Back in Cairo

On a Bridge

Now I am ridiculously far behind on my blog. I apologize for this, I think it’s because my travels have come to an end and I subconsciously think that if I don’t write to the end of my travels I will still be traveling.

January 3rd we had to be on the bus to head to Cairo by 6am. After an exhausting night of partying we all slept really well and since only half of the group was going back to Cairo the bus was half empty and I was able to stretch out and sleep pretty well. In Cairo we checked into our hotel and then went to the Cairo museum. This is where the actual mummies are as well as everything that was found in King Tut’s tomb. Inside of King Tut’s tomb was a giant gold plated box, inside that box were three progressively smaller golden boxes. Inside the smallest box was a gold plated tomb that had three smaller tombs inside of it until the final one was made completely of gold. When the tomb was opened King Tut was found inside wearing a solid gold mask, necklaces, gloves, shoes and more. The amount of gold was beyond extensive. Again pictures were not allowed and so I don’t have any to show you.

At dinner my stomach started to act up. The plan was to go to the Cairo markets, some of the oldest in the world. I don’t want to be too graphic but I decided that it would be best not to go some place that was too far away from a toilet and instead I went back to the hotel to relax for the rest of the night.

The next morning everyone else on the trip was heading home. My flight was tremendously cheaper to stay for a couple of days and get out of the Holiday Travel Season, so I stuck around for two extra nights. I checked out of the fancy hotel and put my stuff in storage to hang out with Janelle until her flight left. We walked around town for a little while but didn’t have a lot of time to see much anything. When Janelle left I was really sad, we had an amazing time together and I am so grateful to her for inviting me to join her and her friends on this wonderful adventure. I look forward to seeing Janelle and all of my new friends again soon (hopefully).

As part of the tour they take you to the airport but since I was going to be in town for a few more days they drove me to my hostel instead. My hostel was in downtown Cairo, right next to a mosque and just down the street from the Cairo museum. Checking back into a hostel for the first time in over a month it was the first time in all of that time that I felt like I was at home. It was a really weird feeling, why would staying in a room with strangers make me feel at home? It is hard to explain, but it is how I felt.

The whole time that I traveled as part of the tour group they would take us to restaurants that were nice and as such the price of meals was close to that of American prices. Egypt is a poor country and the only reason that prices should be that high is to cater to foreigners. Being back on my own meant that I could eat at restaurants along the streets that the locals frequented and I was able to get a kebab, fries, rice pudding and a drink all for less than $2.50.

In my room a Korean woman started to speak to me and asked me questions about where I was from and where I had been. I thought to myself, this woman has really good English. After I had answered her questions I started to ask her questions back and she replied that she didn’t speak English. I think she had just memorized how to say several logical questions and then nodded politely as I responded.

Tomorrow (January 4th) I’m going to wander the city streets aimlessly as usual to see what I can find, I’m excited.

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01_03_10 Cairo Small

The Blue Hole

Thumbs Up!

This part of the world is famous for its snorkeling and diving. There is a place close to the hotel that is called the Blue Hole and as a group we climbed into jeeps and headed there. At the Blue Hole we gathered at a restaurant where we could leave our stuff and got fins, masks and snorkels. The Blue Hole is basically a giant drop off just feet from the shore that goes down supposedly thousands of feet. Janelle has an underwater camera and the pictures today are definitely worth checking out!

This was also the last night together as a group because some people are continuing on to Jordan for four more days while the rest of us were heading back to Cairo to end the tour. At dinner we went to another restaurant along the beach, but they are all basically the same. The little girl with the big attitude from the night before came back but the restaurant didn’t want her bothering its patrons and quickly ran her off. We had another cake but this time there wasn’t a dancing midget.

Tomorrow we have to be on the bus to head back to Cairo by 6am so instead of an early night and lots of sleep we decided to head out to a local bar and sleep on the bus instead. There was this guy at the bar who wasn’t from our group and he was dressed in bright blue plaid shorts and a t-shirt and Janelle said to me “Look there’s another American”. I laughed and told her there was no way she could know that. We weren’t close enough for her to hear his accent, she was basing her opinion solely on his attire. I approached the guy and started to talk to him only to discover that in fact he was an American. Apparently we stand out really well in our wacky clothes and our tennis shoes.

I don’t have much else to add besides that it was a late night and be sure to check out the underwater pictures below.

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2010-01 (Jan)

Great Start

Wheelin' four fun

It is officially 2010 in my blog writing and I am only fifteen days behind schedule. We planned to go four wheeling the day after new years and asked for the latest time slot that we could get so that we could sleep in. Since the sun goes down so early in winter (it’s 70 degrees in the winter here) time Sam suggested that we go no later than 2pm and we setup our quad riding for that time.

Sam is a hilarious tour guide. I am in Group A and when he wants to get us together he says “Aye” and then everyone in the group chirps back at him “Aye, Aye, Aye”. I’m sure to others we look like a momma duck with her ducks walking in a haphazard line behind her “Aye, Aye, Aye”. Sam also says “All for one” and then before anyone in the group can reply “One for all” he says it himself like it is a single phrase “All for one and one for all” which cracks me up every time he says it. Sam also likes to have surprises for us all the time but they are usually convenient for him, like rather than giving us time for lunch he will buy us lunch and get us to eat it on the bus. Not that I would ever complain about free food.

We were given a lesson on how to drive the four wheelers and told that if we mess around we will be taken off of the bikes and have to find our own way home. There were 13 of us in the group and we all got our own four wheelers and headed out into town and then out on some dirt roads. We first stopped by the red sea, then at a Bedouin village and again at another spot along the beach. Driving the four wheelers was fun and there was a time that I got mine to fishtail pretty hard which made my heart race but most of the time it was pretty calm driving in a line. It would have been cooler to have a smaller group or more freedom in where we went so that we could drive over things and go really fast, it was still a lot of fun though. When we stopped at the Bedouin village we were sold tea and little girls were selling the string bracelets they made. One of the little girls came up to the Kiwis in the group of Asian descent and put her fingers to her eyes and pulled outwards. It was really funny because it was being done by a little girl who didn’t know any better and we all reacted by laughing. This only encouraged her and she continued to make the action over and over again. I have a picture of her doing it in my pictures below.

For dinner we went as a group to another restaurant that Sam took us to. A couple of members of the group got there before the rest of us and talked with the owners and told them another restaurant was giving us all 20% off and told the restaurant they needed to top it or we would eat elsewhere and the restaurant agreed to give us 25% off (There wasn’t actually another restaurant offering us any discount). I sat at a table with a guy named Sandal and a preteen girl that was selling bracelets came up to him. Earlier in the night this same girl had approached Sandal and asked him to buy a bracelet and he didn’t buy one. The girl recognized Sandal and saw that he had a bracelet on his arm and the girl became irate. The girl started to insist that Sandal needed to also buy a bracelet from her now and he tried to tell her he didn’t want one but he isn’t a very forceful guy and she was a very persistent that he buy one. After the girl had hassled him for a while it looked like he was going to cave in and then Janelle spoke up and told the girl he didn’t want one and that she should go away. The little girl flipped out on Janelle yelling at her and telling her to mind her own business. At this point we called over someone from the restaurant and had the girl removed.

January 1st is also Sandal’s birthday and after dinner the restaurant brought him out a cake. Then the restaurant staff moved the glass covering the table to one side leaving a portion of the table not covered by glass and then out came a midget who was lifted on to the table. Music started pumping through some nearby speakers and the midget started dancing on the table shaking ever inch of himself. It was hilarious and as usual the dancing ended in a conga line.

Today I laid by the pool, rode four wheelers in the desert and saw a midget dancing, off to an amazing 2010!

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01_01_10 Dahab small

Happy New Year

If only I were an octopus

After the bus ride and Mount Sinai I was exhausted and laid out by the pool for a while and then took a nap in preparation for New Years Eve. Our hotel had a compulsory additional charge on New Years for the party they were throwing and we got ready and headed down to the party. There was a schedule for the party which consisted of several lengthy ethnic dance routines with a DJ playing just before midnight and shortly after before the party was to end.

The party was in a large tent outside and everyone was given a party bag which consisted of an Easter bunny or Santa mask, a hat and a bag of paper balls. I asked Sam what the paper balls were for and he told me they were for throwing at people so we all tore into our bags and launched paper balls at each other. It was really silly and made me feel like a kid, I loved it! For dinner we had a really big, delicious buffet while an unintentional Snoop Dogg impersonator in a white suit danced around on stage. After we had gotten everything that we could get that was free, everyone that had been on my felucca decided that we were going to get some taxi’s and head into town to celebrate New Years.

While we were waiting for our cabs to come Sam and a bunch of other people from our tour group came into the lobby and decided they also wanted to go into town for the rest of the night and cancelled our cabs and called the tour bus to come and get us instead. It sounded like a good idea except the tour bus seemed to take forever to get there and then we waited for more people to come and fill up the bus. We had scouted out a couple of bars in town during the day that were having new years parties but they were all had cover charges. Sam called a friend of his who owned a bar and asked if we could all come in for free and he said we could so the whole bus went there. When we arrived we were pretty much the only people in the place. The bar was selling alcohol by the bottle at a price comparable to three drinks so as a group we got a couple bottles and shared them.

We celebrated several countdowns to midnight and spent the rest of the night at this bar until we returned home. It was a fun new years spent with lots of new friends.

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12_31_09 Mount Sinai small

I Was Wrong

Attention Danger

On the 18 hour drive to Dahab the bus was having problems and kept dying. Every time the bus would die the driver would have to get out and go and manually pump something in the back of the bus and then quickly rev the engine and take off. We were pretty worried for a while that we were going to be broken down in the middle of nowhere, but we eventually made it. Other than the dying bus the ride wasn’t so bad and we arrived in Dahab for a late breakfast and then checked into our rooms.

This is another nice hotel with a pool and a beach along the Red Sea. Across the Red Sea are the cliffs of Saudi Arabia. We spent the afternoon out by the pool having lunch and enjoying the sun. In the early evening we met up with the whole tour group and caught a working bus into town as our hotel is a 15 minute drive from the downtown area. Sam took us on a tour of the very small downtown Dahab showing us ATM’s and various kinds of shops. We had dinner as a group at the fanciest restaurant in Dahab, where the specialty is seafood, something I don’t eat because I am really picky. Everyone who got seafood though had these giant plates that were presented on a giant tinfoil covered platter and looked really fancy.

We headed back to the hotel to get ready for the optional climb of Mount Sinai. Normally this trip isn’t for another day but as tomorrow is New Years Eve and then the following day the monastery is closed so this was the only option available. I’m still sick and the lack of real sleep in a bed is starting to really wear on me. I went to a pharmacy and got some medicine for a cough and some other medicine for a runny nose and two packages of Halls cough drops.

A little less than half of our tour group decided to go the excursion and we boarded the bus at 11pm and started the two hour drive to the base of Mount Sinai. The weather at the bottom of the mountain was freezing and I layered up in all of the clothes that I had, a pair of jeans, a long sleeve shirt and two jackets, known as jumpers in other parts of the world. There were a bunch of Bedouin people around selling Mount Sinai souvenirs and hats and gloves. We had to wait in a line to go through metal detectors before we were allowed on the trail to climb the mountain.

We climbed the mountain as a group and would constantly have to wait for other members of the group to catch up with us. The trails were full of other people from other tour groups also climbing the mountain and Bedoin people selling food and drinks and trying to get people to ride their camels up the mountain. “Camel, camel, you want camel?” No one in my group wanted a camel and so we continued to climb the mountain in the cold and darkness. Near the top we stopped to rest before climbing some 700 “stairs”, basically rocks piled on each other to ascend faster. Then we stopped at a Bedoin building where I bought some ramen noodles and rested out of the wind and cold for a little while. There were blankets and mats available and our tour leader gave those of us that wanted a mat one of them. I grabbed a mat and then followed the group up to the top of the mountain where we would be waiting until the sun came up. My mat was really thin and I found a stack of thicker mats outside being held down by a rock and traded my mat for one of those and then started up the final steps. A Bedouin man came running up the mountain after me and told me I wasn’t allowed to take one of the thicker mats and took it away from me. I went back down the mountain to where I had left my mat, but it was gone. I returned to the shelter where I had been given my mat and told them my mat was gone and asked for a new one, that was thick and they dug around in the back and found me a nice thick mat. By this time my whole tour group had already finished climbing the mountain and was mixed in with hundreds of other people on the top of the mountain. People were grabbing spaces anywhere they could to lay down and sleep until the sun came up. For a while I couldn’t find my group but then I was able to find Janelle, who had luckily saved me a spot next to a couple from London who were in their mid forties. The couple were fighting as I arrived about anything and everything and continued to fight all night and all morning and are still probably fighting at the time of this blog posting. “Scoot over, you are hogging the mat… I’m cold and it is your fault…take a picture of that, no you’re not doing it right…What did you do to the camera? Why did you put your finger on the lens…You have the camera on the wrong mode…No that goes in your bag, I’m not carrying it…”

I put on my sweat pants over my jeans and climbed into my sleeping bag and pulled the flaps over my face to try and get warm. As I laid there I constantly heard people walking around shouting “Mat, Blanket, Mat, Blanket….” After about an hour and a half of laying there the man from the fighting couple started saying in his loudest voice “You are missing the sunrise, if you are sleeping you are missing it”. I removed my sleeping bag hood and looked to see color coming over the horizon. I sat up and watched the sun rise in the distance over the mountains below and spread colors all over everywhere, it was incredibly beautiful. The night before when I was cold and sick and tired I didn’t think there was anything that could possibly be worth how bad I felt but I was wrong, it was all worth it.

After the sun had risen we all gathered our things and started to head back down the mountain. The night before when everyone was coming up the mountain the groups were staggered and there wasn’t a lot of waiting to climb. In the morning however everyone was coming down the mountain at the same time which made for tremendously slow descent. The sun was out in full force and quickly warmed up the day. The sun also made visible the surrounding mountains that were covered in darkness the night before. With all of the people on the trail the climb down ended up taking longer than the climb up did but we had fun taking side trails and trying to quickly jump ahead of other people as they came down the mountain.

At the bottom we ate our breakfast boxes we had brought from the hotel and then went to the nearby monastery to see the burning bush, which is a giant bush behind a wall, which apparently didn’t actually burn because it is still growing.

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12_30_09 Mount Sinai small

Valley of the Kings

Recreated

There was an optional hot air balloon ride this morning that left at 4:30am, since it was foggy, at 4:30 am and you had to pay extra we opted to skip that and to sleep in until 5am to catch the 6am bus to pick up the hot air ballooners and head to The Valley of the Kings.

The Valley of the Kings is where many of the pharaohs of Egypt were buried. The pharaohs were being buried inside of the pyramids, but this was a distinct marker for grave robbers to know exactly where the pharaohs were located so they started to be buried in secret unmarked underground chambers and the Valley of the Kings is a large collection of these underground tombs. Cameras were not allowed inside, so there are unfortunately not any pictures of this posted.

You buy your ticket depending on the number of tombs that you want to enter and each tomb makes you get a punch in your ticket. As part of the tour on limited time we were given tickets to enter three tombs. The first tomb that we went into had brightly colored and nicely decorated art and hieroglyphics on the walls and the ceiling. Inside was an actual slab tomb with its own engravings and the whole place was pretty well preserved and very interesting. The second tomb was up a giant rickety metal stair case and around a wall of rock. Then we had to descend a flight of stairs into the mountain that was only wide enough for one way traffic. Then there was a platform with some very terrible looking hieroglyphics that looked like they were drawn on with a marker pen. Below this platform were another set of stairs that could also only accommodate one way traffic. Down on this level was the tomb and more marker pen hieroglyphics. It took so long at this second tomb waiting in line to get in and then waiting our turn to descend and ascend the stairs we had to rush to a third tomb and we simply looked for a tomb with the shortest line. The third tomb was one the King Ramses tombs and was almost as nice as the first tomb that we entered. Sam told us that three tombs was enough because once you enter one tomb you have seen them all. Janelle and I both adamantly disagreed with him and thought that all three tombs we entered were dramatically different and would have liked to spend more time in each tomb and seeing some of the other tombs that were accessible.

We had to leave the tombs so that we could next go to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut which was really disappointing. Most of the temple has been destroyed through the years and the majority of it was restored in modern times to reflect how the temple used to look. I really wish we had spent more time at the Valley of the Kings and skipped this Temple.

Next we went to the Valley of the Queens which is similar to the Valley of the Kings except that it is for the queens instead of the pharaohs. I thought that it would be like the Valley of the Kings inside but maybe decorated nicer but with less gold. Instead it was a series of holes that the tombs were lowered into and then filled up again, like a bunch of wells. There were a couple of tombs similar to the Valley of the Kings but these were where sons of queens who died before becoming pharaohs were buried.

After that it was still early in the day and we went back to the hotel to check out of the room. The group was planning to go to another temple, but we were all templed out so we lounged by the pool while the rest of the group went to Karnack Temple. Once they were back from the temple we boarded the bus for an 18 hour bus ride to Dahab. On the bus we first watched the movie 2012, quite possibly the worst large budget movie that I have ever seen. Then we watched The Hangover which is quite hilarious and I predicted correctly that we would end up watching before I even knew it was a choice. For dinner we stopped and had three classic Egyptian choices McDonalds, Pizza Hut and KFC. Then it was time to sleep the night away on the bus, good thing we were all so exhausted already.

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12_29_09 Luxor small

Temples Galore

Next to an owl and a weird guy in blue shorts

The felucca crew woke us up at 6am so that we could pack up our things, eat breakfast and cross the river to disembark (is that the right word for boats?) the boat and board the bus to take us to some temples. Our bags had been stored in the bottom of the boat the whole time and if we ever needed anything out of them we had to climb down into the boat and snake our way through everyone’s luggage to our bags to retrieve our wanted items. I brought a larger bag for this two week trip than I took with me when I was gone for six weeks and opening and closing the bag in the tight confines under the boat was quite challenging. After several trips below deck I stopped putting my stuff back in my bag and just piled it near my bag. Luckily when all bags were retrieved I was able to locate all of my stuff and cram it back into my suitcase.

I will be honest and say that I cannot recall the name of the temples that we visited on the way to the hotel, we went to two of them. Neither of them were all that spectacular and everyone in the group was ready for a hot shower and some relaxing by the pool. As a result we rushed through both temples as quickly as possible. At this point the temples are starting to be like cathedrals and castles in Europe, they are really cool at first but then most of them look the same they are only different in size, colors and location.

We finished our journey to Luxor and checked into the hotel which is really nice. The hotel backs up to the Nile and has a large pool and several restaurants. My room is huge and has a smaller room coming off of it that is a luggage room. Yes, I am serious my hotel room has its own luggage room that is as big as some of the rooms I stayed in with 9 other people while traveling elsewhere in the world. This sure is the life of luxury!

After checking in to the awesome room we went down by the pool to relax, soak up some sun, eat lunch and go for a swim. For dinner we were taken to a nearby restaurant that had a buffet of food. I really like buffets in foreign countries because it lets me sample lots of local cuisine and there is always something that I can find that I like to eat. There was also a jeweler at the restaurant that was brought in so that we could buy jewelry from him and know that the stuff is quality. Again I think this is a way that the tour group makes more money by getting a percentage of the jeweler’s sales, but that’s just the skeptic in me talking. I was exhausted and ready to get back to the hotel to sleep but several people from the group were still looking at the jewelry. This is another problem with groups, waiting for other people to get to places and not being able to move on until everyone is ready. Tomorrow we are going to the Valley of the Kings and I am really excited!

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12_28_09 Luxor small

The Beat of My Own Drum

Janelle and I standing around

We woke up in the morning to a breakfast of boiled eggs, sand bread (It’s supposed to be a flat bread but it tastes like there is sand in it), cheeses, coffee and tea. We stayed near the shore for several hours so that people could use the toilets and showers. There was a nearby field with cows in it and I wanted to get a picture with the cows but they were terrified of me and every time I tried to move closer to them they would back away from me as far as their tether would allow them. I decided that I didn’t want to press the issue and have the giant cow stampede me and I left them alone without getting the picture.

Once the felucca set out again we relaxed in the sun and I read Lovely Bones. I am such a cry baby that while reading several times I had to stop reading and look away from the others on the boat so that I could try and stop my tears. Normally I try and avoid the sun but I am still sick and I figured that a little sun would do me good so I applied lots of sunscreen and went into the sun in short intervals. When the boat anchored for lunch I quickly hopped off and ran into the bushes, something I had eaten had given me an upset stomach. At this point I have pretty much gotten used to always having an upset stomach when I travel.

I imagined when I heard that we were going to be sailing up the Nile that we would see people in remote villages washing their clothes along the banks and smiling and waving at us as we sailed by. However the main highway and the railway both parallel the river and most of the banks are under construction to reinforce their sides so that only the designated areas flood during the rainy season. Not to say that it wasn’t nice sailing up the river, because it was, it was just different scenery than what I had expected.

Since my old camera had a scratch on the lens and it sometimes smoked when I took a picture with it I decided to buy myself a new camera for the trip to Egypt. When I met up with my mom in San Francisco she had thought the same thing and bought me a new camera for Christmas. I had already thrown the box away for the camera I bought so I kept the one I bought and brought it with me to Egypt. The new camera has features that my old camera didn’t and while trying to take a picture of the large full moon I discovered that there is a slow develop feature on the camera and that I could make cool designs with the moon by moving the camera around as the picture was captured. Check out some of those in my picture section below.

At night the felucca pulled up to the shore but this time there weren’t any showers and toilets nearby, just a field and some tent toilets setup using the unbroken stools. At every meal the crew would always ask if we wanted more food and we would occasionally ask for an extra helping of an item or two. At dinner tonight however we had chicken wings and as soon as we were given our portions we immediately started asking for more. Our felucca ran out of them and we had the crew run around to the other boats to try and get some chicken wings from them. After dinner we all left the boats and went ashore where a fire had been built and the crew from several feluccas were playing drums and singing songs. After the crew was done playing they left their drums laying around and Janelle and I along with a couple of others grabbed them and started making our own songs. It was fun but hard to think of new rhythms to put together. The crew must have heard our awful banging because after a short while they returned to reclaim their drums and hide them safely away from us. We spent the rest of the night on the beach and then returned to our feluccas to sleep.

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12_27_09 Felucca small

Felucca Day 1

Philae Temple

Another early start and we headed off to the High Dam which produces electricity for all of Egypt and also created the largest artificial lake in the world. It is currently the world’s second largest dam. Then we boarded a small motor boat to Philae Temple where Sam used members of the group to reenact the beliefs of the ancient Egyptian religion for the creation of the world. The Egyptian people no longer believe in this religion and are now roughly 90% Muslim and 10% Christian.

I want there to be a disclaimer on all of the “facts” that are presented in my blog about Egypt that these are the things my guide is telling me and then I am recalling, so inaccuracies should be expected and I apologize for that.

While on the bus Sam told us that there would be lots of people trying to sell us their goods and he would identify to us which items were at a decent price by including the word “sweet” in his description of the price of the items. For example “This bracelet is being sold for 20 Egyptian Pounds, sweet” whereas an item that wasn’t a good deal would be described as “This doll is being sold for 400 Egyptian Pounds” without a sweet after the price. Pretty simple but it was effective assuming of course that Sam wasn’t getting a kickback from any of the sellers.

All temples consisted of three parts, the first part was open to the public, the second part was for the nobles and the priests and the third was only for the high priest and the pharaoh, this place was referred to as the Holy of the Holies and housed the gold statue of the god that the temple was constructed to worship. The temple was covered with carvings of offerings to the gods and hieroglyphics. A lot of the pictures of the gods were damaged when other religions were trying to convert the Egyptians to their faith and used chisels to deface the pictures of the Egyptian gods to prove that the gods weren’t real. Their reasoning was that if the Egyptian Gods were real they would not allow their pictures to be defaced. Later, when the Romans invaded Egypt the temple was used as a secret place for Early Christians to practice their faith.

We were supposed to have lunch on the Felucca but the day was running long and I was getting hungry so I quickly ran down the street to the nearby McDonalds and grabbed a double cheeseburger. It took forever to get the burger and I was forced to run back towards the boat and barely made it onto the felucca in time. Sam got three large Felucca boats for our group and my boat had 14 passengers and three crew members on board. The tour group is made up mostly of Aussies and Kiwis who are currently living in London. My boat consisted of 7 Kiwis, 6 Aussies and 3 crew members from Egypt, I was severely outnumbered on all fronts. The felucca boats are powered only by the wind and weave their way North on the Nile which is downstream.

As soon as we set off sailing the boat was trying to get some toilet stools, for setting up on the shore for bathroom breaks, from another boat when our boat crashed into the other boat. It made a really loud smashing sound but the only thing that appeared to break was one of the toilet stools. Later we clipped the back end of another boat as we were working our way up the river, not a good start. We sailed for a couple of hours and then pulled up along the shore near a Bedouin settlement with toilets and showers. The crew cooked us dinner and then we went ashore to the Bedouin settlement where Sam and another tour guide performed a little skit and then led some Kiwis in a Maori Haka dance. The Maori people are the natives in New Zealand and the Haka dance is performed by the All Blacks rugby team in New Zealand before their rugby matches. I’ve never seen this before and I was quite impressed.

After the dancing the Bedouin people sold sheesha pipes, henna and bracelets to us. We smoked a sheesha pipe and then returned to the boat for the night. Back on the boat we hooked an IPod into speakers and sat around listening to music. We were told several times starting at 10:30pm that we were being too loud and needed to be quieter. The crew considered pushing our boat out into the Nile away from the other boats, but without lights we would have been in danger of being run over by a large Nile cruise boat. Finally around midnight we gave in to the others requests to be quiet and slept soundly on the felucca.

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12_26_09 Aswan small

ميلاد مجيد (Merry Christmas in Arabic)

Nile Sunset

All of these Egypt postings took place over the last two weeks, I will be posting one or two per day until I get caught back up with real time.

Celebrating Christmas morning on a train was a little bit different than what I am used to but I’m in Egypt and I couldn’t expect a normal Christmas. Once in Aswan we got a bus to our hotel where the high temperature for the day was 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the group then took an optional add on tour to Abu Simbel but Janelle and I decided that it was too expensive and we were too tired after all of our traveling to hop on another flight to look at a monument for an hour and then fly back. Instead we spent the day relaxing by the pool and walking around the nearby markets in Aswan.

While in the markets a man approached me and we had the following conversation:

Man: Welcome to Aswan, come and look in my shop.
Me: No thank you.
Man: I have the very best deals…
Me: No thank you.
Man: Please come and look in my shop.
Me: No thank you.
Man: But I said please…
Me: (While laughing) And I said no thank you.

The markets here are very similar to the ones in Morocco and Turkey where people stand in front of their shops shouting at you to come and buy their goods that are identical to every other shop on the street. As usual I wasn’t interested in anything that anyone was selling.

Sam, the Tour Guide, suggested that if we wanted any alcohol we should go to the duty free shop down the street and pick some up because alcohol can be difficult to find in some places in the country. With everyone else away for the day we figured we would go and get some for us and the rest of Janelle’s friends that were also on the trip. We walked to the liquor store was but found it closed. A man who was badly dressed and one lazy eye told us that the duty free shop was closed but there was another shop open upstairs and started to lead us into a very rundown building. At first I didn’t want to follow him into the building but I saw a sign for a hotel in the building and felt a little reassured. The man led us up several shady flights of stairs and I started to feel uncomfortable again and decided that I wouldn’t climb past the current set of steps. Fortunately this was the level the man was leading us to and we turned the corner to a bar. We didn’t want a bar, we wanted a liquor store, so we thanked the man for his help and quickly ran out of the building and back to the hotel.

When the rest of the group got back from their day trip we met up with them again and boarded a boat to take us to a Nubian restaurant accessible only by water further down the Nile. The restaurant served tagine (I have a heavy note of sarcasm here because I ate so much tagine in Morocco, I would be happy to never hear the word again, let alone eat it). It was however a pretty decent tagine as far as tagines go. After dinner there was a dance show with whirling dervish dancers that ended with a congo style line around the room that got half of the people in the restaurant up on stage dancing together to the music.

The only thing that was traditionally Christmas about the day were some songs I played on my laptop while we sat by the Nile watching the sun set over a couple of drinks. Even though it wasn’t a traditional Christmas I really enjoyed myself.

I have started to get a cough, I think it is from too much time on a plane and then a train, I hope that I’m not actually getting sick and that the cough will go away soon, it’s really annoying.

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On Your Mark, Get Set, Cairo!!!

A Little Dry

Amazingly all of my flights were on time and I made it to Cairo at about the exact time I was supposed to arrive. On my flight from New York City to Amman I sat in the middle seat in the back of the plane between two men. Luckily the flight left at 10:30pm from New York City and I was able to go right to sleep. Dinner was served around 2am, a really random time for dinner in my opinion so I tried to sleep through that. One of the two men that I sat next to was very large and he tried to compress himself but still came over onto my seat. While sleeping I think I might have cuddled up with him a little bit but he didn’t seem to mind and it helped me to sleep better resting up against him.

This trip to Egypt is for two weeks and is part of a tour group, something I haven’t done the entire time I have been traveling during the past year and I am looking forward to seeing how it compares to what it was like when I was on my own.

Upon arriving in Cairo I was met by a representative for the tour company who helped me obtain my visa, which meant paying $15 to a bank. Then he waited for me to get my bag that I had checked all the way through from San Francisco and took me to a waiting car where I was given an information packet and shuttled off to the hotel on the other side of Cairo. The entire process minus the driving to the hotel took less than 15 minutes, I was really impressed. Then once at the hotel the representative checked me into my room and waited to make sure that everything in there was good for me, I could really get used to this type of service! My friend Janelle who invited me on the trip had her plane delayed and didn’t end up making it to the hotel until an hour after me.

After all of the traveling I was exhausted and ready to sleep in but unfortunately the tour was getting started and I got a wakeup call at 7am to be on the bus to start the tour by 8am. The tour guides name is Sam and he has been with the tour company since they started 11 years ago and seems to know a lot about what he is saying. He is currently working on his PHD in Egyptology.

Here is a quick summary of why the pyramids exist according to my memory of what Sam said: When a pharaoh would die they would put his body in a tomb and then cover it with a large flat square of rocks. This was done so that after his soul went to be with the other gods it could find its way back to its tomb where it would live the afterlife. Then one day a pharaoh decided that he wanted three successively smaller square blocks placed on top of each other. After this was built they added 3 more levels to make a pyramid shape. The next pharaoh liked this and tried to make a smooth pyramid, but got the angle wrong. There were several more attempts and then they finally got the angle correct.

We went to the Step Pyramid and then to the Pyramids of Giza along with the Sphinx. We were allowed to walk inside of the pyramids but not to take pictures. To enter the pyramid you have to walk down a really short hallway carved into the pyramids to get to where the tombs were. It was pretty cool to be able to actually go inside of an actual pyramid. For Lunch Sam, the tour guide bought us some koshary which consists of pasta, rice, lentil, chick peas, onions, garlic and chili sauce it was delicious.

After a long day we hopped on an overnight train to Aswan where we hung out in the party coach until midnight and the official start of Christmas in Egypt.

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