Saw "Inception" Tonight

Excellent flick! DeCaprio is great at playing the tortured soul. It has a kind of "Matrix" air about it. Good action. The final scene is a gripper. Gotta see it a time or two to retain everything. Be interesting to see how Rotten Tomatoes judges it.

My only question is this: am I actually sitting in front of a computer writing this?

Two Weeks Back In America...

I keep surfing the TV channels for something good to watch. So far nothing holds my interest for more than a couple minutes. Well, not exactly. I still like Colbert and John Stewart. But even my standby MSNBC and Keith Olbermann can't hold my attention.

And who is this Glenn Beck idiot? People believe in this clown? This guy spells trouble for this country. Like we needed it.

And advertisements (radio AND TV) irritate the shit out of me. What crap!

In other news, Cabrini and I got our visas for China. Here we go!

Back to America

So, wow, what a trip! We made it back to the US on July 1st. And we had ourselves a time. I've added some pictures to kind of summarize our trek from Cape Town to Cairo.

So we started out by going down to Cape Town, South Africa. First thing we did was go shark cage diving with the Great White Sharks. It was like watching Shark Week except those suckers were about six inches from our faces. Intense!

We climbed Table Mountain, visited Robben Island and saw Nelson Mandela's prison cell, went on a wine country tour, kayaked, scuba'd, ate lots of food. Just had a great time in one of the great cities of the world.









So from Cape Town we worked our way north to Malawi. Spent a few days relaxing on the shores of Lake Malawi. We wanted to get some scuba diving in there (it's supposed to have some of the best fresh water diving in the world) but the Dive Master was sick the day we had booked, so no go. Hey sometimes you win sometimes you lose.

After Malawi we went back to Tanzania. Cabrini and I had visited the Serengheti, Ngorongoro Crater and Zanzibar back in January. But this time we had one thing in mind: Mt. Kilimanjaro! So we caught a train (24hours) across southern Tanz, then bused to Moshi where we met up with Bibi and Azizi of Maasai Moja trekking company. They took us in and treated us like family.

Long story short seven days later we summited Kili. It was a beautiful experience! Fifty or five thousand pictures can't tell the story, but one will have to do.



Then it was Cairo. After the obligatory trip out to giza to see the piles of rocks we flew to Aswan for a cruise down the Nile.

We saw some of the coolest temples in the world and an absolute TON of hieroglyphics. Aswan, Edfu, Luxor, Karnak, Valley of the Kings and more that I can't even remember. Of all the temples, monuments and various archeological sites in the entire world Luxor has fully one third. It's amazing.

Finally we fly to Sharm el Sheik on the Red Sea for some great scuba diving. We didn't have a good dive in Cape town (rough weather), and the dive in Malawi was scratched. But the reefs we dove on at Sharm were beautiful. Great visibility, beautiful colors, a gazillion fish. Fantastic.




So we didn't have an underwater camera, but you can see how awesome the water was.


Finally it was back to Cairo. Re-connected with my old friend Hani. Then it was catch a flight to JFK and just like that our African adventure was over.

Two years. Man, where did it go? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I met a wonderful woman. Saw amazing things. Did amazing things!

I'm going down to Costa Rica next week to see Mick for the first time in almost two years. Cabrini and I have a few things to do in August. But the biggest thing is on August 24th we hit the road again. Well, the skies to be exact. We're going to China. More about that later.

Sorry if the pictures are incomprehensible or out of order. I hope to get back into the blogging routine. If I could just stay off facebook...