My Santiago de Cuba fan… now with added glitter! (At the Morro Fort)
We took a teeny weeny prop plane across the island to Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern side. This is a smaller, less touristy town, which was at one point the capital before it reverted back to Havana.
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The three amigos with a pink Chevy
Today we had a guided tour with B, walking through many of the streets we’d seen yesterday, but with the addition of historical facts and stories. Continue reading
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Three weary feet
I was met at the airport by the tour company’s representative who pointed me in the direction of the money changing ATMs before we got into a taxi to drive to the Old Town where R had already gone. It took half an hour or so to get there from the airport, with amazingly little traffic for what I’d expected of a Friday night.
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To secure a biz points reward flight to Cuba for the beginning of the school holidays, it meant a 2-day bounce around three continents from Perth: Singapore, Beijing, Montreal before finally landing in Havana. R is taking an alternate route with fewer stops: Singapore, New York to Havana. Warning: many selfies on planes ahead!
Singapore Airlines
(backdated to October 2018)
The Library
I took the long way home from Cairo (points flights are sometimes interesting routings) which meant I had an afternoon in transit in Vienna. They have it quite well set up – lockers to leave your luggage, a train from the airport to the middle of the city, and a lot of sights within walking distance.
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Since J hadn’t been down to the south, we decided we should visit two of the big ticket tourist attractions: Abu Simbel and The Valley of the Kings. Instead of flying, we took the sleeper train south. The compartments felt a little smaller than the ones in the Turkish trains for example, but the beds are relatively comfortable, and you actually get fed edible food in sleeper class.
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I am a giant! In front of the library model.
We had a lovely day trip to Alexandria with tour guide Nibal. We had decided on a more relaxing day, so instead of the fortress and catacombs, we visited the library and the palace, and whiled away a few hours on the beach.
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J and me on Yasmina’s roof terrace, with the pyramids in the background.
When I first visited Cairo back in 2005, it was pretty overwhelming. Now a slightly more seasoned traveller, I took things a little more slowly and without having to keep to the schedule of a tour group.
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Japanese Covered Bridge… with all the other tourists
As we drove through Danang from the airport towards Hoi An, we were pretty amazed to see a lot of development, especially along the beach. There are a startling number of new resorts in varying stages of completion along there, and the Danang airport also has a brand new international terminal since we were last here in 2014. Wow!
Da Nang isn’t the only place to be developing – as we drove in, we saw Hoi An is growing quickly too, and the sleepy town we’d visited is now much bigger too. One night we walked along Cua Dai where we’d stayed last time, and we were shocked to see that almost all the places we’d eaten at (and the cheap beer places, too) had been replaced by more new hotels and electronics shops. The little Pho place next to that hotel was still there, but it looked like only just!
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We flew with Vietnam Airlines to Hanoi, which was uneventful, as preferred! The airport at Hanoi is brand new — only two years old (I couldn’t work out why it seemed unfamiliar, when we’d flown into Hanoi only three years ago…)
Driving into the Old Town, we were overrun by mopeds, and remembered hearing last time that there is some strangely huge number of motorbikes in Vietnam, like three per person or something. There were certainly a lot on the roads!
NYE on Beer Corner
Our hotel was the Essence on Ta Hien St, right off Beer Corner. We had chosen it knowing it was in the middle of the Old Quarter, but didn’t realise quite how much it was totally in the thick of things. It was busy on the Saturday night, but on NYE the streets outside were heaving — literally wall-to-wall people!
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Two Weeks Away 