Gaborone, Botswana!

Left home eaaaarly Saturday morning. Stayed up packing and watching tv. Allie drove me to the airport.
SEA > ATL
Flight time: 4h:45m slept most of the way, was probably asleep on takeoff.
Layover time: 4h:45m, walked around airport, lunched, emailed, tried not to fall asleep and miss my flight.

ATL > JNB
Flight time: 15h:20m. After boarding the flight was delayed about 1.5 hours. I had a sense something was wrong early on as the in seat video screens showed a red hat linux screen rebooting over and over. They wanted to fix the in flight entertainment for the 15+ hour flight. It was very hot and stuff while waiting. I slept most of the wait, and most of the flight too. Too bad, they probably had nearly 100 movies to choose from. Watched "Inglorious Basterds" and the first few minutes of "The Hangover". Wished I hadn't slept so much. They even had Avatar.

Layover: ~14hrs
Got to Johannesberg "Jo'berg" and through customs no problem. Quick shuttle to the Southern Sun Hotel. Nice place, checked out restaurant, was going to eat, slept, watched TV, slept, couldn't sleep, watched more TV, slept a bit, got ready for my 8:30am flight to Gaborone.

JNB > GBE
Flight time: 45m
Was asked to move to the exit row to provide assistance in case of emergency. Sure!
Humid cloudy day
Flying over Gaborone, lots of red dirt roads cutting through green brush not very far out of the city center.
Nice new terminal! Still under construction, we walked around it. :/
On the shuttle to the hotel, the driver pointed out a nice black Range Rover with blacked out plates and told us it was the President of Botswana. He often drives himself, but today he was in the passenger seat. It was surprising from a USA perspective that he didn't have a large entourage of security. There were a few cars that were probably part of an entourage but no visible police, or roadblocks, etc.
The hotel is the Botswana Sun Hotel and is very nice. Very open air. Casino and pool. I checked in and settled in the room and checked in with Jessica, the local ITECH office contact. We discussed meeting later in the afternoon and then I promptly fell asleep. :) The weather that afternoon was heavy rain and thunderstorms which are apparently unusual, especially this late in the year, plus a presentation going on that afternoon meant our meeting was postponed until Tuesday morning. I checked out the hotel a bit after the rain, and tried in vain to stay awake by watching tv and reading.

To be continued...

Tiger Cruise 2010 (draft)

Uncle Fred arrived on Saturday, went out for Thai food.
Darren arrived Sunday afternoon, went to Tutta Bella, hung out, etc
Monday, ran errands then headed over to the ship.
Took the ferry to Bremerton.
Checked in for the Tiger Cruise.
Darren took Allie, Fred and I on a tour of the ship, berthing, hangar deck, flight deck, Flag bridge, office.
Bid Allie good bye, settled down in the bunks.

Tuesday morning, got up early, ship got under way. Suprisingly nimble for such a huge ship. Stood on flight deck for a while, past Bremerton and past Seattle, past Whidby.
Tours in the Hangar bay
Deck tour (deck hands, fantail, anchor, lines)
Air/Nav tour (Flag bridge, Nav bridge, Air bridge)

Wednesday
Air show, postponed due to weather
No live ordance because of course change to avoid weather :/
Supersonic flyby!
Min radius turn

Thursday

Friday
Pulled into port in San Diego
Sailors "manned the rails" in dress blues.
big reception
Darren proposed to Kina (she said yes)
back to the apt for lunch and R&R
picked up allie in the evening

Ok... here now...

The guest apartment had some plumbing problems so now I'm down the street at the Avenida Hotel. Quite nice... That's the pool up on the roof.



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Riiiight here...

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Mozambique

Getting to Mozambique was about the same as getting to Tanzania... Left Seattle at about 1pm... was asleep before takeoff, but only for an hour or two of the 9+ hour flight. Flying Northwest Airlines which has a really nice entertainment setup with 30+ movies on demand to watch from. Landed in Amsterdam, long enough layover to look around a bit.
Next on a 10.5 hour KLM flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. Slept nearly the whole flight. Checked into the hotel at about midnight. Not much sleep, but a hot shower and up at 6am to catch the 1 hour flight on South African Airlines to Maputo.

"All electronics must be stowed for takeoff, however when the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign, you may again use your cd players, calculators, and electric razors."
Maputo Airport is tiny, the wait for a visa was looong, but all of our luggage arrived, not a mean feat I'm told!

Kona, HI - Amazing Encounter

Wednesday December 19th, 2007

So today, we went on our first Scuba dive of our Christmas vacation. On the second dive in an area known as Skull Cave I found a large but rather unremarkable cowrie. It was a but dull, and had some crackling, but it was a pretty good size so I brought it with me.

As is sometimes the case with big older shells like these, a hermit crab will take up residence in the shell after the original occupant is gone. When you pick up the shell, they scurry deep inside and it can be hard to tell if it is occupied or not. I don't need a shell more than it needs a home, so if I find out one is occupied, I'll put it back in a nice sheltered location.

One method for seeing if a shell is occupied is to put the shell, opening down, on your palm and wait a bit and see if the crab lifts the shell and starts to crawl around. This can take some time, and you have to keep pretty still. Another method I use is to carry the shell around with a finger along the opening. As long as you are holding the shell fairly gently, the crab with eventually start plucking at your finger (or glove) to figure out what is blocking it's entrance.

After swimming for a few minutes I felt the tell tale plucking of a hermit crab in the shell. I flipped it over to take a look...

What is that inside...?

IT'S AN OCTOPUS!!!

When I turned it over, thes 4 little tenticles retracted back into the shell... As I stared in amazement, this little octopus eye peeked up above the rim of the shell and looked back at me...

I gotta say, octopodes are probably my favorite underwater animal and to be holding one in a cowrie shell like that was awesome. I could have held it all day hoping he'd come out or stick some tenticles out... but alas, after showing it to my dive companions and trying to take a photo, it was time to go. I tried to find a nice secluded nook to place it back into...

Original pictures can be found here

Zanzibar Dive Pics

Zanzibar Dive Pics

Pictures

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobinwood/sets/72157603050858467/

Day 1 (Sunday)

Woke up late, had breakfast at the hotel. Took a hire car and took a little tour of the city. Went to the National museum, past the fish market and the carvers market. Drove along the ocean.

Then back to the hotel for lunch. I read by the pool for a bit, then tried to take a nap before dinner. Unfortunately the nap lasted about 10 hours. On the other hand I was plenty early for breakfast the next day.

Arrival

Arrived at the Holiday Inn, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania almost 24 hours to the minute our plane departed Seattle.

The first leg on NWA was really nice. Each seat had it's own entertainment unit with about 25 or so movies on demand. Also music and video games (bejeweled, solitare, etc). The meals were pretty nice too... I slept for a bit but mostly watched movies or read.

Amsterdam was cold and foggy when we arrived, the sun was just about to rise... Our layover was short, about 2 hrs.

The second leg on KLM to Kilimanjaro and on to Dar es Salaam wasn't quite as nice, but I slept most of the way...

We arrived in Dar at about 10:30pm and first had to get our visa's. A bit disorganized but overall probably didn't take more than 20 minutes or so. The price for a Visa went up to $100 just last week!

We had a car waiting for us to take us to the hotel about 20km away. The drive was nice... some stoplights seemed optional. Arrived at the hotel at about 11:50, got checked into my room. It's quite nice...