By Stephen Bugno

Enough from the nay-sayers! British food is good!

It is time for the unfavorable reputation of English cuisine to end. In my 20 days in England, I didn’t have a bad meal. The most memorable were the home cooked meals I had in Yorkshire and pub food in the cities and across the countryside.

The full English breakfast

The Full English Breakfast

Baked beans for breakfast?! What a great idea. Add fried eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, mushrooms, a tomato, bread and butter, HP Sauce, and of course, tea with milk. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a gentleman, and supper like a pauper.

Yorkshire Pudding

Not an easy one to reproduce back home. I’m still trying to get the right amount of oil to the right temperature in the oven. But this is how it’s supposed to look. Best served with  a traditional Sunday roast.

A Yorkshire pudding out of the oven

Shepherd’s Pie

An English dish that needs no introduction. Traditionally put together with leftover lamb from the Sunday meal. The one I helped make was made with ground beef, so technically it was a cottage pie.

Cornish Pasties

Although I’ve never been to Cornwall, the Yorkshire version was quite delicious. These convenient, pocket-sized pasties were originally made by women for their menfolk to take down into the tin mine. Filled with beef, onions, and potato, they are perfect right out of the oven.

Cask Ale

Find the best in Yorkshire. Cask ale, or real ale, is unfiltered and unpasteurised beer which is conditioned and served from a cask, usually without additional nitrogen or carbon dioxide pressure. There was a movement started back in the 1970’s to promote and revitalize these real ales that continues today. The best I tasted was Black Sheep’s Best Bitter or those from Theakston Brewery

Toad in the hole

Enjoying a pint at the Black Sheep Brewery

This one I didn’t eat until I returned home and was served up by some Anglophile friends in North Carolina. It’s a simple dish: just sausages with Yorkshire pudding cooked around it…. What could be better than that? But no one seems to to know where the name comes from.

Fish and Chips. England has the best fish and chips in the world. Yorkshire has the best fish and chips in England. Whitby has the best fish and chips in Yorkshire. There you have it, the best fish and chips in the world. Go to Whitby.

Related posts:

1. Ask GoMad Nomad: The English Countryside in Six Days

processing coffee at Finca Esperanza Verde

Blog of a Modern Nomad

Stephen Bugno

“I tried to buy a ticket too, but they’ve run out of seats,” says the only other Gringo on the bus.

There has to be 200 of us packed into this former American school bus. And without a ticket, this means we’ll be standing for the two-hour haul over the mountains to Matagalpa. This is our first time on an “express” bus, opposed to the “ordinario” or “chicken” buses which do not require an advance purchase or have seat numbers.

The overhead luggage racks are loaded, children are sitting on laps, the central aisle is filled with standers. Our bags have already been hoisted up to the roof-rack and secured under a tarp. As we wait to pull out, sweat drips down my face and most everybody else’s as well.

We’ve spent the past day-and-a-half in the colonial city of Leon—church hopping and museum visiting—making this the first time we’ve done any traditional sightseeing.

Nearing sundown and already into the higher elevation, a cool breeze blows in the window. About half of those on the bus have gotten off, so we’re properly filled now without any people standing. From the window, Emolyn points out the vegetables in the street stall that we’re seeing for the first time: beets, carrots, potatoes, green onions. We roll through Sebaco and let a few more passengers off; the bus driver’s assistant lowers a bicycle and some wooden furniture from the roof down to a girl below.

At twilight we pull into the mountain town of Matagalpa. Within ten minutes we’ve checked into the Hotel Alvarado, a family-run guest house with adequate $10 rooms. For a little city, Matagalpa is lively: the sidewalks are crowded and music is pouring out of almost every shop. We head to Cafe Artisano right away, which our guidebook describes as “the bohemian hang of choice”. Dehydrated from our bus ride, we opt for a cold pinolillo—a toasted, milled corn drink with pepper, cloves, and cacao—over a beer or coffee drink.

For dinner we move on to a comedor, an inexpensive cafeteria-like restaurant that serves out plates of typical Nicaraguan food. We fill up for $2 apiece. For a beer we head to Picoteo Cafe, a packed bar/cafe with wooden paneling and a low ceiling. It is smoky inside. A litro bottle of Victoria costs less than $2 and lasts the two of us the entire evening. A three-man band including a guitar, bongos, and a giant bass-like guitar are playing tunes for different tables. I´m wondering if they´re playing for tips or hired by the bar when Emolyn adds “they´re like a jukebox.” The tables pay them in advance for requested songs.

At 7:40 the next morning we´re back on the big yellow bus headed for San Ramon, a village 12 km to the east. Gifford, the general manager of Finca Esperanze Verde has agreed to meet us and take us up to the farm. FEV is a working farm, an eco-lodge, and a non-profit. At 1,180 meters, its 100 plus acres have hiking trails that wind through a steep second-generation cloud forest.

Shortly after arriving, as we’re having a cup of FEV’s finest organic coffee, two men and a women arrive in a truck from Managua. Within minutes, the guy with the huge Nikon hanging around his neck asks if he can take our photograph for the Nicaragua Tourism Association. After all, we are the only guests here and we look relaxed, sipping our coffee looking out to the spectacular mountain view.

He snaps away and then we follow him down to the small coffee bean processing area of the farm and he continues photographing. The model, a woman in a dress, poses with a big smile and glides her fingers sensually through the green coffee beans drying on a rack. But we are more interested in the processing. The beans are picked shiny green and red around December, then de-pulped, fermented for 40 hours, soaked in water and stirred with a wooden paddle, and dried on site. Further down in Matagalpa they are sun dried longer, sorted again, graded, cupped, and shipped out.

FEV sells about 10,000 lbs. of coffee per year and get about double the price of conventional beans because they’re certified organic. They export directly to Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, NC which sells it as Café San Ramon.

We enjoy our two days at the lodge: hiking in the rain, reading and writing under cover of the pavilion, drinking coffee in the mornings, trying to stay warm at night.

Sunday morning we pass the butterfly research center as we pull out from the farm, and start down the hill in the extended cab Toyota pickup. Just then we hear a loud, deep howling from the trees. Giff slams on the brakes and points into the forest—it’s a Howler Monkey. We get a good look at him and continue on our way.

At the bottom of hill, we get out to the main dirt road, and Giff gets out. He’s playing a game of the Nicaraguan national obsession today and hoping the afternoon won’t be as rainy as the morning was. Yes, it’s baseball day today, and half the team is already standing in the back of another pickup dressed in miss-matched nylon jerseys, ready to play.

Another employee of the farm hops in the driver’s seat and shuttles us the 18 kilometers down to San Ramon with beautiful mountain views the whole way.

Posted by Stephen Bugno, Dec 2009

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San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

Blog of a Modern Nomad

It’s been one week since we were robbed at knife-point in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Since then I’ve had a multitude of emotions and feelings: anger, frustration, forgiveness, vengefulness, regret.

As a traveler or tourist you expect to get your pocket picked on a crowded bus, you expect to get your purse jacked in a bar, you expect your hotel room to not be completely secure.

Perhaps I was a bit naive, but I did not expect two teenagers to come down off the hillside, observe us taking pictures, wait for us to come around the bend, pretend to ask us a question while cornering us against the cliff face, put their shirts up over their noses, and produce foot-long butcher knives out of thin air.

I remember saying hola and making brief eye contact as I would do passing anyone. And within what seemed like a second, I had a knife in my face and was being pushed back by the fear of getting cut up. Emolyn was in the same situation but knew enough to say “bag…they want the bag!” after they mumbled “bolsa“. We both threw our bags to the ground, Emolyn got out of the way, and they were still inching towards me with the knives. I had no idea what else they could want since my bag was already theirs and my tee-shirt was with the bag. Eventually they picked up the bags and scurried around the edge of the cliff where they could no longer be seen.

This all took place on the rocks, at the end of the beach, under the mountain with the statue of Christ on top. On our way out, we passed families spending the day in the sun. Our guidebook described it as a good day hike: rockhopping the northern curve of the bay and around the point, minding the the tides and bringing plenty of water. Done and done. What about the kids with the knives?

The night of the incident we were pretty shaken up, and even for the first few days afterward I was still angry. We looked back on the situation a million times and went through every possible what-if. I don’t know how much of a threat these chicos were. Were they prepared to use force to get what they wanted? Were they as frightened as we were? Had they done this a hundred times before? Was it their first time?

I couldn’t believe the utter disinterest in the police about the case. We had run a half-mile on the beach to the nearest bar to make the call. They arrived quickly, but had no interest in radioing over to another officer who might dart to the scene of the crime, or to the road which was the only escape out.

The situation could have been much worse if we lost a passport, a major sum of cash, my camera, or got sliced in the stomach. But these hijos de puntas did get some good spoils. Some, like our handmade journals and Spanish notebooks, had value to us and none to them. With a week’s worth of notes, we planned to study from these for the remainder of our trip.

They got a nice camera from Emolyn and an IPOD mini. A hat, two pair of sunglasses, a watch with alarm, a flashlight, and a Moon Nicaragua Handbook: things that make life on the road easier. My father’s copy of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Herman Hesse’s Demian are now theirs. In a country like Nicaragua, good books in English are hard to come by. Add to that a blue metal water bottle from Quechua in France. They even got the tee-shirt off my back!

I still don’t regret choosing Nicaragua over other Central American countries like Costa Rica, Honduras, or Guatemala. Here´s what my up-to-date Moon Nicaragua guidebook (I had to buy another one in Granada) says about the topic: Believe it or not, Nicaragua is, for the moment, still considered one of the safest countries in Latin America. If you´re traveling south from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala, you should notice your anxiety level drop noticeably.

Although I doubt I’ll be racing back to any one of these Central American countries anytime soon: almost every person we met had a similar story about themselves or travelers they had met who got robbed somewhere between here and Mexico

Posted by Stephen Bugno, 16 Dec 2009

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2. Where my coffee comes from
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buses in Nicaragua

The border crossing at Peñas Blancas is the typical chaos: money changes with huge wads of cordobas, dollars, and colones, a mother and son beggar team, long lines of tired Nicaraguan laborers, and a nun asking for offerings.  Before and after the 200-meter Noman’s Land one tractor trailer after another is lined up, most with goods, some overfilled with scrap metal. The authorities of both countries, with aid from the U.S. are trying to make this a transportation bottleneck to keep drugs coming up from South America. A young Nicaraguan going home leads us through the confusing Costa Rican out-line and on to the Nicaraguan in-line and finally out through the last gate into the even more chaotic mercado/bus station area.

Immediately swarmed by eager taxi drivers, my instincts keep me walking through to the only bus waiting. Bound for Rivas in fifteen minutes we sit patiently inside to the blaring Nica music. We are sitting on an American school bus. Still painted yellow, it’s been modified with a roof rack, a high exhaust pipe, and interior luggage racks. This is the way nearly all Nicaraguans get around their country; by sitting on the buses that we rode to school twenty years ago.

San Juan del Sur is a lively beach town with plenty of foreigners and Nicaraguans on holiday, lots of beachside bars, and a beautiful crescent-shaped harbor and beach. The sweet surf breaks keep young Australians, Americans, and Canadians here for weeks at a time. Cheap hotels are seven bucks per night and fantastic beaches line the coast north and south of town.

We’ve come here to study Spanish. We were hoping the surf wouldn´t be too much of a distraction. And it hasn´t been. There are at least four schools that offer week-long classes and full room and board packages. We opted for Rosa Silva´s Spanish School and have had no problem showing up at 8am the past five mornings for our four-hour lesson. My teacher Oscar and I have been reviewing basic Spanish grammar and practicing basic conversation as well. Rosa put us up at her friend Margarita´s place. Either Margarita, her daughter, or her son-in-law cook us three meals a day downstairs in their cafe. Full week-long tuition, room and board is $180.

What do we do with the rest of our day? On Saturday I tried surfing for the first time. The Lopez brothers from Arena Caliente Surf Shop drove about 10 of us in their packed van five miles down to Remanso Beach. With surf board piles high on top we bounced our way on the winding dirt road. Their buddy Shaggy, a real Nicaraguan surfer dude, gave me an hour-long surf lesson. On the beach he taught me jump to my feet and then 15 minutes later I was catching waves and standing on my own.

Besides surfing, there are evening trips to La Flor Beach Wildlife Refuge to see sea turtles laying their eggs in the sand, a zip-line canopy tour just outside town, and plenty of beach bars in San Juan del Sur with ice cold Toña and Victoria beers for $1.25. Most nights we watch the sunset from chairs in the sand at The Pier bar while enjoying a cold one.

And there’s always reviewing the days Spanish notes and doing homework to prepare for the next morning’s lesson.

Stephen Bugno,  03 Dec 2009

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Blog of a Modern Nomad

Like Tangier for Twain, Aleppo is the spot we have been longing for all the time:

–The Innocents Abroad

click photo for slide show

I am a bit uncomfortable in my interactions, but it’s the uncomfortable I’ve desired. The vegetable vendors at the outdoor market are not used to selling their produce to foreigners, nor am I used to their Arabic, local prices, or bartering techniques.

I am uncomfortable most everywhere, in fact, and am probably naïve too. Maybe I’m being overcharged for my freshly-squeezed mango juice at the fruit stand, but I am too absorbed to give it a second thought.

My travel partner and I are so enthralled with this complete foreignness, the foreignness that Twain describes, and we haven’t even entered the old city and souks for which Aleppo is famous. Here, the new city is a novelty to us.

The first morning in Aleppo I awoke to the call to prayer. It echoed throughout the narrow streets and radiated up from the roof tops just as it had in all the other cities we had traveled through for the past two months. But this morning, it was a real person singing. In Turkey we were used to recorded prayers that sounded harsher than a worn-out 8-track tape from the 70’s. In Northern Cyprus I buried my head under the pillow at 4am. Even though my sleep was interrupted in Aleppo, I had still appreciated its beauty.

A few hours later, at about 9am, I heard church bells. At first I didn’t think it was possible. I hadn’t heard clanking bells since Bulgaria. But later I read that ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and the secular government is tolerant of these different faiths.

Coming from modern and westernized Turkey, Syria seems so vastly different. It is both visually shocking and stimulating to the senses. To begin, everything is in Arabic. The first thing we had to do was learn how to read the numbers. (Arabs don’t use what we call “Arabic numerals”) Adding to this, Aleppean society is very conservative. Almost no women are seen on the streets without a headscarf and many are wearing the chador.

You won’t find international chains in Aleppo and there aren’t even supermarkets here. People still do their shopping in the souqs. The souqs are covered and still preserved from medieval times. In Aleppo you will come closer to experiencing a medieval city center better than anywhere else in the Middle East.

I am often in search of places that are “thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign” but with our shrinking and globalized world, these places are increasingly uncommon.

But in Syria, on the streets of Aleppo, I found Twain’s Tangier.

Stephen Bugno, August 2007

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1. Aleppo Syria Slide Show

Bilbao, Spain

Guggenheim Bilbao

In Madrid, when I learned my brother would be going to Bordeaux, France in a few days on business, I immediately ditched my plans to go someplace warm and sunny in favor of visiting him.

The next day I was on a bus five hours north to Bilbao, the largest city of Spain’s Basque Country—a region and people defined by their ancient language, Euskara. A city so proud, they’ve never fielded a non-Basque on their football club. They even refuse to keep corporate sponsorship on their jersey because they regard it as their national team.

I sat down with a young Basque. It is her generation that was one of the first to be educated in Euskara from primary school. Born in 1978, she speaks it with her peers and her pupils at school. She speaks Castillano (Spanish) with her parents, who are part of a generation that was persecuted under Franco. Then citizens could have been imprisoned or even killed for simply speaking Euskara.

Over a glass of tinto and pintxos, in which Basque Country is said to have the finest in Spain, I got a language lesson fit to survive around town, and more importantly, adequate to order the next round.

I inquired more about the Basque ethnicity and what it takes to consider a person Basque. To further prove her point regarding the vital association between ethnicity and language she responded, “The Moroccan immigrants I teach at school—they speak Euskara—they’re Basque.”

What really makes Euskara of special interest is that it’s classified as a language isolate; which means geographically it’s surrounded by Indo-European languages, but isn’t related to any of them. Today it’s estimated that one million people speak Euskara.

***
In 1997, the city of Bilbao put itself on the map with what is arguably the greatest building of our time. The incredible, unforgettable, flowing titanium curves of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao are just as impressive (if not more, in my opinion) from the inside and the building alone is worth the €12 admission price.

The spaces Frank Gehry has created inside, allow the visitor to be easily propelled around the glass-walled atrium through the 19 galleries on three floors. Unfortunately, most of the installments and exhibitions throughout the museum, pale in comparison to the space that was built to house them.

***

San Sebastian

After a couple hours sleep I barely caught a 7am Sunday morning train, transferred at Bordeaux’s St. Jean, and another at the border, and by 2pm I was back in Spain’s Basque Country walking around center San Sebastian.

San Sebastian, my travel guide told me, was the “undisputed Queen of the Basque resorts”. Complete with a nice old town, excellent tapas bars, and a magnificent crescent- shaped harbor with beaches to match.

After enjoying a stroll up and down the promenade, I caught a 4pm bus back to Madrid where I arrived just before midnight and faced the question of what I would do until my job started on the 30th.

Posted by Stephen Bugno (June 2008) for the Blog of a Modern Nomad.

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Blog of a Modern Nomad

Welcome to Jordan

The Jordanians, like most Arabs, are known for their hospitality. On the street people call out, “You are welcome to Jordan.” You’ll hear the same from those in the tourist industry, although it’s much less sincere. From them it’s more like, “You are welcome to spend your money in Jordan.” These Jordanians will do almost anything to make a dinar. Most upsetting is the official prices at tourist sites that can elevate the cost to four times what a Jordanian citizen pays. And nearly every store and restaurant will inflate the prices as soon as they see you are not a local.

We did, however, experience some genuine Jordanian hospitality while we were in Amman. We have been using an internet site called Couch Surfing Project, which connects travelers with hosts all around the world. If a person is unable to host, they may be able to meet for drink, which is a great way to meet locals (or even expatriates). A guy named Simon not only offered us his place in Amman, but took us out to dinner as well. To add to this, he was already hosting an Austrian couple. He and his friend wouldn’t let us pay for a thing.

Aqaba, Jordan

Moving south from Amman we visited the must-see sights of Jordan. The Dead Sea is a mandatory stop if you’re in this part of the world and floating on its waters is something you won’t believe until you’ve done it yourself. It is not only the saltiest body of water on earth, but the lowest point on the earth’s surface.

Made famous to pop culture by landing a starring role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Petra has been fascinating visitors for over two millennia. Its steep entrance fee (26 USD) might make you reconsider, but it’s something you should see once in your life. We opted for the two-day pass (which was even more expensive) and spent both days hiking all around the area.

After Petra we made our way to Wadi Rum. This piece of extraordinary desert was used to film Lawrence of Arabia. We took a jeep tour around the area and camped out under the stars for two nights with the Bedouin. Although the full moon was so bright there weren’t many stars to see. The second day we hiked around the area and enjoyed the spectacular sunsets and moon rises.

Further down the road in Aqaba, there was still no food to be found during the day. We had to get pita bread from the store and go back to our hotel room. Ramadan is more than halfway finished. At night we’re bound to drinking tea or fruit shakes at the local cafes or strolling with non-alcoholic malt beverages.

From Aqaba we’ll sail across the Red Sea to Egypt, bypassing the land route through Israel.

Stephen Bugno, September 2007

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By Stephen Bugno

Blog of a Modern Nomad

The next day I rode the slow, winding topo train to the French border town, Hendaye, where I caught a short ride out to the on-ramp of the divided highway. After about 25 minutes standing with my thumb up, I was picked up by a guy heading nearly all the way to Bordeaux. Quite well-traveled and speaking excellent English, Sebastian and I chatted nearly the whole three hours as we ripped through the great Landes forest, the largest maritime pine forest in Europe (10,000 km²). “This is the lung of Europe,” he pointed out.

Bordeaux

He lived in a small beach town and dropped me off at a rural crossroads. Waiting in the warm afternoon sun, my next ride really caught me off-guard. A young woman with her elderly mom and her baby in the back seat pulled over on their way home from spending the afternoon on the beach. At first I didn’t even look back, figuring they couldn’t possibly be stopping for me. But they got out, glanced at me and started repacking to make room in the back seat for me. I threw my backpack in the trunk, brushed some sand off the back seat and we pulled off. They dropped me on the outskirts of Bordeaux and as the rain began, I took shelter under a bus stop and got on the next bus going into the center.

Bordeaux, while lacking traditional tourist sites, is certainly a necessary stop if you’re into wine. It is the wine-producing region of the wine-producing country.

On Sunday afternoon my brother and his coworkers and I checked out the World Heritage site of Saint-Emilion. The village was over-run with day-trippers (like ourselves), souvenir shops, and wine shops, but an easy five-minute stroll in one direction landed me in a quiet street with no signs of tourism and great views of the beautiful town and surrounding vineyards.

We toured and tasted at one of the many wineries surrounding the town and took a walking tour through the historic sites, most notably the hermitage of the 8^th century monk for whom the village is named. We also visited a huge church carved into the limestone cliff which was reminiscent of the churches of Cappadocia.

Back in Bordeaux I sat down with a young Bordelais one afternoon before he briefly showed me around Europe’s biggest 18^th century architectural urban areas. After much complaining about the current politics and President Zarko (complaining is a national pastime in France, I would learn later that week) my new left-wing friend suggested I check out an area of town in which he noted was “a good example of an immigrant community integrated into French society”. The next day I enjoyed a stroll through the colorful, mostly North African shops, restaurants and flea market around the Basilica of Saint-Michel.

Stephen Bugno  June, 2008

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On the morning of the 21^st, I left the Atlantic for the interior of Alentejo. Leaving Sines and changing buses in Setubal, I arrived in Evora at about 2pm, and had a bit of a problem finding affordable accommodation. My main reason for visiting Evora was to see the Chapel of Bones, a church entirely covered on the inside with the bones of monks. It was worth the trip since this is not something I had seen before.

Convento de Cristo's aquaduct

Evora is one of the touristic highlights of Portugal due mostly to its Roman history. Although I wasn’t as impressed as I should have been perhaps having been spoiled in Spain where these historically, culturally rich cities are a dime a dozen.

After watching the disappointing outcome of the Turkey-Czech Republic match, I wandered into the enormous week-long St John’s festival. Around the old city I noticed how empty the streets were when minutes later I stumbled upon games, rides, food, music, exhibitions and a whole lot of people. So I grabbed a fartura and beer and cruised through all the activity. Past midnight, children and grandparents were still out having a good time.

The next morning I caught the train to Tomar, which had an inconvenient stop-over in Lisbon.

I arrived in Tomar on the summer solstice and just after sunset my couch surfing host drove to an observatory on the top of a mountain near Constância to observe the clear night sky.

I had come to Tomar to check out the Convento de Cristo (Christ’s Convent), the onetime headquarters of the Knights Templar that sits impressively on a hill overlooking the city. Equally remarkable is the viaduct, built a few kilometers outside of town as part of an aqueduct to supply the Convento de Cristo with water. It’s not touristy at all and anyone can cross the top.

Stephen Bugno, June 2008

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Hundreds of kilometers through the flattest, most desolate landscape I’ve seen, we rode south from Mersa Matrouh, the last city on the Mediterranean coast. This was the final stage of a nine-hour bus ride from Alexandria to the Siwa Oasis. The remote oasis is a depression that stretches 82 x 28 km and contains 310,000 palm trees and 80,000 olive trees. Besides tourism, dates and olive production are the economic mainstays.

Siwa Oasis

Siwa Oasis is different from Egypt’s other oases in the fact that it was never under Pharaonic control and Siwans speak their own language, Siwi, a Berber dialect related to those in Libya.

I had first learned about Siwa from this article in the New York Times and was determined to reach it while I was in Egypt. The Oasis sounds like the perfect escape from urban Alexandria or Cairo, and in some ways it is. But the reality of Siwa town is a dusty, trash-ridden village filled with flies and mosquitoes. The loud musical horns of boy’s bicycles circling on the dirt streets don’t give your ears much retreat either. And my $3 per night mosquito-infested hotel room with florescent light and click-clacking ceiling fan didn’t offer much refuge from the town. The locals, I learned as I wandered the back streets, gave me looks as if to tell me outsiders weren’t welcome in their oasis, or at least not in their neighborhood. But then again, the Siwans have never been regarded as a hospitable people.

I did, however, make the most out of my two days in the oasis by exploring the area by foot and bicycle. The first day I rented a rickety bike for $2 and peddled past the Oracle Temple and the salt lake on my way to Cleopatra’s Bath, a bubbling natural spring that has been enclosed by a stone circular wall. The next day I tried to walk out to the huge dunes at Bir Waheed, but only made it halfway until I ran out of daylight. Still, I saw a peaceful sunset over the endless dunes of the Great Sand Sea. The day before I had foolishly rejected an overnight safari, to sand surf (with a snowboard) at the steepest dunes and swim at two different sprigs, adamant that I could reach the spot on my own without transport, 13 kilometers out of town through soft sand.

Stephen Bugno, October 2007

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