Cape of Good Hope

Well, I'm getting closer to the south pole. I just returned from Cape Town, South Africa. All I can say is WOW. What a place. Sooooo much to do. And the food was awesome.

I stayed in the Victoria wharf area of Cape Town. The hotel was nice, not great, but really nice. From the view of my room I could see the entire wharf area with all its ships, boats and tons of seals swimming around the harbor.

I didn't take my digital camera. It was too much to carry on this mostly business trip. I did end up buying two disposable cameras. I'll work on getting those developed and edit this with some photos.

More later...

Lago di Como

Where does one go when you want to get away from it all? Well for me, last weekend was spent in the lakes district north of Milan. I hopped a flight via Amsterdam to Milan and caught a bus up to Lake Como. From there it was a 2.5 hour boat ride up to a small village on the edge of the lake.

Varrena with a population of 800 is the perfect jumping off point for lake excursions.

I climbed up the mountain to the castle located above the village. The local map shows what appears to be a small road leading from a monastery up to the castle. Actually it was a dirt trail. At times it was only 10 or so inches wide and required you to push through a row of bushes to continue on. If you are up for the hike it will be a challenge just to find this trail. There are two ways to reach the castle from opposite ends of the village.
The first path I refer to as the 17th century way to get to the castle. The path I took was the 14th century way to storm a castle!

The castle below is where they filmed the end to one of the Star Wars movies. I also saw the house used in Ocean's 13. No picture of that... too far away.

The End of Winter? aka The Start of Fried Egg Season

So, I have not seen snow for one and a half years! I'm going into serious withdrawal. Before I came to Dar es Salaam I wondered if they had an ice rink for hockey or something. No such luck. I would have paid someone to let me lie on the ice for an hour.

We are coming to the end of winter in Tanzania. I dread the change just around the corner. This is the first time in my life that I've lived somewhere without snow. Everyother place I've lived I've seen snow for six months each year. Most folks I know try and escape the winter cold. Me, I like it. Or at least I used to... I hope living down here for a year or two doesn't ruin my love of snow. If I go back up north and hate snowy cold weather, someone owes me big time.

If I'm lucky, I've got about nine more months to go here. All of the places I'm looking to move have snow at some point during the year. The next nine months take me right through the hottest part of the year in southern Africa. December and January were just plain HOT! It was the WOW kind of hot, like you never want to go out hot. Hot so hot I could cook a eight course breakfast on the tiles of my roof top patio. (definitely egg frying hot) Note to self: January 1, 2007 - fry egg on roof just to prove a point.

Organizing your computer and all its hardware...

Well a techy I'm not. I've had my ipod mini for a couple of years now and one would think I could find all the wires / cables that came with the thing to begin with. Well after my move from Minsk to Dar es Salaam I lost the usb cable. What does this mean... All the music that I've updated on my computer since the move can not be put onto the ipod! In a country where good music is hard to come by on the radio, I've become dependent on my ipod as the only source of music while I drive around Tanzania.

I was on Amazon.com today and pulled the trigger on ordering a replacement cord. I searched and search for the damn thing and gave up all hope of ever seeing it again. I'm cheap by nature, so the thought of shell'n out $19 bucks for a new cord didn't sit well.

I'm an Amazon.com Prime junky. If what I'm looking at doesn't get shipped for free with my Prime membership I won't order it. Sooooooooo.... I was surfing for the cord and found it on Amazon. I quickly dropped it in my cart and headed for the checkout. Clicked past the details and had it on its way. Boom, that was fast. WAIT A MINUTE! What did I see as the confirmation blew past my eyes at 100 mph as I hit the "proceed to checkout" button??? It took a few seconds to register and I had already hit the button. I noticed however, that I got nicked for about $5 of shipping on a $19 item. Man that burns me up! Well, now I had to cancel the order before it shipped. ABORT MISSION, REPEAT ABORT MISSION!

Just then, my mind clicked into hyper mode and I thought, "just check one more place." Well what'ya know, there was the cable. Right where I left it six months ago. On the bottom shelf of a bookcase with three unhung pictures stacked up in front of it. I've been looking weeks for that thing!

Chapter One

Well, its no secret that I LOVE cold weather! Anyone who knows me, even just a little, will tell you I hate hot temperatures and warm climates.

So you must be asking yourself how did this guy end up living in Africa.. I've been asking myself that vary same question ever since I got here.

Actually, this time of year is not all that bad. The evenings are cool and I get a really nice breeze off the ocean at night. I'm one year into my two year stay. So far not all that bad. I've never lived anywhere that it has not snowed at least five months out of the year. This tropical thing better not stick. If I go back up north and all of a sudden hate cold weather, somebody is gonna get hurt!!

One might think that with a blog title of "Arctic Traveler" you would see the first photo with some snow in it. Well, all my snow photos are packed away at the moment. I had to download them to an external hard drive. I'll hook it up later and load some snowy photos from my Arctic Adventure to Greenland from 2005. Wow what a trip that was... More to come on that note. Now, its hot weather and ocean breezes. Here is one of my favorite pics from this past year.
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One of the things I do to take up my time here is alter photos that I've taken over the years. Here is one that I've spent a lot of time on. The first is the original photo and then what I've done to it...
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