We went to Egypt!

April 22, 2022
We are nearing the end of our second full day in Cairo. Yesterday we spent the day walking around the great pyramids and the sphinx with a guide. After our ‘official’ tour, Jo and Megs sat and sketched a bit of sphinx detail while I bravely fended off hawkers trying to sell horseback, wagon or camel rides. We decided to take one more walk around at the end of day as they'e clearing the place out but a guide saw us as a chance to make a bit of money and quickly gave us another 20 minutes when everyone else was being ushered out to show us a few things off the track and kind of neat to see. Some of these pictures are from that little excursion. The pyramids did not offer anything unexpected but are fabulous to see in person after a lifetime of picturebook interpretations. We keep looking up to see them still there. Amazing. Back at our hotel the evening call to worship coming simultaneously from mosques near and far added quite an ambience in the neighbourhood around the hotel. I found it most peaceful to hear.
Evening sounds of Al Malek Fouad St., Giza during Ramadan...


April 23, 2022
The day was spent at the Egyptian Museum. To be fair, it really would take a couple days to see it all if it were all there. Some of it has already been moved to a new museum. This a good because although the existing old museum has character, it appears to have no environmental controls and is practically open-air. Sun-beams shine on 4,000 year old painted wood artifacts and humidity control is a silica gel packet. Visitors can (and do) touch things they ought not to. These wonderful treasures deserve the better home they’re going to get. I saw more depictions of the eye of Osiris than I expected which left Alan Parson’s "Eye in the Sky" song playing in my head. On the way to and from the museum I saw more old white Volkswagen Transporters than I’d seen up till then in my entire life. Fascinating. The wild assortment of vehicles, traffic and driving habits deserve a message unto itself. Three wheels as popular as two or four. Roadways with four marked lanes and eight rows of traffic. Next day we took an all day train trip (13 hrs!) to Aswan where we’d be for a few days. We went out to get some "creep chicken" for supper. I’ll try to explain that after we’ve had some... Ahh! It was a chicken crepe. More like wrap sandwich. Their English menu needed a little fine tuning. They were delicious. The Egyptians are nice folks and wonderful hosts.

April 24, 2022
We survived the 13 hours by train from Cairo to Aswan. It was 2am before we were settled it to our hotel. The train windows practically opaque and I wasn’t sitting with Meg & Jo so I got out Google translate and made friends with Abdo and Nasser sitting to my left and right. We haltingly chatted away for many hours stopping only when cell phone batteries started emptying. Nasser runs a family farm north of Aswan growing dates, sugar cane and vegetables. We've kept up a translated chat since then. Abdo turned out to be a little shifty, trying to get us connected to a 'friend' who would look after us and then, later, trying to borrow some money. That was disappointing.

April 25, 2022 The first full day there we hired a boat and visited the west bank of the Nile. There we visited a Nubian village on a camel ride and were guided around some ancient Upper Egypt royal tombs. Then we went on to Elephantine Island where we saw a temple complex and a museum. The walls were amazingly carved in a huge relief. Megs lost her glasses on the camel ride but the guides found them later and brought them to her in Aswan which, as you can imagine, was also a huge relief.

April 26, 2022
Next day we had a guided tour of some more National Geographic type sites around Abu-Simbel which was all fantastic but made for a long and exhausting day. Our guide, Ashrf Boshra with Emo Tours, did a great job. Find him through that tour company if you''re there doing the same thing. In the evening we hired a boat again, out to an island and went for a swim. The elderly boatman thought this wild and strange so went for a swim with us. The air temperature was around 35C. The Nile is cold. Go figure. They’re still in the northern hemisphere so it’ll get hotter in June/July as it does for us. I don’t think I could take that. It wasn't bad at all bad in April because it was very dry.

April 27, 2022
We saw a few more Aswan sights: the "unfinished obelisk", the Aswan High Dam and the Philae temple. Then we spent the afternoon on a train to Luxor which is half way back to Cairo. We’re in a really nice little hotel across from the waterfront. The Nefertiti hotel feels like it’s out of colonial times.

April 28, 2022
The guided tour approach has been working out because we aren’t amongst a bus load of tourists it’s just a guide, a driver and private car all to ourselves. It’s great having a trained Egyptologist along; much less googling need be done. We did one of those to the Valley of the Kings today. After that we took in the Temple of Hatshepsut, the Colossi of Memnon, Karnak Temple and finally the Luxor Temple. We started early at 7:00 but it was still 38C by the time we finished around 2:00. It’s Ramadan now so in this heat I think it must be a trial. Our guide, Ackmed Omar (also with Emo Tours), brushed it off - being an old pro - but ten minutes before writing this we saw a traffic incident boil over into a fisticuff (perhaps it was a Donnybrook) of (as Megs put it) "hypoglycaemic road rage" right in front of us. The city will really come to life shortly at dusk.

April 29, 2022
We had a quieter indoor dark and cool day at Luxor Museum and the Museum of Mummification. Both very nice. We walked the waterfront fending off carriages-for-hire in the evening. The other two splashed in the Nile again for a minute then wandered back to our hotel because a medic came to administer PCR tests which we needed on the next leg of journey to Israel.

April 30, 2022
We took another 12 hour train trip back from Luxor to Cairo Saturday. The rail line runs parallel to an irrigation wadi for most of the trip and I saw many groups out splashing and swimming (including a horse) to escape the heat. As on the trip to Aswan, as the sun went down, many of our fellow travellers took out packed lunches to break their Ramadan fast and one of gentlemen went up and down the coach sharing a bag of dates with us all. It was touching to be included. The Egyptians are a warm, friendly and welcoming people. The COVID-19 blight has been hard on their economy - perhaps more here than on places less tourist-dependant. One of the carriage-for-hire drivers said to us "I'm sorry for the hassle with these high-pressure sales tactics" then proceeded to apply his (and everyone's) high pressure sales tactics. None of them considers it a possibility that we might just like to walk. One driver got mad and accused us of trying to starve his horse. There are so many of them and not nearly enough of us. I’ve never seen streets so alive with celebrating crowds as around downtown Cairo Saturday night. Our taxi to the hotel navigated through the crowds (sometimes in reverse) quite adeptly. No deaths! At least I think so; my head was hidden under the seat most of the trip from the train station. In weird contrast, the four lanes (in Cairo that’s usually eight lanes of traffic) on the way to the airport Sunday morning were almost empty.