"A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles."

- Tim Cahill

THANK YOU!

Here in the U.S. it's Thanksgiving, which has gotten me thinking about all the people I owe a debt of gratitude to for being there for me this past year. You made this experience a whole lot more fun, rewarding, and hassle-free than it possibly could have been otherwise.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who offered support, advice, and encouragement when I decided to embark on this crazy year-long adventure, and to those friends and family members who dutifully kept in touch with me via e-mail during the year--you know who you are! Believe me, a few friendly words from home go a long way when you're in unfamiliar surroundings on the other side of the world.

Next, a shout-out to the good friends who helped me "take care of business" stateside; specifically Leonard, Allison and Ben for keeping my car safe and in good working order; and Tony, Chad, and Kevin for their assistance in storing my stuff and helping me get settled on my return. Big thanks, too, to Ric for keeping up the Not Lost Dammit! website and for posting all those pictures and captions.

Next, I have to single out my good buddies who traveled halfway around the world to meet up with me in exotic locales: Specifically, Eric Iversen, who flew from Norway to help me explore the wilds of Tasmania; Tom Jones, who came all the way from Gainesville, Florida (go Gators!) to meet up with me in Sydney, Australia; and Bill Moore, who took time out from his whirlwind tour of Asia to make my second trip to Hong Kong so stress-free and fun. Oh, and of course my mom and brother Mike, who met up with me in Hong Kong the first time! Traveling the world is great, but seeing those places with friends and family is a hundred times better. Many thanks, too, to Christian Clay and Jin Shu for showing me a great time (and offering me a place to stay!) in Beijing. You guys rock!

Of course, I also have to thank all the wonderful new friends I made during the course of my travels. Even if it was just for an afternoon, I'm so grateful to have shared some time with y'all. Among the many friendly folks I met from all over the world, the following definitely merit a mention: Thomas, Laura, Rhett, Jack, Gareth, Irene, Peter, Teresa, James, Gemma, Kate', Mick, Bjornar (BJ), Ben, Kay, Neal, Charis, Chris, Cynthia, Ed, Colin, Candace, Bridget, Craig, Andrew, James, Andrew, Rachel, Doug, Marko, Jonas, Richard, Ali, Greg, Karen, Matt, Ping, Manuela, Max, Mike, Dennis, Alex, Pete, Katherine, Des, Sven, Brett, Camilla, Laurens, Matt, Andy, Liz, Peter, Brian, Mark, Kyle, Henrik, Chase, Kara, Rose, Tom, Patrick, Kim, Peter, Henrik, Smeeta, Ernest, Steph, Alex, Jeffrey, AJ, Ashley, Laura, Ali, Becks, Helen, Dan, Ian, James, Mando, Pete, Selena, Amer, Matthew, Kim, Gemma, Sammy, Matt, Serkan, Kyle, Daniel, Pia, Greg, Laura, Andrea, Derek, Mark, Rob, Charlie, Charlotte, Justin, Karine, Olivia, Mike, Raymond, Benoit, Bhagwant (Pinto), Amit, Jack, Raphael, and Vincent.

Whew! Hope I didn't leave anyone out. :-) Anyway, thanks, guys; you really made this trip something special. And from the above, I really should single out Kyle, Kim, Gemma, and especially Thomas, for friendship above and beyond the call of duty.

AND LAST, BUT NOT LEAST: This trip wouldn't have been possible without the unwavering love and support of....


...Mom! Thanks for being there for me, always.


John

"I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home."

- William Hazlitt

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA

Well, that's that.

Hard to believe it's all over, but ten months and fifteen countries later, here I am back in the good ol' U S of A, trying to readjust to life in the "civilized" world. Part of me wishes I could keep traveling forever, but part of me is more than happy to be back in the land of iced drinks, toilet paper, and most of all, good friends and family who I've missed like hell this year. It's really great to travel, but it's also wonderful to have something to come home to.

This has been an incredible year, and despite the inevitable bumps along the road, I would do it again in a heartbeat. For anybody thinking of doing something similar, I have only one question: What are you waiting for? It's easy to imagine all sorts of difficulties in undertaking such a journey, but let me assure you: Traveling the world is one hell of a lot easier, safer, and more affordable than you're thinking. Honest! Whatever obstacles you might encounter are trivial compared to the positive experiences you'll have. That's what I've found, at any rate.

I've seen so many places and met so many wonderful people this year that it will take ages to process it all, and as more than one person has told me, it will make for a lifetime of memories. Thanks for sharing this amazing experience with me.

John Kuge
November 2006

EGYPT RECAP

Favorite Things About Egypt:

• The Pyramids at Giza. One Canadian tourist had the gall to sniff that they weren't that impressive, and he "thought they would be bigger." I wanted to smack him. "What WOULD he find impressive?" wondered another tourist. Good question!
• The Temple of Karnak. The. Ultimate. Egyptian. Temple. End of story.

Least Favorite Thing About Egypt:

• Baksheesh. That means tipping, and it's expected for every damn thing, from door-openers to picture-takers to the guy who rushes up and offers unsolicited information about some ancient tomb. I know, when in Egypt, tip everybody, but keeping track of who to tip and how much to pay them occupied far too much of my time here. By the time I got a handle on it, it was time to leave.

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT

Last night I took a sleeper train from Aswan back to Cairo, and this time I shared a cabin with a friendly Taiwanese tour guide named Vincent (Chinese name: Shya) who's leading a group of eleven tourists on a tour similar to mine. We had a good chat, although throughout the evening he kept leaving the cabin to check up on his tour group--and bring them more alcohol! He invited me to join their pizza party, but I figured the last thing I needed was to party with some hard-drinking Chinese tourists on an all-night train ride. I did accept his offer of a bedtime drink of vinegar, though. It's not as bad as you might think, believe it or not, although this was special Chinese drinking vinegar, and not the usual salad stuff. (It's supposed to be good for digestion, he told me.)

We arrived at the Giza station at 7:30 this morning, and I was picked up once again by my faithful driver Tamer. Not stopping in Cairo this time, we drove right past the pyramids (an awesome sight in the early morning sun) and headed out on the desert road to Alexandria. For much of the way, it's an eight-lane highway with big billboards and periodic Shell stations and rest plazas, just like the US. There were even tumbleweeds tumbling around, which I though was an American thing, too, but I guess not.

Anyway, after a couple of hours we arrived in Alexandria, a huge, sprawling metropolis on the Mediterranean. Compared to Cairo it's a lot more modern, with a really long beachfront and lots of luxury hotels. We then picked up my guide for the day (whose name I forget), who pointed out a number of local sights including the new Library of Alexandria (ultra-modern, and built on the site of the ancient one), and several royal palaces and gardens. We then stopped at Qaitbey Fort, a 15th-Century construction which is built on the remains of that ancient wonder of the world, the great lighthouse of Alexandria. Right next door was a tiny Aquarium, so of course I had to go inside and check out the tanks. It had a pretty sorry collection of sea life, including some sad-looking sea turtles and a lethargic octopus--but it was free, so I guess I shouldn't have expected much.

After taking some pictures of the exterior of the fort (I didn't go inside), we then proceeded to Alexandria's famous catacombs, discovered by accident in 1900 when a donkey fell into a deep hole (sadly, he didn't survive). There were hundreds of tombs down there constructed in a mixture of Egyptian and Greco-Roman styles, which were pretty interesting to see. No bodies were in the tombs, though, and I guess grave robbers got any loot that was down there. Typical. Strangely, there were also several tombs for prize horses, which had to be lowered down an extra-wide shaft in order to be buried there. (If you ask me, they should have laid the donkey to rest in one of those.)

After the catacombs, we visited Pompey's Pillar, a famous lone Roman pillar standing tall amid a few other ancient temple remains (sphinxes, columns, etc.), that apparently had nothing at all to do with Pompey. I forget the story, but somehow the pillar is more associated with the emperor Diocletian. We then visited an ancient Roman amphitheatre which was discovered by accident in 1923 during building construction. Next to that were displayed some of the finds dredged up from the sea near Qaitbey Fort--among these were pieces of the famed lighthouse, as well as other worn parts of statues and whatnot that at some point had collapsed into the ocean. Cool.

After that, we dropped of my guide and drove back to Cairo, where we got caught in ridiculous rush hour traffic. Finally, we made it to the Noran Hotel, where Tamer dropped me off for my final night's stay in Egypt.

ABU SIMBEL, EGYPT

Everyone I've talked to who has traveled to Egypt has told me not to miss the spectacular temples at Abu Simbel, so I arranged for a day-trip there today. Unfortunately, for some reason all tours to the site have to leave together in a police-escorted caravan from Aswan--at 4:00 am! Which of course meant getting picked up even earlier--at 3:30, in fact. Ugh. I joined a vanload of Chinese, Japanese, British, and South African tourists on the 290-km drive south, which took about two and a half hours. Watching the sun rise over the Egyptian desert was awesome, though, and when we got there it was still early enough to be pleasantly cool.

The two temples are built into the side of a mountain near the shore of Lake Nasser. The one on the left is the most famous and impressive, featuring four massive seated statues of Ramses II, and the smaller temple to the right is dedicated to Nefertari, his queen. They're really dramatic and imposing, but the most amazing thing about them is that these temples and the two mountains of rock that surround them were actually moved to this location in the 1960s due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which flooded their original location! It's hard to imagine the effort that must have gone into dismantling, moving, and reconstructing all the elements--much of the finer work was done by hand using saws, and it's a near-perfect job. Well, the facade of the mountain looks a little blocky, but the temples themselves look completely intact, both inside and out.

There was no photography allowed inside, but the interiors of the temples were filled with dramatically lit figures of kings and gods--by now I can recognize the major ones, like Horus, Hathor, and Thoth. We wandered around the site for a couple of hours, then returned to the van for the ride back to Aswan. By now in the heat of the day we could see mirages along the way that looked like lakes of water in the desert, but we knew better!

We were back at noon, which was pretty inconvenient timing for me, as I had already checked out of my hotel. I had no choice but to wander the city for six hours until had to catch the night train to Cairo. Thank god for internet cafes!


Book read in the past two weeks:

Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia by Stephan Harding: Kind of a strange mixture of hard science and fuzzy New Age thinking, this book makes a lot of good points about mankind's destructive tendencies and the interconnectedness of systems in the natural world. My problem is that while Gaia theory offers an interesting way of thinking about ecology, it's still technically wrong in that the Earth is not actually a single living being by any accepted scientific definition. Still, I guess it's a useful metaphor when thinking about environmental issues , and maybe that's the whole point. Harding's descriptions of natural feedback loops and the earth's fragile self-correcting mechanisms are fascinating, and I'll bet we hear a lot more about these (for better or worse) in the near future.

ASWAN, EGYPT

Today's itinerary began with a quick trip to the renowned Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, which (for better and worse) prevents the annual flooding of the river Nile and provides hydroelectric power to the region. We drove right across the top of the dam, stopping in the middle so I could hop out of the car and take a few photos. I have to admit I was a little disappointed, as I was expecting to see a really dramatic high wall of concrete like the Hoover Dam or the Gordon Dam I visited this March in Tasmania. But it's not like that at all--just a very wide, low embankment on both sides of the road; not much to look at at all. Still, it's considered a marvel of modern engineering, and was built using 17 times as much material as the Great Pyramid, which I suppose is pretty impressive in itself.

Our next stop was Philae Temple, another temple from the Ptolomaic period which was one of the victims of the dam's success: It originally stood on Philae island in the Nile (now Lake Nasser), but had to be moved to higher ground when the dam flooded its first location. They did a very good job of relocating the temple, though, and landscaped the new island just like the old one. To get to the island, Hossam and I had to be ferried by small boat across the lake, which was kind of a neat way to approach an ancient temple. Like all of the temples I've seen, this one had some interesting columns, carvings, and statues, although I'm afraid I can't single out one to comment on! I guess the temple's location, isolated on a small rocky island, was the most notable thing about it.

Unfortunately, then it was time to visit another tourist trap (IMHO), a perfume factory where some teenage "expert" tried unsuccessfully to convince me of the wondrous medical powers of various exotic extracts and scents. Blah blah blah. Oh, and they can exactly duplicate cK1 too, if you like the way that smells. I decided to pass.

Once that ordeal was over, Hossam took me down to the river for a ride on a honest-to-gosh felucca, one of those Nile sailboats with the tilted shark-fin shaped sails (apparently this is a must-do when you're in Egypt). Piloting our boat was a fat old guy at the rudder and a chain-smoking twelve-year-old working the sails. Neither was very good at getting the boat to move, though, as there was basically no wind. So we more or less drifted aimlessly in the river for 45 minutes or so without going anywhere, which I guess was supposed to be relaxing, but in reality was really irritating. FINALLY we made it to our destination, an island in the middle of the river that's home to the Aswan Botanical Gardens, a haphazard collection of tropical plants and trees (mostly tall palms) that makes for a pleasant enough rest stop. After about an hour there, I had to endure another eternity in the felucca before we finally made it to shore.

ASWAN, EGYPT

As I didn't need Hossam's services yesterday, he chose to stay home with his wife in Luxor rather than cruise the Nile with me (the slacker!). Then last night he drove from Luxor to Edfu and boarded the boat, and met up with me this morning for some more sightseeing.

Immediately upon disembarking, we were picked up by a horse-drawn carriage which took us through town to our first stop, Edfu Temple. This seemed to me like a completely unnecessary extravagance, and the ride was probably less than ten minutes, but whatever. I guess the clip-clopping and the sleighbells did add a certain ambience to the journey, although really it just made me think of Christmas.

At any rate, the temple was interesting. It's known for being the best-preserved one in Egypt, as it was completely buried under the sand until the late 1800s. That in itself is pretty remarkable, considering how tall it is--must have been quite a dig! It's also notable for being built not by Egyptians per se but by the Greeks(!) in the 1st Century BC, during the Ptolomaic dynasty. The temple is dedicated to Horus, the falcon god, so there were some cool falcon statues about, as well as lots of scenes carved into the walls featuring Horus, Ptolemy, and Horus' arch-enemy Seth, who for some reason here takes the form of a tiny hippo. There were also lots of interior chambers, a hypostyle hall, and a marble enclosure meant to house a golden statue of Horus, which unfortunately is now missing.

Then it was back to the boat, and we continued on up the Nile. Around 4:30 (right after teatime) we came to a hill at a bend in the river and the temple of Kom Ombo, dedicated to Horus (again) and Sobek, the crocodile god. This was the smallest temple I've seen so far, but it had some great columns and carvings, including some of the legend herself, Cleopatra. Believe it or not, she really did look a bit like Elizabeth Taylor! I am so serious.

Other interesting features of the temple: a number of mummified crocs (in honor of Sobek), and carvings that demonstrate the Egyptians' great skill in medicine, depicting a whole range of modern-looking surgical instruments including scalpels, suction cups, scissors, sponges, and even a bone saw! Next to this are some hieroglyphs listing the ingredients needed to make a type of medicine--this is apparently often referred to as "the first prescription in history."

As I walked around the temple admiring the carvings, the sun went down over the Nile in a beautiful orange sunset and a bright half-moon appeared in the sky. As the sky got darker, scores of bats flew out and around the temple before heading off to wherever it is that bats go at night, and lights came on illuminating the temple ruins. Quite a dramatic scene, and very cool to see.