After a relaxing few days at the Reef and Beach we have now all headed back home, Paul and Terri and family via Rome and Paris and Nancy and I via Cairo where we managed to squeak in a visit to the Museum of Civilization, a camel tour of the Pyramids and the Sphinx and a touristy sunset Nile river cruise that we would rather forget. This last entry will wrap up the blog for this trip which has certainly lived up to its name which (full disclosure) was chosen for me by Chat GPT’s artificial intelligence chatbot. Some things that surprised me or that I didn’t expect: - how close you can actually get to the mountain gorillas and other animals on a game drive, literally being able to touch them if you wanted to. - how on time all of the drivers were for pickups and how smoothly all of the entries into the National parks and border crossings were. In the vast majority of cases we were the cause of the delays or late starts. You often hear the phrase “African time” and that you ...
Modern flight never ceases to amaze that you can close your eyes on one continent and wake up 8,000km away in another world, in this case with a 6 hour layover in between in Montreal. For anyone wanting to visit Montreal in the summer note that nothing opens until 11am, I suspect this has something to do with the City’s reputation as a party town as everyone has probably been up to the wee hours the night before. We headed to Old Montreal in search of my nephew Jayson’s first “real poutine” and we found it in Pub St Pierre ( https://www.pubsaintpierre.ca/ ). Excellent food and ambience, recommended to check it out if you are in old town Montreal. At 11am we made our way into the montreal Museum of Archaeology which is worth a visit to understand the history of the island and also take in their rotating exhibits, in this case a very well done exhibition on the history of Egypt, a culture that put at its core the need for the individual to strive to do as many good deed...
Our first 2 days in Kenya are spent sightseeing in Nairobi and then driving to the Maasai Mara National Reserve, an extension of the Serengeti National park in Tanzania where we have our first game drive of the trip. The Nairobi National park is actually surrounded by the developed city. Our hotel overlooks the park and you can see game safaris driving and animals if you are lucky. The hotel has a poster that offers prizes for spotting animals but we aren’t so lucky with my binoculars which we use every time we are eating in the 3rd floor restaurant. Driving around the City we see baboon families beside the road and ostriches beside the highway. Andrew says that they had to eventually fence the entirety of the park as the lions were walking into the main road and causing massive traffic jams! I guess it’s no difference than coyotes and bears living in Stanley park and the north shore but it seems far more exotic....
best way to travel
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