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A Definition...

March 27, 2011

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...of an Eritrean Car Park!

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Chep Lap Kok Airport

This is a continuation of my diary from my RTW trip from November 2003. On arrival in Hong Kong I really felt for the very first time that I’d arrived in the 21st century! Maybe after 5 weeks in South Asia, I would have felt like that landing anywhere. Arrival at Chep Lap Kok is something special though. You step off the plane and are whisked along on 200m long travel-ators, up 150m long escalators and glide with speed aboard smooth, efficient monorails. It is like the vision of the future I was sold as a kid… all I was waiting for was a hover car or two to go past. Everywhere are state of the art diamond plasma screens, brushed steel and thermal monitors letting you know whether you or your fellow travellers have SARS or not. God help you if the thermal imager shows you any colour other than green! The masked nurses who were lurking around doing a visual check as to how sweaty we all were looked pretty brutal! The scale of the place is just huge too. It all makes the arrival feel calm...

EPEBAH means Yerevan

St Cyril has a lot to answer for. E when it is not preceded by a consonant is Ye P is R E when preceded by a consonant is E B is V A is A H is N EPEBAH is Yerevan... And this is the Martrushka that would take us to country 82: Armenia. Martrushkas are an interesting way of organising transport. They do not run to a timetable but go when they are full. LP said that five a day run from Tbilisi to Yerevan and that they went roughly on the hour from 8am til midday. Thankfully we ignored their advice and arrived at quarter to 8am to find the first Martrushka was full and the second (and last) one would leave at 8:30. As the trains were all sold out with Armenians returning from their holidays on the Georgian coast, this would have been a truly nasty surprise.

Hammam in Baku

While I’m on a roll I’ll cover the hammam I visited in Baku in Azerbaijan. This was the first hammam that I had ever visited. I was curious and interested to find out what the fuss was all about. The hammam in this picture is the hammam in the Old Town buy the Maiden's Tower which is not in use any more... But it is at least authentically an Azeri hammam! What did the LP say about it first? The hammam we found wasn’t in the LP guide. The ‘Aga Mikail Hammam’ was pinpointed on the map of the Old City. In finding the building, it seemed to be a former Palace hammam, turned into a number of different apothecary outlets. Easy to find? One day we saw a big blue sign with yellow writing saying ‘hammam’. I think it is the corner of the turn of Quliyev Kuc on the Eastern point of the Old City Easy to enter? Western tourists seemed to be a fascinating and unusual diversion from the norm. However an guy who seemed to be the owner had some English and managed to tell us the price for t...

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