Travel Tips
There are some things that I’ve noticed on our trip and learned. Here are some traveling tips that have been useful.
- Always carry tip money. It will be worth the pictures if they ask.
- Pack throwaways like shirts, underwear, and socks. Then your bag starts to get lighter throughout your trip as you leave these items behind.
- Trust the web to find the cheapest and nicest places to eat. We found great places and food like kosheri in Egypt ($1) and a restaurant in Jordan ($3), which had fallafels, hummus, pita bread, fries, tea that was delicious.
- Always get cabs with meters. Man they love along advantage of tourists.
- Sometimes a tour is cheaper. By using our tour, we actually saved money since the country’s government may subsidize the cost to get you over there.
- Never give money to the local kids. Their parents or higher powers are forcing them to sell postcards or whatever their selling to miss school.
- And get an iPad. You can view your photos right then; it’s small and light, and you can journal… A bit.
From countries, well start with Egypt.
It’s dirty there. They have no respect for cleaning up after oneself. Trash litters the cities, it overruns the zoo, and it fills the Nile. Clean up yourself, Egypt.
People have gotten to a new level to try to get you to buy. One guy gave me his card right when I got off the tour bus. He then hounded me when I came back out, bugging me to visit his shop. He even shooed another person away who was trying to give me his card, but he had already “claimed” me. (I ended up buying something cool at another shop). Even when we were on the Nile, the boat people would throw their robes to the top deck (three stories from their small boat) and ask us to look at them. That was crazy. Three robes bombarded the top deck. And we didn’t want to buy so we threw them back down to their boat. That’s a risky sale especially if I decided not to throw it back.
A tour guide can make the trip. Friendly Planet’s tour guide for Egypt was horrible. She couldn’t answer questions. She wasn’t approachable. And she wasn’t too friendly. We had a pretty easy going group, but half of the group got food poisoning (lucky, not ours). One girl fainted from dehydration, and for most of the trip we had no idea what was going on that day. Some of it bad luck, but a lot of it could be improved with the tour guide. When the guide heard people were sick, she reminded us not to drink the water. Nice empathy.
If we didn’t taken the side trip to Jordan where we had a great guide, the trip wouldn’t have been as enjoyable .
In Jordan…
Things were different. Their dinar was stronger then our dollar. And yet they seem to have less to work with than Egypt. Better run coutries serve their people better. I have a feeling Egypt could kick some ass if people at the top made better decisions and helped their people.
Egypt though was very friendly. People would welcome you to their country which was nice, and many people asked us where we were from or what our names were. I’m sure the country showed the value of tourism to their country as a whole, and it was nice to feel welcome.
Traveling
Each Time I travel, I’m humbled. I get out of my daily routine, and I feel as if when I get home, I’m going to embark on a new adventure with all the new things I’ve learned about myself and what I want to experience. It’s important for that to happen, and I have much more to experience.
And now our next, big adventure.
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