A cornucopia of choice – Gibbston Winery offers wine tasting, a cheesery with samples, a restaurant and wine cave tours in the heart of New Zealand's Central Otago wine region. It was the end of a long day of wine tasting.  (Feeling sorry for us, yet? )  We were de

In old age people tend to forget things.  And so it is that here at www.IanAndWendy.com we suddenly woke up and realized we had missed our tenth birthday!  That’s right – August 31st 2009 marked TEN WHOLE YEARS of www.IanAndWendy.com! So, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of www

Walking through the streets of the old city of Akko. In Haifa we stayed at the Port Inn – fantastic location, and a super clean hotel.  Yesterday we explored Akko in the morning – it’s an old city just to the north of Haifa.  It is on a peninsula in the Med

The wall that separates the West Bank from the rest of Israel. Well, yesterday we were quite busy. We went to Bethlehem first thing in the morning. We took a bus to the infamous wall and then walked through and then took a cab the 2 km (mile and a half) into town because we are lazy a

  We rented what passed for bikes, and biked around the island for the day. It's only 18km around. Since every hotel was full of the crew for Survivor, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves.  We toured the island by bicycle – and saw no other tourists. There ar

Horseback Riding We did a 2 hour horseback riding trip with Ranch Opunohu Valley.  It cost $55 apiece, and was definitely worth it.  Our guide picked us up from our hotel exactly on time, and 15 minutes later we were on horseback for a guided tour of the interior of the isla

Edfu Temple on the Nile River Edfu was our first stop as we made our way south towards Aswan. Here was where we met our new guide. He spoke English better than our first guide, but overall was not much more competent then the first guide. The temple is located at some distance from th

Abu Simbel Early the next morning, we left for Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel borders Sudan, and there is heavy security. Tourists from Aswan are forced to join an early morning motor convoy to the site, several sleepy hours away. All manner of tour buses jostle for position as they race to t

Life along the Nile River. Kom Ombo to Aswan isn’t a very long trip. At this point, we’d had it with our tour guide. We were supposed to be taken to the Unfinished Obelisk, the High Dam, and Philae Temple. However, these three things could be easily combined with a trip to

Vaguely re-assured, we headed out that evening by ourselves to the Karnak Temple sound and light show. There are various shows throughout the evening in various languages – although to be honest, the language was sort of irrelevant. As is typical for sound and light shows, the n