Hola KJ - back in Madrid! What a busy week did I have... returned from Crete to Germany and enjoyed mama's cooking for a few days before spending a fun night with my high school gang - class reunion after 16 years. Quite a surprise to hear the life stories of some of them, and funny to note that most girls were quickly turning into big breeders while most guys are still clinging to the life in the fast lane. Another great train ride followed aboard a tilt-technology ICE-T through many Germain mountain areas to Munich, where I obviously had few other reasons for being than the Oktoberfest. A quick side trip to Salzburg in Austria, and then it was again off to Madrid to put the icing on top of my round-the-world cake. For all of you in the know - I did get my new passport and I also managed to finally get my new US visas today... woohoo! Sunday it's back to California for my next round of dishwasher-to-millionaire attempts.

Once again, Kalimera - this time from the island of Crete. After my last post I did manage to get to Istanbul in Turkey, which is quite an amazing place for religious architecture, intercontinental river cruises, and fake designer goods on 1,000s of bazaars throughout the city. As I am not too impressed by all things churches and mosques etc. I took the overnight bus two days later to get via Izmir to Bodrum, only to catch a ferry to the Dodecanese islands of Greece. Yeah!!! My favorite past-time.. island-hopping in the land of Homer & Co. This year, I started on Kos, where I visited the ancient Asklipieion of Hippocrates, first hospital in the world and birthplace of modern medicine. Some beach time, then on to Rhodes to wander around this amazing old town of cobblestone alleys and medieval fortresses. I also made it to the touristy Akropolis of Lindos and the southern beaches of Gennadi, where I could finally escape the relentless crowds. A ferry at ungodly morning hours took me to Karpathos, half-way towards Crete. Climbing around the old village of Olymbos is nothing short of spectacular, with its isolated people and their strange customs providing the real traveling experience away from the beaten paths. Another beach-only day at Amoopi before I hopped on the next ferry to Sitia, Crete's easternmost port. More beachtime at the famous palm tree forest of Vai in the far east, then a day in Agios Nikolaos. I arrived at Iraklio today, main city of the island, and after all that island solitude this is quite the civilization shock here, with thousands of stupid tourists causing prices to be more than twice as high as in the rest of the Aegaean Sea. Nevertheless, I did venture to the Palace of Knossos and must say that, after having seen the likes of Pompeji and Herculaneum in Italy, I was quite disappointed. Anyway, more beach time tomorrow and on Monday it's back to Germany for a few days!

Kalimera Froggie - puh, the Olympics are over! I guess you knew that but here's the really good news: I am on the road again!!! I finally managed to escape computer slavery (talk about tuning a web site!) and armchair sports (thanks to EuroSport), so I made my way via Budapest (by plane) to Bucarest (nice couchette overnight train, the old style). Romania's capital is an impressive mix of huge tree-lined avenues and Ceaucescu-era monstrous communist buildings, none more overwhelming than the Palace of the People, the second-largest building in the world. A sweet first-class IC ride to Constanta and a bus ride later I found myself on the coast of the Black Sea in Neptun-Olimp, one of the old communist-era beach resorts with lots of concrete and not a lot of people these days. I chose the land border crossing to Bulgaria via Vama Veche, which forced me to hike for 6 kilometers (with backpack!) to the next village of Durankulak, before there was bus service to Golden Sands available. Boy, did I enjoy the beach time even more! Countless hotels hidden in a forest along the hills of the long beach, with endless bars and club options day and night. The nearby city of Varna was quite pretty, with many shady boulevards and a large center with mostly pedestrian-only streets. Now I am north of Burgas on Bulgaria's Sunshine Coast in the medieval town of Nessebar. Very touristy but rightfully so - basically an open-air museum of a small town perched on a rocky cliff island just offshore. On the way to Istanbul now, here I will arrive by overnight train (I love those!) on Sunday morning. More planning info on http://www.matthiasworldwide.com

Moin Moin Frosch - finally, signs of life from the travel front. After nearly three weeks in Germany the bug bit me quite hard today, so I succumbed aaaaand... bought airline tickets, yeah! I will go on a little 3-week power trip of the Black Sea from Constanta to Varna and on to Istanbul in Turkey, before crossing down to Izmir and the Dodecanese islands of Greece. From Rhodes I will jet-cat-over to Crete, from where I will return in time for my class reunion on September 25. Two days Berlin before and two days Munich Oktoberfest after... perfectly planned, considering it will be rounded off with a three-day weekend in Madrid before jetting back to the States. Meanwhile, I have spent way too much time fumbling around with my old/new web site, which is supposed to go back online any day now. You will like it - tons of pictures! I'll keep you posted...

Grüezi Frosch - Sorry for the 2-week hiatus since I wrote my last message. The embassy dealings in Madrid provided me with yet another unsuspected twist to my travel planning, in more than one way. Left the city very quickly for a beautiful day in London, where I finally managed to take the BA Eye for a spin and walked around all day. Quite a change from my time there almost 10 years ago! Not half as boring, the people dress really cool these days, and you can even get good food, drinkable coffee and cold beer now. Continued that same evening to Iceland to be greeted by Reykjavik's weird midnight sun. Amazingly beautiful, amazingly expensive - I think that's what sums it up best when visiting the island for the first time. Went for a dip in the Blue Lagoon, of course, and started my explorations on the Golden Circle, which took in the ancient Thingvellir assembly site of Viking ages, the thundering Gullfoss waterfalls, and the famous Strokkur and Geysir hot springs. Then I just had to do it - circling the entire island following the over 1400 kilometers long Highway 1: The roaring Skogafoss waterfalls, the colorful fishing village of Vik, the Skaftafell glaciar tip at the Vatnajökull cap of eternal ice, the quiet village of Höfn with its picturesque harbor, the rough ride tracing the eastern fjords to sunny Egilsstadir, the tiring treck across the vast lunar-like volcanic ash highlands of the northeast, and finally reaching much-hyped Akureyri and the wonderland of Lake Myvatn. Bubbling mud pots and steaming hot springs are everywhere, not to mention volcano craters and freaky lava formations along this meeting point of the European and American tectonic plates. Finally returned to Reykjavik for another night of the infamous runtur, a midnight sun pub crawl by every young and fashionable soul of the nation's capital that one has to see to believe. I wouldn't be myself if I didn't top this little adventure on site: I flew to Greenland! Breathtaking floating iceberg fields and inhospitable sleet greet you upon arrival at Kulusuk, a Cold War-era dirt landing strip for the north Atlantic and Arctic radar surveillance station. I hopped aboard a helicopter and was in for the ride of my life through some pretty nasty weather to reach Angmagssalik, something of a Garden Eden for East Greenlanders, which they call Tasiilaq. Hardly a soul lives there and I stayed at the only place you could call a hotel, right at the huge Intelsat satellite relay station atop the bay there. The howling of huskies is what will stick with you forever... the call of the wild. Went aboard an old fishing vessel to see the monstrous floating icebergs up close - if the icy wet winds don't give you the chills, the sight of the deadly blue ice that forms part of the iceberg under the water surface sure will; quite a Titanic moment. Hiked out into the Valley of the Flowers, a glaciar drainage area where some miniscule flowerlike things battle the elements next to lakes and waterfalls. And always the huskies... howling everywhere, untamed and wild, yet harnessed to pull big sleighs. It was time to return into the highlife of Reykjavik! One more night there on the runtur, then back via London to Berlin, where I am currently enjoying Mama's cooking for a few days. Still thinking about what to do next but, no worries, I will come up with something!

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!

Jambosana... glad to be back, dearest of all frogs. I can't even begin to describe what these past two weeks have been like, overland-trucking my way to see the mountain gorillas, of whom only 600 or so remain on this world, all of them in the civil war border triangle of the D.R. Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Uganda. Most of it will have to wait until my website is up and running again, complete with picture accounts of some of the most incredible days spent during the past year. Montain gorillas are probably the most magical thing you will ever see in your lifetime, the final reward after 1500km of rough trucking on dirt roads, countless hours spent fighting corruption at land border crossings and bribing greenbacks to grinning and gun-carrying bureaucrats, and a day like no other you will ever experience - several hours of a triumphant ride on the bed of a pick-up truck, looking in amazement at peace-starved villages in Zaire with the most incredibly happy people running out of their mud homes to wave at you and jump up and down like it's the final stage of the Tour de France. To top it off, an exhausting final 4 hours of jungle climbing await, not to mention at higher altitudes with the weather changing from hottest and extremely humid air to ice-cold mountain winds and torrential rainfalls. Two machete guys were attempting to clear the non-existent path, one guide ranger explained stuff in broken French, and 9 Kalashnikov and AK47-equipped soldiers tried to watch out for poachers and guerilla fighters... in a nutshell, just another day in a civil war area, which it has been for decades. The reward is an emotionally overpowering encounter with a family of gorilla gorilla beringei - some moments in life are unforgettable, and the first sight of a silverback in his jungle is one of them. We watched a mother carry around her big youngster, were thrilled to hear the silverback mate with some of his girls several times, loudly hammering his chest after every round, and we fended off curious attempts to have cameras stolen by an inquisitive younger male. The moment the silverback turned his attention on us made us freeze with fright and sheer amazement - an unbelievably dominant and huge animal to face, yet so peaceful, almost sensing the close bond of sharing virtually our entire DNA. He approached so closely that we could have touched him, making it hard to take pictures (no worries - I got some awesome shots). We tracked the group for about one hour until we had to retreat and embarked on our return treck. Not knowing something is bliss, as they say, and we got our dose of this - while there, Congolese guerilla rebels invaded our basecamp village Kisoro in Uganda. They were fought by UCPF militias, who killed three of them and pushed the rest of them back across the border. At the same time, we later learned from newspapers, two former Congo generals fled with 305 rebel soldiers into Uganda and were subsequently pushed south into Rwanda, which temporarily closed all borders the day we arrived back. We continued on to heavenly Lake Bunyonyi and its islands with pygmy people, where we relaxed for a day before heading to Kampala and Jinja, the source of the nile. On the way, I visited the Chimpanzee Sanctuary on Ngamba Island on Lake Victoria, almost two hours by boat from Entebbe. If faces could talk... these wonderful critters have a hillarious human-like behavior (or was that the other way around?) and an impressive range of facial expressions. What a peaceful two days were the last ones, in comparison to everything else - Lake Nakuru in Kenya, with more pelicans, flamingos, rhinos and all other sorts of stuff in one spot than you can imagine. A big mirror-like soda lake saved by the 1997 El Nino rains, with beautiful camping in a forest of acacia trees, this national park should be on everyone's list of things to do. Crossing south into Tanzania to Arusha tomorrow, but not before enjoying the Saturday night feast served up by Carnivores, easily the most spectacular restaurant in Nairobi. If zebra, kudu and all other sorts of game meats are your thing, this is the place to be - vegetarians need not apply. Next week will see the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti National Park with its famous wildebeast migration, as well as the trip to Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar - Spice Islands, here I come!