havecarryonwilltravel

Here we sit in a 5 star hotel in Aswan waiting for a plane ride back to the chaos of Cairo. The room temp is a 28C. It is amazing how the body adapts. Several days in the outdoors at 30C+ and a temperature that is normally much too hot is quite comfortable.

We drove through the Nubian Desert, which is part of the Sahara Desert. It is different kind of desert compared to Namibia. Tan coloured sand with black rock outcroppings every so often. It is mostly flat, whereas in Namibia, it is quite undulating.

The Egyptian government is heading up a project called The Desert Land Reclamation Project. They are constructing some 60 km of canals to carry water from the Nile and Nasser Lake to irrigate agricultural land. Crops are growing in the sand, using great arms to water them. Wheat is the predominant crop, which resulted from the inability to obtain wheat due to the war in the Ukraine. The crops are mostly large circles as the irrigation arms move in a circular fashion. If you check out Google Maps, just north of Abu Simbel, you can see how many crop circles there are. Just think if the whole desert were to be growing crops, the food shortage would be history!

Many lunches and suppers are a choice of fish, chicken or beef. Either grilled or tagine. Tagine, chicken say, is pieces of chicken cooked in a small clay pot in broth, or gravy, very similar to a stew. Tagine is served with rice and cooked veggies. The meals are usually also served with appetizers of bread, tahini, eggplant and some soup. Too much food!

My favourite refreshment here is a lemon mint drink. Basically, lemonade with mint and a touch of sugar. Very delicious after a hot day in the sun touring temples.

Here in Egypt, paying for the use of toilets is the norm. Not much makes me annoyed when we travel, but this practise does. We stop at a “rest stop” on the way to Abu Simbel. I think the owner makes more money on the toilets than he does selling coffee, trinkets, chips and chocolate bars. I can see the reasoning behind this model, but I do not like it. In a museum or temple, sometimes there is a person handing out TP for 5 or 10 Egyptian Pounds (25 or 50 cents), so I pay. This person may not get a wage and his earnings are what he collects in a day, which might be quite a lot at a busy temple.

On our group tour we get up early. I think the earliest is at 5:00 for a departure at 5:30 am, with breakfast after we get back. This early hour is to watch the sunrise at the Temple of Karnak. We are the only group there at 6:00 when the gates open, take beautiful photos and we are on our way out when the masses arrive. Our intrepid guide is very good at getting us to temples before the main rush, so for that I will get up early.

We stop at two quarries on our travels, one limestone and one granite. The limestone quarry is beside the Nile and we see where great blocks were chiselled out and moved down to the water’s edge. The granite quarry is in Aswan and away from the river slightly. It is the quarry where an obelisk for Hatshepsut was being carved when it cracked and thus discarded. It is still laying in the quarry after all the centuries.

Today, after about a three hour drive south of Aswan, we arrive in Abu Simbel. The reason why we are here is the temple to Ramses II, with its imposing four seated figures.

Ramses wanted a temple close to the Nubian border to show power and strength, and it does do that. There is also a temple for his wife Queen Nefertari.

Inside Ramses’ temple are scenes of the great battle of the Hittites around 1260 BC. There is one scene of Ramses in his chariot with his pet lion running beside him. The temple is awe inspiring.

What makes these two temples very unique is the fact that, when the Aswan High Dam, was being constructed, the temples were moved to higher ground as they would have been flooded behind the dam. UNESCO and five countries aided in the deconstruction, move and reconstruction of the temples. The temples were cut into about 1,000 pieces for the move. Two great domes of concrete were constructed, the temples built and then rock was laid over the concrete to look like hills, or mountains. It is impressive. It took over four years to complete with many thousands of workers and engineers.

The temples look over Lake Nasser or, as the locals call it, The Nubian Sea. It is a huge body of water that was created by the Aswan High Dam and supplies water to Egyptians all the way to the Mediterranean.

There are two types of relief used on the temple walls. High relief, where the background is flat figures and objects are raised. Deep cut, or low, relief is where the figures and objects are cut into the stone and the background is higher.

Our small group have visited two separate households along the Nile. This is what makes the tours with Wild Frontiers so special. The first one is with a young woman named Esma, who invites us into her home and serves us tea while we chat about her life and the community around her. The second visit was with Syad and his family. He is quite humorous but very knowledgeable about what is going on in the world. The village where he lives has 300 people, who are farmers and fishermen. His family has two acres to farm, where they grow various crops to sell and to consume personally. It is a very enjoyable visit and we run overtime and could have stayed longer.

We visit the site of the Daraw camel market, but unfortunately the market is not on today. A fellow shows us his “barn” where he has four camels, a horse, some cows, sheep and goats. The camels are two mothers and two youngsters. They seem content and weren’t bothered by us tourists. Most of the camels in Egypt come from Sudan and are used for transportation, meat, milk, breeding and tourism. Rather sadly, the camels in the tourist industry (like in Giza near the great pyramids) are not treated as they should be.

The biggest insect caution we got when coming to Egypt was mosquitoes. I haven’t seen one in over a week here. What drives me crazy are the flies. They are incessant. They fly at your face, nose, ears, and mouth. Swish them away and they are back in a second. There are not many inside the air-conditioned hotel and there are not any hanging around the boat. I think the coolness of the AC and the constant breeze set by the moving boat are deterrents.  

If you do any research prior to your trip to Egypt you will most likely be apprehensive about setting foot outside your hotel for fear the touts will overwhelm you. I have not found this to be the case at all. There are touts. There are touts that will try to interest you in anything saleable. Some folks will show you something ‘really special’ and then expect to be paid for doing it. I have yet to follow any of them. Others have wares that you might ‘need.’ Really, all these folks are just marketing the way they know how. I have run into very few that are aggressive and most of the time ‘la a’(no) or ‘la a shukran’ (no thank you) is sufficient enough for the tout to cease pestering you. I always try to be polite and in the long run I approach the situation as good fun, part of life in Egypt. Walking though a market would be terribly boring without these people.

When visiting Bhutan, we were about to go into the umpteenth temple in two weeks and I turned to Debbie and said ‘I’m zhonged out’. The temples in Bhutan are zhongs and they all started to look the same and I had no more capacity to absorb any more Buddhist lore. It has been 7 days since we landed in Egypt and my brain is full. The temples are starting to look the same and I cannot sort one God or ruler from the other. There are kings that are famous for some reason or another and some that are obscure. There are warriors and there are builders. There is the first, the second and the third and right now the are all muddled together. I’m templed out.

Prior to leaving on this trip I got a phone call from a friend saying I should give him a call. He had been in Egypt in the spring. I called. He told me the trip was very good, the boat down the Nile was exceptional. He did feel he should give me a warning. “Don’t go outside the hotel compound, Egypt is really sketchy.” I am always leery when I hear things like that. I have heard it so many times I take it with a grain of salt. Somehow this fellow had been informed or convinced that because there are many armed policemen at varying street corners in the cities and armed guards at the gates of the hotel that Egypt is unsafe. The guides and folks we have met all say Egypt is a very safe place to be. We have been wandering around Cairo and Luxor and frankly I think the warning could not have been farther from the reality. Not once have I felt threatened or in any kind of danger. I have turned on my spidey sense and it has not tingled at all. One day I may get burned but I must believe that the vast majority of people are good and you can’t live your life based on the action of a few bad ones.

We did not plan to visit any of the tombs inside the pyramids but we had the opportunity and took it. Jasmine our guide told us if we wanted to do that we should go to the bent or red pyramids. It was free to go into those where as the three more famous and more visited pyramids there was a charge. The caveat was that the bent pyramid had the hardest passageway. It is very low and long and there are many ups and downs. This of course is a challenge if I have ever heard one.

Debbie entered first. The corridor shrank in height very quickly. The first part of the passage was about 1M in height. We didn’t have to bum slide but we were crouched down, folding our body in about half. Our legs were screaming but the time we reached the first place we could stand. The next section has stairs and was vertical. Another long shaft with even less height than the first but not quite as long. At the next place of reasonable height we were not sure we would be able to stand ever again. The next stairs were in an elevator sized shaft and about 10M high. It was a short trip to the tomb from there. Frankly it was not worth the tremendous effort required to get there. Getting out was easier in my opinion. I could support myself on the handrails in a more horizontal position which did not stress my legs so much. The journey was not too bad and although our legs were spongy when we exited it was the next two days that were hell. Neither of us could walk up or down stairs without grimacing . It took us three days to recover. Ouch!

In the ancient Egyptian calendar had 10 days in a week, and three weeks in a month and 12 months in a year with five days of celebrations for a different god each day. There were three seasons – the flood, cultivating and harvesting.