What's new
By:

World travel

fishonjazz said:
Why so against going back to Egypt?

Sent from my OPD2203 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
I posted before butt it's a very aggressive country. Any remotely touristy area you'll be harassed non stop and people don't take no for an answer. People are constantly trying to scam you. Many people are trying to shake you down, even the security guys at the airport. Many people there look down on other people. My Chinese friends were treated like garbage by lots of people. I caught the hotel staff making fun of them and ignoring their request to help get pick up a food delivery at the security gate after they tipped $50. I rarely get upset but I was already at the end of my rope when they happened. I chewed them out and took the money back. 4 times at the airport the one friend who speaks very little English got "randomly" pulled aside and searched. They tried to confiscate things from him for no reason and asking for money not to. They pulled my phone out of my bag and said they have never heard of Google and needed me to unlock my phone and let them look through it. They time I had to aggressively tell them to **** off. Security at the most important sites were asking for bribes to go into protected places and touch things and climb on things that should be actually protected. Every tour guide regardless of what you say will take you to some ****** art or artifact place while thru aggressively try to overcharge you for their crap. I could go on.

That said the sites are very cool to see. And the resorts can be pretty nice. The only city I went to of the maybe 10 cities I went to that was okay was hurgada. People were fairly chill there. Watching fireworks at New years at a nice club above the Nile was pretty awesome and we made a few friends who since have visited us twice. I have a few friends from Egypt and they are pretty cool so I know it's not everyone, it's just hard to escape the bad ones. I'm pretty used to be hassled since I live in a developing country and travel a lot, but this one was much worse.
 
Ron Mexico said:
I posted before butt it's a very aggressive country. Any remotely touristy area you'll be harassed non stop and people don't take no for an answer. People are constantly trying to scam you. Many people are trying to shake you down, even the security guys at the airport. Many people there look down on other people. My Chinese friends were treated like garbage by lots of people. I caught the hotel staff making fun of them and ignoring their request to help get pick up a food delivery at the security gate after they tipped $50. I rarely get upset but I was already at the end of my rope when they happened. I chewed them out and took the money back. 4 times at the airport the one friend who speaks very little English got "randomly" pulled aside and searched. They tried to confiscate things from him for no reason and asking for money not to. They pulled my phone out of my bag and said they have never heard of Google and needed me to unlock my phone and let them look through it. They time I had to aggressively tell them to **** off. Security at the most important sites were asking for bribes to go into protected places and touch things and climb on things that should be actually protected. Every tour guide regardless of what you say will take you to some ****** art or artifact place while thru aggressively try to overcharge you for their crap. I could go on.

That said the sites are very cool to see. And the resorts can be pretty nice. The only city I went to of the maybe 10 cities I went to that was okay was hurgada. People were fairly chill there. Watching fireworks at New years at a nice club above the Nile was pretty awesome and we made a few friends who since have visited us twice. I have a few friends from Egypt and they are pretty cool so I know it's not everyone, it's just hard to escape the bad ones. I'm pretty used to be hassled since I live in a developing country and travel a lot, but this one was much worse.
Click to expand...

My experiences there were the exact same including airport security attempted coercion. Horrific country and the only one I've been to that I would never step foot in again.
 
I haven't been to Saudi Arabia but I've been to Bahrain and it wasn't quite that bad for me but sounds similar.
 
Ron Mexico said:
I posted before butt it's a very aggressive country. Any remotely touristy area you'll be harassed non stop and people don't take no for an answer. People are constantly trying to scam you. Many people are trying to shake you down, even the security guys at the airport. Many people there look down on other people. My Chinese friends were treated like garbage by lots of people. I caught the hotel staff making fun of them and ignoring their request to help get pick up a food delivery at the security gate after they tipped $50. I rarely get upset but I was already at the end of my rope when they happened. I chewed them out and took the money back. 4 times at the airport the one friend who speaks very little English got "randomly" pulled aside and searched. They tried to confiscate things from him for no reason and asking for money not to. They pulled my phone out of my bag and said they have never heard of Google and needed me to unlock my phone and let them look through it. They time I had to aggressively tell them to **** off. Security at the most important sites were asking for bribes to go into protected places and touch things and climb on things that should be actually protected. Every tour guide regardless of what you say will take you to some ****** art or artifact place while thru aggressively try to overcharge you for their crap. I could go on.

That said the sites are very cool to see. And the resorts can be pretty nice. The only city I went to of the maybe 10 cities I went to that was okay was hurgada. People were fairly chill there. Watching fireworks at New years at a nice club above the Nile was pretty awesome and we made a few friends who since have visited us twice. I have a few friends from Egypt and they are pretty cool so I know it's not everyone, it's just hard to escape the bad ones. I'm pretty used to be hassled since I live in a developing country and travel a lot, but this one was much worse.
Click to expand...

I had a similar experience in Cusco, it was after the mud slides and taken the train line out to Machu Picchu, so there were all these shady operators offering tours to the site and back packages included shuttle bus to and from an improvised train station, train tickets and a site pass for the day. Prices would fluctuate rapidly, I was initially quoted 600 USD which i refused, within 20 minutes there was a knock on the door and the new price was 250. I agreed to that and the next morning left at 7am, it was a 3 or 4 hour bus ride followed by an hour on the train from memory. Everything thing went well until the return trip, when I got to the improvised train station in the middle of nowhere at about 9pm there was no shuttle bus to pick me up or for that matter a lot of other travellers, from there it was the wild west trying to organise a ride back to town. Id met a Canadian girl on the train and we were both in the same situation when we got to the train station, middle of nowhere, dodgy as hell, she attached herself to me and we managed to haggle a ride back to town. Not a fun experience considering I had a morning flight out of Cusco for Lima in the morning, not getting back to town was really not an option.
 
infection said:
Went to the Alps last September. A couple years before, I had planned out a rough itinerary for my parents when they flew to Zurich. I gave them a loop that would start in the Berner Oberland area, go down through the Italian Dolomites, over to western Austria, through southern German and back into Zurich. I built a rough sketch of our trip based on that.

A week or two before, we started to see that there was going to be bad weather. It's usually drier that time of year and when my parents had gone two years ago, it was mid-to-late October and they had great weather and everything was still green. My wife started to get concerned and I just waited it out to see what would happen, as there's nothing I could do to change it and would cross that bridge if/when we got there. We ended up having to pack some winter coats to prepare for what the weather was saying.

We had something like a 5 hour layover at JFK and I was able to talk my wife into leaving the airport to go grab something to eat. She was a bit nervous because she didn't want to miss a flight. I don't blame her and most people are quite cautious, but I've done some pretty crazy things on layovers before and feel more comfortable to know how much time I'd really have. I looked up a place outside the airport in Queens called Don Peppe. We were able to take the sky train (free) to a stop that it was just a little ways up the road and took an Uber the rest of the way. It was kind of strange because it was in this building that almost looked abandoned, and from the outside you wouldn't even think anything was in there. You walk in to a lobby that was dark with nothing in there indicating that you're actually entering a business. Then when you open the door at the end of that hallway, it opens up into a restaurant. It was pretty bizarre. First, I had known that you had to bring cash because they didn't accept any card. Who does that in 2024 and especially at a nice restaurant? Somewhere around this moment, I'm realizing that this must be a front for money laundering. We ended up getting seated, but the even more bizarre thing was this strong feeling like we weren't welcome or weren't supposed to be there. Not that there was anything overt. More like the feeling of showing up at a party that you're not invited to, that they don't want you there, but that they're overly cordial putting up a front being nice, knowing that you know they're being nice as a front. Somewhat similar to the scene from Major League where he follows his ex-girlfriend home and ends up going in to his ex's new BF's condo and everyone is real welcoming superficially but it's incredibly awkward. Anyway, everyone else in there seemed to know each other. Really couldn't shake the feeling of like we were imposing on something.

We ended up making it back with plenty of time. It also didn't really matter because our flight was pretty significantly delayed. They were having trouble getting planes to take off and you could see a traffic jam where planes couldn't even pull back from the jetway because other panes behind them. I went to my Flight Radar app and saw they only were running two runways. Not sure why this was as I would have thought JFK would be one of the biggest/busiest airports in the world and for them to only be running two runways was pretty incredible. Since we were going to be moving all over the place, part of our itinerary included doing stuff that day since we were going to arrive at 10:35 am. We ended up getting in perhaps 3 hours later than that so it really cut into our plans.

Anyway, we spent our first three nights up on the hill just outside of Interlaken, which we were using for a base for the Berner Oberland area. That afternoon we drove around Lake Thun and went to a bridge with a good view, but there was fog covering the tops of the mountains. We then drove into Lauterbrunnen and went up to Staubbach Falls. The forecast for the next day looked terrible. We started our day going up to Wengen, which is a town up on the hill above the Lauterbrunnen valley. There was fog covering everything up higher but we could see the valley floor. From Wengen, we took another cable car to the top of the mountain (where you could then go down toward Grindelwald) but by the time we got to the top, there was too much fog and you couldn't see anything.

This is from the top:

View attachment 18172

So... we kinda struck out. We ended up deciding to go back to Interlaken because there may have been a bit better weather but it was still overcast.

View attachment 18175

Ended up seeing this in Interlaken, which I thought was a pretty tall promise for a samosa. We then went to check out this castle in Oberhofen:

View attachment 18176

The next day we ended up having good weather. There were still some clouds high up, but we got a lot of sunshine and you could actually see everything. We started in Grindelwald and it was a pretty impressive valley with the mountains in the background. There was still fog coming in and out and we struck out when we took the cable car higher on the mountain so we came back down. We then rolled over to Lauterbrunnen and as you pass that and go farther into the valley, you can take a very steep cable car up on top of the mountain to Murren. The pictures don't really do it justice so I'm going to use a picture here from Google images:

Murren-2.jpg


Because that other mountain is there, it doesn't capture how high up on the mountain you already are.

View attachment 18180

Above is off to the right of where you're walking down that street in the town and you're looking into the valley in the opposite direction as Lauterbrunnen.

View attachment 18181

This was the view of Lauterbrunnen from Wengen, which we went back to. The previous picture is from on the right side of the valley way in the back of the picture. You can sort of see some of the homes in Lauterbrunnen but this image obstructs seeing the town of Lauterbrunnen.

View attachment 18182

This is a view of Lauterbrunnen from the train.

So we ended up time in Switzerland and the next day we started driving to the Dolomites in northern Italy. There was good weather on the way. Before we dropped into Italy, we went to Liechtenstein, a small country right in between Switzerland and Austria. On the road there, this picture doesn't do it justice, but this may have been one of the most scenic highways I've ever seen.

View attachment 18183

This picture and the lighting is garbage but this view is incredible. We past into Liechtenstein and then into Austria.

View attachment 18184

Random church is Austria. However, it is possible that this could have actually been Italy.

View attachment 18185

This was in Italy at Santa Maddalena, and you can see the clouds that totally ruined the view. This is what it looks like without clouds:

135062_4ab3a687-c471-47c1-8439-db94943c783c.jpg


Up against my image limit so the rest is coming in probably two more posts...
Click to expand...

My family are from Friuli which is the neighbouring region in the dolomites, absolutely stunning part of the world. I've been there a couple of times and stayed at our family farmhouse which is on the step below the alps, loved it.
 
Not world travel but I'm going fishing next week for the first time in over 6 months. That's the longest I have went without fishing in about 20 years. I'm chomping at the bit. Gonna be low 70's in the valley next week and low 60's in the mountains. Perfect weather.

I had such a long stretch with no fishing due to plantar fasciitis but I finally went to the DR a few weeks ago and got an injection in my heel and it's been feeling great for like 10 days straight so I'm going to risk it. Hoping I don't have a setback and reinjure it.
 
fishonjazz said:
Not world travel but I'm going fishing next week for the first time in over 6 months. That's the longest I have went without fishing in about 20 years. I'm chomping at the bit. Gonna be low 70's in the valley next week and low 60's in the mountains. Perfect weather.

I had such a long stretch with no fishing due to plantar fasciitis but I finally went to the DR a few weeks ago and got an injection in my heel and it's been feeling great for like 10 days straight so I'm going to risk it. Hoping I don't have a setback and reinjure it.
Click to expand...
Where at?
 
infection said:
Hah, I don't fish. What I was expecting was like "in the Uintas" or "Spanish Fork Canyon."
Click to expand...
Can't do it. No clues. Someone who does fish might see.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page
Back
Top