Conrad Ottenfeld - An Innocent Abroad

I want a Gromperekichelcher! Luxembourg 2024

By Conrad Ottenfeld | July 2, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

April 28 – May 1, 2024

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

Rosa Luxemburg

I like to start off these reports with a light-hearted, whimsical, or insightful quote that has some bearing on the trip. I had nothing on Luxembourg, so I simply Googled “famous Luxembourg quotes”. Rosa Luxemburg came up. I’m not aware of any relation to the country, but the quote seemed apropos of travel, so I went with it.

It was never likely that Lynn and I would wake up one day and say, “Let’s go to Luxembourg”. But with a trip in planning to the Netherlands and Belgium, and with such great public transportation readily available, it was an easy decision to add this one on.

This was a brief visit with three nights in Luxembourg City (we like to have a minimum of two full days in a spot as often as possible). As such, we didn’t see much of the rest of the surrounding country except watching the landscape pass by on the train. We gave the city a good look during our visit, enough to get a taste of the country. I try to take in as many details as I can when travelling, still, I wonder sometimes if I am not the blind man describing the elephant by grabbing its tail.

Luxembourg is a small, landlocked, hilly country, nestled in between Germany, Belgium, and France. At 998 square miles, it is smaller than Rhode Island. Of the US states, only Vermont and Wyoming have less people than the entire country of Luxembourg. These aren’t poor people though. According to the World Bank, Luxembourg is the richest country in the world as measured by Gross Domestic Product adjusted for purchasing power (Purchasing Power Parity). By this measure they are nearly twice as prosperous as the USA. This was perhaps my biggest surprise on the trip.

Luxembourg became an independent entity in 963. Owing to their location in central Europe, they had constant interference from Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Germany over the centuries before finally becoming an independent country again in 1867. Even then, they were occupied by Germany during both World Wars.

We took a six-hour train ride for the 240-mile trip from Amsterdam to Luxembourg City for $108 for both of us. Crossing international borders within the Schengen Area is a seamless affair. We purchased our train tickets at the international ticket desk in Amsterdam Central Station without showing a passport. The Schengen Area is a group of 29 countries where anyone legally present can move around the Schengen Area without being subject to border checks. Coincidentally, it is named after a small town in Luxembourg near the border with France and Germany. A flight is possible for this trip, though I can’t imagine going through airport hassles compared to the comparatively tranquil and enjoyable train experience. We enjoyed looking out at the pretty streams, farmland, small villages, and forests.

We stayed at Luxembourg City, the capital and largest city at 114,000. We quickly found out that all public transportation is free to everyone, citizens and tourists alike. The city center is small enough that it really isn’t necessary to use any transportation, but we did take advantage of a bus to visit the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial a few miles outside of town. More on that in a bit.

*The electric tram system, along with other public transportation, is free to all*

Luxembourg City is a walkable town, well suited for an interesting day of casual strolling with plenty of opportunities for a coffee or a sandwich. We started our morning walking through the central park. The park leads to an elevated cantilevered observation deck that gives a sweeping view of the Alzette Valley.

From there we walked along the old city wall, with turrets built by the Spaniards during the 17^th century spaced along the wall.

The 500-meter Chemin de la Corniche is part of the old city defensive wall, also built by the Spaniards in the 17^th century. Today, is called the “Most beautiful balcony in Europe” (disclaimer: by Luxembourg writer Betty Weber). It certainly does provide a lovely view of the Alzette River Valley.

*The Chemin de la Corniche runs along the top of the old city wall.*

The Bock Promontory is a rocky outcrop in the oldest part of the city. Count Sigfried acquired the promontory in 963, marking the earliest origins of the country. Remnants of an old Roman fortification existed there then, near an old Roman road. The fortifications expanded over the next nine centuries, leading to Luxembourg becoming a strategically important defensive position. Most of the fortress was torn down in 1867 pursuant to the Treaty of London as a resolution for a conflict between Germany (Prussia) and France. This treaty also placed the country in perpetual neutrality. Today the Promontory serves as a major tourist attraction.

*The Alzette River with the Bock Promontory on the left and the Neumunster Abbey to the right as viewed from the Chemin de la Corniche.*

*“Huelen Zant” (Hollow tooth), the remains of a tower of one of the fortress gates, on the Bock rock.*

*Fortress remnants on the Bock Promontory.*

Also on our self-made tour was a visit to the Bock Casemates. Underneath the promontory are a series of defensive subterranean tunnels and passageways known as the Bock Casemates. The first were built in 1644 by the Spaniards, and later enhanced by the French and Austrians. At the peak years of the late 18^th century, there were 23 kilometers of tunnels containing stables, storehouses, workshops, kitchens, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and barracks for 1200 soldiers. After the casemates lost their military use, they were repurposed in various ways. For example, over the centuries, they have functioned as a shooting range, mushroom farm, market and concert hall, and champagne vault. The casemates were also air-raid shelters during both world wars. Most of the Casemate was destroyed with the Fortress, with the remainder serving today as a tourist attraction.

*The Bock Promontory with casemates below, overlooking the Alzette River with the Wenzel Wall.*

*Stierchen Bridge. a small pedestrian bridge over the Alzette River.*

We took the time to sample some of the shops, cafes, and pubs. I had read that Gromperekichelcher was a popular dish and took the opportunity to try one at a small amusement park in the center of town. Shredded potatoes, onion, shallot, flour, egg, parsley. Tasty! We also enjoyed relaxing at my namesake pub “Konrad” for a couple of pints and lunch.

The influence of the American presence in Luxembourg during World War II is evident as you walk around town. F. D. Roosevelt Boulevard was down the street from our hotel, and Avenue John F. Kennedy was nearby. Nowhere was the American influence more apparent than at the American Cemetery just outside of town. Luxembourg was the scene of intense fighting during the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German counteroffensive following the Allied invasion on D-Day. General George Patton’s Third Army suffered heavy casualties during this battle. A temporary military burial site was established, later to become the final resting place for 5,076 American military dead, as well as a memorial for 371 soldiers and airmen who remained missing (12 have since been identified). Following the war, the government of Luxembourg granted the US free use of the cemetery as a permanent burial ground in perpetuity without charge or taxation. General Patton is buried here at his wish to be buried with his troops. Originally buried among his men, traffic by many visitors caused damage to the grounds requiring movement of his grave to another spot separated from the others. This is the only distinguishing feature between his headstone and the others. I have admired the military cemetery practice of not distinguishing between rank or title amongst the gravestones. Medal of honor recipients have letters in gold, and Jewish headstones have the Star of David instead of the cross; otherwise, all headstones are equal. The grounds are immaculately maintained. It is a sobering experience to visit.

*Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial*

*All gravestones alike save gold letter on Medal of Honor recipients and Star of David on Jewish headstones.*

*General Patton grave was relocated due to high traffic.*

From Luxembourg we continued our vacation to Brussels. I’m glad we decided to add this to our agenda.

A Trip to Tulips, Windmills and more – The Netherlands 2024.

By Conrad Ottenfeld | June 19, 2024 | Comments 6 comments

April 17 – 28, 2024

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

– Vincent Van Gogh

To put it simply – I like Europe. I like the food, the culture, the history, the transportation, the geography, and, for the most part, the weather. I have long been interested in the tulip history in the Netherlands, and the timing of this trip was centered on trying to hit dead center of the Netherlands tulip season. We drafted up a list of places we would like to see and started planning what became a 25-day sojourn to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. This post will cover the first leg of the trip.

First things first – if it is called the Netherlands, what is Holland? Is that a historical name, now out of fashion? And why are they called Dutch? How does that fit in? I certainly didn’t know. Here’s the scoop. There are twelve provinces in the Netherlands, two of which are North and South Holland. These are also home to the three largest cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. During the Dutch heyday, English traders typically dealt with merchants from these areas, hence, they were dealing with Holland. People will still respond to that term, but it is no longer in common use when referring to the country. The Brits are likewise responsible for the Dutch label. Brits calling the people from the Netherlands “Dutch” comes from the fact that the German word for the German language is “Deutsch”. Dutch is a Germanic language, so the British, thinking that the language in the Netherlands was the same, or similar, considered the language Deutsch, which soon became Dutch.

The Netherlands is fascinating to me for many reasons. Consider a few facts about the country:

With a geographic size that would rank 42^nd among the US states, the Netherlands still has the world’s 17^th largest Gross Domestic Product.
The seventeenth century was the zenith of Dutch power and influence, a period known as the Golden Age. During this period, Dutch trading companies had colonies and trading posts around the world.
The Dutch East India Company was the first company to publicly sell shares of stock in 1602; the modern stock market was created in Amsterdam in 1611.
Wealth created from international trade in the 17^th century led to the import of tulips from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). The Dutch embraced the tulip, leading to tulip mania shortly thereafter when a single bulb sold for more than common laborers earned in a year. In 2014, the Netherlands exported over 2 billion tulip bulbs.
Netherlands literally means “lower countries” in reference to its low elevation. Land reclamation began in the 14^th century. Today, approximately 26% of the country is below sea level through a system of dikes, canals, sand dunes. and pumping stations.
Despite having one of the highest population densities in Europe, over half of the land is devoted to agriculture.
Social tolerance includes legalized euthanasia, prostitution, abortion, and liberal drug policies.
According to the 2024 Gallup World Poll, The Netherlands are the 6^th happiest country. Contributing to this is the practice of “Niksen” – doing nothing as part of your daily routine. Example: Have a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe, leaving your phone in your pocket.

We stayed at Wittenberg by Cove for our Amsterdam stay. One of the ways we economize is by looking for lodging with a kitchen or kitchen access. With a central location close to public transportation, groceries, and overlooking a canal, this was perfect. The network of trains, buses, trams, and subway lines – virtually all electric – made getting around a snap, especially with the recent advent of credit card tap in – tap out payment.

*Wittenberg Cove, our hotel in Amsterdam. We had the top corner room overlooking the canal.*

You can’t see a country in a couple of weeks, and we don’t press ourselves trying. But with a bit of prior planning, you can get a flavor. We spent most of our time in the Netherlands in Amsterdam, making a few day trips to the surrounding area. Here are a few of the highlights for the Netherlands portion of our trek.

Food

We didn’t go hungry on this trip, but we also walked lots of miles to offset our meals. A few Dutch specialties we enjoyed on this trip were stroopwafels (a thin, round waffle cookie native to the South Holland province), fresh fish at small island kiosks around town, friets, a variety of fine restaurants, and of course beer. Early in the history of the city, beer was more reliably cleaner than the water and was often substituted.

*Brined herring with pickles and onions*

*Fabel Friets – really really good fries!*

*Brouwerijtij Windmill Brewery, a local watering hole during our Amsterdam stay.*
*Try the Natte Dubbel!*

Bloemenmarkt (Floating Flower Market)

This is advertised as the world’s only floating flower market, and dates to 1862. The floating booths sell at street level and in their early days were resupplied on the canal side. It caters to tourists, with lots of blooming flowers plus bulbs as well as other popular Dutch souvenirs.

The Albert Cuyp Market

The Albert Cuyp is a rollicking street market dating back to 1905 in the Latin Quarter of the city. Over a half mile long, the 260 stalls are food-centric but sell everything from fresh fish to flip-flops, chicken to cheese, herring to hairspray, pastry to pizza, shallots to stroopwafels.

*Fish head soup for dinner? Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!*

*The Netherlands produces about 1.5 million tons of cheese each year, over half of that gouda.*

Auschwitz Monument

Tucked in a quiet corner of a small public park called Wertheimpark is a unique memorial to the Dutch holocaust victims. An urn containing the ashes of some of the 102,000 Dutch victims of Nazi concentration camps is buried beneath a cracked mirrored glass surface with an etched glass sign with the inscription “Nooit Meer Auschwitz” (Never Again Auschwitz). The cracked glass symbolizes that heaven remains damaged forever.

*Cracked glass symbolizes permanent damage from Auschwitz.*

*Never Again Auschwitz. Note the single rose left at the base.*

Zaanse Schans

As the oldest industrial area in western Europe, the Zaan district of the Netherlands has a lot of history. In its heyday, the area had 600 windmills producing grain, lumber, paint dyes, spices, and other products. The highly efficient lumber mills also fueled the leading shipbuilding center in Europe in the 17^th century, with 26 shipyards producing 100-150 ships per year.

The current tourist attraction is the result of the vision of architect Jaap Schipper. In 1946, he created a plan to relocate some of the remaining windmills and other historical Dutch industries to one location. Today, Zaanse Schans has functioning windmills, cheese production, wood clog manufacturing, barrel making, pewter casting and other businesses. Millions of tourists from around the world visit each year – a day like this now and again is okay, this would be too many tourists for us to deal with every day.

*At the peak, 650 windmills operated here.*

*Windmill ground paint pigments, ground from raw minerals.*

*The rough cut is performed by a lathe.*

*Ready for skilled craftsman to finish.*

National Holocaust Name Monument

This wasn’t on our radar originally, we just happened to walk by it enroute to our hotel. This was only unveiled in September 2021, illustrating the memory of the horrors of World War II is still fresh in the minds of the Dutch. The memorial consists of bricked walls forming four Hebrew letters that make up a word that translates as ‘In memory of’ when viewed from above. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1940, 102,000 did not survive the war. This monument has a brick with the name, date of birth and age for each of the known casualties, plus 1000 blank bricks for unknown deaths. We found the brick for Anne Frank and paid our respects.

*Each brick contains the name of a victim, including some blank for future discoveries.*

*People were paying respects here when we arrived; others in line behind us.*

*Stainless Steel profiles spell “In Memoriam” in Hebrew seen from above.*

Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is known as the museum of the Netherlands. Over 800 years of Dutch history, with the great Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh are represented here. It is the largest museum in the Netherlands, and 14^th largest in the world.

*Rembrandt “The Night Watch”, 1642. A colossal 12 foot x 16 foot painting.*

*Spectacular 1/12 model of the William Rex, 1698 Dutch Warship*

Amsterdam Bicycles

The Netherlands has about 18 million people, 9.4 million cars – and 23 million bicycles. They are everywhere, and it’s no exaggeration that you need to be at least as mindful of bike traffic as cars. Dedicated bike lanes, some with their own redlight system, helped. Theft, vandalism, and wrecks result in ~12-15,000 bikes fished from the canals of Amsterdam each year!

Houseboats

There are three semi-circular rings of canals around the Amsterdam city center constructed in the 17^th century as part of land reclamation. In the 1960s, canal houseboats increased in popularity for the poor who could not afford housing. There are over 2900 of them in Amsterdam alone now, many of which are boats only to the extent they float on water. As they are permanently connected to public water, septic, and electric, they don’t go anywhere. And fetching as much as a million euro, they are no longer the province of the poor.

Keukenhof Gardens

This was the highlight of the trip. We planned the timing of our trip to hit peak tulip season, and we weren’t disappointed. I only knew I wanted to see tulip gardens – I was unprepared for how spectacular they were. This 80-acre plot of land is only open from mid-March to mid-May, but packs in over a million visitors during this window. The garden is an idyllic setting of mature trees, streams, small bridges, and grassy areas with flower beds interspersed throughout. Some 7 million bulbs donated by 100 Dutch flower bulb companies are planted in the fall. They aren’t saved from one year to another. At the request of the donors, the bulbs are dug out at the end of the season and used to feed livestock (one reason for this is to keep strict control of the hybrid varieties), and fresh bulbs are planted each fall. There are plenty of daffodils and hyacinths, but tulips are absolutely the stars of the show.

Van Gogh Museum

This was a museum heavy vacation compared to many of our treks, but there was a reason considering the cultural history of the Netherlands. The Van Gogh Museum was one of the reasons, and one of the rare times we used a tour guide. This turned out to be a necessity when we found out this was our only option at getting in despite trying to get tickets a month in advance. This also increased the price quite a bit, but it got us in the door and our guide did a great job.

Van Gogh’s earliest work was closer in style to the Dutch Masters of the 17^th century, but he abandoned this for a style uniquely his own. Like many other artists, he was an unknown in his time. He sold very few paintings during his life, and much of his financial support came from his brother Theo. He was certainly prolific, producing over 900 paintings before his early death at age 37. His work commands top dollar now, with “Orchard with Cypresses” fetching $117 million in 2017.

I was familiar with his “Sunflowers”, “Irises”, “The Starry Night”, and others, but “The Potato Eaters” was new to me and my favorite on this visit. The dark tones used throughout the painting captured the misery and toil these simple people seemed to endure.

*Van Gogh “Self-portrait with Grey Felt Hat”, 1887*

*You’ll rarely see a Van Gogh painting with no admirers. I caught this one of “Sunflowers” at closing time.*

Escher In the Palace

This was the first of two museums we visited during a day trip to the Hague. The “In the Palace” part of the title refers to the setting for this exhibit of 120 Escher prints. It is the former winter palace of the Queen Mother, Queen Emma, early in the 20^th century. Escher’s work is fascinating with his use of optical illusions on themes of eternity and infinity, and “tessellations”, a term that describes covering a surface using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. The term was new to me. This exhibit was a sharp contrast compared to the works of other Dutch artists we visited.

*“Encounter” by M. C. Escher. Note the use of tessellations.*

Mauritshuis Museum

Our second museum in The Hague was the Mauritshuis Museum. We added this specifically to see the “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” (Johannes Vermeer, 1665) and “The Goldfinch” (Carel Fabritius, 1654) and whatever else of the Grand Dutch Masters we might see. Also of interest was the history of the building itself. The museum is housed in the former residence of John Maurits, governor of Dutch Brazil from 1637 -1643. Previously viewed through the lens of art history, the Dutch now acknowledge his role in the transatlantic slave trade – at least 24,000 enslaved Africans were transported to Brazil under his authority.

*Mauritshuis Art Museum, The Hague. Built 1633-1644.*

*“The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp”. Rembrandt 1632*

*“The Goldfinch”, Fabritius 1654. I didn’t notice the chain at first glance.*

*“Girl with the Pearl Earring”, Vermeer, 1665. This is a ‘tronie’, an imaginary figure rather*
*than a portrait.*

Anne Frank House

I’ve taken an outsized fascination with this 14-year-old girl. She received a diary for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942 when she began to document the daily affairs of a teenage girl. This transitioned into documenting life in hiding from when they moved into a secret annex on the upper floors at the back of her father’s business on July 6, 1942 until their capture on August 4, 1944. These diaries survived and lived on as an international best seller. Thousands still visit the house of their refuge each day. Touring the house adds a whole new dimension to her story beyond just reading the diary.

*Street view of Otto Frank’s business. The secret annex was on the upper floors and to the rear.*

*People still leave flowers over 75 years later.*

*Lynn entering the Secret Annex through the bookcase concealing the entrance.*

*Anne’s first of several diaries she accumulated. A gift for her thirteenth birthday from her parents.*

King’s Day

Our last full day in Amsterdam was spent enjoying the celebration of King’s Day. It is the most widely celebrated national holiday in the country. It’s celebrated throughout the country, but Amsterdam is the main attraction with upwards of a million visitors converging on the city. Orange-clad revelers wander the streets and take to the canals. Many inner-city businesses close for the day, as well as the normal transportation services. Orange has become the national color owing to the royal family bearing the name “House of Orange”, dating back to William of Orange who led the Dutch revolt against the Spaniards beginning in 1572.

The Netherlands has a booming tourist trade. They decided it was too booming and have taken steps to maintain the trade but stabilize it at a sustainable level, targeting high value tourists for the city. The port of Amsterdam has closed to sea-going cruise lines, and river cruises will be cut in half over the next five years. Tourist taxes are among the highest in Europe. No new hotels can be built unless an existing one closes, even then, the new hotel may have no more capacity than the one closing. The city aims to limit overnight hotel stays to 20 million per year. We did not suffer from any of the restrictions, and, in general, I applaud such efforts.

We’ve made connecting flights through The Netherlands in the past and idled past the souvenir shops with their cheese wheels, tulip bulbs, wood clog refrigerator magnets and the like in the airport gift shops. It was fun and rewarding to finally get the opportunity to tour the country (my 39th) in much more detail. We left with fond memories of our stay there.

Pura Vida! A Trek to Costa Rica

By Conrad Ottenfeld | January 16, 2024 | Comments 5 comments

November 29 – December 20, 2023

First you learn the native customs, Soon a word of Spanish or two….

Steve Goodman

What better cure for the winter blues than a trip to Costa Rica? That was our thinking, and we weren’t disappointed. Costa Rica is a diverse country – research will describe the country in a broad range of biomes, climate zones, ecosystems, ecological zones, and ecoregions. What do all these terms even mean to a layman? To keep it simple, Mother Nature has a lot going on!

After taking a high-level look, we decided to break our trip up into sections to get a better flavor for the country. Our final agenda started with a visit to the Tortuguero National Park in the northeast. From there we headed to the Caribbean influenced southeast Atlantic Coast for a stay in the tiny beach town of Punta Uva, just a few miles from the Panama border. We headed to the center of the country after that, with stays at La Fortuna near the Arenal Volcano and Santa Elena in the Cloud Forest region. Our last stop was at the mostly deserted northwest Pacific coast beach of Playa Junquillal (say hoon-kee-yal).

Before going into the details of our trip, here is a little bit about the country:

The name Costa Rica (meaning “rich coast”) allegedly was bestowed by Christopher Columbus in 1502. Of course, this designation was in reference to perceived precious metals, not the biodiversity wonderland.
Typical of other areas, the decades following Spanish conquest reduced the indigenous population from ~120,000 to 10,000. Only 2% of the population is indigenous today.
The country has about 5.2 million people (124^th). Measured by purchasing power, the per capita GDP is about ~$25,000 (66^th). The largest city is the capital, San Jose, with about 334,000 people.
The country has been fully sovereign since 1838. The military was abolished following a civil war ending in 1948. Since then, the country has held 17 peaceful presidential elections. The former military budget is now directed to healthcare, education, and environmental protection.
Surprising (to me), the leading export is medical instruments, followed by bananas and tropical fruits. The US is the leading export destination.
The country lies 9° north of the equator. Temperatures can be quite warm but not extreme, rarely exceeding the low 90s. Rain is abundant, over 10 feet per year in much of the country. Temperatures can drop below freezing on the summit of the high point, Mount Chirripo at 12,536 feet.
Costa Rica is 19,730 square miles, about the size of West Virginia. The similarities end there.
Costa Rica has 100% renewable electricity production – 79% hydro, 12% wind, 8% geothermal, 1% solar.
27% of Costa Rica is protected through over 100 National Parks, preserves, refuges, and protected lands, more than any other country.
Costa Rica is the one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with a whopping 500,000 species of wildlife. This is almost 6% of the world’s biodiversity despite covering only 0.03% of the surface area of the earth.
Costa Ricans are known casually as Ticos.
The currency is the colon, named after Christopher Columbus. Exchange rate at the time of travel was $1 = 529 colón. US dollars were widely accepted.

Travelling to Costa Rica from the US is a simple matter. With a current passport, US citizens can be in Costa Rica in a few hours and not much time zone difference (-1 hour for us from Eastern Standard Time). You can get by with English but expect to be dealing with Spanish only speaking waiters, cab drivers and the like on occasion. While investigating rental cars, our daughter suggested just getting a driver. I did due diligence on that idea, and that’s what we settled on. After queries to three different vendors, we settled on Costa Rica Driver (https://costaricadriver.com/#). A rental car may have been a little cheaper, and we would have had increased mobility. In exchange, we would have to do our own navigating on often poorly marked, occasionally horrendous quality roads, risk vandalism or fender benders, purchase fuel, and contend with the stress of driving in a different country. Our driver, Danny Jimenez, was a pleasure, filling us in on all sorts of Costa Rica details and stopping at our request. To each his own – we were happy with our decision. We flew into and out of San Jose but didn’t take in much of the city. On to the trip!

Tortuguero National Park

Tortuguero National Park occupies 120 square miles in the northeast of the country. This is also one of the wettest spots in the country – 20 feet of rain per year! The lush, canal laced park is a mecca for wildlife, including one of the highest densities for jaguars anywhere in the world. Only 1% of the park is available for tourists – the remaining 99% is for absolute protection of resources. According to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, beaches here are the most important green turtle nesting sites in the Western Hemisphere. Literature said to expect heat, humidity, and rain as our travelling companion, but we were lucky throughout for weather. The only rain we had was at night, and the heat and humidity were tolerable. Our lodging, cute individual cabins, had no air conditioning, still, nighttime temperatures in the mid-70s with ceiling fans seemed okay. Bugs were around but not oppressive.

Lodging in the park is limited, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer. We chose Aninga Lodge (https://www.aningalodgetortuguero.com/ ). This was part of a three day – two-night package we selected that included round trip transportation from San Jose. The trip included a one-hour canal boat ride to reach our destination. It’s possible to arrange this on your own, but that’s not where we wanted to focus our planning efforts on this trip. We aren’t big tour group advocates, but sometimes they have their place, and this was one of those times.

Our first afternoon was spent on a short boat ride to the small town of Tortuguero. With a population of about 1200, the beaches of the town see about ten times more nesting green turtles than there are inhabitants. The village was founded in 1930, four decades before the National Park. Deforestation began soon after and continued until the park was formed on September 24, 1970. Ecotourism drives the local economy now, with logging equipment rusting in place as reminders of a more destructive past. We visited the beach, but there is no swimming here – crocodile warnings were abundant. Our contribution to the town’s economy was limited to the purchase of a Coco Loco, a coconut milk/rum beverage made as you wait. This was made from and served in a fresh local coconut while we waited.

*Century old abandoned logging equipment.*

The highlight of the park for us was the early morning wildlife canal tour. We were up at sunrise to head off into the canals with our local guide. Over the next couple of hours, we worked our way deeper and deeper into the canals, seeing all sorts of birds, lizards, monkeys, caiman, iguana, etc. along the way. The weather was good – mostly clear skies, comfortable temperatures, few bugs, good wildlife. This vacation was off to a good start.

*Anhinga fishing bird dries his wings.* *They aren’t waterproof, which aids in staying submerged for fishing.*

For the remainder of our time, we took an afternoon wildlife tour through the forest, and I took an additional short hike up Tortuguero Hill, a 390 foot climb up an inactive volcano for a scenic view of the area. I enjoyed seeing a green tree snake, a yellow viper, a small red frog, and big spiders as much as the hike itself. We recovered from all this “stress” with an afternoon by the sea turtle shaped swimming pool, watching monkeys swing through the trees and iguanas crawling through the limbs, occasionally crashing to the ground when they misjudged their weight. We returned to San Jose the next morning.

*Spider monkey foraging outside our cabin.*

*Sea Turtle shaped pool at Aninga Lodge.*

Punta Uva

Our driver Danny picked us up right on time in San Jose for our trip to Punta Uva in the far southeast of the country. The drive through San Jose was sufficient for me to decide hiring a driver was a good call. Danny stopped at the first of a few ‘sodas’ we enjoyed with him, small mom and pop restaurants selling only traditional Costa Rican fare, often prepared on a wood fire. The most common menu item is Casado, comprised of black beans, rice, and a protein, along with vegetables, plantain, and a salad that varied from place to place.

*A typical casado dish – always beans and rice, plus protein, salad, vegetables that could vary.*

*Food preparation over a wood fire at a ‘soda’ – a small mom and pop restaurant serving Costa Rican fare.*

Our lodging in Punta Uva, Casa Viva (https://casavivalodge.com/), was equipped with a kitchen. Danny was happy to stop at a local grocery store to allow us to load up for the week. Being early December makes no difference for fresh fruit in Costa Rica. I had already loaded up on rambutan at a roadside stand on the way, I added passion fruit, bananas, papaya, and oranges along with other provisions. We were set for the week to eat breakfast and lunch in our cabin and dine out for dinner. Over the course of our stay, we noted Costa Rican food is flavorful but not overly spicy.

*Buying Rambutan from a roadside stand. I think she liked Danny calling her the prettiest girl in Costa Rica.*

Our suite was constructed of beautiful dark hardwood with a tiled shower in addition to the full kitchen and a comfortable porch with hammocks. There was no air conditioning, and if it had been a little warmer this may have been uncomfortable. The weather was in the upper 80s during our stay, with 85% humidity and only dropping to around 80 at night. With a room fan and a mosquito net around the bed we were fine. The windows had no screens and a wooden lattice with about 6-inch openings. We would listen to the wildlife at night, occasionally wondering if we had visitors inside the cabin. All this just added a certain charm, we loved our cabin and the access to our private shaded beach was wonderful. As a rule, we had the beach to ourselves for a quarter mile in either direction. Unlike Tortuguero, the swimming was wonderful, and we had walkable dining options for dinner.

*The kitchen in our Casa Viva bungalow. Note – no screens in the windows.*

*Sunrise on the beach at Playa Punta Uva.*

*Our private shaded beach. Gringos need shade.*

*Playa Punta Uva surf could be a little rough at times, but still good swimming.*

We only had two agenda items this week. The first was the Chocorart Cacao Farm, an organic cacao farm about a quarter of a mile down the road from Casa Viva. As we walked up the hill to the farm, our guide Simon popped out of the woods to join us. Lynn and I were the only people on this tour besides Simon – and what an absolute delight the tour was! Simon is a native, and for the next hour we walked through the woods, with him cutting down a variety of local fruits for us to enjoy. We sauntered on through old and new groves of cacao trees, with red banana trees mixed in. We visited the fermentation and drying platforms before ending the tour at the roasting area. The dried beans were fire roasted, then cracked by rolling a big rock, separated using a simple fan, ground to a paste, then sweetened with pure cane sugar caramelized over the same wood fire. This was poured over fresh bananas for the climax of a wonderful experience. We purchased several of their products as souvenirs.

*Simon leads us through the old grove at Chocorart Organic Cacao Farm.*

*Raw Cacao beans are very sweet but not much chocolate flavor.*

*Sweetened chocolate on fresh red bananas. Yum!*

Our second agenda item was a visit to Ara Manzanillo, a Great Green Macaw reintroduction project opened in 2010. These beautiful birds are critically endangered, with no more than 1000 estimated left in the wild. This 120-acre preserve is now dedicated to providing nesting sites and food for wild birds, adding about 80 birds to the free flying population.

*Great Green Macaw at Ara Manzanillo Restoration Project.*

*Great Green Macaws aren’t the only wildlife at Ara Manzanillo.*

*Dinner at El Refugio after visiting Ara Manzanillo.*

An unplanned bonus event happened mid-week when a local animal rescue center, Jaguar Rescue Center, chose our little patch of beach to release a sloth they had nursed back to health. The young female paid us no attention as she ambled out of her transfer cage and found a spot high in the trees for her new home.

*Rescue sloth climbing back up into the trees.*

We spent five days at Punta Uva. One afternoon a hang glider flew overhead. A single boat cruised by another afternoon, and a few days we could see surfers off in the distance. Otherwise, we had our shaded beach spot mostly to ourselves. That doesn’t appeal to everyone. I thought it was perfect.

La Fortuna

Our next spot was La Fortuna, site of Arenal Volcano and Hot Springs. Several sites list this as the top-rated tourist destination in Costa Rica. It certainly had more tourist activities than our other destinations. Paradise Hot Springs (https://paradisehotsprings.net/) was the closest to a traditional hotel that we stayed in – except for multiple hot spring fed pools of various sizes and temperatures. We were poised at the base of the Arenal Volcano for spectacular views, but we only saw the lower half during our four-day stay due to a persistent cloud cover. This is not uncommon. Danny (our driver) said the volcano likes to sleep with a blanket.

*Hot spring pool at Paradise Hot Springs.*

*The most we ever saw of Arenal Volcano.*

The agenda for the first day was a trip to La Fortuna Waterfall. This is about a 250 foot vertical drop waterfall to a bright blue pool, feeding additional fish-filled swimming holes downstream. The 500-step descent was described as challenging, but the trail is in good shape with handrails and was no problem. It’s not very likely you’ll go swimming here by yourself, but the crowd wasn’t too bad, and we had a refreshing swim while we admired the waterfall. We topped off the day with a fun Costa Rican cooking class followed up by a beginner’s salsa dancing class. It was fun and we didn’t care if we embarrassed our fellow dancers.

*Nice swimming hole downstream of the waterfall.*

*There are approximately 1400 species of orchids in Costa Rica.*

The next day we took a trip to Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park for the Natural History Guided Tour. This was approximately a two-hour, two-mile hike through the rainforest with 15 bridges, 6 of them hanging. A local naturalist pointed out the rainforest flora and fauna. We saw more toucans here than anywhere else.

*Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges. Note the bridge below. That’s later in the hike.*

*The canopy at Mistico Hanging Gardens.*

We made sure to allow plenty of relaxing time at all our spots, and it was no different here. We spent many hours lounging around the hot spring pools (drained nightly and filled fresh) and spent a few hours at the shops in La Fortuna.

Santa Elena and the Cloud Forest

This was our highest elevation stop for the trip, about 5000 feet. We stayed at Rainbow Valley Lodge (https://www.rainbowvalleylodgemonteverde.com/). I assumed the name to just be the typically campy name for a hotel – we soon learned this was well-earned. Positioned at the top of a valley with a constant strong wind, coupled with moisture rolling down from the higher elevation cloud forest created conditions for a constant (almost) rainbow. What a treat! So what is a cloud forest anyway? I wasn’t familiar with the term. This region of Costa Rica sits along the continental divide. Moisture laden air from either the Pacific or Atlantic condenses with the rising elevation, creating a persistent dense fog at the canopy level. This results in lush vegetation growth, rich in ferns and mosses. Only about 1% of global woodlands fall into this category.

*Our daily rainbow at Rainbow Valley Lodge.*

*A typical small neighborhood grocery store.*

Monteverde is the most popular Cloud Forest experience – so we didn’t go there because of the crowds that go with that. We went instead to the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Preserve. This plot of about 760 acres opened in 1992, and all the profits from this community managed conservation project are used in managing the preserve. We saw every shade of green in the spectrum as we hiked about 5 miles of the several trails. One of the trails is designated as the Shinrin-Yoku walk, a term that emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise of “forest bathing”. Think Mary Oliver walking in a rainforest.

Dinner at Santa Elena was the nearby “Taco Station” an unassuming nearby home that had no indication of being a public establishment. The staff was so friendly and the food was excellent. We were lucky to chance upon this diner.

*Our sweet waitress at Taco Station. She drew hearts and flowers on our carryout containers.*

The only other major agenda item we had in Santa Elena was a trip to Café Monteverde Farm and Roastery. This association of twenty families grows and roasts coffee, but it’s more than that. They grow most of what they need to be completely independent – fruits, vegetables, goats, chickens, etc. They aren’t certified organic but are quite close and working in that direction. We find sometimes that famous local products aren’t that special when you get there, but that’s not the case with Costa Rican coffee. The western part of the country has the elevation, soil, and climate to produce truly excellent coffee.

*Coffee bushes with bananas in the background at Café Monteverde Farm and Roastery.*

*Coffee cherries at Café Monteverde Farm and Roastery.*

*Roasting coffee beans at Café Monteverde Farm and Roastery.*

Our next and last stop was Playa Junquilla on the Pacific northwest coast, but we weren’t quite ready for that. This part of the country is known for Chorotega pottery, with its origins in a process developed over 4,000 years ago by the Chorotega tribe. While researching, I found a potter nearby and this was added to our trip to the Pacific coast. Marcos Oliveira greeted us at Chorotega Arts & Crafts, a small roadside building containing everything from the raw materials he collects in the mountains to the display cases for finished pottery. This passionate, indigenous trained potter runs a one-man operation that he proudly displayed for us. This visit was a special treat.

*With Marcos Oliveira at Chorotega Arts & Crafts*

Playa Junquilla

Our last stop was at the isolated beach of Playa Junquilla on the Nicoya Peninsula in the Guanacaste Province. There isn’t much to do there, so if you’re looking for excitement, it’s best to look elsewhere. However, if you like peace and solitude on a pristine beach, you should put this on your list to check out. On several of our walks there weren’t more than a handful of folks on this 2 km stretch of beach; even at sunset not more than a few dozen.

We stayed at the funky Mundo Milo Ecolodge (https://www.mundomilo.com/) in a comfortable bungalow. We used the pool there to escape the mid-day sun and enjoy bird watching, a beverage, and some reading. As we had seen elsewhere in the country, environmental awareness was an important element of business. I’ve never stayed anywhere before where I was asked to bring watermelon rinds and banana peels to the reception desk for composting and told just to pitch coffee grounds in the woods.

*The Oriental Cabinas at Mundo Milo Ecolodge.*

*Afternoon at the pool at Mundo Milo Ecolodge.*

There is an interesting blue theme to this part of the country. First, the Nicoya Peninsula is one of five “Blue Zones” in the world where people on average have a significantly longer lifespan (for example, more than twice as likely as a North American to reach age 90). A low fat, high fiber diet with virtually no processed or refined food and an active manual lifestyle contribute to this.

*Gallo pinto is a common bean-rice breakfast item.*

Second, Playa Junquilla is a “Blue-Flag” beach, an award given to locations with stringent environmental, educational, safety, and accessibility criteria that must be met and maintained. The absence of trash on any of the beaches we visited in Costa Rica was refreshing.

*Saturday morning at Playa Junquillal. Lynn is the only person in sight.*

As usual, we had no transportation, so we were left with what the beach had to offer. Our hostess at Mundo Milo pointed us to tidal pools about 30 minutes up the beach and provided us snorkel masks. We visited there twice. This was certainly the widest variety of sizes, shapes, and colors of fish I have ever seen through a snorkel mask. We even saw an octopus and a sea snake.

*Lynn checks out the prize snorkel spot.*

The beach at Play Junquilla is also the site of the Verdiazul Turtle Hatchery. Founded in 2005, this organization of two permanent staff and a steady stream of volunteers works to protect four of the world’s seven sea turtles that nest here. We had the good fortune to be in the area during the release of Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings. As we left Playa Junquilla for our return to San Jose, I found it hard to believe we had considered a Margaritaville stay a few miles up the beach at Playa Flamingo for our Pacific coast experience.

*Rescued turtle nests relocated for controlled hatch and release at Verdiazul Turtle Hatchery.*

*Olive Ridley hatchling on his way to the ocean.*

*With Valerie Guthrie, one of two permanent staff at Verdiazul Turtle Hatchery.*

Over our three weeks stay in the country, I repeatedly heard and read of the 1970s as the turning point for conservation in Costa Rica. I never determined any single initiating event or person, but there is no doubt the country changed direction. Forest cover in the country dropped from 75% in 1940 to 33% in 1980. Since then, it has recovered to 75%. Sport hunting was banned in the country in 2012. Logging is completely prohibited in national parks. Private property may be logged under specific circumstances. In 1997 the country initiated a program where landowners are paid to leave their wooded properties intact (interestingly, this program is paid for by a fossil fuel tax). Recycling is widely available and promoted. Costa Rica clearly believes their future lies in environmental protection.

Costa Rica still faces challenges. Poaching and illegal logging still occur, and drug trade through Costa Rica from South America causes problems. Without more widespread effort from the rest of the world, environmental changes will negatively impact the country since climate knows no boundaries. A declining birth rate stresses a work force that already relies on many migrant workers. Still, the Costa Rica people have demonstrated themselves to be a progressive, forward-looking people. We had a great visit. Pura Vida!

P.S. – This is the first post where the blog platform (WordPress) offered AI assistant. I declined.

The Great Glen Way – A Walk Across Scotland

By Conrad Ottenfeld | November 16, 2022 | Comments 9 comments

August 8 – 19, 2022

“There’s no present like the time.”

Maggie Smith, The Second-Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

After a wonderful experience hiking the West Highland Way in Scotland in 2017, Lynn and I decided to take on another Scottish trek as a retirement celebration. We researched some options and decided on the Great Glen Way for a follow-up. Both are included in Scotland’s Great Trails. The advent of these trails is recent, with the West Highland Way opening in 1980 as the inaugural trail. The trails are designed to promote international tourism by featuring high quality footpaths that must share certain characteristics – a minimum of 25 miles long, clearly marked, <20% on tarmac, ready access to public and private transportation, availability of facilities and services, etc. As of 2018, there are 29 trails in the network totaling 1900 miles. They weave their way between many economically fragile communities that rely heavily on the tourism industry. Lodging options are often very limited along the trail, and I wouldn’t contemplate making this hike without prearranged lodging and meal arrangements. Having said that – all our accommodations were great.

We booked the trip through Wilderness Scotland, the same company we used for our West Highland Way trip. Different packages are available; we chose the self-guided package that includes overnight lodging, breakfast, and luggage transfer to the next night’s lodging. The trails are sufficiently well marked that there simply isn’t a need for a guide. We were provided with a daily itinerary in advance with detailed maps, instructions for each day, and pre-arranged shuttles where necessary. We originally booked the trip in 2019 for a 2020 excursion, but this was before the term “Covid” entered the lexicon. After two years of postponements, we finally made the trip in August 2022. I can’t say enough about how satisfied we are with Wilderness Scotland.

As a sidenote for anyone interested in a more bohemian approach, in 2003 Scotland passed the Land Reform Act that codified responsible public access to most land in Scotland. We saw a few backpackers and tent campers but otherwise little evidence of anyone using this level of self-guided hiking.

The Great Glen Way joined the network in 2002 (“glen” is Scottish for valley). The hike follows a nearly straight line from Fort William in the west to Inverness in the east along the Great Glen Fault, dividing highlands to the northwest and southeast. This is one of the longer trails in the system at 77 miles and has about 12,000 feet of elevation gain (this can vary depending on optional high and low routes available at different points). Unlike the other trails, the Great Glen Way has provisions to be biked or canoed/kayaked.

*Elevation profile of The Great Glen Way*

We arrived by train from Glasgow on August 8 to start our hike in Fort William. Already a couple of weeks into our European vacation, we chose to stay a few days in Fort William. Our accommodation at Craiglynne Court was perfect with a full kitchen, washer/dryer, beautiful view of Loch Linnhe, and a short walk to the shops, restaurants, grocery stores, and train station of downtown Fort William. In addition to giving us a chance to clean up and rest up before starting our hike, it gave me a chance to summit Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the British Isles at 4406 feet. Having just completed the Tour du Mont Blanc a few weeks before, I foolishly dismissed this as a trivial hike. This summit is climbed essentially from sea level in 4.9 miles of increasingly rocky trail with foul weather and stout winds as the norm. I was lucky with limited cloud cover and modest wind. As honest a day’s hike as any other I have taken – I tip my hat to big Ben.

We officially started the Great Glen Way hike on August 12. The trail began by following the shoreline of Loch Linnhe through town before heading northeast along the Caledonian Canal. The canal, originally built in 1803 to boost trade and create jobs, connects the Atlantic Ocean on the west with the North Sea on the east through a combination of 22 miles of manmade canal and 38 miles of the natural waterway of Lochs Lochy, Olch, and Ness. It’s still in use but limited mostly to pleasure and tourist craft.

*Start of the Great Glen Way in Fort William*

*The start of the trail leaving Fort William.*

*The shoreline of Loch Linnhe with Ben Nevis in the background.*

Our travel along the Caledonian Canal was peaceful, even tranquil with good weather and few other hikers. We encountered Neptune’s Staircase early, a series of eight locks that raise the water level 64 feet over a short distance of 1500 feet. We also passed the only remaining original bridge, the Swing Bridge of Moy, a hand operated swing bridge only used by a local farmer. At Gairlochy locks, we took a detour off the trail for a two-mile hike to The Old Pines Hotel, our lodging for the first night. Accommodations were fine, but dinner was next level – a splendid five course meal with roast carrot velouté with shallots and pine nuts, wild mushroom risotto, and pan roast cod. Yum! (I didn’t know what a velouté was and had to look it up – it is made from a roux and a light stock, and is one of the “mother sauces” of French cuisine along with espagnole, tomato, béchamel, and hollandaise. Velouté is French for ‘velvety’). This was one of a few nights on the hike where there were no alternatives for dinner.

*Peaceful walk along the Caledonian Canal.*

*Swing Gate at Gairlochy Lock. Part of the road when closed, swings to allow boat traffic*.

Looking out from the front of the Old Pines Hotel.

Our second day resumed along the western shore of Loch Lochy through beautiful mature beech trees. Ben Nevis summit maintained a prominent spot on the horizon for a second day. Historical landmarks were common. We passed one location by the loch where WWII Marine Commandos practiced landing craft exercises.

*Ship ruins on the shore of Loch Lochy.*

*Walking through beech tree forest on the shore of Loch Lochy.*

*WWII Marine Commando landing craft training site*

*Ben Nevis in the background of Loch Lochy*

Most of the hike was through open highlands and dense forests, but some sections do go through recently cut forests. This was a reminder that timber is very much an important and managed resource in Scotland, creating over 30,000 jobs and adding over £750 million to the economy.

*Hiking through managed forest sections.*

After hiking the entirety of Loch Lochy, we had a beer at Eagle Barge Inn, a floating restaurant at Laggan Locks while waiting for our cab to pick us up for our delivery to Glengarry Castle Hotel. This is a luxurious Victorian Castle dating from 1866 on 60 acres on the shore of Loch Oich. Lodging choices were limited in many of the small villages we stayed in, but we certainly didn’t suffer staying here as we pampered ourselves. Dinner included such indulgences as wood pigeon breast, Aberdeen filet, and clotted cream with currants and meringue for dessert.

*Clotted cream with currants and meringue.*

The carefully groomed grounds include the remains of Invergarry Castle dating back to 1602. Over the next 150 years it was the subject of repeated attacks during conflicts with the British and was left in its ruined state after being partially blown up following the Jacobite uprisings in 1746. Its sole purpose now seems to be for passersby to admire and reflect on the ancient and frequently violent history of Scotland. One bus driver noted the Scots were known to take pleasure in “cracking a few heads” from time to time.

The traditional English breakfast was offered each morning everywhere we stayed – eggs, grilled tomato, mushrooms, back bacon, beans, and black pudding. A full breakfast weighs in at around 800 calories. You won’t need a morning snack with one of those under your belt. I went full on one morning, just because, well, I was in Scotland, and I always go for full dining experience when travelling. The other mornings I pared back some. Scottish salmon with scrambled eggs and toast and Eggs Benedict with salmon substituted for Canadian Bacon are other popular options.

*A modified full traditional breakfast, minus beans and black pudding.*

Our cab driver returned us to the trail at Laggan Locks the next morning, but not without honoring my request to make a brief stop at one of the more macabre tourist attractions I’ve seen. The “Well of the Seven Heads” is a monument erected in 1812 that is topped by a hand holding a dagger and seven severed heads. This was erected in the memory of revenge killings that took place in 1665 over two brothers that had been killed two years earlier. Ian Lom, responsible for the savage revenge murders, took the seven severed heads, wrapped in plaid, and dunked them in a well by Loch Oich to properly clean them before taking them to display in Edinburgh. I was amazed both at the brutality of the revenge and the fact that this was deemed worthy of a monument 150 years later!

Refreshed with that bit of history, we resumed our hike along the shores of Lock Oich. This was our last day of mostly flat terrain. We ambled along, enjoying the landscape and ripe raspberries along the trail. Leaving Loch Oich behind us, we resumed travel along the Caledonian Canal, passing Locks Cullochy and Kytra before reaching Fort Augustus where a series of locks lower the water level to the shores of Loch Ness. After enjoying pristine weather to this point, we picked up our pace to arrive at our lodging ahead of approaching storms. Fort Augustus was the first population center of any size since leaving Fort William, still, it has a population of under 700 people. None of the hotels arranged by Wilderness Scotland were chain hotels and the Lovat House was no exception. Each was a unique local establishment that had its own special charm. Our room looked out over Loch Ness in the distance, and we relaxed in a big clawfoot tub after dinner.

*Caledonian Canal between Lochs Lochy and Oich*

*One of the ubiquitous ‘thistle in a hexagon’ waymarks along the trail.*

*Lynn crossing a lock at Cullochy Lock.*

*The locks at Fort Augustus with Loch Ness in the distance.*

*Wonderful Scottish style Eggs Benedict at the Lovat House.*

We headed off the next morning for our first climb into the highlands. The sky was gray, and rain threatened but did not materialize. After three days and about 32 miles of mostly level hiking, we began about an 1100-foot climb in the highlands along the Great Glen Way High Route (a low route option is available for bikers and hikers that choose that route). The highlands at this point are also known as Scottish moors or heather moorlands, uncultivated tracts characterized by high rainfall, acidic soil, and low, scrubby vegetation. A low cloud cover obscured the view some, still, the view of Loch Ness shrouded in cloud seemed perfectly appropriate. This was the only time I experienced any problem with the infamous Scottish midge (a tiny biting insect), and that was only when I was crawling on the ground taking pictures as I am wont to do on occasion.

*Scottish heather moorland, with Fort Augustus and Loch Ness in the background.*

*Heading off into the Scottish Moors in splendid isolation.*

Loch Ness is certainly the most famous of the lochs, and it is impressive. Besides the fanciful tales of the elusive monster, the loch itself is a wonder. At 23 miles long and an average depth of over 600 feet, it contains more water than all the lakes and reservoirs in England and Wales combined. We hiked for several miles without seeing a single other hiker, sheep, cow, barn, or homestead. Only Lynn and I with the winding highland trail and expanses of different species of blooming Scottish heather. Legend holds that a scar on the land across the Loch called Horseshoe Crag is the remnant of a ploy by locals to lure Nessie from the loch by placing a bottle of whisky on the hill. Nessie came for the whisky, leaving behind her trail on the hill.

*Bell heather, one of a few common in the region.*

*Loch Ness with Horseshoe Crag across the loch.*

In the afternoon, we descended into the town of Invermoriston. Town is a generous description – there isn’t much there and we did not find a single open business on our arrival. We filled in some time waiting for our hostess at the Glenmoriston Arms Hotel to let us in by checking out the Summer House, a small hut in the woods overlooking the River Moriston where J. M. Barrie is said to have drawn inspiration to write Peter Pan. The Summer House, the falls of Moriston, and the old 19^th century Telford Bridge make for a very scenic spot.

*Glenmoriston Arms Hotel in the village of Invermoriston.*

*The Summer House on the River Moriston.*

*The old Telford Bridge from the 19th century.*

The town of Invermoriston owes its existence to the lumber industry, dating back to about 1600. With the timber industry no longer providing jobs in the town, tourism is a mainstay for the local economy. I chatted with the owner of Glenmoriston Arms Hotel for a while. She has put in a lot of work to make her establishment a warm, comfortable lodge and done an excellent job. I’m happy she survived the Covid pandemic. We enjoyed another wonderful dinner (I really enjoyed the wild mushrooms on toast) and for a change of pace for breakfast we had some belly busting Scottish pancakes loaded with berries and whipped cream.

The hike out of Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit presented another low road – high road option. I took the high road that included the high peak for the entire trail at 1350 feet. Low clouds and fog shrouded the forests with an occasional view of Loch Ness. I hiked in a steady mist, but never quite enough for me to put on a raincoat. Hikers were again scarce. Lynn took the low road, which was actually more of a not-quite-as-high-road. After about 5 miles of hiking separate through a mix of open highlands and conifer forest, we joined and continued our steep decline into the town of Drumnadrochit, a slightly larger village of about 1100 people with several tourist attractions including the Loch Ness Center and Urqhuart Castle. We stayed at the 160-year-old Loch Ness Inn. The repeated notices about staffing shortages at our hotels never seemed to impact the quality of the dinners.

*High route to Drumnadrochit from Invermoriston.*

With twenty miles remaining to Inverness and no lodging in between, we had a two-night stay at the Loch Ness Inn. A scheduled shuttle delivered me to a halfway point the next day, where I hiked the trail backwards for the second night at the Loch Ness Inn. Lynn decided to take a zero day, a concept I totally endorse. My shuttle driver delivered me about 12 miles up the trail to the hamlet of Blackfold. That’s what the itinerary called it – I couldn’t see anything besides an occasional home along a winding highland road. But the sun had returned after two soggy days. The trail was good, the scenery divine. I was happy. I meandered, sauntered, lollygagged, ambled, strolled, dawdled, pondered, reflected, and investigated to my heart’s content as I followed the trail through the rolling landscape. The moorland passed through spectacular expanses of blooming heather before giving way to managed forest land as I approached Drumnadrochit from the east. I was able to get a clear view of sunlit Loch Ness before dropping back into the forest. Sunbeams lit the shamrock covered forest floor. I passed a herd of uninterested furry Highland Cattle as I neared town and harvested newly ripened blackberries before joining Lynn at the Loch Ness Inn for a well-deserved beer. Just a thought (and an American opinion at that) – whatever advantage the UK has in beer variety/quality, they lose in coffee.

*Backtracking from Blackfold to Drumnadrochit*

*I had an obligation staying at the Loch Ness Inn.*

Our shuttle driver returned us to Blackfold the next morning for the final 7.5 mile walk into Inverness. This was a gradually declining trail. I continued my berry harvesting as I plucked ripe blueberries along a stone wall we followed for a few miles. We drifted into the outskirts of Inverness, road walking for the last few miles through business and residential areas and along a golf course before rejoining our old friend, the Caledonian Canal, for the first time since Fort Augustus. The trail led us through a lovely park in the center of town on an island in the River Ness, just a short walk to the trail endpoint on the grounds of Inverness Castle.

*Ness Islands, a city park in the center of Inverness.*

We took a selfie at the endpoint. I was a little sad to see the hike end, but not too sad to pass up a celebratory treat of my favorite ice cream in Scotland, Scottish Tablet. Make that a triple scoop!

*Scottish Tablet, my favorite ice cream when in Scotland.*

Our last official night on the Great Glen Way was spent at Rocpool Reserve, a boutique hotel in the heart of town. It’s hard to say which hotel was our favorite – they all had their own element of charm, and none were chain hotels – but this was certainly near the top. We ventured into town for a wood-fired pizza for dinner before heading out the next morning for the next leg of our journey.

A Walk in The Alps – Tour du Mont Blanc

By Conrad Ottenfeld | October 7, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

July15-26, 2022

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.

-  John Muir

Someday, I will reach a point where I decide long distance hikes aren’t for me anymore. Fortunately, I didn’t decide that this year. After contemplating an offer to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) with a few of my hiking buddies (Heather Waldroup – chief instigator, Rusty Bingham, and Beth Jones) a few months ago, I was all in. I knew a bit about the hike but had some homework to find out what I was really getting into. Some of the background information about the hike:

The Tour du Mont Blanc is an alpine hike in western Europe circumnavigating Mont Blanc, about 103 miles long with 34,717 feet of total ascent.
The Mont Blanc Range dominates an area 60 miles by 20 miles and holds 11 summits over 13,000 feet.
Mont Blanc is French for White Mountain. It is owned by both France and Italy under a bilateral agreement and is known as Monte Bianco in Italian. At 15,777 feet, it is the highest mountain in western Europe.
The route is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Swiss geologist and physicist. In 1767 he walked around the entire Mont Blanc massif looking for a possible route to climb to the summit of the unclimbed peak. Several portions of the trail had been in use for centuries.
The hike travels about 49 miles in France, 29 miles in Switzerland, and 25 miles in Italy.
The Alps are sharply featured compared to my familiar Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. By comparison, the Alps are approximately 45 million years old, the Rocky Mountains of the western US 70-80 million, and the Appalachians 200-300 million years old.

We hiked this profile from right to left.

There were lots of factors to consider and plans to make. Is my passport expiration date still good? What about lingering covid restrictions? What phone plan should I use? What map app should I use for navigation? How much foreign currency will I need and what is the best place to get it? Is it wise to get trip insurance (there is an overwhelming number of choices out there)? What should I pack? Do I need to be concerned about altitude sickness? Last but not least – am I physically up for this?

Heather Waldroup did the advance heavy lifting in reserving hostels and one hotel for our trek. The hostels always included breakfast, with dinners optional for an extra charge and carry out packed lunches available for the following days hike. I tempered my expectations for hostel food and was pleasantly surprised. Breakfasts were typically an average but adequate collection of jams, bread, pastries, yogurt, cereal, etc. Lunches might best be summarized as calories – a sandwich with a lot of bread and a little filling, a piece of fruit, a bag of chips. After a couple of days, I opted out for my own lunch provisions of dried fruit, protein bars, nuts, etc. And Gu gel packs for a quick pick me up. These are a small bag of slime (okay, technically “gel”) containing calories, electrolytes, caffeine and other stuff that science has determined is good for a hiker.

Dinners, however, were generally excellent. Take a picture and write home kind of excellent. More on those later.

We met in Geneva, Switzerland in advance of the hike. I flew in early to give myself a few days to adjust to the time zone shift (+6 hours) and to tour the city. The four of us filtered in over a three-day period. We visited the St Pierre Cathedral, International Red Cross Headquarters, Patek Phillipe Museum as well as numerous parks, gardens, and restaurants around town.

If you’d been along for the trip, this is what you would have experienced.

Day 1 July 15

We started our hike in the small French village of Le Houches, about an hour bus ride from Geneva with a connecting bus in Chamonix (where Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was known to frolic back in the day). Les Houches is a quaint French Alps village of about 3000 people supported primarily through tourists – skiing in the winter and TMB hikers in the summer (over 10,000 hikers per year). There are several points of entry for the hike, as well as the question of whether to hike clockwise or counterclockwise. There are advantages to any combination – we went clockwise from Le Houches.

And we’re off! On the bus from Geneva to Chamonix.

Our first view of Mont Blanc from the Chamonix bus station.

We had the same hostel for our first and last nights – Gite Michel Fagot (gite is French for ‘cottage’). They provided (for 5 €/day) the extra benefit of holding our surplus gear for our return. This was a huge help. Our room had two bunk beds, and as is the norm throughout central Europe, no air conditioning. There were community baths and showers on the floor with a couple of dozen other lodgers, so we had to work our schedules around that. Just part of the experience, no problems encountered.

Our first hostel in Les Houches, Gite Michel Fagot

Day 2 July 16

We started off bright and early for our first day of hiking. After a bit of jostling with the hostel crowd we were out the door. After the obligatory underway photo at the arch in the center of town, we started our first day with an 11.9-mile trip with 5733 feet of incline. That included an immediate 4877-foot initial ascent to our first peak Le Brevent as we headed out of town. This is a wonderful section for outstanding vistas of Mont Blanc, with hang gliders riding the currents along the face of the mountain. The altitude, unusually warm weather, and still adjusting to the time zone shift all contributed to this being a tough day and a heck of a way to start a hike. We spread out some as the day went by as we often did. I had a chance encounter with an adult male Alpine ibex (a mountain goat indigenous to the region) along the way to our destination of Refuge de la Flegere. This was a big place, about 70 hikers. Typical for the hike, there was no wifi signal, but often a weak cell signal. I had already decided I was going to ignore the outside world to the extent possible during the hike.

And we’re off! Left to right – Rusty, Beth, Conrad, Heather.

The climb to Le Brevent with Les Houches in the valley below.

The climb to Le Brevent. I think Heather is happy.

Hang gliders seemed to stay aloft forever.

Day 3 July 17

This was another tough day at 13.8 miles with 4565 feet of incline. The heat coupled with the incline made this my worst day on the trail. The morning started off pleasantly with a moderate climb out of Refuge de la Flegere before taking a steep drop to village of Tre-le-Champ. We encountered some weekend crowds on our way down the steep descent that made the drop slower still. After a refreshing break in the valley, we started our climb to Col de Balme, the high mountain pass that marks the French-Swiss border. This 2500-foot incline was steep, hot, and in soul-crushing full sun. I officially reconsidered my initial plan to reduce my sun exposure by wearing long pants. I ran through my water faster than I wanted to, about 5 liters on the day. Fortunately, a mountain top restaurant had an outdoor water spigot for a cool refill. We still had a few miles of steep downhill to our destination of Refuge le Peuty. This was our least favorite lodging. Steep stairs led to hot, poorly ventilated room with sleeping for a couple of dozen people – and plenty of flies. This did not make for good sleeping. Still a good day with stunning views, and our first encounter with the famous Swiss cows with bucket sized bells that could be heard for miles.

Heading out in the morning from Refuge de la Flegere.

Approaching the steep decline into Tre-le-Champ.

Heading up from Tre-le-Champ. Note the trail coming down the opposing mountain – we had just come down that one.

Approaching Col de Balme, the French-Swiss Border

Our descent into Switzerland to the village of Le Peuty.

Day 4 July 18

The third day of hiking started with a gentle decline through the small village of Le Peuty in the Trient Valley of Switzerland. The air was clear and cool, and I was refreshed but really thinking I could use a good night’s sleep. We turned up the mountain towards the Bovine summit. This was a 2400-foot incline over a 4 mile stretch but the cool morning and the forest shade made the miles pass pleasantly. We passed through a field with enormous cattle and equally enormous bells. While watching a couple of massive creatures battle, I marveled at the moxie of the man who imposed himself between them to split up the fight with a small stick. As we headed over the pass and down to our destination of the village of Champex, we chanced upon the small café Alpage de Bovine selling a wonderful variety of refreshments. I treated myself to a slice of delicious apricot pie with mint tea.

A suspended walkway overlooking Le Peuty and the Trient Valley.

I think this was my favorite image of Beth on this trip. Heading up Bovine in the early morning light.

I assumed these were bulls from their behavior, but….

This brave fellow ran out with a stick and busted up the fights.

Sampling the fare at Café Alpage de Bovine

This was a much easier day. We had 3477 feet of ascent for the day (most of it in the cool morning) and 11.6 miles in arriving at the alpine tourist village of Champex in the early afternoon. This was our sole hotel stay of the hike, Au Vieux Champex. We relaxed, enjoyed a proper cleanup and a pizza for dinner.

View of the lake from our hotel Au Vieux Champex.

Day 5 July 19

After a solid night’s sleep for the first night since Geneva, I was ready to go. We walked through the town of Champex-Lac, then headed down the mountain toward the Swiss Val Ferret. The trail followed the Sentier des Champignons (“Mushroom Trail”) for a time, complete with interpretive signs detailing features of various mushrooms in the area. After reaching the valley, we began the long climb to the high mountain pass of Grand Col Ferret. This is the Swiss-Italian border. It’s still over 19 miles away and almost 5000 feet higher – we won’t reach that until tomorrow.

Mushroom Trail sign. A lot of good information. Helps if you know French.

We started our slow steady incline up the valley, passing through several small villages. This was a departure from the typical trail we had experienced thus far. We enjoyed admiring the quintessential Swiss chalets, with precisely cut and stacked woodpiles, tidy gardens, berry vines, well-tended flower and vegetable gardens, and frequent public fountains of cool clear water.

I marvelled at the precision of Swiss woodpiles.

Public water fountains were common, especially in Switzerland.

This was just a great day. I was rested, had gained my hiking legs, and was in good hiking company. The weather was perfect, and then right on cue, I heard ice cream calling my name when passing a small grocery store in the town of La Fouly. Who am I to defy fate?

It was just a short walk from ice cream to our next lodging, Gite de la Lechere, completing 11.9 miles for the day with an easy 2529 feet of total ascent. Most of our hostels had a small, family-owned feel to them, complete with the children of the proprietors helping out, and this was no exception. Our dinners thus far on the hike had been quite good, but the bar for the future was set higher here. Our dinner started with a soup that was among the best I’ve had in my life. Stinging nettle was the secret ingredient. The main course of ham, finger potatoes, and green beans was good as well, but I would have been perfectly content to stick my head in a bucket of that soup!

Beth approaching hostel Gite de la Lechere.

Day 6 July 20

Our fifth day of hiking started overcast with forecast for rain, but none materialized. Clouds and mist shrouded the peaks as we made our way up the remaining 2800 feet of ascent to the Swiss-Italian border, about five miles away. The heat of the first couple of days had eased. Trail traffic was light, temperatures were cool, the trail was good, and we made good time to the border. Grand Col Ferret is advertised as having some of the best views of the entire hike, but we were enveloped in clouds.

The approach to Grand Col Ferret from the Swiss side.

Grand Col Ferret, the Swiss-Italian Border.

As we worked our way down the Italian side of the pass, the clouds began to part, and we were greeted with incredible views. Bonjour was replaced with ciao as we passed fellow hikers. Our destination for the day was Rifugio Bonatti, a large boisterous facility with over 100 fellow hikers. This had more of a corporate feel to it than any of our other lodgings. Except paying for a frigid shower everything was fine. We hiked 12.3 miles for the day with 4384 feet of ascent.

Our views of the Italian Alps started to improve.

The Italian Val Ferret. Rifugio Bonatti is a tiny building on the left facing slope.

Evening storms in the Italian Val Ferret.

Sleeping accomodations in Rifugio Bonatti.

Phone charging accomodations varied from hostel to hostel.

The dining room at Rifugio Bonatti was the largest by far of any we stayed at. And this was only half of it.

Day 7 July 21

The TMB to this point had been characterized by up, down, way up, way down, up, down. No relaxed sauntering through flower filled alpine meadows. Most of my hiking experience has been with inclines no more than 750 feet per mile – 1000 feet per mile seems more common here. I pondered where in the heck did Hannibal bring his elephants over the Alps. But today started differently. The first few miles heading out from Rifugio Bonatti were delightfully level, with air scrubbed clean by overnight rains. I embraced the moment. It didn’t last. After inhaling a mushroom pizza in the little Italian town of Courmayeur, we climbed a tough 2300-foot climb to our next lodging at Le Randonneur Rifugio (randonneur is French for hiker). We hiked 11.9 miles for the day with 3378 feet of ascent. Any lingering discussions of hike shortcuts using ski lifts or buses fell by the wayside by this point. We had our hiking legs and were in it for the duration with no short cuts.

Beautiful morning hiking from Rifugio Bonatti.

The Italian Val Ferret. One of my favorite pictures for the entire trip.

Day 8 July 22

Our seventh day of hiking was our longest at 16.8 miles, with 4139 feet of ascent, but we took it in stride. After about a 1900-foot climb to start the day, we entered a stretch of several miles of outstanding alpine landscapes on our way to Col de la Seigne, the pass at the Italian-Swiss border. The entire valley Vallon de la Lée Blanche was open for us to admire as we climbed our way to the pass. It’s important to remember to stop and soak in the moment at times like this.

I was amused by the warning of head over heels falls.

Col de la Seigne, the Italian-French border.

We made our descent of 3200 feet over about seven miles to our lodging for the night, Auberge de la Nova, in the tiny village of Les Chapieux (auberge: a house providing food and shelter for travelers). This was a splendid lodging with en suite bathrooms. This was also my favorite dinner so far – fork tender marinated beef with lentils and roasted potatoes followed by panna cotta with berry sauce for dessert. My nose and stomach took over and I neglected to take pictures. There were no leftovers. A note on dining – at home I make modest effort to limit carbohydrates, fat, red meat, etc., but when hiking it’s game on. Put it in front of me and I’ll eat. And if it is some sort of local specialty that’s even better.

Beth and Heather descending into France.

Auberge de la Nova in the tiny town of Les Chapieux.

Boot racks common in the hostels. They don’t want your smelly dirty boots walking around their hostel.

Day 9 July 23

We started the day with about 3000 feet of incline in the first 3 miles. This wasn’t the end of climbing for the hike, but it was the last major ascent. It was a lovely climb through French Alps with meadow grasses blowing in the breeze. An entire herd of ibex scampered on the mountainside. We were past peak wildflowers on this hike, but this was one of the locations where we still had a nice display.

Orchids on the approach to Col du Bonhomme

Looking back down the valley to Les Chapieux.

We passed the Col du Bonhomme Pass and began our long, steep descent to our next stop at Gite le Pontet. There were treats to be had before we got there. After a short visit to the small parish church Notre Dame de la Gorge, we patronized a vendor selling ice cream on the grounds. We all enjoyed a freshly made fruit ice cream cone. I chose to have mine made from black currants and was not disappointed.

Roadside vendor selling ice cream by Notre Dame de la Gorge.

Heather and Beth relax after enjoying their ice cream.

We had rooms rented for the night at Gite le Pontet for the night, a full-service campground with something for about anyone – swimming, putt putt, volleyball, etc. We finished the day with 3299 feet of ascent and 12 miles.

Day 10 July 24

The days were easy now. The worst of the heat was over, the major ascents were done, and the distances were shorter. Our hike to Refuge du Fioux was a pleasant 8.6 miles with 2382 feet of ascent, passing through several small villages. I purchased some fresh red currants from some entrepreneurial young lads selling from a roadside stand. Rusty took a separate high route to check out a suspended bridge. We converged at the Refuge, arriving early. After a relaxing afternoon, I enjoyed another “best dinner so far”, Basque Chicken with rice.

A young lady with her children by the public fountain at a small French village.

Young entrepreneurs selling lemonade and fresh picked red currants. I bought some of the currants.

Our last hostel on the trail, Refuge du Fioux.

Poulet Basquaide, yet another fantastic dinner.

Day 11 July 25

This was our last day on the trail, a short 4.6 miles back to Les Houches with only 507 feet of ascent. I set my pace at “mosey” as I made my way towards town. We completed our end of trail photo at the arch, then enjoyed looking around a farmers’ market for a bit before checking in at our starting hostel, Gite Michel Fagot.

Our last morning to hike, joined by our new friend Oicin Wong.

The view when you mosey properly. On my way back to Les Houches and the end of the trail.

The next morning we headed our separate ways. Our only difficulties on the trip were trivial. Rusty and I did not enjoy our melted glacier showers at Rifugio Bonatti, Beth broke an egg in her backpack, and Heather had some delayed flight issues at the end to sort through. No one was injured or got sick. If anyone got blisters they didn’t complain about them. We had no problems with any of our reservations. All in all, one of my favorite hiking experiences.

I find as I get older the passing of time just gets faster and faster. The events of one day just roll into the next over and over. Its useful to take trips like this, to strip yourself from your daily trappings and get out into new adventures. They give us a stake in the ground of time that we can hold on to, to pause and reflect on some day in the future.

Fun in the Sun – A trip to St. John Island May 11-18, 2021

By Conrad Ottenfeld | June 27, 2021 | Comments 3 comments

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude….
Jimmy Buffett

As avid National Park aficionados (60% of the island is National Park), Saint John in the US Virgin Islands has been on our radar for quite a while. Now in retirement and having completed our Covid-19 vaccinations, the time was right for a trek.

First, a little about St. John. The tropical island is the third smallest of the US Virgin Islands with only 19 square miles. It is due east of Puerto Rico at 18° latitude (compare to Key West at 24.5°). Temperatures are in the mid-80s daytime and mid-70s nighttime year-round, and rain averages about 40 inches a year. As a US territory, the currency is the dollar, no passport is required, and US cell phone providers require no special plans. There are a few oddities associated with being a territory – islanders pay US income tax, but all monies collected stay on the island. There is no sales tax. It is also the only US state or territory where driving is on the left side of the road – something to consider when deciding to rent a car. It’s worth remembering most services (bus, taxi, ferry) and some stores are cash only. The airport is located on St. Thomas, requiring a ferry shuttle. This 20-minute ride runs many times a day and cost us $8.15 each for a one-way trip.

At the time of our trip, much of the world still had various restrictions in place to limit the spread of Covid-19. Those restrictions are, in part, the reason for us selecting St. John as a destination for this trip due to it being a US territory. Still, a negative Covid test was required within five days of entry, which required test results uploaded to a portal and test approval before coming to the island. There were no charges associated with any of this and everything was completed in about 24 hours. Hopefully, these requirements will be a thing of the past as Covid vaccination efforts continue.

We booked a room at the St. John Inn in Cruz Bay for a week (https://stjohninn.com). This isn’t the cheapest vacation you can take, but you only retire once. This brightly painted, conveniently located hotel is a short walk from the ferry dock and all the downtown Cruz Bay shops and restaurants. The hotel offers a variety of room sizes and amenity levels. They serve a decent breakfast with no cooked offerings such as eggs or bacon but with a good selection of bagels, oatmeal, waffles, muffins, fruit, etc. The afternoon complimentary rum punch happy hour was a big hit and a great opportunity to mingle with other guests. In fact, I can’t ever recall staying anywhere that I met so many of the other guests in friendly conversations. We paid $250/night for a suite that included a kitchenette and a balcony porch. One advertisement said they were the only lodging in the downtown area with a swimming pool. I didn’t validate that, and it wasn’t a big pool, but we enjoyed it several afternoons. Snorkel masks, fins, coolers, etc. were also provided to guests.

As a Caribbean Island, the history isn’t much different than others in the area. Christopher Columbus checked in in 1493, and Europeans started settling in the area in the early 1600s. To aid the natives in their enlightenment and help them in optimizing the potential of the island, advance their culture, and maximize productivity, they were elevated to slave status. They were slow to recognize the benefit of this arrangement and saw fit to rebel from time to time. After much back and forth and changing of hands between colonial powers (French, Danes, British) the US government bought the islands for $25M in 1917. The islands were made a territory in 1952 (a sort of friends with limited benefits arrangement), and that’s where they are today.

We didn’t rent a car on this trip. The thought behind that was the island is small, and there are taxis as well as a bus system. That didn’t work out so well. Even though the island is small, the roads were not built with pedestrians in mind. People drive fast on narrow windy roads with generally no shoulder available (except in town), discouraging walking. Taxis are available and not unreasonable (for example, a taxi for the two of us from Cruz to Maho Beach was $14), but not especially convenient. They are modified vans and trucks and typically carry up to 18 people. Because of this, they congregate at high traffic areas and don’t usually leave until they can get several customers on board. Your ability to return can be severely limited if you visit somewhere off the main stops. Buses aren’t any better. They are cheap – you can cross the entire island for a buck per person, but they don’t run very often, and the stops aren’t very frequent. You are completely dependent on luck to try and catch one anywhere except at an established stop.

With these travel challenges in mind, we had to modify our beach visits a bit. Honeymoon Beach was an acceptable walk (about a mile each way) from our hotel. It was a lovely beach where we found a nice shady spot and had the best fish viewing while snorkeling of any beach we visited. We took taxis to other beaches. Maho Beach was reported to be a go-to spot for finding sea turtles due to having the sea grass beds they like to graze on, and we weren’t disappointed. Both of us saw several up close. Trunk Bay was a spectacular beach from the perspective of a wide beach with brilliant blue water (sandy bottom with limited sea grass near the beach). Taken all around, we thoroughly enjoyed our beach visits, and didn’t feel like we were shortchanged too much with our travel limits. Seeing ‘everything’ was not an objective for this week. I added a bonus hike up to Caneel Hill on our way back from Honeymoon Beach one day, a 676-foot climb to a high point on the west end of the island. I sweated a bucket but was rewarded with a beautiful vista in all directions.

After a bit of research, I decided these were little silver fish.

Maho Bay Green sea turtle. Remoras hitching a ride

Lucky to catch this fella getting some air. Green turtle at Maho Bay.

Lynn enjoying some solitude in Trunk Bay

A note about the beaches and sunscreen use: on March 30, 2020, the US Virgin Islands officially banned sunscreen containing the “toxic 3 O’s.” The chemicals oxybenzone, octinoxate and octocrylene are the active ingredients in MANY sunscreens. If you bring sunscreen with you from the mainland, there is a good chance it contains one or more of these chemicals proven to damage coral reefs. Hawaii and Key West have now banned sunscreens with these chemicals as well. From my observation of beach activities, it is extremely unlikely that a person using these would be caught or punished, still, don’t be one of “those” people.

The island was not as lush green as I anticipated. I assumed this was due to the two Category 5 hurricanes 12 days apart in 2017 but found out they are suffering from a multi-year drought as well. Most of the businesses are back in business following the hurricanes but damage is still apparent in several spots. Covid-19 was a cruel follow-up to those natural disasters on an island that relies on tourism for over half of its economy. I sensed tension in some of the locals as they deal with a reality that both relies on tourists for income while having to deal with those same tourists anxious to shed the masks still required in many mainland locations.

Looking north from Caneel Hill over Honeymoon Beach

We took the bus to the east end of the island one afternoon just to see the sites. It’s a small island but has some decent elevation – Mt. Bordeaux in the National Park reaches 1286 feet. The east end seemed to have a dryer landscape, and none of the beaches we saw seemed as nice as the string of beaches on the north shore. The 18-passenger bus was new and comfortable. The roads themselves – not so much.

Food stand on Honeymoon Beach. Fine grilled mahi-mahi sandwich.

Dining on the island was typical resort food and pricing for the most part. We enjoyed our dinners – and to be fair we couldn’t get reservations at the most highly rated restaurants – but the best food we had was from roadside food trucks. The best meal we probably had was island food purchased for lunch at a small roadside stand, “Comida Latina”. We pointed at items we wanted from the attendant (partly because of loud music and partly because of a language barrier) for a meal of beans, rice, shrimp, peppers, onions, and slaw that couldn’t be beat. We also sampled Marie’s fried chicken sold from a roadside converted sealand shipping container and advertised by customers as the best on the island. We were served straight from the frying pan out of this tiny kitchen with no menu. It had been a long time since I had true skillet-fried chicken, and this was indeed tasty. Grilled Mahi-mahi sandwiches from a food truck at Honeymoon Beach far exceeded my expectations.

Smiling Marie of Marie’s Kitchen. Serving out of a converted shipping container.

Marie’s fried chicken. Also the only menu item I know of.

A week was a good length for this trip. I got caught up on my Jimmy Buffett, checked off another National Park, and had a splendid time snorkeling in a huge school of fish and staring at a turtle from close range. I wiggled my toes in a lot of sand and floated in the surf under a blue sky with my sweetie. I’m very glad we came and might come back again but I didn’t find an urge to move to the islands. Many folks we met seem to have this vacation as an annual ritual. Others tour the islands by boat which may offer a different perspective. We had a fine time, but in my opinion, there are lots of other spots in this splendid world that we haven’t seen yet I’d like to check out first before a return trip.

Well that was fun…. Recollections of a stay in the United Arab Emirates

By Conrad Ottenfeld | May 9, 2021 | Comments 11 comments

“And I think to myself, what a wonderful world”

Louis Armstrong

We’ve been been back for several months now from our stay in the United Arab Emirates, and I’ve had a lot of fun remembering the experiences of our many travels. We brought a few trinkets back, but mostly memories. Some of those are of the famous tourist attractions – they were memorable, they are popular for a reason. But many of my most pleasant memories were of people. I have collected a few of my favorites here.

This is where it all began – Lynn on her first night in Abu Dhabi on the balcony of one of the Yas Island hotel rooms where we spent many nights. She spent countless hours planning our trips for the rest of our time there, doing an outstanding job researching flights, finding practical hotels for our agenda that were close to convenient public transportation, and things to do during our visits.

Our first trip was to Greece over the New Year holiday 2018. We started off in Athens. Of course, we went to the Parthenon and saw other museums and ruins, but visiting markets quickly became established as one of my favorite things to do, and the Athens Central Market Meat Shop was one of the most memorable. Butchers bellowed throughout, slamming cleavers into their chopping blocks even when they weren’t carving anything. Just about any kind of meat you can imagine was there, displayed proudly for your inspection in their final cuts as well as in bulk.

Olives for sale in the Athens Central Market

Olives in the Mediterranean are as prominent as dates are in the Middle East. This was in the produce section of the Athens Central Market.

A small shop typical of many we passed walking around Athens. Fresh bread, cheese, wine, and olives were highlights.

We welcomed in 2018 in the quiet port of Hydra.

The Al Mina Fish Market is a part of the Zayed Port, an important international port of trade in Abu Dhabi. The fish market has been open for decades, with gulf fisherman bringing the best they have to this large central market. We visited several times; in my opinion the best was our first, in part because the novelty and authenticity. Fresh seafood of every variety was for sale in dozens of booths. It was generally easy to get by with English in the UAE, but as this was an authentic local market and not a tourist spot, Arabic was needed to move freely. I had a fabulous time working through the booths, trying to figure out everything without verbal communication – what type of fish I was looking at, how much it cost, how did I want to have it prepared, etc. I eventually figured out that some buy the fresh fish to take directly home, others have the fish cleaned to take home, and others have the fish prepared at any of the several shops around the perimeter.

This man was happy to recommend a nice sea bass for our lunch.

Cleaning fish at Al Mina Fish Market, Abu Dhabi

One end of the fish market is lined with cleaning booths. I wondered how many fish this gentleman had cleaned in his lifetime. Some of the salesmen were loud and boisterous – this man quietly plied his trade.

I brought our fish to one of the shops and placed our order with an Arab man that spoke no English (and of course I speak no Arabic). He figured out I wanted fish cooked, and I simply gave him some money with no idea what we were going to get back. I came back in about 20 minutes and it was ready.

Many locals have their fish prepared for takeout. Those that choose to eat on site (us on this occasion) could go to a small room with a 6-8 simple tables. A thin sheet of plastic was spread on the table and you were free to eat your lunch. No napkins. No utensils. No condiments. Just sit down and eat. This was as fine a fish as I have ever eaten.

This was just fun. We took a five-day trip to Seychelles that included a day trip on a glass-bottomed boat to some of the nearby islands, some of which are home to the tremendous Esmerelda tortoises. While taking a break during a walk around one of these islands, this big fella came walking up the path and decided he wanted to go under the bench Lynn was sitting on. He wasn’t even close to being able to fit under it but that didn’t stop him from trying. We had a good laugh.

Our unexpected guide at the Ghiyathi camel racetrack

Camel day. That’s not an official day, but that’s what I called one of these favorite days. I learned there were camel races in the UAE at a few places and endeavored to find one. We headed south of Ruwais, our little town in the western desert, hoping to find a lightly advertised camel race just south of the town of Ghiyathi. We pulled into what we thought might be the right spot. Lots of camels, many being briskly trotted but nothing that looked like a “race” to us. As we pulled up to a spot and got out to try and figure out what was going on, this fine fellow came running up to me. He spoke no English, and I no Arabic – but he was insistent that he wanted to drive our car and show us around. I hopped in the back seat, and for the next couple of hours he drove us around the sprawling complex, stopping frequently to show us highlights and introducing us to different camel drivers. He invited us to his apartment that wasn’t as big as some American home walk-in closets. He washed our coffee cups in sudsy water in a coffee can and shared a cup of Arabic coffee with us, staunchly refusing any payment for his service to us. A special day.

In Little Petra, Jordan, there are a series of homes dug into the soft sandstone rock of the area. Curious to look at one, but cautious not to rudely intrude, I asked if I could buy a cup of tea. I was welcomed, and this fine young man brought me a cup of strong, sweet local tea. As I finished the cup, a small slimy mass went down my throat. I briefly struggled to maintain my composure before I realized the cup had been brewed with whole tea leaves – that is what I had swallowed!

This shot was taken at a Roman auditorium in Amman, Jordan (still in use, by the way). Lynn and I were moseying along, and these two young ladies came running up wanting to have a selfie taken with us. We obliged.

Late afternoon in Wadi Rum, Jordan. The camels, the dust in the air, and the harsh environment appealed to me.

Late afternoon in Zadar, Croatia. Alfred Hitchcock described Zadar as having the best sunsets in the world. I couldn’t disagree. There are no filters or photo editing here.

A fruit stand in Trogir, Croatia. I came to love the markets wherever we went. I don’t think everything is local at these stands, but much is and the cherries were for sure. We saw them at many small roadside stands.

Lynn enjoying a pleasant afternoon at Trstenik, one of the many beaches dotting the Croatian coast.

A roadside bakery in a lightly populated part of coastal Croatia. We pulled over to a gas station and I noticed this small shop next door. I’m a sucker for stopping in at places like this and bought a loaf we didn’t need from this sweet local lady.

I didn’t include too many pictures of pure tourist shots in this composition, but Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany is too much to pass up.

Pretty much the whole world is familiar with Michelangelo’s David on display in the Academy in Florence, but that’s not why I’ve included it here. A short distance down the hall is another Michelangelo marble sculpture, this one unfinished. The contrast between the two – the unfinished piece only served to highlight the realism he was able to impart in a piece of stone. Just amazing.

This was taken in a small parmesan cheese factory in Parma, Italy. The master cheesemaker is teaching his son the trade in framing the raw cheese into one of the molds that will ultimately create one of the ubiquitous Parmigiano Reggiano cheese wheels recognized around the world. I don’t know if intentional training was going on when I took this picture, but certainly the young man was learning.

Lynn standing by one of many racks of parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano) wheels in this cheese factory. The wheels weigh about 35 kg (~77 pounds) each after aging. They mature for at least one year before they can bear the name. Every wheel is periodically removed from the rack, inspected, cleaned, and turned over. Parmigiano Reggiano has a protected “designation of origin” title, assigned to a variety of products throughout Europe that comply with certain quality standards. I noted there seemed to be more products that had this designation than there were fast food restaurants – perhaps quality matters more than quantity in Italy?

We chanced upon this small shop in San Gimignano, Italy that proudly advertised their world champion gelato awards. I had a simply wonderful melon gelato that had us coming back for seconds the next morning. The cheerful young lady serving us just made the experience better.

I took three trips to Oman during my stay and loved them all. Lynn was with me on this abseiling adventure to Snake Canyon (aka Wadi Bani Awf). We stayed at remote rustic lodging, securely fenced not for security but to keep the roaming feral goats from rummaging through everything. A central sitting area adorned only with rugs and throw pillows is common in Arab countries, and we took full advantage this night. This was truly a relaxing evening to ponder my good fortune in life.

I travelled twice on business during my stay in the UAE, once to China and once to South Korea. I flew to Shanghai, China, and from there travelled on a high-speed train to Zhejiang province where I visited the recently completed Sanmen Nuclear Power Station. From the window of my small basic hotel room, I looked out on sprawling clam beds in a shallow inlet from the East China Sea. At high tide, the water reached the shoreline. At low tide the water receded a mile or more, and dozens of people worked their clam beds (small dots going out to the horizon). I have no idea what exactly they were doing. For some reason, this image fascinated me more than the bright lights of Shanghai.

I was busted trying to take a discrete picture of two young ladies (Mongolian I think) on the train to Shanghai. The contrast in their response was funny to me. I should have just asked, but it was a crowded train and I thought I could get away with it.

James of the Tanzanian Chaga tribe was our mild-mannered lead guide to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Having climbed the summit over 150 times, James was the pacesetter, advising us over and over “Pole-Pole” (slow-slow) and “The mountain likes slow steps”.

Isaac was another one of our Mt. Kilimanjaro guides, an enthusiastic young man (and apparent Trump fan) who would periodically burst into song with a resounding “WAYLA!!”. I don’t know what that means.

Noteworthy only because this is likely the highest elevation I will ever reach under my own power.

Early morning on the Nile, with fishermen rowing their boats with oars instead of using outboard motors. Serenity.

Menem was a friendly Syrian I ran across a couple of times. I only met him twice but considered him a good friend and would trust him more than many people I know. How someone from Syria can maintain a sense of humor is a testament to the human spirit. This is on a hike in Kumzar, Oman.

I took this shot walking down a side street in Kumzar, Oman. This fascinating tiny village of about 1,000 people sits at the tip of the Musandam peninsula, jutting into the Strait of Hormuz. Isolated from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula by rugged terrain, it is accessible only by boat. They maintain their own language with influences that reflect their history – Portuguese (originally settled by Portuguese fishermen), Farsi (Iran is just a few miles across the strait), Arabic, and English, along with local additions. I don’t think these youngsters see many visitors – they were very friendly and curious. When I see things like this, I always reflect on how their life experience differs from mine.

Looking down from the high bluffs surrounding Kumzar on a peaceful morning. An unforgettable moment.

This is a young mother and her daughter in the mountains of Tajikistan, taken on a long weekend trip to see some dinosaur tracks on the side of a mountain. I suspect the daughter, and perhaps the mother, had not seen much of the world. They laid out a lunch of bread, cheese, fruits, and vegetables for us on a blanket beside their small mountain home for a lunch experience as memorable as any I have had. Tourist attractions are a fine thing, but I wouldn’t trade these simple authentic experiences for anything.

Have you ever seen a Tajik senior citizen pull over to the side of the road to toss a snowball or two? Yea, I hadn’t either. A serendipitous opportunity to catch a couple of older Tajik women getting in on the snowball fun during an unexpected snowfall.

The date stamp on this photo was April 15, 2019 4:23 PM as we were waiting in line to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral. We left the building about 5:15 to go to dinner.

The date stamp on this photo was April 15, 2019 8:57 PM, less than four hours after we left. Fate had placed us among the last visitors to tour this icon of Paris and France. We slept in our hotel by the Seine with the scent of the burning cathedral drifting in our open windows.

Koreans love their seafood, but much more than the typical fish filets, shrimp, crab, etc. They make a meal out of just about anything that comes out of the sea. This was at the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul, an extensive farmers fish market described in one brochure as “an aquarium where you can eat the exhibits”. This was a lively place where it was best to leave your dress clothes at home.

These ladies seemed to be pressing the limits of what would fit on the scale. I regret not having the facilities on my visit to have sampled the goods.

Fresh seafood

I asked the concierge at our hotel in Seoul for good fresh seafood. He recommended a place that certainly didn’t disappoint in the fresh department.

Another of the memorable trips was a weeklong trip to the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. Pretty much everything there was an eye-opening experience, but none more so than the bull blood drinking event with the Mursi Tribe. This bleeding process takes about a quart and doesn’t harm the bull.

The blood in the gourd was mixed with some fresh milk from the yellow pitcher on the lower left, producing a salty-sweet concoction said to increase the strength and vitality of a young man. I was content just to keep it down.

A young mother also of the Mursi Tribe, known for their ritual of inserting plates in their lower lip. Our guide said this may have been to discourage slave traders, or to make them less desirable to thieves from neighboring tribes seeking to steal brides. See if you can count the number of ways life for this lady are different from the experiences of a young American middle-class woman.

I had two pictures of the same lady that I considered, one carrying a rifle in her right hand or this one with her balancing the milk jug on her head. I chose this one. Either way, you must admire the warthog earrings. Also in the Mursi Tribe, this lady did not have her lower lip disfigured to accommodate a plate.

This lady was of the Hamar tribe. The distinctive hair style of the Hamar women is created by rolling small locks of hair with a blend of ochre and butter or animal fat along with a fragrance. Although her neck rings indicate she was a woman of status among the wives of her husband, that didn’t get her out of wood-carrying chores. Woman – young and old – throughout this country carry wood.

This was likely the only time I will sleep in a legitimate yurt on a mountain in Kyrgyzstan. Our entrepreneurial young Kyrg guide had worked with the family of this fine woman to add a couple of additional guest yurts. The family lives in the yurts for most of the year. They are quite robust structures, but the family can take them down in a matter of hours, then move them up or down the valley depending on the season. They move to a small traditional home near town for the winter. She was a gracious hostess, making sure our hot tea was always topped off.

The trip to Kyrgyzstan started off with me driving to the airport in Dubai from Ruwais (a 3+ hour drive), contemplating that I was on my way to the airport and had no ticket, didn’t know what city we were flying to or on what airline, and didn’t know who else was going. Towards the end of the trip a few days later, I found myself at the bazaar in Bishkek, completely separated from my group with no knowledge of where we were to be picked up, without my passport, didn’t know the name of our hotel, a cell phone plan that didn’t work in Kyrgyzstan, and virtually none of the locals able to speak English. But the sun was out, the locals were pleasant, I was healthy and had resources, and it all sorted itself out. This friendly (and non-English speaking) fellow was a big help. This day goes in my all-time favorite day list.

My nomination for happiest people goes to the Cambodians. No matter where they were or what they were doing – they seemed to be genuinely, sincerely happy. This young lady selling catfish was typical.

This young lady in a Cambodian market (I always sought out the ‘legitimate’ markets used by locals) was surrounded by five-gallon buckets of prahok, a fermented fish product with a distinctive strong smell used by locals to season food. I was always game to eat whatever the locals were eating, but I was cautioned by our guide to defer in this case. His judgement was that tourists’ systems were not prepared for this experience.

Have you ever had someone tie a string of blessing around your wrist, pull you over and hug you, take off your hat and kiss your forehead, and still have no idea if it was a man or a woman? This sweet ‘person’ I chanced upon at one of the abandoned old temples at Siem Reap, Cambodia was as kind and gentle a soul as I have ever met.

This was on a trek to Oman to see the sea turtles. Our trip started with a hike up Wadi Shab, a large section of which was in the water. Just a fun day.

Local Omani fishermen picking their catch from the nets by hand. The town where I took this, Sur, has an interesting piece of trivia – it is one of the few places where the traditional wooden sailing ships called a “dhow” are still built.

This is an afternoon chess game near the waterfront in Baku, Azerbaijan on the coast of the Caspian Sea. There were a few of these. I first assumed they were just typical tourist attraction curios before I realized how focused the participants were. Chess is a serious game in the Caucuses, with some of the world’s finest players coming from the region. At times fifty or more would gather around watching the contest, some tracking the moves and strategies on smartphones.

This was another splendidly wonderful authentic dinner. During our stay in Georgia, Lynn arranged a day tour to some of the sites of the country. I knew it ended with a dinner but was unprepared for how special this was. We were hosted by a local family in the town of Sighnaghi and treated to a feast of home-made goods, including their own red and white wines made in qvevris, the traditional Georgian method of fermenting wine in terracotta pots buried underground. Dinner was served in a 300-year old dirt floor outbuilding under a single incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling.

This shot was taken in Pripyat, Ukraine, a small city built to support the Chernobyl Power Plant staff as well as some local military facility families. The town was evacuated after the accident once the government got past their denial phase. People were told it would be for a few days, but never returned. Decades later, we walked through the eerily vacated buildings.

Our Ukraine trip also included a ride in an old Soviet-era Amphibious Armored Personnel Carrier. After a trip on the river we went to a nearby forest, and were given a chance to take a turn at the wheel. Lynn intently received instructions from our guide, then took off in this manual-transmission vehicle without stalling once. Badass!

Twice I took advantage of the opportunity for a desert hiking experience in Liwa in the south of the United Arab Emirates. The desert here is part of the “Empty Quarter”, a vast desert covering the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. We hiked about 12 miles on a pair of sunset and sunrise hikes, where the angled lighting of the sun created a surreal environment.

These are prayer cloths on the trail to Lungchu Tsey Monastery in Bhutan. They are common throughout the country. The cloths are held sacred, and the wind moving through the prayers printed on them are said to bless passing travelers.

This friendly Bhutanese woman seemed happy to see me. But then, Bhutan is the only country in the world where Gross National Happiness is established in the Constitution as a guiding principle for government action to protect the welfare of current and future citizens.

Paro Taktsang, commonly known as the Tiger’s Nest, overlooking Paro Valley in Bhutan. The monastery dates back to 1692, when it was built on the site of a cave where the Guru Rinpoche is said to have meditated for three years, three months, and three hours. He is credited with bringing Buddhism to Bhutan in the 8^th century, flying from Tibet on the back of a tigress.

This camel won second place at the annual camel beauty contest at the Al Dhafra festival. She is indeed a beauty! Buying her would cost you about $800,000.

During the cooler months in Ruwais I would take an occasional bike ride around the area, out by the oil fields and back through town. I have developed the habit over my life of waving and saying high to complete strangers. This particular day while riding through town around one of many rotaries, I waved and smiled to some fellows (Pakistani perhaps?) who were admiring the lush petunias in the middle of the circle. As I was heading off on my way back to our apartment, I heard them calling to me “Come, come!!”. I turned around and came back to them. Seems they wanted to take some pictures with me, and next thing I knew we are high fiving each other, taking selfies and just having a big time like we were old friends. I left with such a good feeling!

Some Americans have a negative perception of Muslims and the religion of Islam. There are certainly good and bad, as there are of people everywhere. Appearances will vary country to country, but these friendly young ladies sitting outside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul are typical of my encounters with Muslims.

In Istanbul, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner before heading over to see the Whirling Dervishes. The bread with the meal was a delightful lavas, or “balloon bread”. Our server was quite proud, and with just the smallest request he took me back to the kitchen to watch the loaves being prepared. He models one here fresh from the oven.

I went to the UAE knowing the project was a South Korean project in an Arab country with people from many nationalities. I knew I would work with Koreans – I did not know that I would make such great friends. On my right is Hyung Jin Lee. He worked with me as my primary interface with the Korean project team. His amazing work ethic and sense of humor made him a pleasure to work with and made my work much easier. The lady on my left is Susie Wanderlust. She told me her Korean name but that is not how I remember her. She was assigned to my group as an interpreter late during my stay there but became a dear friend. There were many other Koreans that I have fond memories of. I can think of few things that would benefit most Americans more than spending some time immersed in a different culture.

I knew I wanted to write some sort of last blog for my time in the UAE, but I didn’t know quite where it would go. I thought perhaps I would pick my 25 favorite pictures. That didn’t work. This turned out to be just a collection of random memories, but perhaps that is how I will remember the time. I never expected this opportunity at this point in my life. I am a blessed man for the experience.

A Drive Across America to Santa Fe, New Mexico

By Conrad Ottenfeld | November 27, 2020 | Comments 2 comments

September 19 – October 10, 2020

Having returned to the US and officially retired - but hobbled from travel overseas for a time due to Covid 19 concerns – we have turned to domestic destinations for the near future. We’ll have to set the “abroad” part of our travels aside for now. This trip was to visit our daughter Paige in Nashville on our way to a southwestern vacation with our daughter Chelsea in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hitting a few bucket list destinations on the way. So with masks in hand and our hand sanitizer ready in the car, we packed up and headed west from North Carolina.

We are cautious in our travels and try to follow all local requirements as well as those we know make good sense. Our homework indicated New Mexico required a negative test to enter the state. It wasn’t clear to us just how to do this coming from across the country. In the end we had our tests done in the Chattanooga. The test was available 7 days a week, for free with no referral and results loaded to an on-line portal we set up in 24 hours. Simple!

We headed out on the morning of September 19 to our first day destination of Memphis, Tennessee. I’ve made this drive many times, and this day I was reminded of the “Three States of Tennessee” billboards I saw on roadsides as a child. We drove from the mountains of the east, through the Cumberland Plateau of middle Tennessee where we visited our daughter Paige, to the Gulf Coastal Plain of west Tennessee and our first day destination of Memphis. I had set up 3 goals for our stay here – see the ducks at the Peabody Hotel lobby, have some Memphis BBQ, and listen to some Beale Street Blues. We did all three and were off to a great start.

Ducks in the fountain of The Peabody Hotel lobby.

Dinner of blues and BBQ on Beale Street!

We headed out the next morning, driving through the rain across the rolling hills of Arkansas. It took us a couple of days to transit the Great Plains of Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas (including the obligatory stop at the Big Texan steakhouse in Amarillo) before reaching the mountainous terrain of eastern New Mexico and the Santa Fe region. This was about a 1600-mile trek from west North Carolina to Santa Fe – the US is a bigger country when driving than it is when flying!

Santa Fe has a population of about 150,000, and at 7000 feet is at a higher elevation than any other state capital, making for a more comfortable environment than much of southwest. We had a full agenda for our 12 day stay with our daughter Chelsea and her husband Joe. Here are a few of the highlights.

La Cienequilla Petroglyph Site

Lynn chanced upon this little gem while looking at local trail maps. Just a few miles from Santa Fe, this non-descript facility is little more than a small dirt parking lot with a couple of information signs next to some basalt outcroppings of the La Bajada Mesa. The landscape is dotted with cholla cactus and blooming, bright yellow chamisa flowers. Trail guidance isn’t the best, but with a bit of rock scrambling we were treated to a wonderful display of hundreds of petroglyphs, left behind by the Puebloan people living in the area between the 13^th and 17^th centuries. There were many kokopelli and Thunderbird carvings on the basalt rock outcrops, as well of dozens of other petroglyphs. We had fun picking our way through the rocks, exploring and guessing what the different rock art might have meant. The El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro passed through here as well, perhaps contributing to the density of the petroglyphs found here. This 1600-mile trail leads from the Santa Fe area to Mexico City. Its origins date back to around 1000 AD, later expanded and used by Spanish conquistadors.

We wrapped up this excursion with a trip to a nearby food truck, where I had my first beef tongue burrito (burrito lengua). Tasty!

Santa Fe Farmers’ Market

We visited this treat a couple of times, a short walking distance from Chelsea’s house. This is one of the oldest and largest farmers’ markets in the country. It serves 150 farmers and producers from 15 surrounding counties when operating at capacity. There weren’t that many during our visit owing to the late season and Covid 19 concerns, but we were very impressed with the variety and quality of the offerings. All manner of peppers are popular here, with roasting on the spot available from some vendors.

Chaco Culture National Historic Park

Besides seeing our daughter, this was one of the priorities for the trip and we were not disappointed. This park is located about halfway between Albuquerque and Farmington in the northwestern part of New Mexico, high in San Juan Basin on the Colorado Plateau. This arid and remote park isn’t the easiest to get to. We drove through a patchwork of Indian reservations, state land, Bureau of Land Management properties, and National Forests. The last 20 miles to the park is on a dirt road.

This complex of buildings was a major center of culture for Ancient Pueblo people from about 900 – 1150 AD. The park had few visitors during our two days of wandering through the ruins, about 10 miles of meandering. It was interesting to note variations in construction techniques that evolved over the period of habitation, and how solar/lunar phenomena were factored into the orientation of the buildings. One interesting piece of rock art was the “Supernova pictograph” a star-crescent-hand pictograph that possibly depicts the Crab supernova in 1054 AD. This was during a period of peak habitation at the park, and the supernova is documented in Chinese records as being brighter than Venus and visible in daylight. Hopi oral traditions hold that their ancestors saw this “blue star” and were directed to converge at Chaco.

The park campground was closed during our visit, and we brought provisions to camp on open landscape. We chanced upon an alternative and stayed two nights at “Chaco Outlier Campsites” in a small building not much more than a yard barn but with beds, stove, and access to a clean toilet with hot shower. We had the place to ourselves, with a beautiful vista of the landscape and complete silence.

Bisti Wilderness

Our next trip after Chaco was to the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, about a 60-mile drive northwest from Chaco. Bisti is a name derived from the Navajo word meaning “badlands”, a fitting title for this rolling landscape of arid soil, hoodoos, “cracked eggs”, capped pinnacles, and petrified wood trunks. There is scant evidence of plant life. This region is even less travelled than Chaco. A small gravel parking lot and a few information signs are all that greet visitors. There is a trailhead, but little of a defined trail after that. Visitors can wander as they wish to see what interests them. I think we hiked about 5 miles.

Chelsea looks down on the Chocolate Hoodoos

More of the bizarre Bisti Wilderness landscape

One of many excellent petrified wood specimens at Bisti.

The wilderness region covers billions of tons of coal and associated gas and oil reserves, a constant source of concern for wilderness advocates from those with other priorities.

Bandalier National Monument

Another distinctive archaeological attraction in the area, this monument is about 50 miles northwest of Santa Fe. Volcanic activity in the area about 1.5 million years ago left an ash layer hundreds of feet thick, which compressed over time to a soft malleable rock known as tuff. Ancestral Puebloans lived in this area from about 1150-1550 AD, carving homes into the mesa walls from the tuff.

Bandelier showing tuff layer. Blooming chamisa in the foreground.

Lynn and Chelsea looking down from the carved rooms.

Descendants of the residents here now live along the Rio Grande and maintain oral traditions of the area. These descendants still work with park staff on issues affecting the monument.

On the way back to Santa Fe, we added a quick bonus stop to the Valles Caldera just west of Los Alamos. This caldera, 14 miles across, is one of only about a dozen supervolcano locations on earth, all of which will erupt someday at least seven times larger than any volcano in recorded history (a supervolcano by definition will eject at least 240 cubic miles of materials. Won’t that be a special day?)

Wheeler Peak

I am very casually working on climbing the highest peak in each state, so summiting the 13,167 foot Wheeler Peak near Taos was added to the agenda. This was about a 10-mile hike round trip with 3000 feet of elevation gain. This isn’t an especially difficult hike except for the elevation. Anything over 10,000 feet makes a difference when arriving from the low elevations of the east. We enjoyed a splendid hike, topped off with a visit to dinner at Rancho de Chimayo.

We also enjoyed trips around Santa Fe while we were there to local restaurants, shops, and brew pubs. I bought a bag of pinon nuts from a parking lot van, and Lynn picked up a sun dress from one of the many downtown shops. Joe grilled up some chicken on a ‘disco’ grill made from a farm plow disc for delicious tacos. We enjoyed short local hikes with the fall colors on the quaking aspens. We really enjoyed our stay in Santa Fe and getting to spend time with our daughter and her husband – a real pleasure to see what fine young people they have become.

Roasting some shishitio peppers for an afternoon snack

Joe grilling some chicken for tacos in the “Disco Grill”

Our return trip was a little more casual and enabled us to get a few more sites in. Leaving Santa Fe, we headed south and spent an hour or so at the International UFO Museum in Roswell before heading to southwest Texas and Big Bend National Park. The National Park campground was booked to our surprise, but we made an excellent adjustment, staying at the spacious, tent-only Rancho Topango Campground in the small town of Terlingua just west of the park. We left the fly off the tent and slept under the stars. The next day was spend slowly meandering through the National Park, heading on from there through Texas backroads to begin the trek back across the country to Asheville, North Carolina.

Tent camping at Rancho Topango Campground, Terlingua, Texas

Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park

Turkey February 2020

By Conrad Ottenfeld | April 15, 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Februay 7 – 14, 2020

“If earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital.”

Napolean Bonaparte

Our time in the Middle East is drawing to a close. We looked around for the best “must go” vacation left in the area. After discussing with several people, the resounding answer was – Turkey. From the initial review it didn’t appear February was the best time. Not going at the best time seemed much better than not going at all, and in the hindsight of the coronavirus travel restrictions I think our decision was nothing less than brilliant. We had seven days to work with. Turkey is a large and varied country – I think you could easily fill a month or more and never see anything twice. Our time was limited though, so I put my complete trust in my travel advisor (Lynn) to come up with the best possible itinerary for that time. We settled on two full days in the Cappadocia region in the south-central part of the country, with the remaining time in Istanbul.

Istanbul is arguably the most international city in the world. It is literally the only major world city that sits in two continents, straddling Europe and Asia on the Bosporus Strait. It is rife with the influences of bygone empires and far-flung international powers seeking to curry favor. I’ll start off with some facts, figures, and trivia about Turkey.

Turkey has a population of about 83 million people (18^th). It is a young country, with almost a quarter of the population age 14 or younger. The largest city is Istanbul with 15 million people, the capital is Ankara.
Turkey is moderately wealthy with a GDP (PPP) of about $29,000 per capita, good for a global ranking of 52^nd out of ~185 countries (absolute number varies by source).
Few world leaders in modern times have had a greater impact on their country than Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He led Turkey out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WWI, and after eliminating the meddling of western powers, implemented a secular government in 1923 in a heavily Muslim country that includes many western ideas and philosophies. The current president, Erdogan, has enacted measures to undermine some of those policies.
Turkey is about 80% Sunni Muslim and 16% Shia Muslim, with the remainder a mix of other religions. Despite a long and rich history in Turkey, Christianity is now practiced by less than 0.5% of the population after being as high as 17% early in the last century. This reduction is due in part to a forced migration between Greece and Turkey a century ago. More on that later.
Ethnically, the country is about 70% Turkish, 20% Kurdish, and the rest a mix of Arabs, Greeks, and others. The story of the Kurds is an interesting one worthy of separate research.
Saint Nicholas (aka Santa Claus) was born in Patara, Turkey in 270 AD.
Ottomans in Turkey popularized the tulip and exported them to Europe. It is the national flower.
Greek mathematicians were employed for the design of the massive dome over the Hagia Sophia, employing sophisticated calculations that avoided the use of irrational numbers to construct a dome over such a large space.
Oil wrestling is the national sport, where men are lathered in olive oil wrestle under the hot sun. Camel wrestling is also popular.
Turks are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world at about 3kg annually per person.
Turkey is the largest producer of hazelnuts, producing about 500,000 tons in 2019.
In the past, women could divorce their husbands if they were not provided enough coffee.
The currency is the Turkish lira, worth about 16₵ at the time of this trip.

We applied for our Turkish visas online at www.evisa.gov.tr. We have gotten quite comfortable with this process. Our visas arrived in email in less than a day. At $41.10 for a pair of 90-day multiple entry visas, these were among the cheaper visas as well. We cashed in some airline miles and picked up our round-trip tickets from Abu Dhabi to Istanbul for $335 total, an easy five-hour flight a single time zone away. After considering the logistics from the Istanbul airport to our hotel, Lynn determined it was best to immediately connect to Cappadocia for our two day stay there, so when we arrived, we worked our way across the new modern terminal to our connecting flight with Turkish Airlines to Nevsehir Airport in the Cappadocia region of south-central Turkey. Round-trip tickets for this 1.5-hour flight cost another $152 for the pair. As I walked through the airport, I noticed abayas were very infrequent in this Muslim country. Hajibs are more frequent, though not a majority and of greater variety and colors than what I see in the UAE. Attire in general is typical western fashions. I notice such things.

Istanbul Airport. Staring at phones is universal.

A light snow fell as we landed at Nevsehir Airport. We found our hotel transport – this is always an anxious moment – and loaded up into the shuttle van. We drove through the falling snow as we approached our destination of the small town of Goreme (pop. 2000). By the time we arrived at our hotel, Sultan Cave Suites, ($111/night), several inches had fallen. We hadn’t anticipated this, but it was an interesting change to our desert life. Our hotel was one of many in the area that took advantage of rooms carved into the soft stone of the area by past civilizations to create modern, comfortable rooms with unique character. After checking in, we walked around for a while in the fresh snow and gazed out across the town. This was going to be special.

Sultan Cave Suites, in the town of Goreme in Cappadocia

The Cappadocia region is a popular tourist destination owing to its distinctive landscape. Lynn arranged for a Kelebek Travel tour for each day we were there @ 35€ each ($76.62/day). This was a little pricey compared to what we usually spend, but it included a hotel pickup, a small group, good lunch, knowledgeable tour guide, and we didn’t have to drive in the snow in unfamiliar territory. This was one of the occasions where we were best served by a tour.

Our first tour (the “Green Tour” – modified due to the snowy roads) started off through a landscape covered with a deep layer of new fallen snow. Our first stop was an underground city at Kaymakli, one of over 200 underground cities in the region. Understanding these cities requires some knowledge of the geology. Three volcanoes blanketed the Cappadocian region in a layer of volcanic ash and lava 150 meters deep about 50 million years ago. The ash compressed into soft stone know as tuff. The stone was easily worked, a feature identified as much as 4000 years ago by the Hittites. With limited timber in the region, the tuff stone is the only readily available construction material. It was either easily excavated to create underground rooms or carved out in blocks to use for construction. When exposed to air the soft stone hardens, a desirable feature for either application.

Kaymakli is one of the largest underground cities in the region, with capacity for as many as 5000 people. Early Christians vastly expanded earlier carvings and created the city, comprised of eight layers of rooms dug over 40 meters underground with stables, kitchens, living quarters, churches, cisterns, and ventilation shafts. The city was not occupied full time but was maintained readily available for occupation whenever refuge from Roman authorities, Arabs, or others threatened them. Large stones could be rolled into place over openings to the cave that sealed them in where they could be completely self-reliant for extended periods. I’ve had the experience of staying submerged on a submarine for a long time, still, it’s hard to conceive of the difficulty of living underground with simple oil lamps to penetrate the darkness enough to conduct daily affairs in such close quarters with so many people. Tunnel networks several kilometers long connected other nearby cities.

Stone door for blocking access to Kaymakli underground city.

We left Kaymakli and headed toward Pigeon Valley on the way to Uchisar. Our first stop was at a local jewelry store. Stopping at local shops is a common feature of many tours. Sometimes you can learn interesting information if you aren’t too jaded by the sales pitch. This one was not a hard sell, and I did learn an interesting piece of trivia. Some of the first turquoise was found in Turkey. They sent it to France for identification, where it was dubbed turquoise for “Turkish Quartz”. Sometimes I just stick with a good story and don’t try to research it too much.

Across the street from the jewelry store was a spot called Pigeon Valley. Countless pigeon nests have been carved into the soft tuff stone throughout the region – this valley just has a very high number. Pigeons have been raised throughout the region for centuries for two reasons – one, for food, and two, for fertilizer. Much of the soil in the area is poor, and the pigeon guano was an important fertilizer until being replaced by commercial products late in the 20^th century. Pigeon egg whites were also used to bind with paint used to paint frescoes.

The observation deck for the valley also contained a tree decorated with dozens of evil eye amulets, small glass beads with a blue and white background intended to protect the wearer against the “evil eye”, where a curse is transferred through an envious glare. The concept dates back thousands of years and spans many cultures. The malicious glare is cast on someone blessed in some way to transfer a curse that would undo their blessing.

Upstairs hotel rooms at the “Old Greek House”

Lunch was a special treat at a place called the Old Greek House. This was a vintage combination restaurant-hotel serving traditional Ottoman dishes – beef and chicken simmered with vegetables and seasonings in clay dishes, lima beans, salads, and of course, a sweet pastry for dessert. The Turks like their sweets. The hotel upstairs had a fascinating high ceiling painted with peeling, bright colors, with fading frescoes on the walls, a Turkish rug on a wood floor, and massive throw pillows on the floor and big easy chairs for resting. I thought it looked straight out of a movie set. We didn’t stay there but that would have been an experience.

We took a stroll around the town square of nearby Mustafapasa after lunch, stopping in at the 17th century Church of St Helena and Constantinople. This church dates from 1729 and is another example of Muslim tolerance of Christian landmarks. We learned of the forced population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923. The movement of 1.6 million people was mutually agreed on between Greece and Turkey. It was not based on language or ethnicity, but purely on religious identity. Over 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Turks were moved to Greece, while 400,000 Muslims were moved from the Balkans to Turkey. Both countries felt this movement was in the best interest of all, but the movement left a deep scar on many.

One of many Greek Orthodox paintings and mosaics.

We huddled together around a fire in the covered patio of a local shop to warm up with a cup of Turkish coffee. This robust drink came in a small cup holding just a few ounces, with grounds making up at least half of the cup. The storekeeper read our fortunes from the coffee grounds. The grounds are swirled with the remnants of the coffee, then turned over on a platter and the grounds reveal your fortune. The fortune is generally vague enough (akin to astrology readings) to amaze you with the accuracy. We had a good time, and these moments with locals are my favorite.

Mother – Father – Daughter Fairy Chimneys at Urgup.

Our last stops of the day were to see variations of “fairy chimneys” including the Mother-Father-daughter group at Urgup and nearby Love Valley (the chimneys appear as large phalluses to some) just to the west. What is a fairy chimney? The volcanic eruptions of the past resulted in layers of basalt in the ash sediment fields. Over the millennia, the softer tuff layers eroded from the weather, but the basalt stones resisted the erosion, resulting in columns or cones with the basalt as a cap. These appear to be isolated pinnacles or projections from the ground. They form a dramatic landscape, and have helped make Cappadocia a tourist mecca, with hot air balloons being one of the must do events for every tourist. The weather for our trip made this impossible, but the snow created its own special landscape.

We came back to our hotel for the night. A brilliant full moon shone down on the snow-covered town. It was quite a sight. We enjoyed more local fare for dinner – Lynn with a clay dish of simmered tomatoes, garlic, and onion and I with a local pasta and meat sauce with yogurt. A local bottle of wine and fresh baked bread completed the meal. At $24, this was a good deal. Turkey has a modest wine industry known for dark red wines, in keeping with their tradition of strong coffee and teas steeped for hours.

We woke up the next morning to a clear blue sky. The air had a bite to it: -13°C, (8°F). The snow crunched like stepping on Styrofoam as we worked our way to breakfast, reminiscent of our Michigan winters. Our agenda for the day was the “Red tour” with Kelebek Travel Tours with another small group. We re-visited Love Valley, which had a completely different perspective in the bright blue morning compared to the overcast snow showers of the day before. We drove by fields of fruit trees and vineyards with vines at ground level to help protect their moisture in the hot, dry summers. Our guide described the term “bread under the snow”, meaning the melting winter snow drives grain seed into the soil, where they germinate in the spring and get a start on the hot dry months ahead.

We visited Pasabagi (“Monks Valley”), a small park with some of the best mushroom capped fairy chimneys in the region, including some carved for use as churches. This was followed by a tour of Zelve Valley Open Air Museum. Zelve Valley was used as a monastic retreat from the 9^th through the 13^th centuries, with Christians and Muslim living in harmony. Churches were mixed in with private dwellings and pigeon nesting walls. Some of the valley remained inhabited as recently as the 1950s.

Our time in Cappadocia came to a close. We took a short flight back to Istanbul, then about a 45 minute ride (100 € for transfer both ways) to our Hotel Ibraham Pasha ($92/night), splendidly located just a block west of the Hippodrome in the heart of the cultural district in the European section of Istanbul. We left the bitter cold of Cappadocia and looked forward to a new experience.

The Hippodrome was a sporting and social center of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. Today it is part of a square named Sultanahmet Meydanı (Sultanahmet Square), containing the heart of Old Istanbul – the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Basilica Cistern, and Topkapi Palace. Like many places we visit, an Egyptian obelisk had been moved here to add some culture, in this case brought by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the 4^th century. Very little of the Hippodrome structure remains, but the obelisk has stood the test of time quite well.

Lynn bought an Istanbul Welcome Card for our visit. This comes in many varieties. The one she chose for us cost 70€ for both of us. This particular card got us access to the Basilica Cistern, Topkapi Palace, and the Hagia Sophia. We could meet our guide at any of multiple times each day, get express access to the facility, and have a brief guided tour before being left to roam on our own. That is the perfect arrangement to me. We learned a lesson in France about not having express access to popular sites.

A boat ride from the Golden Horn up the Bosporus was our agenda for the morning. We enjoyed our first stroll across the old city to get to the boat launch, working our way through the Grand Bazaar to get there. The Grand Bazaar is a fascinating place. One of the oldest and largest covered bazaars in the world, its 4000 shops cover 61 streets. The core of the bazaar was completed in 1461 by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. Almost anything a person could want is there, from coffee to carpet, Bitcoins to beans, leather to lamps. Everyone was ready to make a deal but weren’t nearly as aggressive as Egypt. I rarely learn more than a few words on our travels, but I picked up a little Turkish here. “Tesekur Ederim” is Turkish for “Thank you” and “Where are you from” is Turkish for “I want to sell you a carpet”.

We purchased tickets for our cruise for 25 lira each, about $4 for a 90-minute cruise. The temperature was cool but comfortable. As we passed the bridge, I noticed the hundreds of fishermen lining the bridge and the shoreline. Grizzled old men with long poles, and buckets for their catch. We cruised up the coast, watching the seagulls swarm around the wake of the boat with the Turkish flag blowing in the breeze. We passed government buildings, historical landmarks, and shopping centers. I enjoyed watching the locals and other tourists on the cruise as much as I enjoyed the landscape passing by.

We walked through Spice Bazaar on our way to lunch when we returned (one of several trips through both the Spice and Grand Bazaars). This landmark was originally completed in 1664 and served as the pharmacy of the Ottoman Empire for many years. An important pillar of the Silk Road trade, over 100 shops still sell herbs, spices, baklava, Turkish Delights, nuts, tea, coffee, etc.

As we walked down the street looking for a place to eat, I noticed two separate ladies sitting on the ground and sorting through Kentucky Fried Chicken trash bags for scraps to eat. We didn’t see much of this. In each case, it was heartwarming to see a young man approach them and give them money. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is almsgiving. As Istanbul is heavily Muslim, I wondered if this is what I was witnessing.

We settled on a diner for lunch. Lynn had a Turkish pizza and I had Iskender Doner, the first of several times we would have this. Doner, shawarma, and gyro are all very similar, with doner of Turkish origin, shawarma in the Middle East, and gyro in Greece with variations in the meat and spices and all made from thinly slicing meat stacked on a spit and cooked it on a rotisserie. Iskander Doner was invented in northwest Turkey in the 19^th century Ottoman Empire. The dish is thinly sliced lamb served on top of strips of pita bread and covered with a hot tomato sauce, melted sheep butter, yogurt, and grilled peppers. Yum!

A light drizzle fell as we started the next day at our first stop, the Blue Mosque. This was built in 1616 and remains a functioning mosque. It is free to the public but requires all appropriate respect given (removing shoes, modest dress, and restricted access to certain areas by non-Muslim). A truly spectacular building but with heavy reconstruction in progress during our visit.

We continued across the Sultanahmet Square. Steam and smoke drifted up from push carts selling roasted corn and chestnuts, common snacks for sell by many vendors. Motor scooters that have been very common on many of our trips were almost absent here. Our next stop was Basilica Cistern, one of dozens of cisterns buried beneath the city as a fresh water supply during long hot summers in ancient times. The cistern was built in the 6^th century by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I using some 7000 slaves and holds 80,000 m³ of water – a whopping 21 million gallons! This was one of two cisterns we visited, the other being the Serifiye Cistern. This smaller cistern was only rediscovered in 2010 and is now used for rotating art exhibits and small classical concerts, the enclosure apparently being well suited for acoustics. We certainly enjoyed our stroll through the cistern enjoying the exhibit and the soothing background music.

After lunch where Lynn tried the Iskender Doner and I tried another popular dish, grilled meatballs, we headed for the spectacular Hagia Sofia. Along with the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace, this is one of the centerpieces of historic Istanbul. It was built as an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral in 537, and, except for a period in the 1200s when it was converted into a Roman Catholic Cathedral, remained so until 1453 when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and converted to a mosque. It was the largest cathedral in the world for almost 1000 years until the Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520.

Where the Blue Mosque remains a functioning mosque, Hagia Sophia was reopened as a secular museum by President Ataturk in 1935. The central cathedral is a mammoth opening. The Ottomans defaced or destroyed many of the Christian symbols as did the Crusaders, but several impressive mosaics remain. Adjoining Ottoman tombs feature beautiful tilework, calligraphy and paintings. Fires and earthquakes have damaged the building over the years but each time it has been restored to a place of grandeur, often ranking as the most visited place in all of Turkey.

The Topkapi Palace was on our agenda for the next day. This was the central seat of power for the Ottoman dynasty from the 15^th to the 19^th century. This is a virtual city unto itself, covering approximately 150 acres with everything needed to sustain about 4,000 people inside its fortified walls during the peak of Ottoman power. Four courtyards lie inside the Imperial Gate, and contain gardens, treasury, weapons depot, art galleries, library, kitchen, sleeping quarters (including a separate one for the Royal Harem), mosques, baths, doctors chambers, and everything else needed for daily life. Istanbul’s location on the crossroads between east and west is obvious from the collection of fine porcelain from both China and Europe.

We enjoyed all our meals in Turkey and this night was a special one. We visited the Khorosani Kebabhouse, one recommended by our hotel. Lynn tried the Iskender doner again – seriously, try this if you get a chance – and I opted for mussel stuffed squid. Both were spectacular and served in clay dishes we had become accustomed to. The bread served with the meal is known as lavas, or “balloon bread”. A thin layer of dough is cooked in a wood fired oven for about a minute, where it balloons up to a thin crispy air-filled loaf. The owner took me back to watch the process – he was quite proud. We also had beer and wine with our dinner for a total of 331 lira, about $54. Beer and wine are readily available in restaurants, in fact Turkey has a modest beer and wine industry. Restaurants will sell for people to carry out, but markets selling alcohol were rare in this Muslim country.

Lavas, or “Balloon Bread” at Khorosani Kebabhouse

For the evening we went to the Sirkeci Train Station, the eastern terminus of the Orient Express that ran between Paris and Istanbul from 1883 until 1977. Besides just wanting to see the train station, tonight’s special attraction was the Whirling Dervishes. Tickets cost 200 lira, about $29 for both of us. I knew the term Whirling Dervishes but that was about it. The whirling process is a form of physically active mediation by the Mevlevi order of Sufi, a mysticism-oriented variant of Islam over 700 years old. The presentation of about an hour was an actual meditation service as part of Sema, a worship ceremony where the Dervishes whirl in silence with many symbolic gestures demonstrating their focus in abandoning all personal desires in search of focusing on God. About 50 people watched the show, which was done mostly in silence with a few Mevlevi elders playing music on simple instruments in the background.

Our last day in Turkey was a mild sunny day, making me think perhaps the timing for our trip was not so bad. I imagined the summer sun with the crowds could be quite taxing. We drifted through the bazaar once again on our way to the Galata Tower, passing through the textile and garment section with each block giving way to a different specialty. Suits and ties gave way to bras and underwear, women’s wear, and by children’s clothes. A cheerful senior citizen spread his shoeshine gear on a street corner and was quick to share his sunny disposition as he shined shoes for the passers’ by.

The Galata tower was built in 1348 to replace an older Byzantine tower. At 67 meters it was the highest point in the city when it was built and affords a nice view across the Golden Horn to the old city, with the Bosporus to the east. Our tickets to climb the tower cost 90 lira for both of us, about $13. We pushed our way around the viewing deck on the top of the tower, snapping a few panoramas and enduring the others taking selfies. We stopped in a café at the pinnacle and enjoyed a Turkish tea. We came down from the tower and visited Karakoy Gulluoglu. This is famous as the first baklava store in Istanbul, opened in 1949 by a family with a history of making top quality baklava for 200 years. We purchased a sample platter since we didn’t really know one type from another in a store with dozens of types to choose from, as well as some more tea (I read Turks drink ten cups of tea a day on average. Good thing Turkish tea is low caffeine).

Our last afternoon was leisurely. We picked up some ceramic bowls for souvenirs and spent some time on our hotel rooftop terrace in the pleasant afternoon sun, watching the ships in the Sea of Marmara wait their turn to enter the Strait of Bosporus. Our last dinner was on a rooftop restaurant looking over the Bosporus to the Asian side of the city.

Karakoy Gulluoglu Baklava sample platter

We spent a week in Turkey. You could easily spend more, and each trip we take we learn which places we might like to explore at a more leisurely pace in the future. Turkey is one of those countries. Thanks in part to using some of our airline miles, this was one of our cheapest trips to date – $2420 for all airfare, shuttles, hotels, meals, tours, souvenirs, etc.

Bhutan – December 2019

By Conrad Ottenfeld | February 1, 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

November 28 – December 3, 2019

“Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth.”

Bhudda

A view of a rocky mountain

Description automatically generated — The Tiger’s Nest

Bhutan was the destination for this trip to my 32^nd country. This was another Meetup trip with Trekkup-Dubai. This group of 24 trekkers was a little larger than the usual group, but with 13 countries represented it was as diverse as ever. Also typical, the passport used for the trip by many of the trekkers doesn’t really tell the whole story of their background, with several having lived in many other countries and holding dual passports. The conversations with people from all over the world are a valuable part of the experience of these trips.

Bhutan is a small, high elevation, landlocked country in south Asia. Despite having the giants China (Tibet) on the northern border and India to the south, the country has never been colonized. Bhutan does things a little different than most countries. Here are a few interesting facts:

Bhutan is small in area (133^rd), population (165^th, ~750,000), and wealth (per capita GDP 115^th)
Bhutan pioneered the concept of Gross National Happiness, used as the guiding principal for government action to protect the welfare of current and future citizens. This concept emphasizes harmony with nature and traditional values. It was established in the Constitution of Bhutan in 2008 when the country became a constitutional monarchy (previously absolute monarchy).
Bhutan maintains diplomatic relations with 52 countries and the EU but has no formal ties to any of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
Bhutan is the world’s only carbon-negative country. The constitution mandates that 60% of the nation’s landmass shall be maintained and protected as forested.
Bhutan is primarily Bhuddist (77%), with the remaining population Hindu (increasing percentage as you approach India).
Gangkhar Puensum is the highest mountain in Bhutan and considered so sacred that no one has yet climbed to its peak (at 24,840 feet).
Possession of tobacco is not illegal, but smoking is not allowed in public, and tobacco has not been sold in the country since 2004.
The capital city, Thimphu, is the only capital city in Asia with no traffic lights. White gloved officers direct traffic.
Hydroelectricity is the leading export, supplied to various states in India.
Bhutan has recently doubled teacher salaries, making them among the highest paid civil servants. This is in keeping with their constitutional commitment to improve quality of life.
The currency is the Ngultrum. Paper currency only is used – coins are not available. 100 Ng = $1.41 at time of trip.
The official language is Dzongkha.

Travelling to Bhutan is not a simple affair. This is intentional as part of a low impact – high value tourism policy. First, the cost to visit is up to $250 per day per person, depending on the month. But this isn’t your normal visa – besides the $40 base visa cost, the fee includes a variety of normal expenses such as lodging, guide service, and meals, as well as a $65 tourism royalty that goes towards free health care, education, infrastructure, and poverty alleviation. All travel arrangements must be through a state authorized travel agency. The visa is obtained on arrival but must be paid and approved before you go. One of the benefits of travelling with Trekkup-Dubai – they take care of almost all these details. Sign up, pay, give them the documents they ask for, then show up and enjoy.

A close up of a mountain

Description automatically generated — The flight into Paro, Bhutan. One of the top 10 most dangerous airports to fly into.

The flight into Bhutan is another distinctive feature to this trip. The town of Paro is home to the only international airport in the country, and you will find it on any “Most Dangerous Airport” list you care to look at. Cradled in a valley surrounded by high mountain peaks, less than two dozen pilots are certified to deliver passengers to their destination here. Passengers can watch the nearby mountain tops pass by as they make the hard banks and rapid descent to the runway. Our trip was uneventful, and I enjoyed learning a bit about the country from a flight magazine (national bird – raven, national tree – cypress, etc.).

We arrived on a clear, cool morning. Passage through customs was painless. After working our way through the colorful terminal with native art and scale-model landmarks on the luggage carousels, our guides for the trip, Nirs and Sonam greeted us to the country with scarves. English was not a problem throughout the stay as English in school is mandatory for several years. After the first of many group photos, we had lunch at an airport restaurant. My research that said Bhutan cuisine was characterized by lots of chilis was spot on, and we had chili-cheese for the first time. It would not be our last.

A picture containing bedclothes, clothing

Description automatically generated — Prayer Cloths

We loaded up in a pair of Toyota Coaster minibuses for our trip from Paro to Thimphu, a little over an hour away. We were introduced to prayer cloths when we stopped to see the first of many monasteries. These cloths are a common feature of the landscape, often along trails, bridges, and other roadside spots that are frequented by travelers. Of Bhuddist origin, the flags come in sets of five colors – green (nature), yellow (earth), white (air), red (fire), and blue (water). They are printed with prayers, and the breeze blowing through the flags spreads compassion and good will to the surrounding spaces. They are held sacred because of the symbols and prayers on them – new flags are continuously mounted to renew hope for the future, and old ones are disposed with respect by burning. We encountered thousands of these flags during our visit.

A statue of a person

Description automatically generated — Buddha Dordenma statue in Thimphu

We took a short visit to the gigantic Buddha Dordenma statue as we arrived in Thimphu. This gigantic gold gilded bronze statue stands a whopping 52 meters high. Completed in 2015, this statue was completed at a cost of $47 million (built by the Chinese and funded with the help of several Asian countries). The statue is in a nature park overlooking Thimphu and is dedicated to bringing peace and prosperity to the world. The construction is said to fulfill an ancient prophecy from the 8^th century that a second Buddha would appear here to promote peace and harmony. We arrived in late afternoon – not the best time of day for lighting on the statue – and a chilly breeze encouraged us to speed up our observations and snap our pictures.

Our destination for the night was Hotel Phuntsho Pelri. The rooms were basic and comfortable with a big brass key on a big wooden keychain. I was unable to adjust the wall radiator and wound up turning it off and opening the window for our stay. Many of us met downstairs before dinner for drinks and got to know each other a little. These chats are a real source of pleasure for me – Swiss, Lebanese, Saudi, Polish, Iranian (by way of Canada), Singapore, and others. For all our differences we are much alike. Perhaps someday our political leaders will get together for a trip somewhere and many of our problems will go away. We had dinner (chilis are a central feature in many Bhutanese dishes) at the hotel. Some went out to investigate the area, some decided to prepare for the next day. I was in the latter.

A tree in front of a building

Description automatically generated — Roadside water-powered Prayer Wheel with rock painting and prayer cloths.

We were greeted the next morning with bright blue skies and a crisp 4°C. After breakfast, we loaded into the vans and headed out to Tango Monastery about an hour away. Along the way we stopped by a roadside Prayer Wheel, in this case a couple of meters high, powered by water and enclosed in a small shrine. We saw many prayer wheels during our stay, ranging from some meters high to small hand-held wheels. They could be rotated by hand, by water, or by wind, but the rotation must be clockwise and was the essential element to purifying negativity, generating compassion and enabling enlightenment. Monks were cleaning a giant Bhudda painted on the rocks with brooms to complete the peaceful scene.

A close up of a tree

Description automatically generated — Butter lamps, used to banish the darkness of ignorance.

The Tango Monastery is at an elevation of about 3000 meters. The hike to it was about an hour, gaining just under 300 meters along a pleasant forest trail with frequent benches and trash cans and plaques mounted to trees with bits of Buddhist wisdom on them. Many spoke of the importance of protecting the environment, others were more philosophical and spoke about the transient nature of life. Along the way we passed a small room tended by a single monk with over 100 butter lamps burning. These lamps are in a small metal dish and traditionally burn clarified yak butter. Their illumination is said to aid in enlightenment by banishing the darkness of ignorance which covers the true nature of the mind. An unfortunate reality of the lamps is they present a very real fire threat, and several of the monasteries we visited had suffered from one or more serious fires over the years when mountain breezes disturbed the lamps.

The trail to Tango Monastery. Prayer cloths were on every trail.

I hiked alone for a little while as the group had spread out, enjoying the peaceful solitude. We arrived at the monastery, each at their own pace. Much of the monastery was not open to us as repair work was in progress, but we enjoyed what we saw, and had a pleasant walk down the mountain. I marveled at the flowers still in bloom at the end of November at such a high elevation. Perhaps Bhutan is genuinely blessed.

A group of people standing in front of a building

Description automatically generated — Hand-powered prayer wheels at National Memorial Chorten

After lunch in Thimphu, we stopped for a visit at the National Memorial Chorten, a prominent center of meditation in central Thimphu. Built in 1974, this structure is located on a pretty green grass lawn along with a prayer wheel building with ten large prayer wheels over 2 meters high. Dozens of people meditated and worshipped, slowly walking around the prayer wheels, turning them as they passed. Elderly ladies sat on the curbs, slowly spinning handheld wheels, while others walked slowly around the Chorten. The direction of all movement – turning the large prayer wheels, spinning the handheld ones, and the walk around the Chorten was clockwise, always clockwise.

A close up of a hillside

Description automatically generated — Cheerful lady at the National Memorial Chorten

The next stop was Tashichho Dzong, a combination Buddhist monastery and government center (a dzong is a fortified building containing administrative and religious buildings). As we entered the grounds, I noticed clusters of tall, thin white flags scattered across the surrounding hillsides. Our guide Nirs described these flags as memorials to the dead, to aid them in finding the right path to the next life. Ideally, Bhuddist monks say fresh wood should be used for each pole (reusing indicates less effort), and a higher number of poles is more powerful. Unfortunately, this runs counter to the governments constitutional responsibility to maintain the country at least 60% forested since young trees are preferred and over 1000 trees were being cut each week. The government is working to promote using less flags and either reusing flag poles or using alternatives such as quick growing bamboo.

Much of our time in the Tashichho Dzong was spent in the monastery, where Nirs described in detail the Circle of Life. This circle presents a cycle of birth and rebirth through layers and sections representing different things, but the most interesting part to me was his description of the three poisons at the hub represented by the pig, the snake, and the bird. They represent the three main poisons of life – desire, anger, and ignorance – that can trap us in an existence of pain, suffering, and counterproductive behaviors. The description of the whole circle was quite complex but the essence of the three poisons being the hub rang true to me.

A tree with a mountain in the background

Description automatically generated — The hub of the Circle of Life, representing the 3 poisons of life that trap us (desire, anger, and ignorance).

The temperature was dropping with the setting sun, but we had one more brief stop for the day. This was an archery session in town that was impressive to me for the simple reason the archers were aiming at a small target, outdoors in the breeze, a whopping 145 meters away! The target was quite small, and in reality they only hit it a few times, still, this was an amazing display to me given the distance. We returned to our hotel for dinner and more socializing.

A person flying a kite

Description automatically generated — The Himalaya Mountains in the background from Dochula Pass.

After breakfast the next morning, we loaded back up in the cruisers for our trip to Dochula Pass, the starting point for our next hike to Lungchu Tsey Monastery. This was a 3.5 km hike increasing from 3025 to 3560 meters in elevation – our highest elevation for the trip – along a forested path with the ever-present prayer flags and an occasional yak. The snow-covered Bhutan Himalayas towered on the horizon. Clouds closed in as we approached the summit. We spent a few minutes inside the 18^th century monastery. As always, photos inside were not allowed.

Hiking down from Lungchu Tsey Monastery through an abundance of prayer cloths.

We hiked back down the hill to dinner at the café at Dochula Pass. 108 chortens (monuments) are erected at the site in memory of soldiers who died in a 2003 battle against insurgents from India. Visitors here, as at every Bhuddist site, walked slowly in the clockwise direction around the memorial. We boarded the cruisers and took the drive back to Paro, discussing all manner of cultural, philosophical, and political issues amongst the international passengers to pass the time. A very pleasant afternoon.

We drove back to our hotel in Paro, but before we reached the hotel, we had about an hour to walk around the downtown and shop for souvenirs. The shops were full of candles, incense, yak wool scarves, shawls, and sweaters, hand painted Circles of Life, soaps, singing bowls, along with all colors and sizes of phalluses. The last we had seen in abundance in Athens, but I had not anticipated them here. The purpose is to ward off evil. The world is an interesting place. I picked up a nice baby Yak wool scarf for Lynn and a singing bowl for myself. These interesting bowls produce a harmonic frequency when a wooden stick is gently rubbed around the perimeter, producing a sound said to clear the air around us of negative energy and emotional blockage.

A stone building with a mountain in the background

Description automatically generated — Somehow they ward off evil.

After shopping, we checked into our hotel, the Metta Resort and Spa. Not lavish or particularly modern but large and comfortable just the same. After another meal of dodging chilis, we enjoyed some local beverages and socialized.

Our trek the next morning was to the highlight of the trip, Paro Taktsang, commonly known as the Tiger’s Nest. The collection of buildings making up the monastery is perched on the side of a nearly vertical cliff 900m above the surrounding valley floor. This was a steep but short hike of about 2.5 km with an elevation gain of 500m through a forest of pine, oak, and rhododendron. The monastery itself dates back to 1692, when it was built on the site of a cave where the Guru Rinpoche is said to have meditated for three years, three months, and three hours. He is credited with bringing Buddhism to Bhutan in the 8^th century, flying from Tibet on the back of a tigress. Entering the monasteries required us to remove our cameras, backpacks, and shoes. We were given a few minutes of private contemplation in one of them and looked into the cave (now sprinkled with donations) believed to be where the Guru meditated in another of the buildings. I noticed small CFL lights in some locations, giving way to LED bulbs in others to supplement the light of the ever-present butter lamps (I often notice such anachronisms). I didn’t know if this was to reduce the risk of fire (one caused serious damage here in 1998) or simply to maximize the limited power available.

A brother and sister from a local family that served us lunch on our hike.

We headed back down the mountain, stopping along the way to enjoy a lunch prepared for us by friendly locals. Our last event of the week awaited us – a traditional Hot Stone bath. Rather than benefit from natural hot springs, these wooden tub baths use wood fire heated river stones dumped into a receptacle at the foot of the tub to heat the water, with herbs and slices of aromatic wood floating in the water. A nice touch following the hike.

Fire baked river stone hot bath. The stones are dumped in a chamber at your feet.

We had dinner in town, and one last trip through the souvenir shops. Some enjoyed treats around a bonfire at the hotel when we returned under the clear cool Bhutan sky. As we headed out the next morning to the airport, Nirs thanked us for coming to his country in the simple sincerity we had come to expect from him. One last spectacle awaited us. As we left the runway and exited the valley through a hard ascent with a series of sharp banks, the snow-covered Himalayas were revealed to us on a morning of perfect clarity. A great ending to a great trip.