Let’s see how far we can amble
11:34 pm Sunday, 10 February, 2008
Note: From Wednesday February 6th.
I’m sat in the departure lounge in Heathrow waiting for my flight to Dublin to board. I have at least another 30 minutes to wait. I’m not really sure why I ended up at the airport so early but it had to be done, or at least I thought it did.
For the first time BMI are checking bag weights. Now in fairness to them I was 25% over but they just pointed out that now I can carry two pieces of hand luggage and there is no weight limit on them so why don’t I just do some repacking. So I did and it all worked out fine though I could do without having to carry so much shit. That’s going to come back to haunt me but more on that later.
So Dublin. I’ve been staying at my sisters a bit recently. It’s not been ideal (air mattress in a one bedroom studio) but it’s worked out much better than I expected it to. This last weekend though I was down in County Kerry for some music, drinking and of course some photos. It didn’t help that it lashed rain for most of the weekend but it wasn’t too bad and I ended up with a few shots I liked.
Now I’m not sure what I really wrote about Egypt, I’m not even sure I wrote anything. So lets go for a very quick recap on that. There isn’t really very much that I can add to the hundreds of thousands of people who have written or commented about seeing the temples at Karnak, Luxor, Philae, the jaw-dropping Abu Sembel or walking in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings or seeing the collection in the Cairo museum from Tutankhamun’s tomb. If you really want to know anything about these all I can actually tell you is that they are beyond amazing, the colours deserve to be seen and they look a thousand times better than any photo or video you have ever seen (yes even mine!).
Two things which I will single out, one because I don’t care how many people have talked about it, I did it and it was instantly one of the highlights of my life to date and I suspect will be one for the rest of my life too. I am, of course, talking about going into one of the Pyramids of Giza. Now as it happens, I have typed something out about this so I’m just going to paste that in here.
***
There is nothing inside but a simple stone sarcophagus and blank walls. There is no oxygen, it’s stupidly hot and the only way for someone of my size to get in and back out is to get down on hand and knee and crawl, sometimes in close to pitch black. It’s sore, I left several pieces of skin along the corridor (though thankfully I did not crack my head at any stage). The walls are blank save for a simple name and date from the early 1800’s in French. It is in fact nothing compared to the sights of the temples of Luxor or Kom-Ombo or Abu Simbel, just blank walls. It doesn’t matter, nothing at all matters but for the fact that you are standing inside one of the Pyramids of Giza. Nothing else matters. It’s beyond words how amazing an experience it is, how profound the feeling is as you scramble through the dark in a monument built (we don’t even know how it was built) over 4000 years ago. I was crawling from the very first metre of the passage way but way more importantly I was smiling (if not grinning like a loon) from the same point. Just amazing.
***
Now the second was a little more mundane but it was absolutely nothing like what I had expected and is now something I’m very keen to do again. I went on a hot air balloon ride over Luxor and the Nile (not the valleys of the Kings or Queens unfortunately) but still it was awesome. I didn’t take that many photos because I was simply there enjoying the ride. Great fun and I’m totally going to do one again the next time I get a chance.
Alright so that’s pretty much that on Egypt, you can take a look through the photos for more of the story.
So Dublin. Few reasons for heading there. The main one being the lack of a flat in London. I’m not doing anything until the second week of March and I’m not crashing around at people’s places for that long when I can just stay in my old room at my parents in a real bed. So that’s the big one. That really leads up to the second one which is that I’m going travelling in March for a while and I don’t really need to be paying rent into a flat and so my stuff is in storage.
While I was in Egypt I had some quiet time for thinking and I believe the correct term is self-reflection. I came to a few conclusions and I decided that while I didn’t know what I was going to do next but I was certain it wasn’t going to be a job (sorry mom, dad).
Most of the thoughts and conclusions and indeed realisations were about me and I’m going to take some time and work with them. I decided that I have a once in a lifetime chance to get out into the world and take a good look. I’m not going to have the money or the time off again so I need to do it now.
So in a fit of something that I’m not really sure is like me, or at least wasn’t like me but is now, I am going off around the world. I leave from London on March 10th and I’ll be back at some stage early next year. It’s all booked and paid for (my bank account isn’t looking as good as it was a couple of days ago!) and will take me through around 20 countries spread over 5 continents. I’ll put some more details up on that over the coming weeks and will probably switch over to some sort of travel blog assuming that I have time (read am bothered) to set something up and it’s of course based on the assumption that I’ll get online a bit while I’m away. One thing I have to be careful about is that some countries seem to have a nasty habit of canceling place tickets if they find out you have been to come places that they don’t like.
Anyway I’m pretty conflicted over the trip. I am extremely nervous about what it will all involve and what it all could bring (and how much it’ll cost when it’s done!!) and I’m so excited about heading out to see what there is to see and experience a little, or a lot more. As one close friend said to me when I told him the news “Man, that’ll change you!”.
Now I guess I should back up a little and spill some other news. Not the ideal way but I guess it’s now slowly doing the rounds but I’m back to the world of singledom. The travel plans above kinda become plans after that athough the travel was certainly a factor. Before anyone rushes to jump on that one, it wasn’t the only one and wasn’t really the important one. It brought some conversations forward and well those conversations went different ways. So that’s that and indeed probably more than I had intended to say. Oh well.
So yes around the world. Hurrah! I have two things to work through now (aside from mountains of preparation of course). The first being I need a laptop for travel. I think that my Macbook is too heavy. I am loving the idea of a Macbook Air but I need to get one into my hands for a good look first and I need to have a think about the cost. Several sorts of handhelds (Sony have a couple of nice Vaio’s) look like they might do the job for half the price. The next and this is the one that I’m more worried about is camera kit. I currently have 3 lenses that I would use for this covering 10-200mm between them for a total cost of about $2000. Now to get a single lens of better quality which would replace all three of them and do me 28-200 would cost me about $3000….hmmm
And that’s where they called my flight and I stopped typing.