by this MASSIVE gorge, with the only entrance to the old city being a very narrow (~100-200m wide) and very steep incline, now the site of a plaza and a modern-ish Novotel Hotel. The other 3.8 sides of the old city are these massive ravines. - The opposite side of the old city -- that gorge is going allll the way around. That's a different bridge! - Yet another view of the gorge. What is also wild about the river is that it flows from two directions here, into a bottomless pit; there's also small waterfalls leading into the pit on the left and right of this image. The river then emerges out of a tunnel from a natural cave system. Absolutely mind blowing geography. If you've ever been to Luxembourg City and thought "wow, two small rivers forming an impressive citadel", then once you'll see this you'll think Luxembourg City's natural citadel looks like an architect's desk-sized mockup of a real citadel.  - Algeria's got real mountains folks! Lots of snowy mountain peaks right on the seashore, here photographed around El Aouana.  - Lots of cool architecture too, here in Algiers at the Palais des Raïs, one of the few palaces that has actually been decently restored.  - Unfortunately basically every seaside city in Algeria has devoted its entire coastline to massive factories and ports. I don't think any major city has an even halfway decent boardwalk, and most don't even have a boardwalk at all, and/or they "have" a boardwalk but it's like 5 km outside of the city (Algiers, Skikda). Here seen from inside the closed (but 99% restored) casbah.  - That said... the beaches all suck. There is just trash everywhere everywhere, e.g. this representative average beach near Tipasa. Not quite "true third world" levels of bad, but bad enough that I would never remotely consider a beach holiday in Algeria. The cities are (for the most part) reasonably clean, but whoever is cleaning up the cities is clearly not getting to the beaches or the national parks. It is especially sad because there are a lot of trash cans around, a million signs asking people to not litter, and several people we talked to deplored the state of the trash, including a park ranger we chatted with in Bejaia. "It's beautiful here!" we said. "Yes, but so much trash! It is forbidden, and I patrol, but it is never enough" he replied.  - Speaking of, here is the better photograph I said I'd post of the monkey trying to get some drops of coke out of a discarded coke bottle. - Nuclear reactor, or cathedral? If you guessed cathedral ("Sacred Heart Cathedral, Algiers"), you are correct.  - Stray cat at Algiers airport assisting with baggage handling. - Itty bitty kitten. - Restaurant owner's wife's cat in a "taqueria" and pizzeria near Tipasa. We went back the next day and asked where the cat was as it wasn't around - so the owner asked his wife to bring the cat for us, which she did. Those eyes!!!! Full service cat cafe.  - Here's a bad picture of a somewhat fancy restaurant in Constantine, the [Ninja] Turtles Pizzeria. US$1 = 200 DA. Expensive burgers at 350 DA!! You can get them for half the price in restaurants on the same street. 100 DA for a can of soda!! Again double the price of a basic sitdown restaurant.  - We filled up twice -- this was the cost at the exact halfway point in our trip, 1200 dinars (US$6) after around 750 km of driving. So, $12-ish for the entire ~1500 km roadtrip. Annnd more text writeup: In general stuff was crazy cheap compared to Egypt or Tunisia or Morocco. Food was about the same price in Ethiopia at hole-in-the-wall places and local markets. I guess the complete and utter lack of an export market, and the subsidization of everything with oil and gas money, keeps prices among the lowest in the world. Price comparisons for Algeria you find online often vastly exaggerate how much things cost in Algeria because they use the "official" exchange rate of US$1=135DA instead of the real exchange rate of US$1=200DA... and even then Algeria is often on lists of world's cheapest places, even after that 40% price increase compared to reality. In Egypt and Tunisia some things are super cheap, like bread, which have huge subsidies - but here everything is insanely cheap. Unfortunately for anyone wanting to be a tourist there, there are like... basically no shops in the entire country that sell anything tourists would want. Of EVERYWHERE we went, Tipasa was the only place that had the types of items that a tourist might expect to buy (carpets, metalware, ...). Souks in Algeria only sell food, simple cooking wear, and normal daily use clothing like socks and knockoff Adidas. We got one carpet for $8 and the other for $18, both clearly handmade based on the weave on the back. Takeaway for Algeria: this is the only country I've ever visited where I would actually tell a friend going there that they might actually seriously want to take a guide for the entire time. If you speak Arabic - including classical - it is fine, if you speak Arabic and French it is better (French will open up Kabylia more, although Kabyle will probably speak Arabic if forced to, especially if you are obviously not Algerian, but they definitely vastly prefer French if you don't speak Northern Berber). Getting around is an absolute mess because nothing is signed, and asking people is also a mess because no one knows anything, including workers at places where you would think they would know where to buy a ticket or which check-in aisle to go to or where the exit is or god knows. That said you have to ask people a lot, it's just that they also will be wrong a lot. Doing a traditional "backpacking" trip around Algeria sounds aawwwwwwwwful, because hotels are few and far between, and literally the majority of places listed as "hotels" on Google Maps are not actually hotels, not open, and if you do find reviews or photos, half the time the photos and reviews are completely loving wrong, like someone was posting photos of Jijel in their review of a non-existent hotel in Tipasa, hundreds of kilometers away. For food it's easier to wing it, but it can still be hard some times. Backpacking around Algeria in Ramadan or even shortly after would be double mega triple awful, as then you can't even eat, as restaurants often close for 5 or 6 weeks or more. Going around Algeria by train would also be awful as they only run like one or two trains a day, and some of the lines are just randomly not functional, or god knows what. Buses exist but short distance buses are either built in 1950 or are modern Tata buses which look like they were built in 1950. Longer distance buses (like Algiers-Constantine) are good quality. If you want to just hit up the big cities (Algiers - Oran - Constantine - Tlemcen - Anaba - Bejaia) you could do that as a backpacker, but honestly? All the cities we went to sucked except for Bejaia, and Constantine had a beautiful natural setting but the city itself was not nice. If you are willing or able to self-drive then getting around without Arabic or French would be OK, but you'd be missing out on a lot. As a backpacker / public transit user you'll definitely eventually get where you need to go safely and without being scammed, but it just sounds kind of miserable to me. Everyone we met was SUPER INCREDIBLY friendly and Algerians are by far the friendliest people I've ever met on average. It got kind of tiring in Algiers and Constantine, but in every other city we went to people only welcomed us if we interacted with them, and not randomly accosting us on the street with "Welcome, hope you like Algeria!!" which is really nice but also really old when it happens every 5 minutes. During the first few days when it was still winter, I was able at least to put up my hoodie and wear sunglasses and look Algerian. On that note, looking Algerian - probably 10% of Algerian men and 20% of Algerian women could pass fine in Sweden or England as natives, supposing a change of clothing to fit in. Why more women than men? Well, like Egypt or Rome (and probably more modern places) the men are generally much more tan than the women. Eyes of all colors were extremely common, saw a handful of natural redheads. I never saw a natural blond, so as one myself, I did stand out quite obviously with my hair uncovered even if I had dressed in more Algerian styles (either nicely dressed with a button-down, or like... in a tracksuit). We saw I think three independent tourists the entire time we were in Algeria. One older French backpacker in Constantine, and two Swiss who took their own car (no clue why one would do that, seems like a PITA and almost certainly more expensive than flying+renting). There were a handful of people who we could not tell if they were independent tourists or Franco-Algerians, since as said above, there is no visual ethnic difference between Algerians and Europeans, with the only clue being how they dress (not definitive) and what language they're speaking (pure French, or a melange of French+Arabic). People also absolutely loved Tunisia, loved loved it. My wife was also identified as a Tunisian within about 5 words, even by kids. This was kind of surprising, as she thought that probably between Annaba and Tunis it would not be so striking, like telling a Minnesotan from a Saskatooner. But no, immediately pegged like telling an Australian from a New Yorker. Fortunately everyone loves Tunisia, because of Tunisian food, because it's the only country that Algerians can easily travel to, and because Tunisia was the only country that supported Algeria as a whole nation during the civil war (it never closed its borders and it kept trade open; a number of countries supported the Algerian government, like France, but they massively reduced visas and restricted travel so they didn't support the people). Tons of people we talked to talked about how much they loved [insert several different parts of Tunisia here]. I have to say the beaches in Tunisia absolutely blow Algeria's out of the water... not in natural setting, but god drat, at least they're not covered in trash. I variably identified myself as a Swiss or as an American, depending on the mood, and typically got a better reaction as an American ("cool!!") although most of the time it was just a generic "welcome" and probably would have been the same if I said I was from South Africa or Brazil or Canada, and never a bad reaction either way. We were never scammed in the slightest the entire time. Even when people didn't have proper change for us, they either rounded in our favor, or occasionally they were just like "gently caress it, just come in for free" (happened at a couple museums). In any case museum entrances were lol cheap, usually 120 DA ($0.60), even for famous sites like Timgad and Djemila. Parking was often another 100 DA for the car, so we were looking at like... US$1.60 for two people+parking to go to most of the famous world heritage sites. Asking people for help, or people offering help unprompted, never ever ever led to a request for baksheesh, and I doubt any baksheesh would have even been accepted if we had offered. Like one time an old lady started chatting to us, we asked where we could get sweets like baklava, and she spent like half an hour walking around town trying to find baklava with us (failed - and this was in central Constantine - god drat Algeria is terrible for food) and eventually she took us to a nougat shop and bought us some nougat and offered to host us for dinner. We'd already eaten but it was super nice and genuine. On that note an adventurous backpacker who speaks Arabic (possibly could get by French) could almost certainly get around the country just by asking for help finding a hotel and end up being genuinely hosted by whoever they asked for help. We had people ask in Bejaia and in Constantine and I am 100% sure they were completely genuinely being friendly. Note that this also requires looking distinctly foreign... and to be honest it probably also involves a lot of prejudice, like I doubt a sub-Saharan African black tourist would get such a welcome, or a single male traveller. As a single female traveller or even a duo I also suspect you'd also want to only take up women on the offer to avoid uncomfortable situations. But yeah tldr; definitely a very niche travel destination. There's a lot there and there's a LOT LOT of potential with amazing natural beauty, friendly people, amazing historical heritage, but there are also really a lot of logistical challenges that make it not a casual tourism destination. It is also vastly different from Tunisia, like comparing Spain to France. I have not been around the Rif part of Morocco which at least geologically is quite similar, so I can't compare that so much. But I imagine it is also very different, given how much richer coastal Algeria is than the Rif, and given how Morocco and Algeria have been at near-constant war, whether a cold war or a hot war, for like 800 years, which probably leads to difference in culture between the places, even though they speak mutually intelligible dialects of the same two languages and have a lot of cultural aspects in common. Just a guess though! We'll have to go to northern Morocco to check it out for ourselves. Oh, and one other thing I remember now. The Tin Marzouga dune had this weird thing where as you stepped on the ridge and caused sand avalanches, it makes a very deep and very loud humming noise that sounds like a helicopter in the distance, or a large generator of some kind, or like a sand worm in the distance burrowing towards you. We could also occasionally hear it from the campsite underneath the dune, particularly at sunrise when the wind picked up and the ridge would (partially) collapse. Very weird. Unfortunately impossible to capture the sound as the wind completely drowned out the rumble, and I don't think it would be well captured by a regular audio recording device anyway. We were also asked one time for our marriage license. We were never stopped by police at any of the dozens of checkpoints we went by, which is nice and a clear change from a decade ago when people said they were stopped constantly and often had to arrange escorts on the spot even between major cities. Also the only time we got thrown out of the "men's eating room" was that first place in Algiers. Several other times we were offered to go to the Family Room, but never forced to, except the first time in Algiers downtown. A couple other of those times we also saw women with their husbands eating in the "men's dining room" so I think just the owner in Algiers was crazy. Similarly a couple other hotels mentioned that the marriage permit is required, but it was only actually enforced/checked at the one hotel we stayed at in Boumerdes, which also had signs up in the elevator that "visiting between rooms is forbidden". It was a new and decent hotel too, very comfortable, although outrageously expensive at 11,000 DZD/night (€50) for what would be a 2* European hotel. But, we'd been driving for an hour and a half failing to find a hotel that existed and was open and was not booked out and would pick up their telephone ffs, and it was 7pm by then so we took it. Seriously we did not find one single hotel open between Tigzirt and Boumerdes, which is around 80km/90 min drive along the coast through a whole bunch of towns. The old coastal town of Dellys, 35k people, appeared to have zero hotels; none listed on Google and none visible from the street as we drove through the city. Saladman fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 22:12
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I'm in Côte D'Ivoire with my friend for a month, visiting his family in Abidjan, Yamoussoukro, and San Pedro. It's the dry season, meaning humidity is 70-90% and it only rains once every week or two and the mosquitoes are few(er). AMA about: -Dinner -Haphazard construction practices -Even more haphazard driving practices -Gbaka (old sprinter vans turned into route-style buy-a-seat transit, custom-painted with any number of themes) -Waxed fabric shirts and tunics -People selling all sorts of poo poo to people in cars wherever there's a traffic slowdown -Roadside furniture markets that stretch for a mile -The racist advice the travel nurse gave me while getting shots -Ignoring said advice -Not speaking a lick of French in a French-speaking country -Watching someone get married off quasi-unwillingly -Being informed that I can be married off too, and I don't even have to be here for it to count -Getting called "moussier le blanc" by vendors trying to get my attention in the marketplace -The lady with the giant snails getting hella mad at me for trying to take a picture, and Google immediately serving me an article about someone getting busted smuggling them into Detroit -KFC Will update as the trip develops further
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Mar 18, 2023 23:36
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Car Hater posted:
Can you elaborate on those points?
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Mar 20, 2023 04:50
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Car Hater posted:I'm in Côte D'Ivoire with my friend for a month, visiting his family in Abidjan, Yamoussoukro, and San Pedro. It's the dry season, meaning humidity is 70-90% and it only rains once every week or two and the mosquitoes are few(er). Post some photos! Most of what you posted looks pretty common across all of the populated parts of SSA and makes me feel like I've seen enough big cities in SSA, but still interesting to hear your general impressions. What'd the short nurse say? Don't get AIDS from touching Africans?
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Mar 20, 2023 12:50
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CrypticFox posted:Can you elaborate on those points? So for context, I've known my friend since his first day of college, he was born in the states but his parents are Ivorian, and junior year or so I started hearing about how the old ladies wanted him to come meet different girls that they approve of so they could get some grandkids and how incredibly not about that right now he was. Apparently for his people and closely-related groups it's pretty much always been that the women very much outlive the men, resulting in a lot of grandmas with property still dictating to their adult children + his dad sort of hosed off rather than deal with it. He's the oldest of his generation so he got the whole man of the house role and the expectation of (great)grandbabies fell to him pretty much as soon as his youngest cousins were in kindergarten. After college he met his long-term gf, which kept the potential arrangements at bay or at least muffled, but that ended back around Thanksgiving. Now we're here! Danielle is here too! They've apparently been talking for a couple months, all the older ladies like and approve of her, works a government job moving paperwork in the sanitation department. Claims to be shy but is pretty quickly bagging him up. I've been teasing him a bit about it and his mom's been asking if I want a wife (or two), insisting she can introduce me to several very pretty women, tells me I don't even need to be there, as long as I approve they can use a stick as a stand-in for ceremony and all I have to do is sign the paperwork later. Saladman posted:Post some photos! Most of what you posted looks pretty common across all of the populated parts of SSA and makes me feel like I've seen enough big cities in SSA, but still interesting to hear your general impressions. Not anything so blunt but more like too-negative advice on how to avoid travellers diarrhea, very much implying that everything was filthy and my friend would probably want me to eat street food with my hands and to be careful because they don't wash their hands. Told me to pack my own toilet paper because they probably wouldn't have any. Everything is pretty filthy in the poorer areas and markets mind you, and the first thing we did is hunt down my friend's favorite street meat guy, but fuckit I'm eating better food than I can get premade back home and none the worse for wear. I'm also taking pictures of all the toilet paper I see. (You find it in bathrooms and the store) General impressions: This place needs better building code enforcement and waste management, but it is built in an area prone to flooding and apparently the civic works department has their hands full dealing with keeping the lagoons at bay as it is. The food is amazing and I keep forgetting to take pictures. Lots of spices, incredibly flavorful fish and chicken, tomato, onion and okra very prevalent. Real Orangina. The clothes are incredible - I see more colors and patterns of men's and women's outfits than anywhere in any media. I also keep forgetting to take pictures of that but I have time, I'll organize and imgur dump photos later but here's some shots of the city from a distance  
Car Hater fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 17:40
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Saladman posted:
 if I may vote so myself. This is awesome, thanks for sharing the photos and detailed experience! It's a fascinating place to visit but, not speaking French or Arabic, would be challenging to pull off without getting a guide, as you say. How much is that roughly, if you don't mind? It's either that or taking your own car... don't know how much that "makes sense" (probably not at all) but I saw some people do a road trip from Germany: quote:Car Hater posted:I'm in Côte D'Ivoire with my friend for a month, visiting his family in Abidjan, Yamoussoukro, and San Pedro. It's the dry season, meaning humidity is 70-90% and it only rains once every week or two and the mosquitoes are few(er). They have actual KFC? I Was surprised to find one KFC in Sharm El-Sheikh, along with one Pizza Hut and at least 3 McD's. The latter was unremarkable. In Dahab they have KFC but it's Korean Fried Chicken lol. What's with the snail lady? Does everyone get mad at being photographed? That was a thing in The Gambia/Sengal which is why I have few street photography type shots.
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Mar 20, 2023 20:51
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mobby_6kl posted:
The Algeria-Morocco border has been closed since 1994, and there are also no boats, and since 2019 they even banned direct flights between the two countries. It's basically the Lebanon-Israel border, but wrought large... so you'd have to ship your car from Morocco to Spain, and then from Spain to Algeria. For Tadrart Rouge area: not allowed without a guide, not at all. You can drive on the tarmac road all the way down to that general area – we saw a convoy of motorcyclists down there – but for anything offroad you have to cross a military checkpoint at the main valley entrance, and the view from the tarmac road is mostly boring slightly hilly rocky wasteland. Even if it were allowed it would be ill-advised to drive around offroads in the remote central Sahara without a guide or at least a convoy, and most of the cars in those photos definitely wouldn't be able to do it. I doubt independent driving will be allowed there in the next 30 years, or tbh in my lifetime. The trips there are also quite expensive... we paid €110pp/day plus the flight (€100/ea roundtrip). Unlike e.g. Bolivia, the operators do not organize groups to be lumped together to save costs - everyone is with their group that they booked together, exclusively. We overpaid since we booked with a licensed Algiers-based operator who then subcontracted it out. That is no longer necessary since Algeria suddenly did away with the Saharan visa in January, but we'd already booked the trip by then, c'est la vie. Booking directly is probably around €85pp/day – I found a Tunisian website giving that price – so still very expensive. The actual operator we used was Essendilene Voyages if you want to look. Probably all operators have exactly the same prices, because Djanet is a small and extremely remote town and they all know each other and they are not going to undercut their cousins as they all work together and cross-contract depending on how many people contact them. You could definitely get around Algeria with just charades skills without a guide, I guess just like any country, it'd just miss out on a lot of the human interactions. At least for me I get exhausted trying to communicate with people through charades, especially when they want to try to continue conversations, which is about a quarter of why I generally rent cars when I travel outside of countries with well-organized public transport systems. I also doubt Google Translate Voice works with Maghreb Arabic, but haven't tried it. Everyone will understand classical Arabic though so I guess that would work okay, if you had internet connectivity. For northern Algeria, no guide or police escort is required at all. It's also ridiculously cheap, a couple could easily spend a month in the north travelling extensively and eating out for every meal and spend under €1000 (500pp), probably even less if you look for really cheap hotels. Personally I'd rather spend €30 and get a good 2* European-quality hotel (listed as "4****") rather than spend €10 and get whatever Algeria considers to be a 2* hotel, even if it's triple the price. I showed a more extensive set of photos to an Algerian colleague today and she was surprised at how expensive Algeria had gotten in the past 7 months since she has been back. Gas prices apparently nearly doubled; $6 for 41 liters of diesel is like twice what she would have expected. Still, a basic Algerian hotel will be fine with hot water and heating and AC and everything, it'll probably just have a really lovely bed and pillow, if they're anything like basic Tunisian hotels. We only stayed in newly constructed hotels, which we looked for specifically. As far as I can tell, and hear from people, there was basically no hotel construction in Algeria from like ... 1979–2019. There's a ton ton ton of construction going on now though, including one nice hotel we stayed at that would be 4* by European standards (€75/night). We spent €1900 on our two weeks in the north, but that was splurging. The car was €400, 3+1+1 nights in the Sofitel was €550, and the nice spa hotel in Tipasa was €175 for 2 nights. The Sofitel was way too expensive for what it was – very dated 80s feel – but for logistical reasons it was nice (airport shuttle, possible to check-in at 8am and sleep after a 4am flight, possible to leave two bags there for a week while we were in the desert, and it's the only hotel on booking.com that is connected to the metro system, albeit Algiers has like 10 hotels or something lol like that on booking.com). Car Hater posted:Not anything so blunt but more like too-negative advice on how to avoid travellers diarrhea, very much implying that everything was filthy and my friend would probably want me to eat street food with my hands and to be careful because they don't wash their hands. Told me to pack my own toilet paper because they probably wouldn't have any. Yeah, but I guess a travel nurse can't tell you "just drink the water and eat salads from streetfood stalls. It'll probably be fine, it's only like a 0.1% chance you'll get a tapeworm." Nice that there actually is toilet paper in most places in Ivory Coast. You'll find TP in like 1% of bathrooms in North Africa, outside of hotels and fancy restaurants. There's always a bidet sprayer which I appreciate and use, but wtf I would like to dry myself off afterwards and not have a wet rear end. (Sometimes there's no bidet sprayer but instead a bucket with water which I... appreciate much less.) I'm curious on how the TP situation develops as you leave Abidjan.
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Mar 20, 2023 22:54
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Great pics and stories ITT. My destination is less interesting - Hurgada in Egypt. We're planning a family trip in September and I've never stepped into a tourist resort in my life. We're using an agency and flying from Belgrade. Our dilemma is when to purchase the package. As soon as possible? Or wait for a last minute deal? Also, we haven't made our minds about the length of stay. A week at least, maybe more. We have a 4 year old and the hotels do advertise children's entertainers. However I have no idea if we can leave her with them for an hour, or half a day. Because if we have to entertain the kid, I don't want to stay too long. Would probably rest better at home, so that the kid goes to kindergarten. Not to mention money saved. Anyway, looking for advice about Hurgada itself and holidays with kids in resorts in general.
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Apr 20, 2023 21:54
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Doctor Malaver posted:Also, we haven't made our minds about the length of stay. A week at least, maybe more. We have a 4 year old and the hotels do advertise children's entertainers. However I have no idea if we can leave her with them for an hour, or half a day. Because if we have to entertain the kid, I don't want to stay too long. Would probably rest better at home, so that the kid goes to kindergarten. Not to mention money saved. Anyway, looking for advice about Hurgada itself and holidays with kids in resorts in general. TripAdvisor Forums are actually pretty solid for that type of broad mass tourism question, especially for global tourist hotspots like coastal Egypt. The average person posting on TA's Egypt forum is a 50 year old functioning alcoholic British person*, so they're almost certain to know the best places you can leave your kid for half a day in a big resort area. I still haven't found any replacement for more "20-30s-something-without-kids" forums since Thorn Tree (Lonely Planet's forums) got shut down and deleted, but TA is fine for club med type questions. Definitely don't ask ChatGPT. *I do realize that "alcoholic British" is tautological.
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Apr 21, 2023 22:08
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Saladman posted:TripAdvisor Forums are actually pretty solid for that type of broad mass tourism question, especially for global tourist hotspots like coastal Egypt. The average person posting on TA's Egypt forum is a 50 year old functioning alcoholic British person*, so they're almost certain to know the best places you can leave your kid for half a day in a big resort area. Thanks, I'll try. And you can open that 20-30s forum yourself, you know more than enough. 
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Apr 23, 2023 13:58
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Doctor Malaver posted:Great pics and stories ITT. My destination is less interesting - Hurgada in Egypt. We're planning a family trip in September and I've never stepped into a tourist resort in my life. We're using an agency and flying from Belgrade. Our dilemma is when to purchase the package. As soon as possible? Or wait for a last minute deal? I also didn't make it to Hurghada this trip, it seems that the ferry from Sharm got shitcanned recently. It looks more like a real city than Sharm, but I still can't imagine being stuck there for more than a week being particularly interesting. If I were there though, I'd definitely reserve some more time to do a trip to at least Luxor and Aswan perhaps. No idea if that's doable with a child or if you can leave them at the hotel for safekeeping Saladman posted:The Algeria-Morocco border has been closed since 1994, and there are also no boats, and since 2019 they even banned direct flights between the two countries. It's basically the Lebanon-Israel border, but wrought large... so you'd have to ship your car from Morocco to Spain, and then from Spain to Algeria.
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Apr 23, 2023 16:23
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Might as well do a quick Egypt / South Sinai trip report while waiting for food to finish cooking. This trip was mostly about diving/decompressing in the middle of winter so not as fun or exciting, and I'm counting it as Africa as it's part of Egypt now so   Direct flight from Vienna to Sharm El-Sheikh is very cheap and convenient as there's no visa bullshit at any point. If you don't intend to leave the Sinai peninsula, you just fill out a small arrival form and get a stamp. That might get a question if you go to Israel but it's not actually a problem. Otherwise a visa for the rest of Egypt is like on arrival but check yourself to be sure. The airport is pretty small and quick to get out of, but they do scan your bags so don't smuggle drones (those are haram) and alcohol might prompt some questions. I had a taxi arranged through booking.com but if you're not arriving in the middle of the night, you can walk out to the main road (5 minutes) and get a minibus to the city for under a dollar lol.Sharm is super touristy and full of kitschy resorts, casinos and theme parks, and giant billboards with Sisi on them    You can probably find a resort anywhere along the coast, but the two main areas seem to be Naama bay roughly in the middle and Old Market in the south. I stayed in Naama bay for the first two nights:  The main touristy street looks like this in the middle of the day. I couldn't find anything open for lunch other than McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut (yes they have the holy trinity). McRoyal medium meal is  The beach there is divided between resorts and/or restaurants so I got an entrance ticket from the hotel. They have food and drinks that are somewhat overpriced compared to outside but not too bad. My favorite though was Albaladi near the main road that had traditional meat grill and dishes     Anyway this place was ok to chill at the pool or on the beach but not great for diving, the dive shops were all overpriced and wanted >150EUR for two boat dives inc. equipment and mandatory check dive. There are a few daily buses to Dahab for around 100EGP, departing from the Go Bus station (circled), you get there by catching a minibus for around 5-10EGP on the main road and getting off at the intersection, and then getting another minibus, or walking if there aren't any. I've been to Dahab before a few years before Covid and it's still toursity of course but much more low-key. The bus stops right near the downtown area, centered around this bay surrounded by restaurants and cafes where you can hang out and go for a swim whenever, but it's still pretty crowded.     The southern beach is big, sandy and has lots of watersports options, I rented a kayak but there's boats, wind and kite surfing, dive shops. Near where it says Laguna Beach there's a "magic lake" which I assume is just formerly part of the seat that got cut off and is now super salty and supposedly good for your skin. The actual cool spot though is the laguna beach itself, where many locals come and have a bbq or just chill with a shisha or something.    One thing I didn't get to do the last time was St Catherine. It's a mountain with some biblical history and a monastery you can visit. It's marked on the first map. Apparently there used to be public buses going there but now those don't seem to be running, so the only option is a taxi or an organized tour, which is anywhere in town. They pick you up at 10pm, drive for about 2 hours, then hike up the mountain from midnight to around 4 in the morning, and wait for the sunrise. Not a huge fan! At least there are little cafes where you can get a drink or snack every 40 minutes or so.      Overall I'm not sure I'd recommend this to someone unless they really like hiking. It's a pain in the rear end, it's cold, the sunrise was underwhelming (maybe because of the misty weather?) and the guides don't explain any of the history. Can't see much in the monastery either. You get back around lunch time and then have to sleep it off so the day is kind of ruined. If you have more time, you can stay at some beduin camp nearby and maybe have a more pleasant experience. I'll have to edit in some more stuff about Sharm, Nuweibaa and diving later.
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Apr 24, 2023 17:44
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Doctor Malaver posted:And you can open that 20-30s forum yourself, you know more than enough. For a few parts of Western Europe and the MENA region! It's a big world, crazy how even with all the time I've put into travelling and rarely going back to the same place twice (except Northern Italy, <3 Northern Italy) how much there is left. More than a lifetime at my pace, certainly. Maybe NomadMania at some point will do a forum. I kind of wonder if the general clientele there is more focused on checklist tourism, but at least they do it regionally and consider "visited St Petersburg for a day on a cruise" as "visiting St Petersburg" instead of "visited Russia", like on those scratch maps they used to sell everywhere 10 years ago. The best travel info is from people who are obsessive about local / regional tourism, but the overlap of "people who like writing travel blogs," "people who like to travel," and "people who have extensively traveled in one specific location" is a pretty small circle, and then it gets even harder if you also want "also is a good writer" and "also is a good photographer". I hit like... three of those five criteria.
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Apr 24, 2023 17:47
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Hello thread. I'm in the very early stages of planning a trip to Egypt with my dad. Kind of a bucket list present for him, but also something I've wanted to do. Neither my mom nor my wife are interested so it would just be father (73) & son (44) exploring ruins/museums/old towns for about a week. I'm looking for a... let's call it "upscale" tour operator, because I don't think  true luxury is in the cards. Still, I'm looking for a relaxed the kind of experience that wouldn't make my dad croak two days in because the tour is geared for 30-something hikers. Ideally a company that would handle tours, day trips, transportation. I know I'm describing boomer-style vacationing but... He's a boomer.(he's also a former tour guide and hotel manager himself, and remains convinced that putting yourself in their hands is the best way to see things) Some cursory searches show that most tour operators will have a few options to choose from, so I'm really looking for operator suggestions or even ideas on how to best search for them. My usual travel style is very much DIY, so I'm (ironically?) lost in this scenario. Giving up control over your trip is weird, but I think it's the best overall solution given that I'm not doing this only for myself. Any suggestions would be welcomed!
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Aug 26, 2023 07:19
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Trabant posted:Hello thread. I'm in the very early stages of planning a trip to Egypt with my dad. Kind of a bucket list present for him, but also something I've wanted to do. Neither my mom nor my wife are interested so it would just be father (73) & son (44) exploring ruins/museums/old towns for about a week. This won't exactly answer you question but: Egypt is super easy to travel in for that type of tourist... since that type of tourist makes up the vast majority of tourists who are anywhere in Egypt that is not a coastal resort. Pick a budget, set your general itinerary, and book suitable hotels for that budget. All the big hotels, like Hilton, will help you arrange tours on the spot, which at least IME ended up being similarly priced to those that I found with online booking sites like TripAdvisor. I'm sure there are cheaper options if you DIY since those working with luxury hotels and with good online presence will be the most expensive, but if "luxury but not LUXURY" means that spending $50/day on a guide instead of $25/day on a guide is fine, then it would be certainly be easier. If you want to book it all in advance, I'd just go with whoever is on TripAdvisor with good ratings. I know the company I used but it's been 5 years and I'm sure there is huge variance depending on the exact guide. I only took a guide/driver for the White Desert and for Qena and Abydos so I can't help with too many specifics, otherwise I just drove us myself. A typical 7 day trip would be: • Fly to Cairo, spend 3 nights there (requires 2 FULL days, ideally 3-4 full days but maybe not on your time frame) • Fly to Luxor, spend 3 nights there (requires 2 FULL days) • Get a transfer to Aswan (~3 hours), spend at least 1 night there, stop in Edfu on the way (Aswan does not require really any full days unless you want to see Philae, but it is a beautiful city and anyway there is no direct flight from Luxor to Abu Simbel and Edfu is great) • Get an early transfer to Abu Simbel (~3 hours) • Take the evening flight back from Abu Simbel to Cairo and then home. Unless you want to see Abu Simbel by sunrise or sunset, which is a big deal for some people (we did both, it's definitely neat). Best of: • Saqqara Pyramids (Bent, Red, Djozer) - Not quite as tall as the Giza pyramids but have 1/100th as many people, and going in the Red Pyramid is amazing (and free), but not for the claustrophobic or badly-out-of-shape. • Qena Temple - Absolutely the best-shape of any Egyptian monument, since it was also one of the very last ever built in ancient Egyptian style. Still has wall paintings and ceiling paintings and etc in original color, including its second floor that you can walk to, still intact. • Old (Christian) Cairo - really neat to see the Coptic churches and district. There's also a 'hidden city' part of it that people live in that we completely missed on our first visit. Hanging Church is amazing. Culture is very distinctly different in that part of Cairo, e.g. nearly all girls there show their hair, unlike every other part of Egypt, where 99% of women are veiled (except rich people areas). • Edfu Temple - really neat, quite different from any of the others. Definitely worth a stop on the way between Luxor and Aswan • Aswan - the only city in Egypt that actually has natural beauty. Great place to do a Felucca trip, if that is at all your type of thing. • Valley of the Kings • Luxor city (Karnak and that whole area) • White Desert - possibly not in the cards for your dad as it is Bedoin camping, but pretty incredible and depending on the season (temperature) and his fitness, could be a VERY unique experience. Requires 2 full days + 1 night, from Cairo (5 hour drive each way, we did 3D/2N but it is possible to do 2D/1N). Mid Tier: • I am not sure Abu Simbel was worth the amount of time it takes to visit on a short/tight schedule. YMMV. It was a must for my parents and they had no regrets. Possibly hard to miss due to FOMO. • Giza pyramids: they're really cool but so crowded and with annoying people compared to the Saqqara pyramids that are totally empty. Likely impossible for you to miss due to FOMO. • Garbage City: it's interesting and the people are friendly but visiting it as a tourist might feel awkward and rude. It's a Christian quarter with a heavy focus on recycling trash. • Cairo Citadel: It's OK and has a nice view of Cairo but I wouldn't prioritize it on a short trip. • Kom Ombo: it's pretty ruined, it's probably worth the 45 minute stop on the way if you're driving from Luxor to Aswan, but imho just fly back from Aswan to Cairo. • Cairo Egyptian museum, unless the new one finally loving opens, currently 5 years late and eternally "3-6 months away" literally since 2018. Right now a lot of the stuff in the Egyptian museum downtown has already been moved, or is in storage, or whatever. • Luxor Egyptian Museum - has some cool stuff, lots of conceptual overlap with the Cairo museum. These are both cool museums but you can see Egyptian stuff in museums in other countries, so IMHO prioritize seeing actual Egyptian stuff that you can't see in Berlin or London. YMMV. Definitely Missable: • Cairo Tower: long line to enter, mediocre view. • Fayyum Oasis: It's fine but not worth the visit • Everything north of Cairo; the Nile Delta is just modern farming and a bunch of dusty brick villages and cities. • Alexandria • The Red Sea; it's nice but the Nile valley is obviously why you are visiting Egypt. • Elephantine Island (Aswan): if you're staying at the Movenpick it's neat to walk around, but not worth the detour otherwise. • Unfinished Obelisk (Aswan): have you ever seen a quarry? OK, you can skip this. Unknown: • I haven't been to Philae, which is my only regret from almost a year of visiting around Egypt. People are super annoying in Luxor, especially the awful horse and buggy drivers. People in Aswan and Cairo are generally much less annoying.
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Aug 26, 2023 16:00
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I agree with most of what Saladman said. I personally LOVED Abu Simbel and it was a total highlight of the trip for me. I'll also say that the tomb of Nefertari at the Valley of the Queens was ten thousand times more impressive than any of the ones at Valley of the Kings and while fewer tours go there I would prioritize one that does. I think if you can stretch it from 7 days to 10 you would have a better time. We did a full two weeks and felt that an additional one would have been even better. Honestly, if you want a good boomer vacation and you have 10 days I'd do a Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor and then fly back to Cairo and finish off there. I just did a search on TripAdvisor and went with a highly rated one, I can't speak for any all-in-ones because apart from the cruise we organized everything ourselves.
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Aug 26, 2023 23:55
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HookShot posted:I agree with most of what Saladman said. I personally LOVED Abu Simbel and it was a total highlight of the trip for me. I'll also say that the tomb of Nefertari at the Valley of the Queens was ten thousand times more impressive than any of the ones at Valley of the Kings and while fewer tours go there I would prioritize one that does. I missed Valley of the Queens, so actually that and Philae were my big two regrets. 10 days is definitely much more comfortable. Luxor really needs minimum 3 full days if you want to add Qena (you do - Denderah temple is incredible) and Abydos (more important historically, less impressive architecturally). One full day is not really even enough for the left bank of Luxor. We spent an entire day between VotK, Hapshetsut’s temple, and the Colossus (meh). Didn’t see ramessum either. We also spent a full day on the right bank, and then the full day for Qena and Abydos. So four full days in Luxor is necessary to even see the best of’s at a fast pace. Less time than that and you’ll have to miss one or more FOMO YOLO list items. Well, if you’re 73 anyway. I guess we three still have like 40 years to go back and I doubt they’ll have changed much in the meantime.
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Aug 27, 2023 20:10
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Thank you both for the writeups and suggestions! I'll absolutely be using your lists as I plan this  I'm leaning towards the 10-day trip as well, as I know it takes my dad at least two days to acclimate to time differences (we'd be going over from Texas). That said, I don't know whether he'd be up for all of those days to be full of activities, so I'll probably have to get him to list must-sees vs. would-be-nice sights. That might let us do "two days sightseeing / one day relaxing" kind of sequences over the entire trip. (he's not in truly terrible shape, but he's also no spring chicken, so this is mostly me trying to make sure it's a balanced event rather than my dumbass "if you're not exhausted, you're not doing it right" approach) re: cruise down the Nile: that might work, I'll look into them. I remember hearing that is an immensely popular and therefore overcrowded way to travel through Egypt but I fully expect that's just the case for all tourism in Egypt. My desire for having a tour operator is to remove the car/bus/plane/guide scheduling as variables. I'm not opposed to doing the "have the hotel schedule tours" approach, especially if it gives us flexibility to choose hotels we want. It's the transportation between cities/sites that I don't particularly feel like managing.
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Aug 27, 2023 22:44
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If you’re still keen on doing an organised tour, I can recommend Intrepid. Most of their trips are aimed at I guess 25-50 kinda age (ie not party tours but not pensioner coach tours either), though there’s been older people on the couple of trips I did with them. Although most of their trips are fairly no-frills, ie staying in 2-3 star hotels, overnight trains and guides that are more like facilitators, they also have specific Comfort and Luxury branded trips too with nicer hotels and more guided supervision, which might be a bit more appropriate for your dad.
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Aug 28, 2023 02:11
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Trabant posted:Thank you both for the writeups and suggestions! I'll absolutely be using your lists as I plan this Yeah, you'll definitely need to cut things off a FOMO YOLO list even for 10 days. Cairo and Upper Egypt have a ton of "must sees absolutely do not miss". Cairo or Luxor are both good places to acclimate to the time differences. Get a nice hotel somewhere that fits your budget. In Luxor, the Hilton and Winter Palace are both great (I've only stayed in the Hilton) and not exactly budget breaking at around $100-175/night for a room. In Cairo, hotels next to the Giza pyramids have an incredible view of the pyramids, but are far from everything else interesting in Cairo. I think the downtown Nile-side hotels are more convenient, but seeing the pyramids from your hotel room would be cool too, and if the new Egypt museum ever opens, it is right next to the pyramids too. To get around within Cairo: Uber is basically free, and the cars are nice and prompt and a decent number of Uber drivers speak English. The Cairo metro is also quite nice too, if you happen to have a hotel next to a stop and want to go to Old (Coptic) Cairo, which is directly on the metro line, but that would only be worth it for the experience of taking the Cairo metro, since Ubers are so cheap. At a normal pace: Giza is half a day. Saqqara is 2/3rds of a day (you can skip Memphis, it sucks). Old Cairo is 2-3 hours. The Egypt museum is an unknown amount of time since I don't know how emptied out the old one is already - they've moved quite a bit - but the new one will be at least half a day (and would be a MUST SEE if it actually opens). Walking around Khan el Khalili (the main souq) and Medieval Cairo, including visiting Al Azhar, is maybe 3 hours. Shopkeepers are fairly chill in Cairo, even in Khan el Khalili. I would strongly suggest checking out some non-ancient-Egyptian stuff, particularly medieval Cairo and Coptic Cairo, they're very unique (especially Coptic Cairo) and it will give some variety compared to ancient Egyptian stuff, even if that is the highlight of the Nile. There are also smaller boats for Nile cruises, although I think the nice ones will be much more expensive than just staying at the Hilton or Winter Palace. Luxor is one of the few places where I think it's really worth it to stay in a luxury hotel rather than a budget one – the additional $80/day in a 5* compared to a 2-3* there will go a long way. When my wife went with her family to Luxor they stayed in a budget hotel for like $50/night and when we later went with my family we stayed in a suite for like $100/night, it was absolutely no contest in the value of that $50. Normally idgaf about the difference between a 3* and a 5* hotel since I'm only there to wake up and sleep, but the Luxor Hilton was just such a beautiful and calm spot. All of Egypt is very safe btw, the only real issue is that Luxor has a LOT of minor harassment, especially the caleche drivers in Luxor who will actually stalk and follow you. The biggest actual risk by far is car accidents. Don't take regular taxis, not because they're dangerous but because they'll overcharge you, will be difficult to communicate with, and they have poo poo rear end awful cars without seatbelts. Uber doesn't operate in Luxor or Aswan unless that has changed recently, so you will want to hire a driver for the day to avoid taxis there or do a group tour if that's your thing. If you do go to Saqqara by Uber, then make sure your Uber driver waits for you there for a drive back, as it's not in the pickup service zone. Intercity transportation in Egypt (by plane or train) is also pretty well organized so you can DIY it without too much trouble. Overnight sleeper trains in Egypt reasonably nice, which could be more convenient than flying to Luxor from Cairo, given how far the airport is and how annoying airports are. OTOH, when I went with my parents they flew directly USA --> Cairo --> Luxor, thus starting their trip with Luxor, which might also be convenient. Then you can just fly back from Abu Simbel to Cairo and end the trip in Cairo. Staying at the Hilton (or Winter Palace) in Luxor would be a super nice way to get over jetlag, and if you take 4 days there you can chill a bit. I can't handle organized multi-day group tours, so can't really suggest anything in that vein as I never looked, but certainly Egypt caters very well to every possible type of travel at every possible budget!
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Aug 28, 2023 09:51
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Trabant posted:I remember hearing that is an immensely popular and therefore overcrowded way to travel through Egypt but I fully expect that's just the case for all tourism in Egypt. Not all tourism, but all organized tourism, yes. The Nile Cruise was the only part of our tour that we did as an organized group, we DIYed the rest of it, and it was WILD to us when we got to Abu Simbel at the same time as all the tour groups how busy it was. Up until then we hadn't seen more than a single straggling tourist here or there in Cairo. Then, they all cleared out at the exact same time and we had two hours to ourselves in the complex with literally no one else there before being driven to the airport. That said, one reason I recommended it (Saladman is also right that it will be more expensive that just sitting in a hotel) is that the days involve a lot of sailing. It's like get up early in the morning, so see a sight, get back on the boat and sail for a few hours, so for someone like your dad that can be good because he's just sitting on the top deck seeing Egypt, but not actually doing a lot of physical exertion. Then in the afternoon there's generally another excursion, but none of them are longer than a couple of hours. If you're comfortable DIYing a trip, then honestly it's not that hard, but if your dad really wants the comfort of having everything planned out for him I would go the organized route, but yeah, going the organized route you will be in the same spots at the same time as every single other tourist in Egypt. Saladman posted:I missed Valley of the Queens, so actually that and Philae were my big two regrets. But yeah I totally agree with all of your times listed for what's really needed.
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Aug 28, 2023 17:36
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Saladman posted:Great advice HookShot posted:More great advice Absolutely amazing stuff. I'm heading to Egypt in February for 16 days so I'm definitely gonna use all of this info. Right now looking at: 5 days in Cairo Overnight train to Aswan 4 days in Aswan (including Abu Simbel) 1 Travel Day Aswan to Luxor (Edfu and Kom Ombo on the way up) 3 days in Luxor 1 Travel Day Luxor to Cairo 2 days in Cairo w/ possible day trip to Alexandria Feeling pretty good about the itinerary, but open to suggestions. The end is definitely a bit wonky, but my flight leaves at 1:00am and I want to ensure any travel issues don't cause me to miss it. I'm kind of the opposite of Trabant where I'm going solo and not interested in using tour operators, except for Abu Simbel probably, so any advice on solo/DIY travel through Egypt would be greatly appreciated as well.
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Aug 29, 2023 03:10
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MagicCube posted:Absolutely amazing stuff. I'm heading to Egypt in February for 16 days so I'm definitely gonna use all of this info. You will probably want one less day in Aswan and one more day in Luxor - 3 full days in Luxor does not leave enough time for all the "must sees", although 4 days does. That’s even with one of those Aswan days being an Abu Simbel day. The city is beautiful and if you just want some chill time and think you’ll get templed out though, then Aswan is a good place for that as you can walk anywhere in the city, including the souk, without people bothering you. Kom Ombo would be difficult to impossible to visit on the same day as Edfu by public transport - you would need a private car for the day. This is easily enough arranged but just FYI. There is a road bridge in Edfu so it’s not an issue by car. Alexandria is probably only worth it so you can say you’ve been all up and down Egypt, but also you do have a lot of time in Cairo so if you don’t want or need a chill day, then taking the train to and from Alexandria would be fine. It’s an okay city it just doesn’t have anything of special interest to tourists. But if you’re interested in a modern mélange of European-Egyptian 1960s architecture then it has that in abundance and is quite different from Cairo culturally and architecturally, it’s just still not the most beautiful of Mediterranean cities. It’s extremely chill to walk around in and shop and whatever since it gets approximately ten tourists per decade.
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Aug 29, 2023 08:08
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