Tokyo, noodles and a giant golden thing

12 noon Wed Oct 24: Thanks for emails guys, great to hear your news. It`s a nice autumn day in Tokyo, about 22C in the sunshine and a lovely fresh breeze. Arrived on Sunday night and staying in a very homey but extremely small hostel with even smaller rooms and door frames (Mandar the giraffe would have bruises on the upper third of his body), near a kind of bizarre golden giant sperm perched on top of a flashy black building which is actually Asahi beer`s HQ.
Currently trying to burn pics to CD using Japanese-only instructions...a task which would test the mental dexterity of Mandar, Einstein, Stephen Hawking and numerous other clever people combined. It says squiggle...squiggle...squiggle if anyone knows what that means?
Had two days of neon lights, enormous skyscrapers, nice autumn colours and super-cool fashion stores which had Nati doing somersaults, and enough noodles to last a lifetime.
Been in brilliant but very busy cities for a fortnight - Cairo, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo - so now leaving mankind behind and heading for some space near the colossal Mount Fuji. My uni friend Andy and I actually climbed it when we were travelling here three years ago...but it's far too dangerous to climb outside summer unless you're Sir Edmund Hillary. So Nati and I are gonna admire from nearby in the superbly-named Kawaguchi-ko, before heading on to temple-and-monkey heaven Kyoto and a interesting-sounding large island nearby with ocean whirlpools, kayaking (don't worry Mum, not too nearby), vine ravine bridges, monster waves on a big headland and a white-sand beach with palm trees.
Might get the bullet shinkansen train once as very pricey (some things in Japan are double the England cost, others less) and then hop on buses.
One fantastic piece of news is that Japan is crazy about techno. Some of you might know that's right up my street...and even sweet Nati likes a bit of bass now! So back in Tokyo on Nov 3 to hit Layo-and-Bushwacka favourite Womb or another big techno club with a nice Japanese girl we met and some of her mates, before Bali and Indonesia.
Hope you enjoyed this blog...trying to give a flavour of our trip. Thanks for reading - drop us an email to say hi if you'd like to.
Sayonara!
Ali

Trance lessons, forest of skyscrapers, toilet brushes and fake DVDs

2.30am Sat Oct 20: I'm in a Hong Kong internet cafe where it is perfectly acceptable to blast out internet music on high-quality Creative speakers at extreme volume - so right now I'm giving the neighbourhood a pumping trance lesson with assistance from the awesome http://www.di.fm/. It's going off! I'm in a doubly-great mood as I've just knocked back an amzing mango juice-jelly-ice-cream combination...superlatives cannot do it justice.
HK is a brilliant city - a forest of skyscrapers, harbour to rival Sydney and very busy, pretty fashionable and about 2/3 the price of England. Had a couple of jaw-dropping jogs past Tai Chi hot-spot Victoria Park and along the promenade.
Stumbled across the hostel I stayed in here three years ago when travelling with Andy Worden (the really thin guy from my uni); hostel is smack bang in the middle of the action and nice apart from rather bizarrely having a used toilet brush on the kitchen sideboard. The Peak is the famous mountain overlooking the city and it's a really staggering view on the few days it's not cloudy.
Picked up a great portable DVD player in Bangkok plus 16 top-quality #1.30 DVDs...so Nati's loving that...thank God I managed to persuade her not to buy the entire 35-DVD Sex and the City back catalogue.
Been away a month now but feels like three or four months. Really loving travelling. Seen a lot already with Verona, Venice, day in Madrid, Egypt, five days in Bangkok and HK...going to Japan on Sunday after a hopefully-epic Saturday night featuring one of HK's best club's house music launch night followed by 3am RWC final (we're seven hours ahead of UK).
Thanks for emails to Nati and I - we both love hearing from family and friends. Drop us a line to say hi and let us know how things are in England/Peru/Israel/Anglesey!/elsewhere.
Take care and thanks for reading.
Ali

4.30pm Sunday October 14. It's absolutely throwing it down in Bangkok, which is so humid it's impossible to dry clothes. Have just slept off my hangover after watching England's amazing rugby win (2am kick-off here), and now going shopping so Nati's very happy! Thought we'd add a pic from Venice so it should be above.
Hope you all enjoyed the rugby, unless you happen to be French!
Take care
Ali and Nati

Pyramids, habiscus tea, police checkpoints and a beer drought

8.45am Wednesday October 10. Our dilapidated bus is leaving Egypt's Gulf of Aqaba (across the water from Saudi Arabia) and swinging inland through the foothills of Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Arabic easy-listening music is easing our passage to Cairo, as it will do for the next nine hours.
Nati and I have spent an enthralling 17 days exploring Egypt and learnt that this country, 90% desert and 10% Nile Valley, is a fusion of new and old, rich and poor, easy and frustrating.
We caught the tube to the Pyramids; drank habiscus tea in a wood-pannelled bar on a five-star cruise down the Nile; snorkelled world-class coral and fish in the Red Sea before savouring a smorgasboard of seafood in chilled-out divers' haven Dahab; and stumbled across a funky house pool party at an outdoor bar with stupifing flame dancer, far eclipsing any flame dancer I've seen in Thailand.
But we also saw thousands of bony donkeys and horses carting around everything from dates to building materials and tourists; fought erratic phones and undecpipherable Arabic to contact the airline that cancelled our flights; and washed under (sometimes salty) showers ranging in power from nothing to Niagara, made more bizarre by uncontrollable shower-heads swinging from side to side and soaking the entire bathroom. We were also kicked off a bus after four passengers were bundled into a police van at a one of many checkpoints, a legacy of a succession of terrorist bombs targetting tourists in the last decade...although the drama of our situation was reduced by policemen's pjyama-style uniforms that made them look like the Egyptian judo team.
We had some great Arabic experiences - meeting Mustapha, Mahmood and Abdul (all on our first day, and all who looked surprised when I said Ali was actually an English name); suffering a beer and food drought (our visit coincided perfectly with Ramadan, Muslims' month of fasting); and receiving an offer of 100 camels for Nati. I declined, insisting on 200 minimum.
Egypt is great fun, which is why 8million tourists flood here every year, although most of them ae on uncomprehensible race-round-a-temple-and-be-back-on-coach/boat-in-30-mins tours, or trips to Sharm El-Sheikh, the least Egyptian town in Egypt and, strangely, absolutely rammed with Russians.
We took a little more time and had some fantastic and fortunate solo experiences. We bartered for a camel ride to a desert viewpoint as the Pyramids closed and were lucky enough to walk back through the monumental complex alone before sunset, with just the Sphinx for company.
At the Valley of the Kings, a gap in the tour group/cattle-driving frenzy allowed just the two of us to stare at the sarcophagus of Tutankahmuan, on the spot where Howard Carter opened his tomb to spark Egyptomania and the curse scare story (journalists!) in 1922.
We also gawped at Ramses the Great's phenomenal Abu Simbel temple 25 miles from Sudan, and met the great man, sorry, mummy, himself in the antiquity-packed Egyptian museum, along with King Tut's gold death mask.
Suffering, as all visitors do, from Pharonic fatigue, we headed for the Rea Sea, snorkelling and dodging barracudas at the awesome 110-metre deep Blue Hole and finishing our trip yesterday with a quad-bike blast to a desert canyon and absolutely shimmering Red Sea lagoon.
If you made it this far, we hope you enjoyed our update and thanks for reading. We hope you're well wherever you are. We actually had four days in Verona (Juliet's balcony of Romeo fame) and Venice (every bit as spectacular as you could hope) before Egypt, and we'll update you again from SE Asia.
I'm going for a big Leo beer now before watching the rugby, Ali.