Travel Blog No. 1 - Our Plans

So now that the learning 2.0 stuff is over this blog is now my travel blog. This is my first entry as a travel blog. We don't leave for 52 days and 22 hours. Let's just say 53 days... less than 2 months. Anyway, I thought I'd make this first entry about what our plans are and how they are going so far.

We leave on March 8th and fly to Singapore. We stop there for 2 or 3 hours and then fly to Egypt (Cairo). We'll be flying Singapore Airlines. There is only a few hours we have to wait at Singapore Airport so hopefully the flight from Melbourne isn't delayed too much. There are not many flights to Egypt and if we were to miss the connecting flight then we would miss the start of the tour we have booked in Egypt. We arrive in Egypt close to midnight, and will have someone waiting for us there to take us to our hotel (Hotel Pharaoh). We will then sleep and spend the next day wandering around Cairo and having no idea about anything, should be fun. Apparently Cairo has a population of about 16 million, a bit more than what I'm used to. Later that day we will meet up with our tour guide and will spend the night again at Hotel Pharaoh then head off to Alexandria the next morning. In Alexandria we plan to visit the library, and Liz wants to swim in the Mediterranean so we may do that as well. I'm sure we'll also find some other stuff to do. We stay there the night and head back to Cairo the next day.

After another night in Cairo our big adventure begins, starting with looking at places around Cairo and visiting pyramids and whatnot. That night we catch the overnight train to Aswan. In Aswan we do some more stuff, go on a boat, and a camel. The next day we go to Abu Simbel and check out our Nile cruise boat. The next few days we cruise up the Nile, stopping at places of interest and generally enjoying ourselves. Day 7 we ride some donkeys into the valley of the kings as the sun rises. Apparently it's a very nice experience, not sure how comfortable it is to ride a donkey though. Hopefully it won't be too hard to steer them. At the end of the day we head off to Baris and spend the night sleeping under the stars. The next day we do more stuff, see more stuff, travel further into the desert and spend the night in some reed huts! The next few days we do more stuff, travel through the desert some more and get back to Cairo at the end of day 11. We have one more night there and then we have a flight to Austria!!

We arrive in Vienna on the 22nd of March at 7pm. And that's all we've planned so far. We have no accommodation yet for Vienna. No idea about anything there really. I know Billy Joel has a song called Vienna though. Hopefully things will sort themselves out. We plan to buy a Eurail pass thingy which will allow us to travel about for a bit. We intend to go to Prague from Vienna and relax there for a bit and then we have no concrete plans. We'll travel west until we get to London. Then we'll find somewhere to stay for the next few months and work and earn money so we can afford to get to Africa before we come home. Liz is going to Africa a month or so before I do because she has an archaeology dig to work on. Once she's finished that then I'll go meet her and we'll probably have a tour around East/South Africa and see lions and things. Then we'll either stay in South Africa for a little bit before coming home or not, depending on our money situation I guess. So that's our plans... we don't even have a uk visa yet though. We sent the application (which cost $500) on Tuesday and hopefully we'll hear back from them soon.

Feel free to leave a comment below. Any travel tips or info that would be of help to us. Or anything interesting at all. I'll write again soon when I have something new to say, or perhaps when I have nothing new at all to say. If you're interested in our trip then check back here occasionally. I'll try and update it as much as I can. Thanks for reading.