Traveling, Sleeping, Eating

I wanted to write a bit about how we travel, what we do and what we don’t do. What works well and what doesn’t. We’ve now traveled quite a few countries and learned quite a bit. So here goes.

Camping

The advantages of camping are several, it’s cheap (free actually) but the best is probably that it gets you species. Usually we try to camp on the spot for one or several birds. A good example is the Golden Nightjar spot in Western Sahara. Camping lets us be on the spot late in the evening, and then also waking up on the spot early is obviously good. We’re carrying a 3 person dome tent as well as cooking gear. The stove we use is a Primus multi fuel stove that runs on petrol as well as on diesel. Petrol and diesel are easy to buy everywhere. The dish we have settled on we have nick named Golden Rice, since the first time we cooked it was at the Golden Nightjar spot. The ingredients vary, but it’s basically rice, tomatoes, onions, chilli powder and whatever. If sausages are available they go in too. Fry everything, add rice and water – boil – eat. Everything in one casserole.

We’re also  traveling with sleeping bags and sleeping mattresses. All this is pretty bulky, and almost one entire bag is full of camping gear. It’s worth it though, especially since it makes us much more flexible. When driving, we know that we have the camping gear, thus there is almost never any panic as to where we shall sleep, we can always choose to set up the tent somewhere in the dark.

Internet

So far we have managed to have proper internet in all countries we have visited. We have a low-end Android phone, and we buy new SIM cards in the countries we visit. This can sometimes be a bit of a hazzle, but usually works fine. The low-end phone has the local SIM card, and then we use WIFI tethering on that phone to share internet to our regular phones and laptops. We consume almost 1 Gig per day. Internet is cheap though, especially so in countries like Morocco and Egypt. It’s invaluable to have Internet on the road. It makes things like eBird research and hotel bookings just so much easier. Prior to the year – while researching which birds are where, we did enter a lot of eBird/observado GPS points into a shared “Google My Maps”. From there it’s possible to export a KML file, which can be imported into an (Android only) map app called Locus. Thus, even without internet, we would have access to offline maps with GPS points for the important birds. So far we haven’t used the Locus Map that much since we have had proper Internet.

Hotels

Usually we sleep in hotels or sometimes in apartments. We use the booking.com app or sometimes just the regular hotel search on google maps. This has worked very well. We usually try to make the bookings as late as possible en route in the car. We don’t want to be tied up by hotel bookings, it’s better to focus on the birding tactics and late in the afternoon decide where to sleep. Flexibility is key. Prices of hotels are very different and sometimes it can be ridiculously cheep. Especially in Egypt, we have had a few full board hotels for as little as 10 Euro / night for the three of us. It’s probably subsidised by the Egyptian government.

Customs, police and checkpoints

Countries like Morocco and Egypt have checkpoints on the roads pretty much everywhere. Especially the Moroccan ones were irritating since each stop could take up to 10 minutes with police men writing down the details from our passports. A good trick is to have ready made copies of your passports that can just be handed out to the police at a checkpoint. In Egypt the checkpoints are military, not police, and pretty relaxed.

In Morocco we developed the ultimate checkpoint tactics. Here goes – read this and use for the remainder of your lives. When driving in to a police checkpoint you must never ever, under no circumstances have any eye contact with the officer standing there making the split-second decision weather to stop the car or let it through. That’s it, and it works unbelievable well. Since we started to employ this tactics, our checkpoint track record is stellar.

Customs and Airport Security is a harder nut to crack. In Rabat, Morocco we had our cameras and scopes confiscated by the customs. There the story was that we needed a permit from the “Ministry of Communications” in order to travel the country and photograph. We think they were just generally afraid of journalists, especially journalists travelling south into Western Sahara. We were able to get the damned permit, but it took the best part of a day to get it. However, the trick when flying with optics into Morocco is easy, just don’t fly to Rabat, choose Casablanca or Marrakech where they are more accustomed to tourists and optics are fine there in the customs. On our second trip to Morocco, we flew to Casablanca. The customs inspected our optics and there were no problems.

Egypt is a different story altogether though. In short – it appears to be a random process. Some birders get optics through customs, some don’t. We had almost all our optics, including the binoculars confiscated at customs. We’re not the only ones, others have had similar bad experiences with Egyptian customs. This situation is so bad, and random, so until this changes we cannot recommend Egypt as a birding destination at all. Unless you’re desperate for those (pretty awesome) WP ticks, choose another country. If you do go to Egypt, put all optics into the checked in luggage. If possible, choose a camera lens that is smaller. We have Cannon 100-400/5.6 lenses and those went through.

This is something for Birdlife International to work on. Egypt is a fantastic birding country, and it would be a shame if birdwatching tourism died out due to idiotic rules.

Music

We spend a lot of time driving. Offline music in the car is extremely important. These are some of our offline Spotify lists. Enjoy.

Pet Sounds Stefan from the hipster record store in Stockholm.

Lennart Persson a collection of what now deceased music critic Lennart Persson wrote about

Klackes Songs

Leon Hennings our friend Leon has impeccable taste in music, these are his most listened to songs last year.