The dream of wild life safari from the window of a luxurious train passing through African bushes and red earth savannas came true! In Kapiri Mposhi we boarded the first class compartments, men and women separately. Soon it turned out that our wagon is full of other ‘mzungu’ (white men), backpackers from different parts of the world who just like us are traversing the black continent. My travel companions were mainly Scandinavian, a group of 3 Danish journalists, one Finnish web-designer and a Dutch anthropologist – I enjoyed a splendid company in our ‘girls’ compartment during the next 2 days.
The country of trillionaires
Zimbabwe now is very different from what the media usually served us. It is friendly and safe. The shops and gas stations are well stocked. There is a quite good infrastructure, normal asphalt roads, and plenty of cars on the streets. Somewhat surprising, especially after Mozambique.
Swaziland is different from Switzerland
What is this country that always pops just next to Switzerland in various dropdown lists in the Internet? There is not much that we can say about Swaziland. We’ve spent in this kingdom only one night, in Manzini, the capital, just 30 km north of Mbabane.
June 8, 2010
Yo from Jo
So we crossed the third big water, the Indian Ocean and landed in Johannesburg. During the long flight, I watched two movies: the beautiful scenes of ‘Australia’ (a good-bye the vast, dry, red continent), and inspiring ‘Invictus’ (hello South Africa, and World Cup, and apartheid).
Yes, apartheid. Read the rest of this entry »
February 11, 2010
Panama – splitting the continents
Panama Canal is a very interesting piece of technology. This 80km water track connecting Atlantic and Pacific consists of a canal and a huge artificial lake 26m above the sea level. The ships are lifted to the lake level with the help of huge locks (“sluza” in Polish) – simple yet powerful technique. Read the rest of this entry »
January 23, 2010
Valparaiso
We’ve decided to spend the remaining 3 days to our flight in an interesting port city of Valparaiso and a neighboring beach resort of Vina del Mar. Read the rest of this entry »
January 13, 2010
Dakar
The famous Paris-Dakar race, as the name suggests, begins and ends in Buenos Aires. At least this year. It happened to be crossing not far from us in the city of San Juan, Argentina, so we decided to check it out. Read the rest of this entry »
December 2, 2009
PS. Routa 40, still on the bus
It is almost 10 pm now and it is still quite a bright day. We’ve been driving the whole day. Just a small add to the Patagonia part.
At the moment we’re approaching El Chalten on the bus. We see one of the most beautiful mountain sceneries one can imagine. Read the rest of this entry »
Routa 40
Yup, that’s where we are now. So excuse us all the misspellings, but the bus shakes us up and down on this legendary dirt road. We feel like shaken jellies and Read the rest of this entry »
November 19, 2009
The definition of unreliability, or the buses in BA
-geeky version below-
We had heard that the buses in BA are “not always punctual”, but yesterday we had the opportunity to verify this criticism trying to catch #29 from La Boca. Well, probably the only thing that roughly matches the schedule is the total number of bus runs per day. Otherwise, that’s a mess – or a special kind of order, if you want. Indeed, the buses seem to be nicely grouped by numbers and to come in bunches: e.g., 5 times #152, then 3 times #33, next 4 times #64, and #152 again… We were waiting for #29 for more than one hour observing this amazing pattern. And, of course, when our bus finally arrived, it was followed by another #29. Well, at least there is a local transportation, in contrast to most of US, for example.