travelling right, travelling light

My brother, D’ell’s, fiancée is Swedish, hence finding ourselves winding down our world trip in Are, a picturesque little town roughly in the middle of Sweden that – once the snow arrives – becomes something of a domestic ski haven.

The view at twilight from our chalet out onto the town of Are. It was like looking down on a tiny model village!

I truly believe that skiing is something that needs to be first attempted before the age of ten. After that, life experience of pain and injury seriously complicates things and the first time I tried skiing last December, I was so bad that I was taken out of my group beginners’ class and given the instructors’ instructor for a private lesson! So, I’m not sure if I’d have signed up for another opportunity to humiliate myself if Christmas in Sweden hadn’t also been billed as the pre-wedding party for D’ell and Emma.

Soon-to-be-wed: my brother D'ell and fiancee Emma, pictured during dinner on the 23rd.

Lloyd skis very well, and so spent several happy days with some combination of D’ell, Emma, Steve, Jill and/or Simon on the slopes. Of course, a remedial skier like me can only dream of going as high as the ski lifts go, but it looks like there is some pretty stunning scenery up there…

Lloyd was accompanied by a friendly fox that came trotting out right onto the slopes!

Me? Well, I suffered another session with a painfully bad instructor who reported at the end of my lesson, “well, maybe skiing isn’t for you”. A little rude, maybe and – if I hadn’t been so shocked – I might have had the good wits to retort “Judging by the quality of your tuition, I’d say maybe skiing isn’t for you either!”. But his insult was enough to keep me on the nursery slopes with dozens of two-feet high munchkins whizzing by me for hours and, thanks to Lloyd, making good progress on my turns. I have a long way to go before I could even attempt to ski with the rest of the group, but Lloyd and I will try and squeeze in a few trips to Tahoe when we’re back in California so I can try and at least catch up with the ten year olds….

Me with my ski class. Enough to cut anyone's ego down to size....

Not good enough to ski with the big kids. But good enough to carry the skis...

Accompanying the skiing were the associated traditional activities involving plenty of food and more champagne than is feasible for our party of seven. Lloyd and I haven’t seen anything like it for the last six months, so good quality red wine and excessive quantities of edible food (although the smoked reindeer heart probably doesn't qualify here) was a bit of a shock to the system but you’ll be glad to know we quickly got into the swing of things.

The bride-to-be prepared a tremendous Swedish feast on Christmas Eve, which meant that Lloyd and I truly had our work cut out for us come Christmas Day. But between us we managed to conjure up 10 kilos of Roast Turkey (I know, what were we thinking?) with all the trimmings, served to an appreciative audience. We almost had a disaster, though, with the realization that we had drunk all the wine intended for the meal the previous evening. Sweden has some pretty tough regulation concerning alcohol sales which are limited to government-run “Systembolaget” shops. Despite the fact that the supermarket was open on Christmas Day, the “Systembolaget” had been closed since the 22nd. Faced with a critical wine deficit, D’ell, Steve and Jill engaged in a wine smuggling operation. No doubt the waitress in a local bar was a little confused when the three of them ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir. Each. And the sight of the three of them hoofing it down the street with three open bottles of wine carried in inside pockets must also have been interesting.

Steve and D'ell - Caught in the Act...

With no christmas tree in the chalet, we had Lloyd fulfil the function. Useful, no?

We enjoyed a wonderful White Christmas with friends and family in Sweden ahead of what promises to be a wonderful wedding weekend in Gothenburg. In the meantime, thanks to D'ell and Emma for hosting us in Are over christmas, and hello to Jill and Steve and Simon who also made it such a memorable time.

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From Are in Sweden, hello to our friends and families!

We’ve had a crazy second half of 2007, travelling more than 100,000 kilometres. It was a long journey, and one which always included our friends and family: if not in person then firmly in our hearts and thoughts. We wish you all a very enjoyable holiday season, and look forward to catching up in the New Year!

In the meantime, you can see we’ve been busy with our Christmas hats ….

Happy Christmas from Lloyd and Jacquie!!

1) Use the metro in Cairo. It’s cheap, fast and gave us a perspective on Egyptian life that we didn’t experience anywhere else. (Like kindness, respect and generosity . . .)

2) If your itinerary allows, visit the Cairo Museum AFTER visiting Aswan and Luxor. It’s an inaccessible museum that – as presented - lacks context, and having been to the sites we were better able to appreciate content relevant to the places we had visited.

3) Don’t be concerned, as we were, that the travelling Tutankhamen Exhibition (currently at London’s O2) has borrowed too many of the key artifacts to leave the Cairo Museum lacking. We were able to see far more than we expected, including the gold (Funerary) face mask (etc)…

4) Be prepared for the expense of visiting the sites you will want to see: we spent somewhere around US$120 each on entry tickets, and that didn’t include more expensive options including Tutankhamen’s tomb in Valley of the Kings and the Royal Mummies’ exhibition at the Cairo Museum.

5) Be sure to take a balloon ride over Valley of the Kings (Luxor). The price has come down dramatically in the last twelve years. The going rate seemed to be around US$80 per person for a balloon that will hold sixteen or so passengers, but we were offered the same flight for US$50 so be prepared to haggle.

6) Don’t use Viator.com! Note that I pre-booked online and grossly overpaid at Viator.com which seems to think that 200% profit margins are reasonable. Don’t be fooled by their money-back guarantee (claims to guarantee a refund if you find the same service offered at a lower price locally), enforcement of which has turned into one of the most frustrating elements of the entire trip.

7) More on balloons. We couldn’t decide whether to go for a sunset balloon ride, or a shortly-after-sunrise balloon ride. In the end, and for no other reason than we thought we like to sleep late and get up at 5am rather than 4am (!), we went for the latter. There were a gazillion balloons out for the sunrise which meant that we were greeted with a beautiful sky filled with hot air balloons which – for me – was a wonderful sight to experience. I’m sure it was pretty awesome from the air too. Perhaps a benefit of the later ride was that – when we finally took off at about 7am – we were one of only three or four balloons.

8) Don’t miss Philae Light and Sound. It’s expensive at E£75 per person (about US$15), but it was awesome. To be fair, I haven’t been to the Karnak version which is also supposed to be quite good, but the opportunity to walk through Philae at night was unexpected and simply brilliant.

9) To get to Philae, you need to take a boat for a four minute ride. You should expect to pay about E£35 per couple, but we grouped up with three other groups to negotiate with a boat caption and ended up paying E£15 for the two of us!

10) Unless you follow my strategy and stop eating for the duration of your visit, the odds of a little Cairo Quickstep are not in your favour. Get ahead of the curve and buy ‘Antinol’ from any pharmacy as soon as you arrive. It’s an antiseptic solution (also available in tablets) that can be your fast track ticket to recovery. It worked for Lloyd!