Wafted to Paradise

We would have liked to have done a few more 'live' posts from Egypt, but unfortunately circumstances conspired against us. Our Poddy was no use to us for blogging, as although the hotel had wi-fi, it had no method of allowing guests to use it, and the £6 per hour internet connection was so slow that we only got about 10 minutes effective use, making posting rather expensive.

We're now safely back home and able to tell you all about our Egyptian adventure. We were staying at a veritable paradise and we're almost afraid to show you some of our pictures, as we think they might make you rather envious of us, and make you want to leave cold, wet England to fly right there. But here goes, lets give you a taste of where we were staying.


This was the view from our balcony. The bay you can see was not where we sailed, it was the bay where the kite surfing took place. What a spectator sport that was!

Although it wasn't far to the beach, if we fancied cooling off before we got there, we only had to take a few steps to reach the first of the hotel's 3 pools.


Waterfalls, bridges and rock formations provided lots of interest.

But we were really there for the beach and all that goes on there in the way of watersports. As soon as we saw the blue sea, sand, palm trees, loungers and wicker parasols we knew we were going to have a good holiday ...


... and that was before we'd seen any of the boats.

Lots of love George & Yorkie xxx

It's a Very Blue Red Sea

Greetings from the land of camels, Pharaohs, sun and the Red Sea. As you can see from our first picture, the camels are quite frisky beasts and do need a firm paw. Even the locals need a bit of a hand to keep them under control.


Perhaps you have guessed that we are reporting in from Egypt, more precisely from the 5* Intercontinental hotel at Abu Soma.

We are here to make the most of our Minders' remaining sabbatical time, before they return to work, and we are doing rather more than lazing round in the Egyptian sun. This is a watersports holiday, and where better to learn to windsurf and sail, than the beautiful waters of the Red Sea. One of our minders is learning to sail and windsurf from scratch and the other is honing skills and learning how to sail cats (the twin hulled variety, not the furry kind).

There are loads of lovely boats to choose from, and here are just a few of the selection, just pulled out of the water. Being small bears we like these yellow fun boats, but we are also finding the Laser Picos lots of fun.


We're all having a wonderful time and look forward to telling you about it all in lots of detail soon.

Lots of love George & Yorkie xxx

Up and Away Again

We've been busy bears since our early return from Spain. Infact, we've hardly spent any time at all at home. We've had a lovely time visiting friends and family all over the country and enjoying some wonderful hospitality.

You know us though, it doesn't take us long to get itchy paws and we thought about how best we could use our minders' remaining sabbatical time for a new adventure and a new chapter for the Friendly Planet Guide. We made our decision and then realised that, although the bearports were still valid, one of them expired less than 6 months after the return from our planned holiday. It therefore needed renewing and quickly.

We therefore wasted no time in leaping into one of the bearmobiles and heading for the Passport Office at Peterborough. We found it in plenty of time for our appointment slot.


Thanks to the helpfulness and efficiency of the very nice staff, we were sorted in no time at all and free to look round the city of Peterborough.

We headed for the Cathedral and were very pleased to find that it wasn't locked a la Spanish style and even wanted people to come and visit. This was a notice we approved of.


We returned home to get on with trip preparations and packing.

In fact since starting to write this blog at Gatwick airport we have travelled a few thousand miles and are now at our trip destination. All we will say for now is that we are having fun getting wet in the sun.

More will be revealed soon (but perhaps not too soon with internet rates of 6 pounds stirling an hour - we're sure you'll understand).

Lots of love George & Yorkie xxx

The Not So Good Bits

We don't want to dwell on the lowlights of walking the Camino too much, but there are just a few we want to get off our chest and we are sure we will feel much better for it.

1. Our biggest bugbear, locked churches. Spain was much more of a culprit than France. It really made us growl to find, time after time, locked churches, bang on one of the world's most famous pilgrimage routes. They were even locked on Sunday.


Here was all too familiar example.

And then, on the rare occasions we did get in, we found the amount of gold and ornate decoration quite off-putting ...


... or we'd sit through a service conducted entirely in Spanish, or French, with the only words spoken in English, being a warning that non Catholics were not welcome at the Communion table ... more growls.

2. Plastic Pilgrims. Our hackles really rose when we encountered able bodied 'pilgrims' not bothering to put the effort into walking, but taking regular short cuts by bus, while pretending to be walkers. It's a good job we don't know names, but the 2 hot water bottle girls will know who they are (not that they're likely to ever read this blog). It was also disappointing to find the Le Puy route in France so busy, especially with groups of daysack walkers with full vehicle support. This put pressure on the accommodation so that it was necessary to book ahead. We didn't want to have to do this, not only because of the language difficulties, but also because we wanted the freedom to take each day as it came and stop when we were ready, rather than at a place determined in advance.

3. There were some stretches in Spain that needed a bit more scenery and something to look at other than a bit of soil. We were also not too keen on the 'sendas' (paths running alongside main roads) such as this one ...


... as we much preferred to get further away from the traffic.

4. Ipods going to sleep and not waking up. We were quite reliant on our Ipods for blogging, music, games and electronic books, so it was a real disappointment to see a screen looking like this ...


... not once, but twice, once on each Ipod. As the only solution was to reconnect to the parent computer several hundred miles away, it was very frustrating, although it was good to be able to call on the hammer treatment from Fred of the Suffolk Branch.

Thankfully, we have now loaded the software fix so hopefully, when we return to Spain to finish the walk, this problem should not occur.

And finally ... there was the rather big lowlight of not being able to finish to walk this year due to our minder's stress fracture. This was a whimper, rather than a growl, as it wasn't his fault. On the positive side it means we can all look forward to some more Camino walking before too long.

Lots of love, the Camino Bears xxx

Reflections on St James and ... Caterpillars

So far, in our highlights, we've mostly talked about things which were incidental to our pilgrimage, albeit very welcome accoutrements (we do like that word!). But after all, our walk was, first and foremost, a pilgrimage, so how was the actual pilgrimage in the highlights stakes?

We've already mentioned the pleasure we had meeting fellow pilgrims and of course, had we been able to make it to Santiago this trip, arrival at Santiago cathedral would have undoubtedly been a highlight, even though, because of swine flu, we couldn't have kissed St James' feet!

We really did like all the reminders along the way that the route we were walking was more than just another 'GR' path. Because the Camino is the way of St James, and his emblem is the scallop shell, the path was frequently adorned with scallops which came in all materials, shapes and sizes. In terms of natural scallops, we thought this wall was pretty special as it was covered in scallops, many of which had pilgrim names and messages written on to them.


As for man made scallops, we really liked these metal ones which did wonders to what would otherwise have been a rather dull path, leading into the city of Logrono.


While the scallop shell was a potent reminder of St James, there was nothing quite like seeing him in the 'flesh', or should we say nuts and bolts.


This was our favourite image of him made out of old car parts: spot his exhaust pipe staff!

I (Giovanni) was lucky enough to have my own pilgrim's passport, in which I, along with my minders collected stamps from the places we stayed along the way. It was a very special moment for me when I received my first stamp from the cathedral at Le Puy.


I was so proud to be finally officially starting this great walk, which we'd been planning for years, that I had to have a picture taken with my first stamp. By the time we stopped, I had many pages of stamps, at least one for every day of our trip, and I can hardly wait for the time when we will return to Spain to complete the walk to Santiago, as we will then be able to exchange our passports for Compostellas.

We'll be back soon, to tell you a few of the disappointments we experienced along the way - there always have to be downsides. Sorry if we've gone about this the wrong way round, as we really should be ending on a positive note.

For now, at least we can end positively with a favourite picture of ours. It doesn't belong in this post and should have been included in the last one, in the food and drink highlights section, but we forgot it. We want to include it now, as we were extremely appreciative of this special camino fuel, sent all the way from England to the French town of Condom.


We will always be very grateful to Fred's Mum for the wonderful parcel of marshmallow Colin caterpillars she posted to us. You can see from our photo how much we enjoyed them.

Back soon, love from the Camino bears xxx

Camino Highlights Part 2

We could extol the virtues of the Camino for hours, but the rest of the Norfolk branch say we must be succinct, and that highlights does mean the best bits. Bearing this in mind let us continue.

In this post we want to include some of the quirky aspects of the trip, but first we simply must mention food and drink.

Rarely have we eaten so well and enjoyed such good wine and beer. Unfortunately most of the time we were too busy eating to think about taking photos, so have little photographic evidence. It is strange that, although we would say we dined better in France, two of our highlight pictures belong to Spain.


The first we have mentioned previously, and it is the Irache wine fountain. Free wine and fine tasting wine, not some inferior plonk - what more is there to say, except that we loved it. Thank you Bodegas Irache.


But, as our second picture shows, we did drink things other than wine. We all loved big steaming glasses of cafe con leche. Gio drank it as often as he could, but Yorkie and I liked to slip in an occasional Spanish brandy.

We turn now to artwork along the way. Even though we passed through some wonderful scenery, we were always excited when we came across a new installation. Here are some of our favourites ...


Ermintrude was no ordinary cow on the Aubrac plateau. When you pulled her tail, she nodded her head. We tried not to do it too much in case it annoyed her, but it was irresistible.


We had great fun being part of this pilgrimage montage on the top of windmill hill, more properly known as Alto de Perdon. There were some huge wind turbines turning quite close to us, which tells you we had climbed to a high point and it was windy.

We're not normally city bears, preferring the big outdoors instead, but we did enjoy Pamplona, especially taking part in our very own enactment of the bull run.


You would all have been very proud of us. We sat, as cool as cucumbers, just inches from those thundering hooves and we didn't flinch at all!

Back soon, as once again this post is going on far too long.

Love from the Camino Bears xxx

Our Camino Highlights

Our walk along the Camino was our trip of a liftime, and before the memories fade too much, we want to share some of the highlights with you all.

1. At the top of the list is the wonderful new friends we made. All the lovely encounters we enjoyed made the pilgrimage so much more than an ordinary walk. Despite all our cultural and language differences, our shared identity as pilgrims, gave us so much in common and broke across all the barriers.


Here is Luc from Belgium, one of our special friends, who we hope to see on one of his frequent visits to England.

2. We will always remember some of the marvellous accommodation we stayed in.

One of our favourites in France was the gite Montalibet in a small village called Lichos.


It was a lovely old stone building and was owned by some special people who invited us to use their swimming pool and sun loungers and gave us aperitifs and a superb meal. We then retired to bed on a characterful mezzanine floor.

In Spain we thought the albergue at Boadilla was rather special. We could see why it was called 'Shangrila' in Travels with my Donkey'.


The accommodation was in the grounds of some former farm buildings and many historical features had been retained including a pair of threshing sledges. The grounds were simply delightful as you can see from our pictures and our host was a charming Spaniard who was great fun.



3. We enjoyed walking through some wonderful scenery, especially in France.


We loved the alpine scery and the Aubrac plaeau which reminded us quite a lot of Derbyshire.

4. We passed through some delightful villages with some great photogenic qualities. Two of the finest were Espallion ...


... and Estaing ...


It was a shame we passed through these 2 places briefly and weren't able to stay. Of course the sunshine and the blue sky might have coloured our view.

It's becoming apparent to us that we have far too many highlights to fit into one post, so we'll break here and bring you part two soon.

Lots of love, the Camino bears xxx