Our fourth stop, St. Martin, presented a question that I can only assume most people are not faced with on a regular basis. Did we want to go to the naked beach or to the airplane beach? Undoubtedly, there are other things to do on this half French, half Dutch island but with no tour guide, very little research and a rental car, those were the only real options available to us. We had maps, brochures, phone apps all within our disposal but try as we might, there were no museums, forts, historical sights or even largest balls of twine-type exhibits for us to visit. Not even trying to crib from the ship's own excursions booklet was of any help. In hopes of stumbling onto something, we played around with the car's pre-programmed GPS with its long list of other beaches we could choose from. We picked one at random, pulled in and saw that it was indeed a beach. Sand, water: check. One empty restaurant with a bored looking waitress: check.
I am back home from Kigali. I should be preparing for our upcoming month-long trip to Peru, which kicks off just 5 days from now, but my mind is still bumping along the dirt roads of Rwanda. Since it is a relatively small country, we got a chance to cover a lot of ground; we saw most of the northeast section of the country when we visited Akagera Nat'l Park and later a big chunk of the south when we visited Nyungwe Park. All along the way, two things were all but guaranteed. One was stunning vistas; I was constantly fighting the urge to ask our driver, Modeste to stop for photo ops, since I knew the goal was to actually get to these parks in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. The second sure thing was the chorus of cries from the children everytime we would drive through any of the villages. Sometimes, we would hear them before we saw them. "Muzungu! Muzungu! ( something unintelligible in Kinyarwanda) Muzungu!" We quickly lea...
Two things I learned mid-way through my tour of 'Nam: 1) Hoi An is probably one of the most beautiful cities in all of the country. 2) Getting there via a Camel line night-bus from Nha Trang is not such a great idea. Earlier, I wrote about how efficient and stress-free the Fula/ Pula buses were. On this journey, I met their bizarro world counterparts, the Camel bus line (or to use their full name, the "You'd wish you ridden a camel instead bus line"). Not to get into all the nasty details, because #1 is the memory I am taking away from all this, but the bus was filthy and smelled like feet. For 13 hours, the driver was reckless, even by regional standards. And they crowded the aisles with local villagers sleeping on the floor, making it impossible to reach the (possibly working) bathroom. Not that this mattered, I guess, since I woke up to find- first thing in the morning- a toddler with his penis in a water bottle and a group of women making "ssssss...
Coll! it really looks like littel magic has been done ;-))M a g i c is in the air!!
ReplyDeleteGee! Thanks for the endorsement :)
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