buses in the CD

 

The buses in our new neighborhood are better than we realized, with the significant exception of getting to Jack’s office.   Multiple bues run to the Mount Baker light rail station, which is great for getting to our parents’ neighborhoods.

The part where we come home

Late last night we arrived home in Seattle, coming to rest after our trip around the world.

The only thing better than the adventure of traveling for six months is travelling together for six months and starting off our married life by spending nearly every moment side-by-side for half a year.
Happy Six-month Anniversary, Jack!
The next adventure will be getting back to work and rediscovering Seattle after a decade away.

Hong Kong hikes

 

Hong Kong offers a ton of great hiking.  The terrain is very steep and covered with thick forests wherever it isn’t covered in huge metropolis, and there is a lot of land reserved for parks.  We had two days of hiking, one on Hong Kong island itself, above the city, and another on Lamma, one of the outlying islands.  There is a lot of space in the New Territories and Lantau Island, as well, and from what we saw the paths are very well maintained and marked.

We hiked up from Quarry Bay into the hills just behind downtown Hong Kong, above a reservoir and past several great views of the city and the surrounding topography.  Hong Kong seems always to be a little grey and foggy, but I think the air may be smoggy a lot of the time, as well.  We never did make it up to “the peak,” the touristy mountaintop right behind the central business district, but I am not sure that there was a truly clear day while we were there, anyway, and I think the views we got on this hike were just as good.

On another day, we took a ferry to Lamma Island, south of Hong Kong, and hiked around the northern half of the island.  The only car-road on Lamma goes from the power plant across the island and is called simply “power plant road.”  We walked on it for an hour or so, and it was clear that it was rarely if ever used for car traffic.  The rest of the residents of the island walk on footpaths, or use bicycles.  It was a different world than the city, and yet they were only a 25 minute ferry ride from Central in Hong Kong. 

map update

 

From Jordan we will fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, arriving on the morning of January 2nd.

Here’s a map of where we’ve been so far:

the first week in Morocco

This is where we’ve been so far.


We spent the first two days in Casablanca, which is industrial, large (about 3 million) and not very touristy.  It has some art deco buildings, some wealthy shopping areas, some slums and a medina that is decidedly not touristy.  People looked at us, but there was virtually no annoying tourist hustle.

The highlight was the Hassan II Mosque, which is the 3rd largest mosque in the world and one of the few that non-Muslims can enter.  I suspect this is because it was so exceedingly expensive.  It opened in 1993 and cost about $800 million.


    


Then we rode a train about three hours south to Marrakech, a city of almost 2 million that is a very popular tourist destination.  We made the mistake of staying in the medina, next to the tourist trap that is Djemaa el Fna square.  Yes, I mean trap literally.  I can say that Auberge Riad Douzi was one of the best hostels I’ve stayed in, in terms of social atmosphere.  I suspect this was because of the free mint tea on the beautiful roof terrace, the overwhelming desire to escape the bustle of the medina and the higher average age of people traveling outside of the summer holidays.

 

The only museum like thing we did was visit the Saadian Tombs.  We look happy and relaxed because the 10 dirham ($1.50) entrance fee cut out the rifraff.  These 16th century tombs were walled off and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1917 by aerial photography.



Jack’s last post wasn’t an exaggeration – Marrakech really was an extraordinarily unpleasant experience because of the people.  The best interaction we had was this: we walked out into a busy alley and were immediately approached by a spa hustler.  We were in the middle of a heated discussion after two days of being constantly accosted so I just kept talking (in addition to continuing to walk, which I advise) and the guy kept talking and walking with us and I kept talking and I guess my volume and the absurdity of the situation made him and then me start laughing, so that he gave up.  That’s it.  That was the most genuine interaction we had outside of our hostel. 

I have never felt such animosity, veiled in such false friendliness as I did in Marrakech.

Also in Marrakech, tourists are flooded with opportunities to take tours into the mountains or desert.  Most are overnight.  We couldn’t decide between them, so we took the bus to the desert ourselves.  I think this was the right thing to do because we learned that a lot of the tours take you from one sponsored shopping opportunity to another and we probably could not have dealt with that.

So, we took a 9 hour bus ride over the snow capped Atlas mountains to a town called Mhamid, where the road ends and the Sahara begins.  This is definitely enough material for a post of its own.

After the desert, we took a 12 hour bus trip back through Marrakech, to a nice seaside (Atlantic) town of Essaouira, which is where we are now.  It is beautiful and much more relaxed.  Whew.

map update and what’s next

Here’s an updated map of where we’ve been.  Green tents show where we’ve wwoofed, yellow points are where we stayed with friends, light blue is for places where we primarily walked and dark blue is all the rest.

On Wednesday we’re leaving our second wwoof farm (near Alessandria Italy) to go to Florence.  Then we’ll go to Sienna and Rome for a few days before we go to our next wwoof farm in Umbria.  Then in November we’ll go to Vienna (yay!) and then somewhere outside of the Schengen zone in Eastern Europe because our 90 days will be up.

where we've been so far...

Do you like maps?  We do.  This is where we've been, in addition to Iceland, which is too far away for the scale I wanted to use.

If you really like maps, you can see the whole google map here here