Summer Travels 2012

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After arriving back from Morocco there is no time wasted sitting around before our next holidays. We have an action packed 5 months planned, starting with a trip to France this long weekend for the May Bank Holiday. We are going to celebrate our friend Scott's 30th birthday so we are hiring bicycles and cycling around the vineyards of Beaune. I am really looking forward to this mini break as we are taking the eurostar and therefore I don't have to endure flying :)

June 1-10 - we are going to be in Italy. We fly into Rome where we will spend two days, and hopefully manage a day trip down to Pompeii before heading to Cinque Terra. Here we plan to walk along the coastal fishing villages and relax. We finish our trip with two days in Venice eating freshly made pastas and crusing the canals in gondolas.

End of June - Nath and I have a wild weekend booked in Brussels, where again we are taking the eurostar so I am happy. We have not looked at what we can do in Brussels yet, but I do know there is lots of good beer.

Mid July - my 30th in Faro, Portugal. We are staying in the algarve region, think beaches and hotels with swimming pools.

Mid August - Naths 30th in Devon/Cornwall. Naths family fly in from NZ and we are going to meet them along the coast somewhere. TBA.

August 17-19 - Edinburgh Tattoo. Enough said.

August 25 - September 2 - Sail Croatia. We have booked our own yacht with 9 Kiwi friends where we will sail the Islands of Croatia. We have our own skipper who, as well as sailing, will cook our breakfasts and lunches on board. This holiday will be amazing. I am looking forward to this get-away the most.

We think September will be a stay-at-home month to allow us to save money. We will be busy though as Nath family will be in London. We will spend a weekend with them on a canal boat they have hired for a week in the Derby region. You can look forward to many amazing updates over the coming months.

I have just booked a girls week away to Switzerland with work friends.  We fly into Zurich on the 18th July and fly out of Geneva on the 25th July.  We are yet to sort out the details inbetween but looking at the possibility of training to Lake Como in Italy and spending some time there.

Mich & Nath

Exotic Morocco

Nathan and I have just arrived back from Morocco.  We did a 10 day tour of Morocco with traveltalk tours.  Our group size was 14, three kiwi's, one toekn brit, and the remainder were aussies. The map to the right shows you where our tour went, you can see we got quite close to the Algerian border.
Our tour started and ended in Marrakesh.  The 'first day' consisted of meeting at 7pm in the hotel lobby for a meeting and then a group dinner.  Day one done.  Bit of a joke.  Just like day ten is breakfast in the morning and then heading to the airport.  After an exhausting first day we then headed to the desert where we were amazed at the luxury of our camp site.  We had proper beds and showers and flushing toilets.  Totally not expected but brilliant.  Our food for the three days in the desert was excellent, lots of tagines and fruit.  I have never eaten so much fruit in my life! While in the desert we enjoyed a jeep safari, a camel trek, meeting a nomad family and climbing sand dunes to watch the sun set.  It was so peaceful and quiet in the desert, a far cry from London.

After our desert oasis it was time to head to Fes, with an ovenight stop over along the way in Erfoud.  There is nothing much in Erfoud, just a bunch of hotels, obviously just a tourist stop off along the way to elsewhere. On our drive from Erfoud to Fes we passed through the Atlas mountains, reaching Midelt, an impressive mountain city at 1488 metres above sea level.  It is at this point the weather changed and started snowing/hailing.  There is debate amongst the group if it was snow or hail.  Here is where Nath and I got caught out wearing shorts and jandals and a singlet top for me in freezing cold weather.
We arrived in Fes in time to go to a dinner and show that evening.  The show was pretty budget, with long gaps between performers with groups of guests leaving as they thought the show had finished.

     
We had a full day to explore Fes, the oldest imperial city of Morocco with more than 10,000 tiny streets offering the largest “medina” (old city) and souks in the world.  It also has the oldest university in the world and is a protected UNESCO heritage site.  We did a fair bit of shopping here, stopping off at pottery workshops, tanneries, and carpet shops.

From Fes we travelled to Rabat, the capital of Morocco. 
 Rabat is a coastal town with a large marina and big yachts moored.  It had a tram system and was the most modern of all the Moroccan cities we visited.  It was then onto Casablanca where we spent the night before arriving back in Marrakesh. In Casablanca we had a night on the town as it was one of our group members 30th birthday.  Being a muslim country alcohol is not freely available, but luckily our tour guide sourced some for us that we had to sneak into the hotel and drink before dinner. Our guide Muzza also made arrangements with a restuarant that we could take spirits in as long as they were premixed into a fizzy bottle. In the morning we visited the United Nations Square and the impressive Mosque of Hassan II.

We arrived back in Marreksh in the afternoon where we were able to explore explore the famous Djemaa el Fna Square, where there were snake charmers!!  Everytime I wanted to get close enough to see what was happening a man would come over shoving snakes at us as a way of enticing us over.  That type of marketing certainly didn't work on me! There were also loads of monkeys chained up and being dragged around as tourist draw cards.  Some even had nappies on, it was rather disturbing and most of our group asked about animal cruelty groups getting involved to stop the abuse of the monkeys and the cobras. In the evening we headed back to the square for dinner as it had been transformed into outdoor restuarants.  The area was bustling with families out for a cheap meal. As we were paying for our meal a young mother with a toddler in tow came up to me and begged for our left over bread.  I gave it to her and felt good.  Nek minnit I turn around and two women are putting our left over chicken bones into a plastic bag and eating our left over couscous and vegetables with our cutlery.  I found this quite disturbing and wasn't sure what to do other than get Nathan to watch them too.
All-in-all we had a fabulous time in Morocco.  It was nice to go away for a long period of time and meet new people on our tour group.