A Short Post About Istanbul

Istanbul was one of our favorite cities. We probably would have had a fantastic time had we had good weather. Instead, it rained about eight out of the 10 days we spent in town. The uncooperative weather didn’t stop us, but it did contain us.

Cool Rotations

In Konya, Turkey, whirling dervishes perform the sema rite at the Mevlana Cultural Center.  Konya is the city where the dervishes were founded and where their founder, Mevlana, is buried in an ornate shrine bearing his name.

On Baklava

We usually write a lot about the food we taste when we travel from place to place, and the food in Turkey is no exception. Turkey is one of the best countries to come eat. Once you’ve tried the Doner Kebab, you move on to Gozleme and Pides, and you dive into the wide variety of delicious mezes that are at the heart of every Turkish meal. But, for me, the best part of eating in Turkey – hands down – was baklava.

Bulungula

Our travels have taken us to some pretty remote places.  We’ve told you about driving around the Irish back country, making our way to the edge of the Moroccan Sahara, and making pasta on an Italian farm.  None of those places were nearly as remote as Bulungula.  If you ever want to go to a place where cell phones and blackberries usually don’t work, where you can’t be found unless you want to be (and maybe not even then), this is your place.

A Primer On Driving In South Africa

Apparently, the government of South Africa had the great idea of setting up a webpage with advice for foreigners driving on its roads and highways.  It certainly has some good tips for getting your bearings on South African roads, but I think it’s a bit incomplete.  So, I thought I’d add a few additional tips of my own.

Soweto

After our crazy adventures at Victoria Falls, we returned to South Africa.  We just had not spent as much time traveling in South Africa as we would have liked. Truth be told, we could probably have spent three months exclusively in South Africa and still not have seen and done everything we would have liked.  While we don’t have that kind of time, we added another two weeks to see more of South Africa.  Our return from Victoria Falls took us through Johannesburg, and we decided to spend two days in Soweto before heading out to the Wild Coast.

Come On A Safari With Us

Ach, internet in Africa is hard.  If you’ve been checking in with us for the past two months, you know the posts have been pretty sporadic.  When we’ve been able to get on-line at all, it’s really slow, unreliable or both.  But now we’ve moved on and we’re in a place with an totally awesome broadband connection.  So, it’s blog catch-up time.  We have 3 or 4 more Africa-related posts to put up here, and then we’ll start sharing our travels through Turkey and the Middle East.

One thing I’ve been dying to do is share some of our safari pics.  I know we’ve used some already in posts here and Kara has put some up on Facebook, but my favorites are here in a set on Flickr.  Enjoy!

Cooking, Zambian Style

While staying in Livingston, Zambia, we had the opportunity to take a cultural tour with an emphasis on Zambian markets and cookery.  The morning started out with a trip to the local food markets to buy our supplies.

Blowing Your Mind At Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls well deserves its place on the list of natural wonders of the world.  Even in the dry season, you can hear the thunder of the water well before you see the falls themselves, and your first sight of falls is likely to be the huge clouds of mist that billow up when the water crashes into the river bed below.  On our first day in Victoria Falls, we checked out the falls from the Zimbabwean side.  We were suitably impressed.

Make Mine A Mokoro

After a rocky start to our tour (let’s just say, some of our fellow travelers were – uh – less than welcoming), we had a pretty good reprieve from riding around in Nomad’s overland truck.  Instead, we boarded an old Mercedes safari wagon and set out on a three-hour drive to a mokoro station in the heart of the Okovango Delta.  A mokoro is a dug-out canoe made from the trunk of an African sausage tree.  It is similar to a gondola, and is piloted by a poler, who uses a three-meter long pole to push the canoe along the river.  We had a two-hour cruise by mokoro on the first day, and it was fantastic.  The peaceful silence of the river is only disrupted by the occasional snorts of hippos and the sotto voce chatter of the polers.  You can lean back and watch the tall reeds and papyri rustling in the breeze as you float by, or you can lean further back and fall asleep until your poler whispers down to point out an elephant grazing nearby.