Haha, anyways. I was asked to photograph “The Backstreet Boys” and I was not sure what to say. I thought they were all dead honestly. Anyways, I decided to give it a go for kicks. I only stayed for the first two songs, and I couldn’t stand the screaming girls (and a few guys). Anyways, here are some photos of the famed Backstreet Boys playing at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston.
We’re finally home from our epic trip around the world. It was great and we made it back without any problems!
Day 2 we went out on another tour. We stopped at the Trevi Fountain first.
They get about 400,000 euro out of that fountain each year.
Then we walked through a local market/artist are which was very nice. The architecture in Rome is just amazing. The next building we saw was the Parliament Building.
After that we headed to the Pantheon, which is a huge church like building, which has the biggest dome in the world. The doors weigh 6 tons also.
Then our tour took us back to Vatican City to see St. Peters again. It was nice to see it again.
Well the day started with a nice breakfast at our hotel, and then we decided that instead of taking a guided tour to Vatican City, we would do it on our own. We figured out the subway system, and made it there. Their subway trains are nicer than the ones we have in Boston, but the subway stations are far worse than ours. Super dark, and they smell pretty horrible.
The Vatican was very crowded. St. Peters Basilica had a huge line to get to it, but it moved a lot quicker than I was thinking it would.
After waiting in the line, we obviously went into St. Peters, and it was pretty amazing.
After that we walked a bit to the Vatican Museum, which, along with many other amazing pieces or art, it houses the Sistine Chapel. The ceilings of every room were so ornate. After a while you hardly even think twice about how much work went into making them.
After that we headed back to Rome to get on a organized tour. First stop was ‘Capitol Hill.’
Then a little bit down the road, we went to a lookout point over the Roman Ruins.
Just up the street was the church “Saint Peter in Chains.” The chains he was put in are kept there on display.
The last stop of the day was at the Colosseum.
Well I managed to finally upload my Africa photos to my website. The internet here in Rome is (marginally) better than the internet we had in Africa… here is a link
http://scotteisenphotography.smugmug.com/Travel/southafrica/
Well we made the somewhat ‘epic’ journey from the middle of nowhere South Africa to Rome, Italy. The trip started out around 12PM Wednesday. We got in a tiny trucked headed for Richard’s Bay Airport, which should be 2 hours from where we were on safari. An hour into the car trip, my dad decided we needed to go to an African market to get some clay ’sunscreen.’ This was a market straight out of a Hollywood movie and I did not feel safe at all.
We made it out of the market it fine, but about 15 minutes down the road we started to smell some burning rubber, and smoke was coming out of the car hood. The air-conditioning belt was not working right and starting to smoke. We ended up cutting it off of the engine, and make our way to the airport.
We had a short 1 hour flight to Johannesburg, which went 100% okay. We had to go back through security again. We were flying on Iberia airlines to Madrid. A short TEN hour flight. Unfortunately, Iberia is the worst airline on the planet, and there were a lot of problems boarding the plane. We boarded, did the long flight, and made it to Madrid about 45 minutes late.
We had to go through customs, and then back through security again at Madrid airport, for another flight on the horrid Iberia airlines. This flight boarded 20 minutes late, and then once we were all on the plane, it was delayed another hour. Awesome!
Once we landed it took awhile for our bags to come out, and we found our driver, and now here I am, at our hotel in Rome, typing this post. Wooooo.
We had 2 last drives today. We first went out with a different guide in the morning because our guide had another commitment to make. We saw the rhinos again, as well as the baby. The mother white rhino got pretty mad at us and charged our vehicle. Pretty scary. Then we found the 2 male cheetahs again.
After the morning, our guide was back and we went out. While we were driving at the far end of the reserve I saw something that looked like a dead impalla. Indeed it was, but it was being swallowed by a 10 foot African Rock Python.
Well we went out on two game drives today. Saw many animals, and they were out in herds today which was pretty cool. We were on the outskirts of the game reserve and we ran into a big herd of Giraffe. I love Giraffes, they’re so funny. A lot of them came up real close to our truck. I snapped this photo.
We have 2 more game drives tomorrow before we head to Rome on Wednesday.
Well we woke up around 7AM to get ready for our day. We met our guide Philmone and went out for our morning drive. The goal of the drive was to find some Rhinos. They only have 6 white rhino, and 1 black rhino on the reserve. We were up in the hills and our guide spotted something that looked like a rhino. Indeed it was, and as we were sitting there, we didn’t realize there were 2 more behind a big bush. There was a mother and her 5 day old baby rhino. This was a great find
We then continued around, finding tons of other animals. Many zebras and giraffes. We also found some elephants. They got pretty upset with us, and they started charging at us. It was pretty frightening since they could kill us very, very easily.
After lunch we went to a cheetah rehabilitation center. They more than just cheetahs there. They had a few different types of endangered cats, including African cats. The cheetahs were very cool, but also very mean.
After this we came back and had a very nice dinner at the game lodge. We treated our guide to a dinner with our whole group, and instead of sitting with people we came on the safari with, we mixed up the seating to talk to other people we have in our group. I am by far the youngest person on safari here, but it’s not that big of a deal.
Well we woke up early, met out guide, and heading out for a two hour drive to Tembe Elephant Park which is on the elephant coast. We stopped at a market on the way to get some snacks. The supermarket there was sortof like the ones back home, but everything else there was not. There were about 200 locals just hanging out around it. We arrived at the park, which is basically in Mozambique. We were only expecting to see elephants, but we managed to find a bunch of lions. It was awesome to see them.
We also saw many African elephants. They look big from far away, but when they get really really close to you, they’re huge.
