Skip to main content

London

Nairobi has by the far the worst airport i have been to. The first security chech is out side the entrance which you can't get past without a ticket which is just plain annoying when you've caught a taxi to see a fellow traveller off and you have to do it from the taxi rank. When it was my turn to leave i had to explain twice (2 x-ray points) that the contents of my pringles were in fact pringles and not a bomb. There also no decent lounge in the place, not that i could find anyway.

Once on my flight to Dubai i had some pretty awesome views of the sunset through storm clouds and lightning. Emirates is probably just better then Singapore airlines if only because of the camera mounted to front of the plane allowing you to watch during take-off and landing. Dubai airport isn't nearly as interesting as Singapore. A 1hr delay in transfer didn't help. Flying over europe was a little weird, at any given time there were planes flying beside, underneath, above, oncoming and across us. Not sure what a near miss is but some came pretty close.

Once at Heathrow i was out surprisingly quickly. I walked through the doors to the immigration hall and my heart sunk as i saw 1000's of people queing. Spirits rose as i moved straight through to the UK passport holders gate and was on british soil in 5 minutes. Of the two people that were meeting me at the airport neither showed up which after a 15hr flight was a little discouraging. I caught the tube to kilburn where i am now living with frosty, another aussie and a Saffa.

At the moment i am working as a driver / storeman / porter / random tasker for a catering and bar company. It doesn't pay much but i'm getting a lot of hours (80 last week). It also allows me to drive around london (which is shite quite frankly, the city is a maze of one-way streets, roundabouts, dead ends, no street signs, stupid people who walk into to traffic expecting you to stop and roads so narrow two bikes struggle to pass each other. I have to negotiate this in a 3.5t truck) and some of the surrounding country side.

During my first week i was asked to pick up a group of mexican businessman and take them from Heathrow to their hotel via some of the sights. At the time i had not driven through central london and was having a small anxiety attack about the prospect of the whole thing. This was not alieved when the guide (brazilian but spanish speaking) revealed she knew less than i did about driving in london. A desperate look through the A-Z had us on our way and i'm relieved to say that all went surprisingly well considering the irony of the situation.

I haven't done any rubber necking yet so a the moment its life as usual just here and not their.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Strung Treng

Strung Treng was an unexpected stop over, more a hospital visit then the usual tourist stuff. I was waiting in a guest house restaurant for the bus to Laos when i was rather suddenly overcome with a fever and fatigue. I rented a room and slept for almost 24 hours straight. The manger was understandably concerned, he thought it might have been Malaria, and sent me to the doctor for tests. It wasn't Malaria but was probably Dengue Fever but I needed a 10 hour bus trip back to Phnom Pehn to confirm this. Either way the 'cure' was Panadol, plenty of water and rest. I was going to do this in Laos anyway so decided against the bus back to Phnom Pehn and caught the bus to Laos the next day instead.

Al Hudayda

I asked the hotel manager in Manakhah about getting to Al Hudayda. He assured me I just had to catch a taxi to Al Magraba on the main road and wait for a taxi to pass by. And so I waited. And waited. And waited but of course taxis don't leave Sana'a until full so I wasn't having much luck. Not that I minded much. I just sat in a road side cafe drinking tea,watching what was going on around me and answering the same three questions to anyone that cared to ask. With the help of a local I eventually managed to hitch a lift as far as Banjil. Turned out for the best really. Its must more comfortable on the bends when you have the back seat of a land rover to yourself. The drive out of the mountains along a wadi was quite impressive but once out of the mounatins the drive to Banjil and the shared taxi to Al Hudayda from there was like the drive from anywhere to Port Augusta. Long, flat, hot, featureless, boring. During the day Al Hudayda is dead. There might have been a bit going...

Amasya

Lonely Planet suggested that Amasya is one of the prettiest towns in Turkey. Set in a mountain valley with a river running down the middle, I couldn't agree more. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves when I eventually post them. Once again the weather was perfect and it hadn't snowed here at all which was good because I had a lot of walking to do. It was a strange town. Mostly because it was one of the more modern towns I had come across, it almost had a cosmopolitan feel to it. But then there would be a horse and cart parked in the street. Most people spoke some English. They would come up to me (blond hair = foreigner), especially children and say hello, welcome, what is your name? where are you from? but that would be it as if that was as far as their grasp on the English language would go. This was excellent but as the conservation wasn't going to go any further (my Turkish matches their English) it made for a weird silence until one of us went on our way. I d...