Hola Sr. Frog!  Back in my beloved Madrid... what a sane and civilized place after my whirlwind tour of the Near East.  After taking off from Tel Aviv I first decided to head straight to Ein Gedi on the western shores of the Dead Sea.  Now that is one thrilling experience - 52 degrees Celsius (126 degrees Fahrenheit) in the afternoon, 412 meters below sea level, and to describe the water merely as salty wouldn't do it justice.  It creates so much buoyancy that it is extremely difficult to keep your "lower" parts under water - when you do manage then about everything upwards from the middle of your chest still sticks out of the water and any attempt to sink lower makes you bounce as if jumping on a trampolin.  The heat both inside and outside of the water was painful, though, so I made my way back across the Judean Desert to Jerusalem.  Wandering the streets of the Old City was very impressive, even though the whole religious thing doesn't do anything for me, as you know.  I visited the halls of The Last Supper, took a peak at the Sleeping Maria Magdalena, and went to the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) to watch Jews in their frantic head-banging prayer activities there.  Afterwards, I haggled with some Arabs close to the Via Dolorosa and eventually purchased an awesome sheesha made by Bedouines living between the ancient Jericho and the Jordan river.  Party back in Tel Aviv that night, with an early morning departure to the Gaza strip (sorry, of course I couldn't tell anybody before I went).  Made it past the first military checkpoint and hooked up with a camera team trailing UNHCR personnel on a trip to the Jabahlya refugee camp.  My pre-registration hadn't gone through in time, though, so the inside military post suggested I better not continue, as there had been a new wave of violence since the night before due to the PM's resignation and Arafat's latest act of nepotism when appointing the new security forces chief in Gaza City.  Well, I don't like to turn around after having made it that far but my smart brain got the better arguments over my traveling heart, so I exited via the Eisra checkpoint and kicked my car as hard as I could on the way south.  Five hours later I was in no-man's-land between Israel and Jordan, probably the loneliest border crossing I have ever witnessed.  Spent the hot afternoon hours (well, "only" about 44 degrees Celsius, or about 111 degrees Fahrenheit) in Aqaba, the seaside port town and special economic zone on the Gulf of Aqaba.  The ice-cream sorbet shake I've had at the Moewenpick Resort was probably the best piece of cool stuff in my life, even though they skin you alive - a large 2-liter bottle of water runs about US$11, and the winds are so hot with virtually no humidity that I drank 5 of these bottles in a 4-hour span and still got so dehydrated that I never had to go pee even once!!!  Back in Israel (oh yeah, talk about a slightly more involved border crossing!) I enjoyed the evening and nightlife of Eilat, basically a hotel resort town with a few beaches where half of Israel's youth seems to congregate between July and August.  Next morning I continued my border crossing assaults by venturing via Taba into the Sinai peninsula of Egypt - why people want to go there is beyond me as the landscape is an extremely barren mountainous rock desert with nothing to offer beyond its hotels.  I cruised down the coast to Nuweiba and enjoyed a few quiet hours in El Tabarin before returning all the way to Tel Aviv that night, where I was fortunate enough to meet up with an old friend from New Zealand, who showed me around Yafo (Jaffa) and the beaches at night time.  To give you that final experience for Israel, if you needed one, the Ben Gurion international airport has some of the most acribic security checks in place:  I arrived just after 2 o'clock in the morning and barely managed to get onto my flight, which left at 6:45!  Every single piece of my luggage content was separately swiped for explosives and drugs, I was interviewed by standard security and Mossad folks four times, and still I wasn't as annoyed as when at US airports... it somehow seemed to work much better and it really seemed to find everything and then some.  Arriving in Madrid was quite a relief, to say the least, and I relaxed for the weekend at the swimming pools of the city.  The embassy dealings I've had here would fill another book so I'll skip those for now... long story short, everything is approved but I can't get actual visas into my passport until 10 days before the trip, which effectively requires yet another trip to Madrid in September.  For now, however, it will be some cooling-down time in Iceland and Greenland starting on Thursday.

Shalom KJ - greetings from Tel Aviv (Jaffa), where I finally arrived yesterday morning after a 2-day odyssey from Zanzibar via Dar es Salaam and London. Puked worse than a sick puppy on the hydrofoil from Stone Town to Dar in heavy seas, adventured with crazy cabbies through the streets of Dar at night in search of an available hotel bed, slept through most of my long flight to Heathrow, which was its usual ugly self except for my six hours in the lounge, waited in the airplane for three hours on the ground (at midnight) only to be told of a necessary complete change of aircraft due to some crazy flaps control computer, and got stuck at Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv thanks to arriving in the morning hours of Shabath. Oh well! There goes all the rest+relax accumulated on Zanzibar, which was quite a beautiful island to spend much more time on one day. This morning I awoke to a bomb explosion at one of the busiest central bus stations in town - welcome to the real Israel! The city is surprisingly green, young, and very much alive despite all the things CNN tries to tell you. Endless beaches right downtown, a fancy mix of old and new, and a welcome 1st-World experience after almost three months of criss-crossing through Africa. Tomorrow on to Jerusalem and maybe Ramallah, depending on the security situation, then back to TLV and on Friday home to Madrid for a week or two.

Yowza Junior - one more thing: Return to California planned for October 3rd, 2004.

Heya KJ - back in Arusha after cruising for three days through Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Wildlife viewing was as expected - spectacular, to say the least. Spotted cheetahs on the lookout for prey, countless zebras and wildebeasts on the wide-open plains, lots of impalas and tomson's gazelles all over the place, and majestic lions up close, not to mention the usual fare of giraffes, elephants and hippos. The night atop the crater rim was freezing cold and spent inside mystic (and misty) clouds but the early-morning descent into the caldera, at 20 kilometers diameter one of the world's largest, more than made up for it: Thousands of stampeding wildebeasts in search of fresh grass, beautiful flamingos and pelicans on the salt shores of the crater's biggest lake, rhinos and hippos enjoying the frigid water ponds, spotted hyenas lazing in the sunshine, elephants and vervet monkeys at picnic sites looking like sets from Jurassic Park, and of course the cheetahs and lions everybody was asking for. Next via Pangani to Dar es Salaam and the Spice Islands of Zanzibar!