Well am finally finding time to sit at the laptop in the winter sun and let you all know about our trip to Egypt!
We stocked up on travel wipes, Imodium and toilet paper and headed off to Egypt on the first Saturday in December. We happily traded 5 degrees in London for 25 degrees in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan!
We arrived into Luxor late avo and a busload of people from our flight got picked up by our tour rep and taken to the hotel, which was pretty mint (check our Facebook album). It was straight into it first thing the following morning, after we'd tucked into breakkie at the hotel, which included one of the biggest spreads of bakery goods I've ever seen (Ryan indulged in several helpings!) We bused out to see the first stepped pyramid, the Sakkara pyramid which was pretty incredible. We got to go down into Titi pyramid nearby and see the many hieroglyphs in the chambers below which was awesome. Then it was onto one of the seven wonders of the ancient world - the great pyramids! These were very very cool, to be there walking around something built in like 2500BC and see them was wicked and the top sight of the trip! Saw the Sphinx too, but neither of us was as awed by this as we'd expected to be. I think you imagine it to be bigger than it actually is. Don't get me wrong its big, but the pyramids are much more impressive in scale.
Sightseeing at the pyramids introduced us to the hawkers of Egypt for the first time. Luckily our brilliant tour guide let us know what we were in for before we got there, telling us people would offer to take our picture, then ask for payment, or give us a 'gift' from their country, and then ask for a 'gift' from ours. Preferably a US$ or GB£ gift! Or offer us 'A ride on my camel, for free my friend, for free'. Before taking you to halfway around the pyramid and then charging £100 Egyptian to get back to where you started! They had a number of lines to get into conversation with you, 'Where you from?' or simply guessing 'You American? British? Australian? Canada? New Zealand? 'What your name?' Or 'You very beautiful lady, you lucky man, you buy a scarf for lady?.' But they were harmless enough once you got used to it. Some of the shop owners in the markets were actually pretty funny, saying 'I got what you want, whatever you want I got it' and our favourite 'I can help you spend your money.'
We stopped by a flower essence shop, which is the raw ingredient of perfume, before Gucci etc add 8 parts alcohol to 2 parts essence. I buy 100ml of Queen Cleopatra essence, which is turned into Jadore. We spend the evening smoking some shiesha, an apple flavoured tobacco bong next to the hotel pool reflecting on our first day and the things that you knew you would see, but still surprise you: the smog (like as bad as I imagine Beijing is!), cars and donkeys pulling carts of veges using the highways side by side, and the driving in Cairo to name a few.
The driving in Cairo has to be seen to be believed. They have lanes painted and they have functioning traffic lights. They use neither. The lanes are disregarded and the traffic lights are decoration only. Hands and horns are more commonly used to signal. The horns are constant, incessant. Headlights are off or replaced by red, blue, green lights which flash in patterns rather than illuminate the road in front. Missing doors are common, cows are transported on the back of utes, people cram into or on top of or hang off the back of vans, which then stop all of a sudden in front of you in one of the 'lanes' to let someone off who'll make a dash of death to the 'footpath'. Small mobs of sheep or goats huddle by the sides of these 3 and 4 lane roads with vehicles rocketing past. The aim of the game is to get your vehicle in front of the person driving alongside you. Chaos is an understatement!
That night we caught an overnight train to Aswan. The train, like much of the transport there, had seen better days. Several decades ago. We managed to sleep in the 'reclining' seats. They reclined in a similar manner to say seats in a cinema or one a budget airline. The next morning we watched the southern Egyptian countryside pass by our windows. The transport was just as precarious out in the countryside. We saw a van with three or more young kids spread eagled on the roof hanging on for dear life. Even in the smallest of towns we could spot the dairy: Coke posters seem to have invaded every corner of earth. A man riding a donkey talking on his cellphone (the man not the donkey, ha!) was passed by the train.
Arriving into Aswan we checked into our hotel, one street back from the Nile. We headed up to the High Dam, which from the top doesn't seem as impressively high as I'd imagined it would from below. We motorboated out to Philae Island to the temple there, (the first of many!) which was amazing. After playing dodgems with the other boats moored at the wharf, we went by a papyrus factory and got a bit of a demo on how they make their papyrus paper from plant stalks and paint them. We had dinner in a Nubian (native southern Egyptians) village which is an hours boat ride down the Nile. On our boat ride back one of the boat crew broke into the chorus of Dave Dobbyn's Slice of Heaven. World famous!
After a few hours sleep we were up at an ungodly hour to bus in armed convey through the southern desert for 3 hours, close to the border with Sudan to the temple of Abu Simble. The Abu Simble temple was amazing. Like Philae temple it was painstakingly cut into pieces when the High Dam created Lake Nasser and raised the water level, and shifted to higher ground and put back together. What amazed me about the temple is that the entry and passage inside to the back room where the statues of the four gods to whom the temple is dedicated is on an angle so that on two days of the year, and only two days, the morning sunlight hits each statue of the gods, one by one, except for the last which is the god of darkness and should never see the sun. The two days of the year? Feb 21 - Ramses II's birthday (the Pharaoh who built the temple) and Oct 21 - his coronation. Incredible.
Back in Aswan that afternoon we wandered the markets. Ryan was questioned on how many camels I'm worth, and not for the last time! We took a ride on a felucca, a traditional sailing boat late in the afternoon, before we headed to a local restaurant with the tour and had a delicious dinner, including peppers, courgettes and eggplants stuffed with rice. Bizarrely, they served each plate with several cold fries. Perhaps its a local garnish?
After dinner we wandered back through the market which must go late into the night and haggled for some spices which Aswan is famous for. We came away with 100gm each of an Egyptian spice for bbq'd meat, paprika, cumin, rosemary, oregano, cinnamon sticks, mint and mixed spice, all for £65 Egyptian (not much more than a fiver). Ryan took to haggling over the price like a fish to water and drove a hard bargain.
The following day we bused from Aswan up to Luxor, via a couple of temples, Kom Ombo and then Edfu. Kom Ombo has one of the worlds first calenders carved into one of the inner walls. Edfu is the best preserved temple of all, thanks to being covered by sand. In Luxor we explored the streets and market near our hotel, across the street from the Nile. The sunsets were amazing with all the traditional sailing boats plying the river.
The next day we were up before dawn to cross the river and go hot air ballooning! The balloons looked magic firing up in the dark which lightened to pre-dawn dusk as we rose to 500m as dawn broke and we floated over the Nile and Valley of the Kings. Seeing the sunrise and the landscape below from the balloon was magic, magic, magic. Back on the ground, we all clambered onto a donkey for a short ride. In hindsight I wish we hadn't ridden ours, as we're probably far too heavy for the little creatures. Think I nearly killed mine. Not funny, worst touristy thing we did while there. Headed into the Valley of the Kings and went down into a few of the tombs there, before we went to the funeral temple of one of only two females to rule Egypt. Her temple (the tiered one in our Facebook pics) was amazing and different to all the others we'd seen. Wandered into the markets back in Luxor again, haggling to buy a scarf and papyrus.
The next day we visited a couple more temples in Luxor, Karnak temples and Luxor temple. We headed off to Hurgarda by the coast and stayed there the night. We had our first hot shower since leaving Aswan, as our room in Luxor lacked in the hot water department! The ferry ride across the Red Sea the next morning was hell in a boat ride. I think the captain put the boat in cruise control at top speed and thought to hell with the white caps. At times I'm sure no part of the boat was touching the water.
We spent about 4 days in Dahab, learning to dive for a day, walking up the coast to try snorkeling and generally lazing about in the sunshine and walking along the beach into town most nights for dinner at one of the many, many restaurants on the beach. On one of our walks we passed a woman feeding her camel cardboard. We'd been wondering what the poor creatures existed on as greenery was largely non-existent. That explained it.
Toward the end of our two weeks we bused back to Cairo for a final day of sightseeing. We saw the Mohammad Ali Mosque (not the boxer obviously!) which dates from 1100, spent some time in the Egyptian museum, seeing among other things the incredible treasures from King Tutankhamen's tomb, which take up a whole floor of the museum all by themselves, including his 11kg gold mask! 11kg's of solid gold and he wasn't even a particularly rich pharaoh. Fittingly, our final thing was to go to one of the markets in Cairo. It was packed, so we didn't engage in much haggling, except for a paperweight pyramid statue.
The following day we flew out, leaving Egypt with its pharaohs, pyramids and papyrus behind.
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