The Backpacker Duo

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on December 26, 1991

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Picked peppers, sorted peppers, and pulled nets out of the field. Yawn.

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Eilat, Israel (£1=4.14 shekels)

Checked out of the Moon Valley camp today. About to walk to Dahab City to get the bus to Taba, when one of the many Bedouin taxi-drivers homed in on us, after getting wind of our departure. Our first reaction was to shun him, as we had to do several times each day to his colleagues in the trade. However, it turned out that he was asking only E£10 each for the trip, which is 110km! We used to pay that to travel from Gateway to the Polytechnic Precinct in Sunderland. The 1½-hour taxi journey seemed a lot shorter, due to a very entertaining guy from New York. In the States he had earned $1,000 a week as a plumber in Brooklyn, but was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He told us interesting stories about his hobby, which is diving, as well as what it is like to be mugged repeatedly in New York by "fuckin' niggers". Even though he has now bought a 9mm revolver, it is only protection against a knife, he explained. We got through the Israelis' stringent customs and into Eilat ...

Zimbabwe (Z$9.05=£1)

Woke up feeling fine, but Olly seemed pretty bad. After another failure at Barclays trying to withdraw dollars, we travelled to the border at 10.00, courtesy of a resident white whom the Americans had met in a café. The Zambian side of the border was a breeze. Not so the Zimbabwean. The immigration man wasn't fooled by our far-fetched story about being able to withdraw money on our credit cards. Nor was he fooled by our onward flight booking slip from Kenya Airways in Lusaka. Basically we was a twat and he didn't want to let us in. Fortunately we had all our other tickets to hand, including our flight from Nairobi to Bombay. The sight of £2,000 worth of tickets seemed to convince him, at last, that we didn't intend to travel into Zimbabwe, get deported, and have a free flight home. Victoria Falls town was only a very short walk from the border, and one of the first things we saw was Barclays Bank. Unfortunately, it took well over an hour to authorize my visa card, but at l...

Got up at seven so as not to miss breakfast, which finished at 7.30. Not surprisingly, breakfast was crap. Africa Unity Square, Harare. In Harare we did a few errands, as Kathy and Diane would say, and caught the bus to the airport. Despite the fact that Harare is the major airport in Zimbabwe, it has just one international terminal, with only two gates. It wasn't a massive shock when we saw a notice advising us that their X-ray equipment would damage our films. Bloody stone-age stuff. The flight was a few minutes late; but, apart from that, it was fine. It lasted only 2 hours 40 minutes and we had a great view of dense forest and the Zambezi for the first part. Immigration and customs were a real breeze. The immigration official even said "How are you?", which was a bit of a contrast to how we were treated at Beitbridge. We 'phoned the YMCA to check that they had beds and then took a taxi there for 400 ksh. When we arrived we were disappointed to discover that the ...

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