Pete's Adventures on the Road

"Is it Safe!?" “Is it safe?” is a question that pops up from time to time when me and Erin travel or move to a new country to live temporarily. In fact, it's a question relatives and friends have always asked when I travelled by myself to certain countries before meeting Erin, and I found it can be a frustrating question, but it is also one that is often completely innocent and sometimes perfectly valid. "What shapes people's perceptions of countries?" In short, a lot of factors. Media... is definitely a big influence, and unfortunately it is an overwhelmingly negative influence. In fact if you switched on the news channels now, you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere that seems 'peaceful'. The world always seems to be falling apart. But you have to consider the fact that the media only report on sensationalist stories and stories that will stir up fear in people, since that virtually all of the world's media is now owned by ...

  Not quite as bad as Mad Max: Fury Road, but... Off the grid, in Dahab... So, we had experienced problems with the plumbing here shortly after we had arrived in our apartment here which left us without running water for close to 72 hours. Then yesterday, we had a power outage which also meant water could not be pumped from the water tank into the taps and the toilet. Luckily, this was quickly resolved by our land lord Sam who came over and called an electrician. While we both waited outside for the electrician to turn up, me and Sam started to talk about the problems Dahab has with internet connections, the (rationed) water systems and the electrical grid. He said that recently many people have had problems with all three, both Egyptian and expats a like. I asked him why was this such a massive issue in Dahab and he explained it to me. Basically, the problem stems from when Israel occupied much of the Sinai (after the "6-Day War") from 1967 until 1982 when a p...

  Sophie! My favourite Egyptian cat! 😍 A Cat Named Muezza... I always thought that Egyptians loving cats was just a stereotype from pagan times, where cats were worshipped and revered as demi-gods and goddesses.... But while Egypt slowly became a Muslim nation and these old beliefs faded, they did not disappear entirely... There are thousands of cats everywhere we have been so far, most of them in good condition and well looked after. So I asked a local and googled the topic looking for some answers... Well, apparently it seems that cats are respected and sometimes revered in Islam. And this comes from stories about Mohammed's life found in religious texts: Mohammed was very fond of cats, and once he was getting ready to go and pray and found his favourite female cat - which he named Muezza – asleep on the sleeve of his prayer robe. Instead of moving her, he cut the sleeve off and went on his way to pray at the mosque, leaving Muezza fast asleep. When Mohammed...

 View from our window “It's not the years, honey. It's the milage...” Our move from Albania to here was a pretty gruelling journey. First our bus to Athens from Albania got stuck at the border for ages and so we got into Athens late. So we could only sleep a few hours before getting to the airport and on our early morning flight to Cairo... We didn't linger in Cairo: I was expecting it to be like a big city like Delhi which is just dusty, hot and sprawling with a lot of hassle. And that is essentially how it was, just on a even huger scale, with close to 30,000,000 people making it both the biggest city in both Africa and Europe... But I really should point out here that Erin actually handles countries and travelling in general a lot better than I do now. So when it comes to “hassle” - even if it's just taxi following you beeping at you when you are just trying to walk to places - I think she both notices it much less than I do and isn't phased or ann...

Dahab view. The land on the right is Saudi Arabia! We haven’t written in awhile as our last few weeks in Sarande were relatively unexciting. We worked a lot, stayed in a lot but also hosted a couple of couchsurfers again, which was a lot of fun. One of the travellers was from Hungary and he ended up cooking us a delicious Hungarian chicken stew for dinner which was positively delicious. The other two travellers were from Germany and are on their way hitch-hiking to India from Dresden. It seems the longer we’re on the road, the more people we meet who are taking travelling to the next level. Sometimes I feel like a bit of an imposter with my flash buses, public transportation and flying meanwhile here there are dozens if not hundreds of travellers literally thumbing it on the side of the highway with the attitude of whatever happens, happens. We even met a Spanish girl last year who had hitchhiked from Madrid all the way to Laos. We met her in a tiny village called Tad Lo and she ...

Photo Source It's been a few weeks since we got up to much if anything. I had a brief meltdown with anxiety about two weeks ago which put our trip to Himare on the back burner a bit, at least for now. The weather in October seems to fluctuate highly and we missed the last window for Himare, but not to worry. We have already decided we're going to come back to do Himare maybe in May or June of next year (after our visas reset) so more on that as well as Berat later! In the meantime though, we only have around 3 weeks left before we need to really get a move on and get out of Albania or risk overstaying. Overstaying is NEVER a good idea in any country and can cause you several issues including fines or even exclusion periods, so to play it safe, just don't do it. Although, it does depend on the country you find yourself in. For example, Thailand and Laos typically just charge you an extra fee of like $4 a day for each day you overstay. So it can rack up fast if you don...