Red Sea diving

Happy Birthday, Hugo!  What a lucky kid, for his 12th birthday, he earned his PADI Junior Open Water Diver certification and discovered the incredible underwater world of crocodile fish, pajamas slugs and sea cucumbers.  Another day and then back to Turkey, the boat and cat.  We opted to skip the trip to the burning bush/Mount Sinai for a variety of safety-related reasons and watched Cecil DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" instead.  :)

   

 

Egypt - Giza, Western Desert and Luxor

Egypt makes your head spin, as every day you see both the ancient and modern life side by side.  One day, we’re leaning over our hotel balcony to watch a protest in Tahrir Square over the people who died in the 2012 Port Said stadium riot, as the mighty Nile, the lifeblood of early human civilization, flows past just beyond.  The next day, we’re wandering around 4,000 year old pyramids, with the incessant accompaniment of  countless touts trying to make poverty wages by selling camel rides to the few tourists who haven’t been scared away by the revolution, and, in Maggie’s case, patiently humoring the Muslim women who apparently love photographing themselves with little blond-haired girls.  

Then we went into the vortex of the Western Desert with a Bedouin driver and back 20 million years to a time when prehistoric shellfish, sharks and whale-like creatures swam overhead, leaving their fossils for us to find.  Then, whisk back into the present with the police escort that briefly followed us to keep us safe (a honor preserved apparently for travelers from America, Israel and Denmark?). We stopped occasionally in the oases along the way to clean off in the water being pumped from the massive aquifer under the desert to irrigate new fields.  Everywhere from Cairo through the desert to Luxor, we saw gas stations either closed, or with long lines of trucks and minibuses lined up waiting overnight for the next fuel delivery.  Makes the ubiquitous donkey seem awfully dependable.

For me, my favorite scene of the old and new Egypt will always be the man on a donkey cart, pulling a load of hand-cut Egyptian clover for fodder, talking on his cell phone.  For the kids, they’ve learned about ancient  alphabets, from the hieroglyphs on the temples to Arabic numbers around the campfire in the desert sand from our Bedouin driver, but also about the hard side of modern Egypt, seeing for their first time bands of kids living on the streets of Cairo. 

Hands down, our favorite family experience was the mind-bending experience of being in the desert, where the quiet and wide open emptiness gives you time to think, while the wind creates the best ever sand dunes for rolling down. 

We’re now in Dahab on the Red Sea, hoping to do some snorkeling and perhaps a side trip to see the site of the burning bush and Mount Sinai…but not sure given the recent flooding.

Tahrir Square protest from our hotel balcony

 

Pyramid & sphinx in Giza

Everyone wants a photo with Maggie

Maggie and Hugo run off to roll down a dune

Anyone have a shovel? 



Fossils

Cleaning off in Well Number 7, Bahariya Oasis



Donkey cart along the Nile

Temple of Karnak in Luxor

 

Side trip to Egypt - Cairo

Flew into Cairo Egypt yesterday - what a crazy city!  The anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian revolution is on January 25th -  staying in Tahrir Square really brings the recent history alive.  Quite a day today walking the streets and especially crossing them (stand next to local, hold onto your kid with a death grip, and walk when the locals do) and then spent a fascinating afternoon with my high school French teacher and her friend - seeing the sights and hearing about the events of the past few years.  Egyptian hospitality is amazing. 

Egyptian Museum, with burned out former 

Mubarak National Democratic Party HQ behind

Tahrir Square

Tahrir Square, getting ready for January 25

A lovely lunch on the Nile

travels around Turkey

What an amazing two weeks traveling in Turkey with our Alaska friends.  Each leg of the trip took us progressively back in time, starting from the Ottoman empire grandeur of Istanbul near the Black Sea, then back to the Christian towns of Cappadocia in central Turkey, and finally the Greek/Roman cities of the Aegean coast. Nice to trade in homeschooling books for on-the road school for a while!

Our Istanbul apartment was in the old part of town, a perfect location for exploring the mosques and palace built by the Ottomans after they captured the city in 1453 - will never forget the mosque-dominated skyline with the reverberating call to prayer from all sides (and in the background the kids singing the 1950s ditty about “take me back to Constantinople, no you can’t go back to Constantinople, now it’s Istanbul…”).  Cappadocia was like being a kid again – sleeping in a “fairy chimney” formed by erosion of volcanic tuff where the Christians lived from the 4^th to 11^th century, descending into the underground city where they hid from invaders, topped off with a sunrise balloon ride.  Then we rented a van for a road trip to the ancient cities of Aphrodisias, Hierapolis and Ephesus to explore the temples, theaters, stadium, library, roads and market places built as far back as 10^th century BC…highlighted by deliciously fresh winter vegies and oranges straight from the fields and the scrumptious warmth of mineral springs and saunas to soak the winter chill from our bones.   

Our merry band of travelers, Christmas in Istanbul

Istanbul by night from Bosporus River

Fishing from Galata Bridge

Daily call-to-prayer times

View from our apartment overlooking Bosphorus.  Note 

mosque minaret - first daily call to prayer was 5:46 am!

Sunrise at the Blue Mosque

Mandatory headscarves in the Blue Mosque

Hiking in Cappadocia

View from our balloon ride

"Fairy chimney" housing

from early Christian communities

 in Cappadocia

Church carved inside rocks

Underground city to hide from invaders

Gateway to the Temple of Aphrodite, 

pilgrimage site since 6th century BC

The kids hamming it up on stage at Aphrodisias

Library of Celsus at Ephesus,

built 2nd century AD

Swimming over toppled marble columns
 in sacred hot springs of Hierapolis

Enjoying the warm water running down the
mineral travertines at Pamukkale 

daily boat life in winter in Turkey

Given the frequency and severity of winter storms - at times it’s like living in a wind tunnel or under a water/hail spigot -  we’ve joined the majority of other Med cruisers in holing up for a few months until the weather improves.  And given the dearth of cruising kids in the Med -  a product of Somali pirates cutting off the flow of families from Australia/New Zealand and “the crisis”, our kids are thrilled to be in a marina with a few other families.  Between us, we have ten kids ages three to 15, from Australia, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland and the US. 

Like the other families, our kids do homework every morning Monday - Saturday, then spend afternoons between boats and playing in the marina.  Miraculously, there’s a professional musician and sax player in the marina, so every 4 or 5 days Hugo has a saxophone lesson and Maggie a recorder lesson, with concerts on Sundays.   Maggie has inspired the other girls to learn to knit, and with yarn so beautiful and inexpensive, I’ve found I actually have the patience to try it again as well.  Marmaris is also a great place for boat work – I’ll never want to move back into our house after all our cushion and canvas work is finished.  And just outside the marina is a large environmentally and archeologically protected island with beautiful dirt roads winding through it…perfect for hiking and running.  It’s truly a combination of the best of all my former running trails:  the flora of my favorite California Bay Area running trails but without all the people and the elevation challenges of my favorite Juneau Alaska running trails but without the rain.   All that running builds up an appetite, so I’ve been subjecting the family to my attempts at Turkish cooking…bulgur wheat and red lentils, swiss chard and spinach, pomegranate sauce and red pepper paste…the kids can’t wait to get home and have fries and chicken wings at Mr. Henry’s!

So while the transition to a sedentary lifestyle isn’t easy for some of us (ie me), we’re making the most of it, knowing it won’t last long - later this month we meet friends from Alaska for a two week trip around Turkey, and in late January we head to Egpyt for a couple of weeks. 



View of our marina from the nearby island







My hat-knitting experiments...Goldilocks would be proud...

...either too big or too small.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Maggie leans into the wind in front of

the winter storm wave barricades



Boat kids on a hike to a nearby cave, it filled with their echoes

of "Frere Jacques" in five languages

last Greek islands - and arrived in Turkey

The last couple of weeks we’ve been exploring more Greek islands: Amorgos, Astipalya, Nisyros and Symi, each with something different to offer.   Our favorite has always been the family hikes:  a surreal hike through dense fog where stone walls and goats materialized out of the fog in Amorgos,  the steaming stinking sulfur crater of Nisyros, and the sun-drenched rock mountaintops with ruins and cypress forests in Symi.
 

Having left our days of ancient Greek temple ruins behind, we’ve been spending more time visiting monasteries and Greek orthodox churches.  In Symi, we enjoyed the festival of St. Michael, patron saint of the island and sailors, where we joined the procession around town, following the Greek orthodox priests, band and military unit, as they carried the icon and banners through town, complete with incense, holy water sprinklings and chanting.  Our favorite churches however are the tiny little ones way up in the mountains. 

The weather is still amazingly warm and sunny, and our sea dog of a girl Maggie still swims whenever we find a beach.   But despite the good weather and lack of rain, we decided to call it quits in the Greek islands and head to our winter marina in Marmaris, Turkey.  After five months of covering a lot of ground (over 5,000 miles as the crow flies), John and I were ready to stay in one place for some boat work, and the kids were dying to get to the marina, as they had heard there were a few other kids here.  Hard to believe, but despite all our attempts to find other cruising families, this is the first time we’ve met other cruising kids since Spain (and the first boy since Bermuda). 




Cliff-side monastery on Amorgos

 

 









Lighting a candle in a miniscule

mountain church on Symi

 








Goats in the fog on Amorgos

Volcanic crater on Nisyros, very impressive
despite the huge "Jane and Mark, USA"
stamped out in footprints in the mud in the
bottom

 

Maggie never misses a chance to swim





Hugo's favorite is scrambing to the top of the peak



Approaching the coast of Turkey

Happy Halloween

No trick or treating here in Greece, so we hid candy on the boat and the kids had to find it with flashlights.   Halloween meets the Easter bunny.... Found some Greek gourds that worked as pumpkins, except that they start to rot faster than normal pumpkins - I was neurotically sniffing every corner of the boat until I finally found the source.  They also dyed our hands a curious orange - see Hugo's hand in second photo below. For costumes, the kids dressed as comedians and put on a show, see jokes at bottom.

Skeeker in her pumpkin costume.

She always scowls like that.

No pumpkins, but Greek gourds will work

 

Hugo's pumpkin: family on one side, boat on the other

Maggie's pumpkin:  "BOO" (with a heart over it!)

Instead of a ghost in a graveyard,

we had a ghost on a halyard

 

Ghosts flying around the cabin

(especially as we sailed in a good breeze)

 

Selections from the Halloween comedy show on Tenho:

 

What do you call a bear with no teeth?  A gummy bear. 

 

What did the elder chimney say to the younger one?  You're too young to smoke. 

 

Why shouldn't you write with a broken pencil?  It's pointless. 

 

Why did the cowboy adopt a weiner dog? He wanted to get a long little doggie. 

 

The two fish are in a tank and one turns to the other and says "You man the guns and I'll drive." 

 

What's invisible and smells like carrots?  Rabbit farts. 

 

What do cats eat for breakfast?  Mice Krispies. 

 

What washes up on tiny beaches?  Microwaves. 

 

What to you do with a sick boat?  Take it to the doc. 

 

What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?  Pumpkin Pi.

 

Happy Halloween from the crew of Tenho!