A Camel, a Mall and a Gold Souk in Dubai

Dubai! What a weird place for us to finish our trip...well at least a very big contrast to Italy. As I only had 3 days there we agreed to do the touristy thing...we stayed in a hotel!! And we visited shopping malls! But the shopping malls did have ski fields, Arabic castles, fountain shows to the theme of mission impossible and looked like palaces. On our first day there we swam on the beach with full view of the 'Sail' hotel which claims to be the only 7 star hotel in the world.

A ski field in a shopping mall. What next?

Swimming in the warm Dubai waters...

For breakfast we ate curry which was a delicious variation from pizza and pasta. On day 2 we went on a 'desert safari' which involved a large amount of hooning around sand dunes in 4wd and rather less camel trekking than we had hoped..but nevertheless the camel was very exciting and I am keen for more (desert and camels that is). We had opted for the overnight safari..which transpired everyone else left at 9.30, Chris and I got left at this camp thing with 2 sleeping bags and many ants! Rather interesting, we sat on a dune in the dark and found some scorpion tracks..yikes!

In the morning we were picked up from the desert then delivered back to the hotel. The roads in Dubai are wide and busy; everyone travels by car, big car, here. We visited the gold souk, a famous gold market brimming with diamonds and gold, then the spice souk. We ate at the food court for dinner (all we could really afford) surrounded by women in black veils and men in white suits and an elaborate Egyptian ceiling.

After a 3 hour long bus ride home (the bus system in Dubai is not so flash!) we started packing for me leaving and Chris staying at 1 am. At 3am we were ready and set the alarm for 6 am, great. All was packaged in our ginormous highly patched yellow pack liner sack (rather eye catching and we got strange looks from the fancy suitcase wheeling types). After a short taxi ride I was headed home for NZ, and Chris on the bus to Abu Dhabi for his adventure race. If you want to see how he gets on check out the race site and Sleepmonsters covers adventure races well too. (Chris's team is Nike).

This is a picture of the NZ team Adventure Sport coming in to land on Day 2 of the race this morning:

I am now back in sunny Christchurch for the next four months, Chris is back after the race...then we are heading off on another adventure to Malaysia and then back to Europe again, so you never know I might just have to let silly billys roam the world again and hopefully entertain you again with my appalling spelling (0: Thanks everyone for reading my blog, it was neat to think people were finding out about our adventures as we had them!

Goodbye and Ciao for now,

Em

Mmmmm...looks like scorpions to me!

The Last of Sicily

After Mt Etna we spent a few days in 'recovery mode', well I did, but Chris spent many hours bobbling about in the sea in a wee kayak. We attempted to sell the bikes in Catania, but had hilarious episodes trying to mime out 'sell bikes' to the shop owners who didn't get it at all. Eventually we got one shop to understand, only to be offered a miserable sum. So we biked back to the campground dejected, only to discover the campground owner was super keen for two new bikes and bought them for a bit more.

Below: Chris enters the choppy waters in Catania...

Below: Chris's bike looking all shiny and clean before it was sold (note his beloved red tyre).


The following day it was raining as we ran (running very late) to the station, missed the train and had to wait 3 hours for another through the centre of Sicily out to Cefalu on the Northern Coast. We found a nice hotel and splashed out on our last Italian pizza. In the morning we swam on the pretty beach and wandered around the town of Cefalu with its large rock. In the afternoon we headed to Oliveri to camp.

We woke early with the intention of catching the train to Milazzo hoping to maybe get out to the Volcano Islands. But, at the station the grumpy little Mr Bean conductor said 'No, no trano till 12 oclock', great. Miserably we wandered around pukey little Oliveri with our large yellow sack. At midday we returned to be told 'No, no trano.....ever...its schobero,...schobero...no trano! No!' And with that he went and hid in his office! Panicked we asked others only to be told sadly 'schobero, yes, schobero'. And no trains came at all. So we went back to the campground to uncover the mistery of this schobero thingee, and discovered that in fact it was a national strike and there were no trains, no planes, no buses and no boats running all day!

So in Oliveri we remained and in the evening discovered a very nice bit of beach just along from our camp spot. In the morning we caught the 7 oclock train to Messina, and then the ferry, and then the 7 hour train up and finally back into bustling Rome. We bused way out to a campsite (were ironically it turned out there was no camping, only cabins?). On Dec 2 we trained to the airport and flew away from a place where we had had some great (if a tad crazy and frustrating) adventures over the past few months!