Welcome to the first trip of 2022; an exploration of Israel, Jordan and Egypt. As with so many of our recent trips, this is a trip rescheduled from 2020.
Jim and I left Los Angles on March 1st, and landed in Tel Aviv about 4 in the afternoon yesterday. Although Israel has recently removed the requirement that all travelers be vaccinated to enter the country, they still require that travelers take both a pre-trip COVID PCR test, and a PCR test upon arrival. You are then required to quarantine in your hotel room for 24 hours or until your test results come in, whichever happens first. In our case, we went to our hotel, ordered room service for dinner, and went to bed. We had our results by the time we woke up this morning, so we were cleared to roam freely.
After a rainy and windy start to the day, we headed out about noon to walk along the beautiful oceanside promenade outside our hotel, the David Intercontinental. The waves were still really big, but that didn’t stop multiple kite-sailors from the surf.
Looking south towards the ancient port of Jaffa
Jim and I wandered through the Carmel Market, and on the recommendation of our tour director, we had lunch at one of the many small restaurants/cafes within the market, called Schmuel. They do a classic kebab meal (which generally means ground meat) grilled, with hummus and Israeli salad. As advertised, it was very good! After the meal, we actually ran into our tour director at Schmuel’s and caught up with him.
Exploring the Carmel MarketSchmulik behind the counter at Schmuel’sKebab lundh
Tonight, we will have our welcome dinner with the rest of our group. We can’t wait to explore more!
On September 27th, Jim and I booked a walking tour of Greenwich with one of our favorite tour companies, London Walks. www.walks.com To get to Greenwich, we took the Tube (Jubilee Line) to catch the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which runs all through the area around O2 Stadium and the huge new financial district which has sprung up in the area south of the Thames around Canary Wharf.
Our guide for the morning, Fiona, is a registered “Blue Guide”, and she took us first to a park named after St. Alfege. Danes camped here in the early 1000s, and in their raids, they captured the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was held here in Greenwich. Apparently, there was a great delay in raising his ransom, so one night as all the Vikings sat around the fire eating and drinking, they then started tossing their bones at the bishop. Bones turned to stones and then clubs, and it was said that he was “boned” to death. On the site of his murder, a church was built, called St. Alfege’s, and it was a central fixture in Greenwich for centuries. King Henry VIII was born in the Tudor palace here in Greenwich, and he worshipped at St. Alfege’s church. Henry also celebrated two of his marriages there, and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth were both baptized there.
The church itself was rebuilt four times; most recently in 1711, with those renovations being overseen by the architect, Hawkesmore. The interior woodwork of the church was carved by Grinling Gibbons. St. Alfege’s was badly damaged in Blitz of London during World War II, but restored. Sadly, only a small piece of the Gibbons carving remains.
St. Alfege’s Church
While we were in the park, Fiona showed us the horse chestnuts lying on the ground, and told us that children call them “conkers”. They play a game where you string the conkers on a line and then take turns trying to conk your opponent’s chestnuts off the line.
Horse Chesnuts
From our spot in the park, we could see the top of the Town Hall, which was originally built in the 1880s. By the 1800s, there was a fair here, which was a very popular day out for Londoners. From the hill, there was an activity mentioned by Dickens in his works called “tumbling”. The game involved running down a hill very fast, and occasionally losing your footing so you tumbled down the hill. Young men purportedly liked it when girls tried the sport, and fell with their petticoats all askew.
Greenwich Town Hall
There is quite a bit of royal history centered in Greenwich. Although the royal palace at the Tower is just up the river, back in Tudor times, Greenwich was considered to be a more pastoral setting away from the smells and pestilence of London. Royal courtiers would travel by barge to visit the royal palace here. The area started to be developed by the Duke of Gloucester inn the late1300s. That family became the house of Tudor. The Duke of Gloucester had a huge library, which he donated to Oxford upon his death. The collection was so large that it became the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Henry VIII was born at the royal palace in Greenwich, and spent a great part of his youth there. He was a very athletic man in his young man, and loved to host jousting matches outside the Greenwich palace. However, a jousting match in 1536 resulted in a grave injury to Henry, and he was no longer able to sit a horse or exercise. It was after that he turned into the corpulent fellow we all have seen in paintings.
From the park, Fiona walked us through the Greenwich Market, which has been in the same spot for centuries. Sadly, the pandemic took quite a toll on the vendors, so they are only now starting to come back.
Greenwich Market
Then we walked down to the main waterfront area in Greenwich. The original tea clipper, the Cutty Sark has been restored and floats on a “glass pillow” which allows visitors to view the underside of the ship and the museum beneath. Some of the various figureheads that graced other tea clippers are also on display, but we didn’t have time to see the museum. “Nanny” is the figurehead on the Curry Sark.
The Cutty Sark resting on her pillow of glass
The Cutty Sark is the last remaining tea clipper in the world today. These ships were designed to have very narrow hulls; originally to save on taxes, but they also became the fastest ships in their day. This was very important because tea got a price premium for being freshest. In fact, there was a bounty for the ship that returned to England the fastest with its load of tea. Ironically, given the history of the Boston Tea Party, the Cutty Sark was built in America.
From where we are standing on the waterfront, the view up the Thames is a little off kilter because the Thames takes big bend down here in Greenwich. Still, we had a great view of the skyscraper called The Shard on left and the Post Office Tower in center.
Then we walked into the center of old Greenwich. On the site where the royal palace used to stand is the Royal Naval College. The buildings were originally designed by Sir Christopher Wren (who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral) and built between 1696 and 1712 to operate as a home for disabled British sailors, and it was used for that purpose until 1869. The buildings were operated as the naval academy from 1873-1998. Today, it is a museum, and looked like it had numerous interesting exhibits, not the least of which was a small nuclear reactor which used to reside in the basement of the college so students could learn who to run nuclear class submarines. The reactor was decommissioned in the 1970s, and was about the size of a large breadbox.
The decommissioned nuclear reactor
One of the buildings is now a college of music and fine arts. But among the more interesting features of the buildings are a Painted Hall, which was the Refectory (dining hall) for the Sailors Hospital. Queen Mary started the home for the disabled sailors, but did not live to see it finished. The Painted Hall is described as Britain’s Sistine Chapel, and was started in late 1600s, painted by James Thornhill. Interestingly, when repairs were being done to the building in 2017, the contractors found remains of the Tudor Palace beneath the Wren building.
Remains of the old Tudor Palace
We also saw the Royal Chapel. The original burned down, but it was rebuilt in the 1700s. If it looks familiar, it was used in several movies and TV shows, including “4 Weddings and a Funeral”. Benjamin West was the Chapel’s artist, and he was one of founders of Royal Academy of Art.
The Royal Chapel. The paintings of the apostles near the ceiling were done by Benjamin West.
In the courtyard outside the Painted Hall is a frieze also painted by Benjamin West, dedicated to the great British naval captain, Horatio Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. On the outside of the building is a special window, called “Nelson’s Window” which looks onto the courtyard.
The frieze by Benjamin West
Housed in another of the buildings is the Maritime Museum. Up on a hill overlooking the grounds of the Royal Naval College is the Greenwich Observatory. It is also built on the site of the Greenwich Prime Meridian. Time was not standardized until the1880s, when it became required by needing accurate timetables for railway schedules, but the Greenwich Prime Meridian became the basis for the standardized time system. This line in the photo on the ground is where the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich.
Prime Meridian
From where we stood in the Greenwich Park, we could see the Royal Observatory on the hill at the back of the park. One of the cool features of the Royal Observatory is a mast on top with a ball. The ball on the mast tells time to the ships in the Thames, so the ball moves to top of the mast at 1:00 p.m. every day. We were fortunate to have timed our visit to see this happen. Time was critical to setting latitude for navigation, so this was a vital function for the ships’ captains. Our tour now over, we walked back to the waterfront for lunch.
The Royal ObservatoryIt’s one o’clock!
We had lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern, overlooking the Thames. Jim enjoyed some authentic fish and chips, but I just had some really good tomato bisque because we are booked for a great dinner at a restaurant called Galvin la Chapelle in the Spitalfields area of London.
Inside the Trafalgar TavernView of the O2 Stadium (fka Millenium Dome)
We squeezed in a small shopping expedition to the Burlington Arcade, just off Bond Street near our hotel. Sadly, the pandemic has not been kind to many of the old-time shopkeepers in this Victorian shopping arcade, and many of the historic shopkeepers have vanished. We did visit one of the longtime stores, a cashmere purveyor called N. Peal, who has operated in this same place since the 1930s, but we found their selection much less adventuresome than in years past.
Jim and I had lucked out on reservations at one of London’s “in” restaurants, called Galvin la Chapelle. There are three Galvin brothers in the restaurant family. All three were raised in Great Britain, but introduced to France at an early age, and became instant Francophiles, and then great French chefs. There are six restaurants in the Galvin family enterprise, all providing Franco-centric cuisine. This restaurant is located in a very old church.
We decided to do the tasting menu with wine pairings. Here is the menu:
Our first wineThe melon soup with langoustine.The gamay wineThe terrineThis was a wine varietal neither of us had tried before, but it paired beautifully with the risotto.Herby risotto topped with Parmesan foam paired with the CatarattoSurprise! We tried this wine in Croatia two years ago with Mark & Rebecca. Great choice with the seafood “lasagne”The crab lasagneOops! I’m a lousy food blogger because I keep forgetting to photograph the food before we eat it. The Cumbrian beef was excellent, as you can tell!This is the last photo since I forgot to photograph the final course!
Stay tuned, because tomorrow we board our ship, the Crystal Endeavor, for a tour of France, Spain and Portugual.
Jim and I landed in London on Sept. 26, 2021. After taking our “second day” COVID test, according to current UK rules, we were taken to our hotel, the Connaught, in the Mayfair area of London. This is one of London’s legendary hotels, and has been very graciously updated sometime in the past ten years. The stairway in the entry hall was truly lovely.
Entry hall at the ConnaughtThe amazing toilet; look at all the buttons on the left!Our Negronis
While our room was very spacious and lovely, probably the highlight of the accommodation was the space age toilet in the bathroom! Oh, and the welcome cocktail; a pitcher of Negronis which awaited us!
After checking in (and enjoying our Negronis), we walked out to our restaurant, Mimi Mei Fair; a really fun Chinese restaurant not far from our hotel. As the legend would have it, the restaurant was located in a Georgian townhouse purportedly owned by a Chinese empress, MiMi, the keeper of Chinese culinary secrets. The interior reminded you of a private club. One thing we did not know before we got there was that two signature culinary options; the Peking duck and the tasting menu, were to be ordered at least 24 hours ahead of time. Although we missed out on the Peking duck, Jim and I created our own tasting menu. But first, we started with a round of the craft cocktails. I had something called a “Yunnan Pony”, while Jim had a “Chestnut Sour”.
Mayfair
Annabel’s: a private club in Mayfair, raising money to benefit the Amazonian rainforest.
Inside MiMi Meifair’s
We shared an appetizer course with some of MiMi’s signature dishes including the Canadian scallops, the crispy langoustines, and the very colorful Xiao Long Jewels, which were little dumplings, each with a different filling. For our entrée course, we shared a very non-traditional cashew chicken dish, and a braised pork belly dish. Thank goodness, we had a decent walk back to the hotel to burn some of it off!
We woke up on the morning of August 28th to a site we had not seen in a week; sunshine! After hurriedly packing my suitcase, I left Jim eating breakfast, and jumped in the car to drive back to Jökulsárlón Lagoon to see what all those icebergs looked like in bright sunlight. In a word: stunning!
The waterfall outside our hotel. This was the first time we saw it clearly.All the little seabirds still resting on the icebergWe could not even see these glacier fields when we were here before!Seal swimming in front of the icebergYou could even see the lagoon from the parking lot for Diamond Beach!Another iceberglet headed out to sea.I headed back just in time as clouds rolled in and the raindrops hit my windshield.
I missed breakfast, but we were on the road back to Reykjavik by 9:30. It was close to a five hour drive, but we made stops along the way. It was very cool to be able to see sights that had been obscured in clouds and fog on our drive south. The first and most important of those was to drive back out to Dyrhólaey to see if we could actually see the hole in that sea stack. Bingo! While we didn’t see any puffins up close this time, at least we got better views this time around.
Icelandic horses grazing.More basaltic columns. We never saw this on the drive down.Another glacial river draining to the sea.Barbara: This is for you!Return to Dyrhólaey. You can already see one of the holes in the rocks.Reynisfjara BeachFinally, the holes of Dyrhólaey!
We also stopped in the small town of Hella for lunch at a café on the main road, and then pushed on to Reykjavik. We checked in back at the Canopy by Hilton, and even got a slightly nicer room this time (and since it was on the 3rd floor instead to the top, it was also not steamingly hot). We set it up to do our self-administered (but proctored) COVID tests, which turned out to be “easy peasy”. It takes only about 15 minutes to go through the whole process, and the US accepts these rapid antigen tests for reentry to the U.S. We celebrated our return to Reykjavik with dinner at Apotek restaurant, which was easily one of the best meals we have had in Iceland.
Tomorrow is our last great adventure, as we will travel outside of Reykjavik, and hike to an extinct volcano which exploded 4500 years ago, leaving a perfect cone into which you can go down to the bottom.
Jim and I returned to Iceland on August 10, 2021, to board our first cruise in 18 months. We will sail around the island for seven days, and then spend about twelve days driving to several areas we did not visit on the cruise.
From the airport, we were transported yesterday to the famous Harpa Concert Hall in downtown Reykjavik, to have our health screening, and complete our embarkation formalities. Then we were taken to our home for the next seven days, the Viking Jupiter. This is our first trip on a Viking ship, and we were eager to explore the ship.
Since you’re no doubt wondering; here are the COVID protocols: all of the passengers and crew on Viking are required to be fully vaccinated. Additionally, we have a daily PCR test (saliva sample) collected daily, and we must wear masks when on the ship (except when eating and drinking) and tours, and we all have contract tracing tokens which track whether we have had meaningful contact with someone who might have had a breakthrough infection. Infected persons are quarantined in the ship’s infirmary, and exposed persons are isolated in their rooms until they test clear. Additionally, since the infection rate in Iceland has recently risen, we are not allowed off the ship unless we are on a Viking sponsored excursion. To be honest, all of this puts a damper on the normal effervescent shipboard experience in that you do keep wondering if you are going to test positive, and it makes us less likely to meet others for a meal or a drink since we are unmasked at those times. But we decided the experience of being back on a cruise ship and at sea again after all these months was worth it.
We spent the bulk of our afternoon unpacking and exploring the ship, which has some nice Scandinavian design features, and an awesome two-story forward-facing bar called the Explorer Lounge. Then we went to dinner relatively early and crashed as we were working on about four hours’ sleep from our overnight flight. The Viking stayed overnight in the port of Reykjavik.
Jim and selected different activities in Reykjavik for the day of August 11th. Jim took a whale watching boat from Reykjavik, while I opted to go horseback riding on the special Icelandic horses.
My excursion took me a few miles outside town to a special horse area. We are riding with a stable area called IS Hestar, and it is the fanciest stable set-up I have ever seen! Icelandic horses are not native to Iceland as they were originally brought here by Vikings over 1,000 years ago. The original horses were a mixture of Mongolian and Arabic breeds, which produces the iconic small stature and shaggy manes of today’s breed. However, don’t make the mistake of calling them ponies, as the Icelanders are quite proud of their horses, which have five gaits and can cover up to fifty kilometers in a day. One of the special gaits is called the “tolt”, and is characterized by the left and right legs moving in sync, which produces a smooth rolling gait.
After the obligatory safety briefing, we were provided with helmets and mounted up. Our ride took us through an ancient lava field partially cover3ed with lichen and moss. Sadly, it was all over too soon, but our guide told us that one of the most popular activities in Iceland is to take the horses for a long trek of up to seven days in length, where you eat gourmet food at night and relax in geothermal pools each evening after the day’s ride. The Icelanders ride year round, but in the wintertime, their horses are re-shod with special spiked horseshoes so they don’t sleep on icy ground.
Jim, meanwhile, went in search of whales. The boat was rather large, but because of the COVID protocols, the Viking passengers were the only ones allowed onboard, so there were only seventeen people on his boat. Jim saw both minke and humpback whales (he only has photos of the latter), but several species of other whales are also regularly seen in Iceland’s waters. In fact, one of our future stops on this cruise is Húsavik, which calls itself the whale-watching capital of the world. I think our mariners at home in Dana Point might dispute that, but whale watching is a big draw here!
Jim and I returned from our respective excursions at about the same time, and we spent the afternoon cleaning up and watching one of the enrichment lectures onboard. Then it was finally time for our sail away. Gosh! We have missed this for the last 18 months! We celebrated by taking a single malt whiskey tasting class, and then went to dinner in the specialty Italian restaurant, Manfredi’s. Stay tuned, because tomorrow we visit the town of Ìsafjördur in the West Fjordlands.
Jim watching us pull away from the dockFarewell to Reykjavik!Whiskey tasting in Torshavn BarThe selection: Two Scottish whiskeys, an Irish and a Taiwanese single malt
[The Gringos are actually at home now, but we’re finishing up some posts from 2021, before we head out on the road again.]
We woke up the morning of June 19, 2021, in our tents in the Kalahari. If imaginable, it was even colder here than it had been in the Okavango Delta. It is possible I would have never climbed out of my pile of blankets were it not for the delivery of hot coffee to our tent! But we soldiered onward to the lodge for breakfast, and found ourselves in the safari vehicles before the sun rose.
Our diligence was rewarded right away as we drove down by the airstrip where we saw a black-shouldered kite, and another pair of black-backed jackals hunting. We had a better view of another Steenbok this morning, and a great view of some Kori Bustards, which are the heaviest flying birds on Earth, and an endangered species.
Black-shouldered kite on tree topBlack-shouldered KiteBlack-backed jackalKori Bustards and a Steenbok
We took a drive over to the viewing platform to see if we could spot any of the rhinos. No dice, but we saw a dwarf mongoose playing among the Tsamma melons, and spotted some Red Hartebeests, who also like to eat the Tsamma melons. This was a personal first for Jim and I, as we had never seen this species of antelope before.
View from the viewing platformNo rhinos in sight!Dwarf MongooseRed HartebeestWildebeest
Then, because we were traveling in the time of COVID, we had to return to the airstrip to have COVID tests administered (PCRs, if you care) because we needed them to get back into South Africa. Why the airstrip, you might ask? Because the camp had to fly in a nurse to take the samples and them fly him back to Maun to have them processed in a lab there. It cost us about $150 apiece to have this service. Noses and tongues swabbed, we returned to our regularly scheduled wildlife programming.
Welcome to the Dinaka International Airport
Hanging around the airstrip, we saw another pair of black-backed jackals, and got some good shots of a Steenbok. We also spotted quite a few Kori Bustards, and got the best shots of them so far. Then we ventured back out.
Black-backed jackalKori Bustard
We saw a lovely Tawny Eagle, and a Pale Chanting Goshawk devouring its prey. Then we found what may have been the most beautiful giraffe I had ever seen. His coat was an even darker brown than the one we had spotted in South Africa, with the spots looking like brown velvet. After taking WAY too many pictures of him, we went back to the lodge for lunch. On the way home, we spotted an absolutely gorgeous Swallowtail Bee Eater! There were some Crimson-breasted Shrikes waiting for us at the lodge, and a herd of kudus at the watering hole.
Tawny EaglePale Chanting Goshawk with preySwallow-tailed Bee EaterKudus at the lodge watering holeCrimson-breasted Shrike
That afternoon, we went to an animal blind by one of the watering holes. We spent about an hour and a half just being quiet and watching the wildlife come to drink. It was like watching a wildlife movie! The animals can’t really see you until they come to drink, but I suspect they could smell us once they got close to the watering hole, so they’re initial approaches were all very wary. After a time, though, they kept coming in and going away, only to repeat a few minutes later. Some of the animals became very curious and came right up along the side of our hide and peered in like this big bull kudu. Your collective noun for the day: a group of kudus is called a “forkl”. We saw many of those and a dazzle of zebras; not to mention a couple of solitary wildebeest, and a black-backed jackal. After a ridiculous number of photos, we headed back to the lodge. When we checked out the lodge watering hole, there was a Bateleur Eagle taking a drink down there.
All was quiet at the bunker to begin.Then the animals started to arrive.We are being checked out!Mr. Curiosity–“say, what are you doing in there?!”Common waxbills?Bateleur EagleSunset in the Kalahari
After dinner, Rebecca and I drove out with Slim to see what wonders we could uncover that evening. It was a pretty awesome array (although again, my photos don’t really do it justice). Our first sighting was a Spring Hare which looks a lot like a mini kangaroo. Then we saw an African wild cat. We also saw a scrub hare, but lucked out when we spotted a honey badger being chased by two hyenas.
Honey badgerHoney badger being chased by hyenaBat-eared foxesScrub HareAfrican Wild CatSpotted Eagle Owl
By this time in our visit, Slim is entirely focused on trying to find us at least one of the rhinos on the property. Thus, he was driving through the preserve like the proverbial bat out of hell over windy little dirt roads lit only by our headlights. At times, I questioned our sanity for participating in this wild chase. Finally, his quest paid off, as we found a mother rhino and her calf. Shortly afterward, we found a confusion of wildebeests.
baby rhino
We also saw a Martial Eaglet, some bat-eared foxes, and we found our Spotted Eagle Owl hopping down the road again. What a night!
Vaya con Gringos 