B10[mg]

After seeing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Machu Picchu, it was more than logical to visit yet another world wonder: Petra (and yes, that's in Jordan ;-). With that in mind, and seeing a fairly nice offer for an 8-day trip through Jordan, my wife and I decided to go.

The only downside to this all, was that we had to travel in a group. A group of random strangers, no, worse! A group of random Dutch strangers! 29 people who we'd never have chosen to travel with annoyed us throughout most of the trip by being loud or "Dutch" (meaning: arrogant, selfish, a total bastard and disrespectful). But oh well, let's quickly forget about them.

The trip

In just a few days, we've traveled to some interesting spots of the country. In short: Amman, Jerash, Amman, Mt. Nebo, Madaba, Karak, Petra, Little Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, Dead Sea, Amman.

Day 1: Amman

This was our first trip to the Middle East and we expected it to be roughly the same as Egypt (where we've been before). That was our first misconception. At the airport we already noticed that the Jordanian people are a lot friendlier than their Egyptian neighbors. While driving through Amman to our hotel, we also found the city to be different than, e.g. Cairo. It just all looked a little more civilized / advanced compared to Egypt.

We had a nice dinner in Amman and quickly went to bed, for the next day, Jerash was planned and we wanted to be well rested.

Day 2: Amman / Jerash

The first thing to do was to visit the King Abdullah Mosque in the city, known for its' blue dome. The women, like in all mosques, had to cover their heads and everybody had to take off their shoes. Nothing new so far. Inside the mosque, our tour guide (who was a Jordanian national who married a Dutch woman and lived in the Netherlands for 7 years) explained the basic principles of a mosque, a little history etc. etc.

While walking around the site, I noticed the mosque was surrounded by christian churches. According to the guide, there were no problems at all between Christians and Muslims in Jordan. At least less than in the Netherlands. Both lived happily next to each other, like it's supposed to be. I tried to capture that thought in this image, but it was cloudy, so lighting wasn't too good.

After the mosque, the city tour was next. First we went to the Roman Amphitheater, followed by a trip to the citadel. I've read about the Romans being in Jordan, but had no clue everything was so well preserved.

Jerash was next up. A police agent of the tourist police joined our bus which seems a standard procedure with large groups of tourists. Although Jordan is a stable country and very safe, the government tries hard to make it even safer for tourists, hence they get personal protection from a guy like this. Jerash was also a Roman site and also extremely well preserved. The weather wasn't too warm but at least it didn't rain, so we happily shot some pictures before returning to Amman.

Day 3: Amman, Mt. Nebo, Madaba, Karak, Petra

Early in the morning we left Amman to visit Mount Nebo; the mountain where Moses looked at the promised land. The sun kicked in, but unfortunately it was hazy, so we couldn't see what Moses saw. Nevertheless, the view was spectacular.

After absorbing a few rays of sun, we went to Madaba where a Byzantine Church still showed us an ancient map in the mosaic floor. The sun was now shining and after quickly buying some souvenirs we went on to Karak.

Karak showed us ruins of a crusader castle where Saladin beat the crusaders. It felt like I was walking in Assassin's Creed (part one) while the tour guide explained what went on in the castle through the years.

After all this beauty, we went to our hotel in Petra.

Day 4: Petra

We woke up early to beat the stream of tourists that usually flood the site of Petra but on arrival, there were but a handful of buses. I was happy to find out it was still low season. Would I be able to take a photo the famous Treasury without tourists?

Before reaching the Treasury, one has to walk through the siq. After reading on some sites that it was long and boring, I didn't expect much, but oh was I wrong. The siq is beautiful. Wonderful colors greet you everywhere and to be honest, the walk wasn't that long.

After some time, our guide pointed us to some tall rock and asked us how high we thought it'd be. A rather pointless question, but it was to distract us from what lay behind the corner: The Treasury!

Everyone was excited and wanted to run towards it to see the glorious building. I was happy to find the area not flooded by tourists, but still, it'd be impossible to shoot a pic without the bloody tourists!

The Treasury was more impressive than I imagined it to be. This was absolutely marvelous. But where was the Monastery? Our guide explained that we could walk around the area and that it was a rather large site. The Monastery would be one of the hikes, but he also recommended the High Place of Sacrifice. Not per se the Sacrifice altar, but the trip from there, around the mountain. We decided to walk them both, ending up walking / climbing around 30 km. that day (see the GPS track )

But before we went climbing, my wife and I decided to check out the Treasury once more. We already took many pictures and shot quite some minutes of video, but I truly wanted a picture without tourists. When we walked back, we found the place almost deserted. About five stranded strangers were blocking my wanted shot, so I kindly requested them to move out of the picture. They understood and quickly moved away from the building, leaving me with this:

Look mom, no tourists! My day was already good.

But this wasn't all. There were more tracks to walk. The guide was right. Our first walk (High Place of Sacrifice) was stunning. The place itself was fairly boring, as explained, but the view and walk afterwards were beautiful. Many tombs could be seen and the weather made it even more pleasant to walk.

We walked slowly, taking many pictures and enjoying the absolute silence, for in the two and a half hours we walked, we've only met two other tourists once and a handful of locals, trying to sell us either donkey rides or stones / necklaces etc.

We arrived back at the place where we left the group and after a small lunch, we found out we had but little time to make it up to the Monastery and back to the bus in time. Different people gave us different answers to the question how long the hike up there'd be. From two hours to thirty minutes. We decided to try it nevertheless. We got the guide's phone number and he already told us that anyone who didn't make it in time could get a taxi to the hotel.

On our way up to the Monastery, we met a lot of people of our group already walking back and informing us we were insane and would never make it in time. It took us ~ forty minutes to get up there and about twenty minutes to get down again.

This track was a lot less interesting for there weren't any wide views. After making it up there we found the place to be close to deserted. The Monastery is a lot bigger than the Treasury, but less detailed and decorated. Nevertheless, very impressive.

We had little time and had to walk down, back to the Treasury and through the siq again to make it to the bus. So many people told us we'd never make it, so we just had to prove them wrong. We arrived one minute before the bus left, laughing at the group as we drove back to the hotel, where I smoked a water pipe. Much deserved after all the walking.

Day 5: Little Petra, Wadi Rum

The day started early again as we drove to Little Petra, a small site with a tiny siq and some interesting tombs, but nothing compared to the real Petra site. Not much time after, we drove to Wadi Rum, the desert. (If I recall correctly, "wadi" means "valley" and Rum is the name of a mountain).

We would spend a night in a tent camp and tour the desert by Jeeps to make it to a nice place for sunset. The trip was, as expected, dusty so everyone wore scarves around their faces. The desert was beautiful. Lots of sand (duh) and rocks with marvelous views. In the end we looked for some wood (which we did find) to build a fire and make some tea, while we waited for the sun to drop behind the mountains.

The thing I remembered about deserts was that it's usually quite warm during the day, while when the sun drops, the temperature follows, so I brought some warm clothes. I was right to some degree. It didn't get freezingly cold, but chilly it was.

While the sun dropped, I finally had a chance to play with my camera again (I do use the 'auto' setting too much ;-)

We returned to the camp for dinner and some entertainment (two guys playing Arabic music around a fire place), but we were quite tired, so we went to bed early.

Day 6: Aqaba

From Wadi Rum, we drove to Aqaba, the only port of Jordan and a tax-free haven. As it turned out, I ran out of cigarettes here, so I could buy a pack (and a lot more) of Gauloises for but one Dinar. A Dinar is similar to the Euro, so it was cheap (considered the package in the Netherlands costs me four and a half).

The optional excursion was to cruise the Red Sea on a yacht with snorkeling and BBQing. The weather was still pleasant, while the news reached us that Amman was about to suffer snow. We went snorkeling nevertheless. Fun, but not shockingly beautiful. Relaxing on the boat was enjoying though (as was the BBQ at the back of the yacht).

Day 7: Aqaba, Dead Sea

After a good night in Aqaba, we drove back north, close to the Israelian border towards the Dead Sea. I remember my mother talking about it (from the Israelian side) and imagined the Jordanian side wouldn't differ too much. A fun experience to float on the water at the beach of the beautiful resort.

By now, it was indeed snowing in Amman, yet we still had good, sunny weather and the idea of a snow covered Amman on our last day in the country quite excited us. We arrived in Amman in the evening to find only some snow covered cars, but nothing much.

Day 8: Back to Amsterdam

Wake up call at 04:00am. Yuck. Just enough time to drink some coffee and have a quick bite before hurrying to the bus. Our vacation was over.

The flight back was nothing special. I was happy to see a personal screen in the Royal Jordanian airplane with on demand audio / video (the Dutch KLM still doesn't offer this in every plane).

Conclusion

Jordan is a beautiful country, plagued by a lack of water, which gives it the beautiful deserts. The people I met were friendly and never did I get an feeling of not being safe (unlike Peru).

I can only recommend it to everyone and please do look at the other things Jordan offers besides the marvelous Petra. It's well worth visiting (but preferably not with a group of Dutch people ;-)

This year, we decided to spend our vacation days (and money) in Peru. The reason for this is quite easy. We've never set foot on the Latin American continent and Peru offers Machu Picchu and the famous Nazca lines Both were high on my "to visit" list.

Lima

We arrived in Lima and went straight to Casa 667 a lovely small hostel ran by friends of friends of friends of my wife (and of course the name is cool. 667, the neighbor of the beast). The place was small, but offered a very friendly environment with a good location (Miraflores).

Quickly we noticed the similarities between Peru and Indonesia. Both countries have bad drivers, and houses aren't always the nicest (although unlike Peruvians, the Indonesians at least finish their homes). A big difference though: the weather. It was cold :-(

After spending some time in Lima, it was time for us to start our tour of ~2700km. First stop: Ica / Huacachina.

Ica / Huacachina

Due to the national strikes starting a day earlier than planned, we were stuck on the road for several hours, waiting for the police to remove the roadblocks (burning tires). After many hours, our bus finally arrived in Ica and we were brought to Huacachina.

Huacachina is an oasis in the middle of sand dunes and from there, many hotels offer sandboarding tours, in the sand dunes. Since I can't surf the waves, nor am very good at snowboarding, I decided to lay flat on the sandboard and go down the dunes in breathtaking speed. Fun!

Nazca

Because of the above mentioned planned strikes, we changed our itinerary and left the same evening for Nazca. In Nazca we spend the night and were welcomed by a small earthquake. I never experienced one before, so was quite amused by it (again: it was a small earthquake).

The next day, a flight over the famous Nazca lines was planned. After waiting for too long, our plane finally left the ground. But within 5 minutes, we were back. Some blinking light caught the pilot's attention and he decided to call off the flight.

After more hours of waiting, we finally managed to get airborne again and see the spectacle of the lines, still shocked by the US-citizens in the terminal claiming (too loud, as usual) that before they arrived in Nazca, they never even heard of the lines. People like that should not be allowed to see the beauty of it.

Arequipa

Without much hassle of strikes, but in a bus with a strong and foul urine stench we went to Arequipa. A lovely small city and a base for our upcoming excursion, the condors at the Colca Valley.

Arequipa has some monasteries, some old colonial houses and a lovely town square but besides that, nothing much happens. Our hotel's WEP encryption of the WiFi they offered was easily cracked, saving us some money, but more importantly, allowing us to use the EeePC in the bedroom, rather than the PC in the dining room.

After a day or so, we went to Chivay.

Chivay

Chivay is cold. During the day (while the sun is visible) it's ok, but as soon as it goes away, it's taking the heat with it, so our little radiator in the hotel room was a pleasant surprise.

After inspecting the hot springs (also very nice in a cold area), and a good night's rest, we went to the Cruz del Condor, where we should be able to see the huge birds. Initially, the condors seemed to sleep in a little, but after a while, they finally came and flew over our heads, a mere 2 - 3 meters above us. Wonderful!

Too bad the altitude got me and made my stomach do crazy things. Fun tip: if you have to vomit every 15 - 30 minutes, drink different colors of Gatorade. It makes it a lot more fun. After a while, Coca Cola seemed the best remedy and so my stomach relaxed a little again.

The environment was still dry and green trees weren't easily spotted. By now we longed for trees and I started to feel like an Indonesian who visits the Netherlands during fall or winter. You do miss the color green!

Anyways, back to Arequipa!

Arequipa / Puno

We took the bus from Arequipa to Puno, to see the floating Uros islands. But due to more planned strikes, we had to cut a day off Puno, to make sure we'd be in Cusco by the time our Inca Trail started.

The floating islands were ok, but I could've done without. Puno, again, was very cold and I can't really enjoy "locals" showing us how they live / work etc. in exchange for money. I don't care about giving them money, I just don't care about their style of living that much.

The solar panels did catch my attention though and made me giggle.

Cusco

The Inka Express bus took us from Puno to Cusco, the old Incan capital. The small town was way too touristic for my liking and to make matters worse, the hotel was owned by a Dutchmen (the people I tend to avoid during holidays).

Massages, souvenirs stores and way too many restaurants all try to make a buck out of the many many tourists that roam the streets. Due to our change in itinerary, we had an extra day off here, which was good, because we needed to prepare for the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu (rent sleeping bags, a big backpack, buy chocolate, insect repellent etc.). After we've gotten everything, we took a good sleep and the last hot shower for some days to come.

Inca Trail - Day 1

The first day was supposed to be the easy day, but in the blazing heat and with close to no trekking experience, it was already quite tough on my smoking lungs and muscles. The cheap hamburger the day before decided to mess up my stomach (once again), making it even worse.

Our group existed of but 6 people (us included) and a guide (and the 6 porters, carrying food, tents and our bag ;-). After 9 kilometers walking, we made it to the campsite, where a dinner was waiting for us. The tents were already awaiting us, and soonish I found out I was too tall for them. So I had to sleep diagonally, in a sleeping bag that was too small as well.

We decided to hit the hay (on mattresses thinner than an average magazine) early (after dinner), for the second day was going to be tough. But before that, I looked up to the sky for quite some time in awe. The starry night was beautiful and I suddenly realized why the Mayans, Egyptians and Incas were so impressed by it.

Inca Trail - Day 2

A "challenge", the brochure called this day. I'd rather call it "pure hell". Climbing up to 4000+ meters was definitely harder than expected. The last few meters up were close to impossible (walk 10 meters, sit and rest again) and I suspect we were the last people who made it up to the Dead Woman's Pass.

Luckily the road after that was only going down to the second campsite. We followed our tradition of sleeping before dinner, and straight after. I was completely beat and during the trek up, I toyed with the thought of returning and taking the train up to Machu Picchu, like some people seem to do (we noticed people walking the wrong way, obviously giving up).

After asking the guide a hundred times if this was really the hardest part of the trip, I ate my dinner and went to sleep.

Inca Trail - Day 3

The final day and indeed, not as hard as the second day. Still climbing up to two passes, the trail mostly went down and we made good progress. Both my wife and I had close to no problems walking down, although the 3000+ steps of the Inca Stairs got quite annoying after about 1500 steps.

In the end, we arrived at the campsite, with the horrible "restaurant" that offers hot showers (woohoo!) and beer (again woohoo!) although I was too tired for that, so I went for Coca Cola, still remembering the medicinal features of it in the Colca Valley.

We had to prepare for the last day, a good hour walk towards Machu Picchu and did so with a huge meal. After dinner, we payed the porter and tipped them. I figured 50 soles for both of us was the least we could do (~ €12.50 per person) for these poor souls literally had to run up and down the trail, making the tents and cook for us, but the rest of the group decided to pay even less. We Dutch are stingy? Try the French! Bah, it sickened me.

Inca Trail - Day 4

An early breakfast waited for us and as soon as we finished it, the first drops of rain fell out of the sky. Our flashlight broke down, so we had to walk in the dark and in the rain. Not fun!

To make matters worse, the rain got stronger, making our rain ponchos close to useless and due to the fog, we couldn't see much.

After the hour walk, we arrived at Machu Picchu, soaked, pissed off because we couldn't see anything and cold.

So that was it. Three days of terror for a rainy Machu Picchu, covered in fog. Words can't describe our disappointment, but because we were there finally, I wouldn't leave without at least some pictures, so after the guided tour, we went to take a few pics quickly, before going to Aqua Calientes.

The fog did give the place a bit of a gloomy atmosphere though, which was somewhat ok.

Puerto Maldonado

After arriving back in Cusco, we took the plane to Puerto Maldonado the day after. The sun greeted us on the airport and my heart was skipping a beat when finally we saw green trees again. Hot weather + mosquitos + green trees; this must be the jungle!

A little boat brought us to the jungle lodge after cruising the Madre de Dios river (which flows into the Amazon, if I recall correctly).

The three days we've spend here contained some jungle trails where we saw a lot of caymans, many birds and monkeys and even an anaconda (luckily sleeping).

Because we were stuck in the jungle lodge, we had no choice but to eat at the restaurant, which served the exact same buffet every day for lunch and dinner. We got quite tired of it, but oh well, at least it wasn't bad food.

After the Puerto Maldonado, we went back to Lima, where we spent one more day before returning home. Time flew by and we had a lot of fun, although I can't really say the dessert attracted me much. The jungle was a lot better (I like hot weather). All in all a nice vacation, but I'm dying to visit Indonesia again, next year!

I don't often read the "dagblad van het noorden" website, but today I noticed a news article around the crazy PVV . They find it insane that the poorest people of the Netherlands can get money to buy a flatscreen tv or something (still have no clue what they're exactly against).

Anyways, when opening the webpage, I saw this (click to enlarge)

An overlay asks you to fill out a survey. If you participate, you could be the winner of the Philips LCD TV, yay. Ironically, this overlay covers the title of the article ("PVV wil verbod op flatscreen via bijstand").

Last night my dad called me to inform me my server was not functioning correctly. Funny, 'cause I was working on it as he called, so I asked him to explain his problems in a little more detail. The problem, or so it turned out, was that he couldn't send any emails and the Ziggo helpdesk told him it was my server.

Quite strange, for he does indeed uses my IMAP/POP3 server, but SMTP is handled by his ISP, Ziggo. And since he can't send any mail the problem is most likely to be at their end. So after explaining the difference between incoming and outgoing mail, I told my father to call the helpdesk again and demand some help, not some ignorant answer.

After a while, he called me again. The helpdesk this time deemed it necessary to reset his password. My dad had to wait for half an hour and login to the webmail of ziggo to see if he could send mail from there. Again a rather odd reply in my humble opinion, but hey, it might be a known workaround of ziggo. In the meanwhile I asked my dad what error message he did get and the answer to that question made a lot of things clear. The error was (translated, the original error was in Dutch):

550 - this is unwanted email and will not be delivered.

Nice, right? I had no clue how a password reset was going to help, but I wished my dad good luck with the spamfilter that was obviously too strict.

A little later the phone rang again and my dad was getting more and more annoyed. He waited for 30 minutes, logged into the webmail, did send a test message and all that went fine. However, his mail still couldn't be sent from Outlook and now he had a new phone number that he was going to call tomorrow. The phone number of the Microsoft helpdesk.

I literally was in shock when I heard they send him to Microsoft. Did Outlook create the 550-SMTP reply? Nope. Why on earth didn't these moronic hell-desk employees simply tell him to reformat the mail and try again? So I had to call them myself and asked them for a motivation for sending my dad of to Microsoft. The explanation was rather simple according to the friendly but completely clueless guy. "Webmail works fine, but Outlook gives an error, so it must be an Outlook problem and thus Microsoft.". I asked him what part of the error message he didn't understand, if he looked the '550'-code up, why he didn't simply send my father to the 2nd line support if he couldn't solve the problems and what the email address was to complain to.

He kept mumbling and even wouldn't agree on the spam filter being too strict. Apparently, false positives are completely acceptable to him. I asked him why three helpdesk employees who get training (I hope) and money for helping people weren't able to help my dad, while I could help him over the phone in less than two minutes. That he didn't know either.

So I drafted a fine mail to the complaints department of ziggo to complain about the competency of the helpdesk. Not even do they not help, the even don't call in the 2nd/3rd line support and I'm fairly sure that would be procedure. Fire the guys, give them a decent training, do something about it, SickoZiggo!

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Update I: I don't seem to be the only one who didn't like ziggo's customer service ;-)

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Update II: I just read that Ziggo lost 265.000.000 euro last year. Well, try to improve your customer service instead of scaring people away!

Everything that the US of A comes up with, is introduced in the Netherlands very soon after. There's a complete smoking ban in Schiphol, the Dutch airport, and security measures are annoyingly similar to the US.

My recent vacation to the far east made me long for the simpler times, when we, in the Netherlands, weren't so paranoid and weren't constantly wagging our tails when daddy Bush and his friends come up with annoying new rules.

By the time the rude Dutch security officials allow me to pass the check point, I've crawled through the scanner at least three times. Holding my pants up, because my belt could be a potential terrorist weapon, barefoot and fairly annoyed, they inform me that my half empty deodorant bottle is not allowed for it contains slightly more fluid (when full) than is allowed and think of all the horrible things I might do with deodorant!

Back in the day, smoking was not allowed in the common waiting areas, but the small pubs still had smoking sections, to make the mandatory 3 hour wait a little less painful, but hey, smoking probably supports terrorism as well, so let's make the entire building smoke free. Poor transit people that are stuck on the horrific airport that used to be so nice...

In Asia, I had to pass the airport security of both Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and I must say I truly adore those airports. Granted, Schiphol looks better (although Kuala Lumpur is state of the art as well), but the people are friendly, smoking areas are provided for the poor addicts that are stuck and if a plane is a little delayed, meals are promptly provided for the waiting souls.

Sure, there are scanners that you'll have to pass, but heck, I carry too much that'll trigger the darn thing, so I simply pass it and have the friendly official use his hand scanner to find out I'm wearing a belt, carry a lighter, keys, watch, ring, glasses etc.

God bless the far east!