Finally, the promised post about my loverly trip south and west during my teaching break at the end of August. It was a God-thing from start to finish. I had dearly wanted to take the trip for a long time, but once again it looked like it was going to fall through when all the friends I asked to go with me were unavailable the week of my teaching break. But then my teaching break was extended by a week, and I found out that two other friends weren't starting their jobs quite yet, so the pieces all fit together for us to hit the road! We even took my friend Tania's car, which is a 4x4 and enabled us to explore more than my Kia would have!
I think I'll tell about the trip in three separate posts, perhaps breaking them up with a non-picture post that's on my brain at the moment.
I wanted to take this trip, because any time anyone really asks you about where you have been in this country, they want to know if you have been to this city. And not just to this city, but to this city during the monsoon season. Because during the monsoon season, it turns green like Europe or the US. That's what they always say, and I'm always like, yeah, yeah. But after almost two years here, I really did want to go, if only to say that I had been when I'm asked. And if I'm really a brat, I can always say that it's not truly like Europe or the US. Because hello, we are in the desert!
We left early-ish afternoon on a Saturday. We estimated the drive at 8-10 hours, I think, but by the time we stropped for groceries and then to have lunch 40 minutes out of town, we didn't really get trucking until mid-afternoon. Tania is a whiz-bang hostess, so she packed all sorts of food goodies for the trip. New Zealanders are pretty good at picnicking, so her trusty cooler bag sustained us.
It is totally normal to stop by the side of the road to picnic.
Everyone says the scenery is boring, and it pretty much was. Everyone also freaks out about what a looong trip it is, and I always think 8-10 hours, are you kidding me? That's nothing compared to the 17 hours we would do to Indianapolis or the 19 hours to Georgia or the 24 hours to Florida. It really wasn't that long, but the desert almost makes it feel like it stretches out longer, perhaps because it's hard to latch on to land marks and happy places, like the cheap gas exit or the Krispy Kreme or the place where you broke down and the family you didn't know took you in. It'd be like the rock that looks like the rock where you picnicked last time, the tree that looks like the tree where you took that emergency pit stop. Okay, I exaggerate. There are towns--a few.
We did most of our driving after dark, because it got dark by 6:00, I think, and we didn't really hit the road till 3:00-ish. We had always heard about how dangerous a road it is because of people hitting camels. Natalie said as we were driving that the government recommends that people don't drive it at night. So we drove pretty cautiously, maybe 20 km under the posted speed limit, and it felt surreal to drive through kilometer after kilometer of pitch blackness, not really knowing what was beyond. That also slowed the trip up, but on the other hand, there wasn't a lot of traffic on the road, which helped. We arrived about 11:30 PM, and yes, there was fog on top of the mountain before we descended into the city. And yes, it was pretty coming down into the lights. We stayed at some friends' business place.
The first full day, we set out east to explore the road on the way to the previous country I lived in. Here are my beloved traveling buddies. Natalie, on the left, and Tania, on the right. They both are the reasons that I have the job that I do. When I first arrived in the country two years ago for a month of language school, my apartment mate had a lunch date to meet Natalie for the first time and invited me along. Natalie happened to bring Tania with her, and Tania worked at the language institute where I now work and invited me to come and check it out. I took the four-hour bus trip and spent a weekend with her. She rolled out the red carpet for me, and the rest is history. But I'll be forever thankful for how these two pointed me here. They are also roughly my age and single, so it's nice to have companions on this journey.
We stopped at a famous area to observe some blowholes and started to notice the green. Not bad!
Yeah, pretty nice! A refreshing changed from the beautiful brown of the town where I live and work.
Here's one of the blowholes. The air would force the water up through it, but you could also hear the wind moaning through it. The children would stand over it, then squeal when the jet of water came.
The bottom right is my best attempt at capturing the actual spray of the water up a blow hole, I think.
My girlfriends are great for many reasons, including the fact that they were cool with me dressing this way, even though we were tourists away from our hometowns. My reasoning was that I knew that many, many of my friends and acquaintances were visiting this city at the same time, so I knew I'd probably run into someone I knew. And I like to be consistent. Sure enough, I ran into a family I knew this very evening. And a couple of days later, the son of one of my friends from a city three hours beyond mine saw me and contacted his mom to tell her about it. She then texted me, and I never saw him.
There are scads of tourists there at this time of year. And we were there at the end of the season, so I think the crowds had lightened by the time we got there. It wasn't so bad when we were out and about during the day. There were certain places, like this, where there were scads of people, but there are probably a dozen directions that people can go to sightsee, so they were kind of divvied up. And remember it's fine to stop anywhere along the road, so you'd see family after family after family picnicking by the side of the road, but not all clumped up in one place.
When it was bad was at night, when no one's looking at nature. Then they all clumped up in the city, and the traffic was awful.
But back to the number of tourists. Thousands and thousands come through here each monsoon season, most of them from the region. So we were definitely in the minority of westerners.
I didn't know what this rock was, but it was interesting.
The girls waiting to capture the water coming up the blow hole, or maybe the children squealing and scattering when that happened.
We kept following the road after the blow holes, and this is the road to that other country. It started to look like the other country, and it tugged on my heart. The mountains are just gorgeous.
Hairpin curves, ahhh. As long as I'm not driving.
Tania was, and had lots of patience with Natalie and me getting out and taking pictures.
She was good and safe, too.
More mountains.
We stopped for another camel photo shoot on our way back.
Our new friends told us about this dirt road about 6 km down to the ocean. At their suggestion, we took it. This is one of the points where we were mighty glad to be in a 4 x 4.
The isolated beach was so worth the drive down and back! The white sand and stones and shells scattered along it were beautiful. And almost no one was around, so I ditched the scarf for a brief while.
Natalie found and gave me a beautiful purple rock with what looks like a heart on it, and I saved it to remember God's love for me in providing this trip.
These rock formations are amazing! I can't explain why they are in these big chunks, but they certainly were fascinating.
After we reached the city again after our day of exploring, we hit up the tourism festival which runs in conjunction with the monsoon season. I found three new abayas that I love for fair prices (around $26 each, instead of more like $52+)! More evidence of God's lovingkindness!
I think I'll tell about the trip in three separate posts, perhaps breaking them up with a non-picture post that's on my brain at the moment.
I wanted to take this trip, because any time anyone really asks you about where you have been in this country, they want to know if you have been to this city. And not just to this city, but to this city during the monsoon season. Because during the monsoon season, it turns green like Europe or the US. That's what they always say, and I'm always like, yeah, yeah. But after almost two years here, I really did want to go, if only to say that I had been when I'm asked. And if I'm really a brat, I can always say that it's not truly like Europe or the US. Because hello, we are in the desert!
We left early-ish afternoon on a Saturday. We estimated the drive at 8-10 hours, I think, but by the time we stropped for groceries and then to have lunch 40 minutes out of town, we didn't really get trucking until mid-afternoon. Tania is a whiz-bang hostess, so she packed all sorts of food goodies for the trip. New Zealanders are pretty good at picnicking, so her trusty cooler bag sustained us.
It is totally normal to stop by the side of the road to picnic.
Everyone says the scenery is boring, and it pretty much was. Everyone also freaks out about what a looong trip it is, and I always think 8-10 hours, are you kidding me? That's nothing compared to the 17 hours we would do to Indianapolis or the 19 hours to Georgia or the 24 hours to Florida. It really wasn't that long, but the desert almost makes it feel like it stretches out longer, perhaps because it's hard to latch on to land marks and happy places, like the cheap gas exit or the Krispy Kreme or the place where you broke down and the family you didn't know took you in. It'd be like the rock that looks like the rock where you picnicked last time, the tree that looks like the tree where you took that emergency pit stop. Okay, I exaggerate. There are towns--a few.
We did most of our driving after dark, because it got dark by 6:00, I think, and we didn't really hit the road till 3:00-ish. We had always heard about how dangerous a road it is because of people hitting camels. Natalie said as we were driving that the government recommends that people don't drive it at night. So we drove pretty cautiously, maybe 20 km under the posted speed limit, and it felt surreal to drive through kilometer after kilometer of pitch blackness, not really knowing what was beyond. That also slowed the trip up, but on the other hand, there wasn't a lot of traffic on the road, which helped. We arrived about 11:30 PM, and yes, there was fog on top of the mountain before we descended into the city. And yes, it was pretty coming down into the lights. We stayed at some friends' business place.
The first full day, we set out east to explore the road on the way to the previous country I lived in. Here are my beloved traveling buddies. Natalie, on the left, and Tania, on the right. They both are the reasons that I have the job that I do. When I first arrived in the country two years ago for a month of language school, my apartment mate had a lunch date to meet Natalie for the first time and invited me along. Natalie happened to bring Tania with her, and Tania worked at the language institute where I now work and invited me to come and check it out. I took the four-hour bus trip and spent a weekend with her. She rolled out the red carpet for me, and the rest is history. But I'll be forever thankful for how these two pointed me here. They are also roughly my age and single, so it's nice to have companions on this journey.
We stopped at a famous area to observe some blowholes and started to notice the green. Not bad!
Yeah, pretty nice! A refreshing changed from the beautiful brown of the town where I live and work.
Here's one of the blowholes. The air would force the water up through it, but you could also hear the wind moaning through it. The children would stand over it, then squeal when the jet of water came.
The bottom right is my best attempt at capturing the actual spray of the water up a blow hole, I think.
My girlfriends are great for many reasons, including the fact that they were cool with me dressing this way, even though we were tourists away from our hometowns. My reasoning was that I knew that many, many of my friends and acquaintances were visiting this city at the same time, so I knew I'd probably run into someone I knew. And I like to be consistent. Sure enough, I ran into a family I knew this very evening. And a couple of days later, the son of one of my friends from a city three hours beyond mine saw me and contacted his mom to tell her about it. She then texted me, and I never saw him.
There are scads of tourists there at this time of year. And we were there at the end of the season, so I think the crowds had lightened by the time we got there. It wasn't so bad when we were out and about during the day. There were certain places, like this, where there were scads of people, but there are probably a dozen directions that people can go to sightsee, so they were kind of divvied up. And remember it's fine to stop anywhere along the road, so you'd see family after family after family picnicking by the side of the road, but not all clumped up in one place.
When it was bad was at night, when no one's looking at nature. Then they all clumped up in the city, and the traffic was awful.
But back to the number of tourists. Thousands and thousands come through here each monsoon season, most of them from the region. So we were definitely in the minority of westerners.
I didn't know what this rock was, but it was interesting.
The girls waiting to capture the water coming up the blow hole, or maybe the children squealing and scattering when that happened.
We kept following the road after the blow holes, and this is the road to that other country. It started to look like the other country, and it tugged on my heart. The mountains are just gorgeous.
Hairpin curves, ahhh. As long as I'm not driving.
Tania was, and had lots of patience with Natalie and me getting out and taking pictures.
She was good and safe, too.
We started to realize that camels are everywhere. This isn't just a camels-in-the-desert place. This is camels on the mountains, camels on the cliff, camels in the fog, camels on the beach, camels in the road. Tania was pretty obsessed, so we stopped and took lots of pictures of camels. I really didn't mind.
More mountains.
And yeah, I started to get convinced that this was kind of like the green of the west, but still with an eastern feel.
I had told Natalie and Tania that it was my heart's desire to meet some mountain people, and it was near this spot where we stopped to take pics that some local girls came out and invited us inside for dates and coffee. We accepted their invitation, and--voila--new friends! And they started teaching us a few words in their first language, the language of the mountain people, which I have been interested in ever since having my mountain man student, who is also from the nearby mountains. But I can't really interact a lot with him, since he lives here and is divorced and close to my age. So I felt like this was Father's way of saying, "I like that you like the mountain people, and I'm going to give you some girlfriends to love on here."
We stopped for another camel photo shoot on our way back.
Our new friends told us about this dirt road about 6 km down to the ocean. At their suggestion, we took it. This is one of the points where we were mighty glad to be in a 4 x 4.
The isolated beach was so worth the drive down and back! The white sand and stones and shells scattered along it were beautiful. And almost no one was around, so I ditched the scarf for a brief while.
Natalie found and gave me a beautiful purple rock with what looks like a heart on it, and I saved it to remember God's love for me in providing this trip.
These rock formations are amazing! I can't explain why they are in these big chunks, but they certainly were fascinating.
After we reached the city again after our day of exploring, we hit up the tourism festival which runs in conjunction with the monsoon season. I found three new abayas that I love for fair prices (around $26 each, instead of more like $52+)! More evidence of God's lovingkindness!
Posts
2 comments:
Wow! These pictures are beautiful! I love all those rocks and rock formations too, and I love the picture of the beach with all those smooth stones. SO glad you got to go, especially as that's something that we all asked for specifically. Hurray for God bringing it all together so perfectly! And I love that you have a little "Ebenezer" stone to remember it by!
Oh yeah, and the super cool trees, just above the last camel photo shoot. Gorgeous! And fascinating! As so many of these pictures are : )
Post a Comment