Category Archives: history

Africa, city, history, travel

Egyptian Museum & Khan el Khalili

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I don’t think I slept quite as well on the train overnight as the previous journey, but it was a much calmer drive back from Giza Station to our last hotel – Friday morning is the start of the weekend in Egypt so the traffic was quieter.  Although, we were told that there are many more road accidents in the weekend’s reduced traffic as Egyptians aren’t used to driving at speed – so they do the same crazy things going five or ten times faster than normal & wreck.

With the mandatory carols still playing in the hotel lobby, we once again got an early check-in & settled into our rooms.  All the hotels we stayed in during the tour were of a high standard, but this one was another step-up – with a pool the like of which I have not seen in a hotel before.

Late morning it was back on the road again for the short drive into the centre of Cairo, for the first time, to head to the Egyptian Museum.  Once again we had to leave our cameras in the bus or check them in – so all I have is a few sneaky phone photos.  The Egyptians don’t appear to be overly proud of their flag as it was almost a week in before I found one to snap a picture of – this is on the front of the museum.  The building looks rather European – designed by an Italian apparently.

Being right on Tahrir Square, it wasn’t too far away from all the revolutionary activities two years ago.  This is no more obvious than by looking next door at the burnt out shell of a building of a Ministry of the former regime.

To no-one’s surprise, inside the building is packed with just a small part of the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities.  Construction of an astoundingly large new museum has begun just down the road from where we were staying in Giza.  The footprint and piles of sand point to this being a massive undertaking – Lafarge will be pleased to have that concrete contract.  Only nine-hundred-odd days to go until completion – or so the big sign outside told us every time we drove past.

Far & away the highlight of the museum was seeing that recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb – which I’d been in the morning before.  Considering the size of the tomb, it’s staggering that so many things fitted in there.  It took Carter twice as long to empty & catalogue the tomb as it did for him to find it (five versus ten years).  The golden shrines (outer coffins) are there and they get progressively smaller from very large boxes (at least two metres tall & even longer) a smaller box – still big enough to hold a sarcophagus.  I think Russian Dolls have much greater value as a childhood amusement than having one’s own set of Egyptian coffins to play with.

Now that I’m at the point of describing the room that held the most valuable and spectacular of Tutankhamun’s possessions for afterlife, I’m running out of superlatives.  So much gold, so many jewels.  The most famous, and most spectacular, piece is of course the Gold Mask – eleven kilograms of gold and so intricately detailed; it really was worthy of a lot of staring and inspection.

It was good fun wandering around the rest of the museum as it really is quite old and has the old, dusty museum feel to it that makes one feel like the clock has been wound back or you’ve been dumped into a film.

Through the building traffic we set off for a bit of a shopping afternoon.  First off a perfume factory, where I wasn’t in any way tempted to spend the last of my Egyptian pounds.  Our journey took us past the huge Citadel (originally built by Saladin to keep out marauding crusaders) and the quarries where the stone for the pyramids was excavated.  Our destination was Khan el Khalili, a market in the Islamic part of the city dating from the late fourteenth century.  With plenty of warnings of how persuasive the shopkeepers are and knowing not to be lured away from the main streets, we set forth with our undercover bodyguard/Tourist Police Officer.  It was great fun looking in (from the narrow alleyways) all these shops as the salesman tried everything approaching physical contact to entice you to buy their particular piece of Chinese-made tat.  Unfortunately there wasn’t enough exotic foodstuffs to hold my interest for long, so I just wandered feeling generally bemused at the banter of the shopkeepers until I found the meeting point.  The rice-pudding at the cafe where we met was worth the effort – it was scrumptious.

We had our final dinner together as a group that night & said a lot of goodbyes.  Six of our group departed for a few more days beside the Red Sea in Dahab, while the remaining four of us slept through their early morning departure.  With postcards hurriedly sent and the last little while spent by the pool, it was off to the airport.

So that was my Christmas week in Egypt – absolutely fantastic, a fair dose of third-world craziness, a mind-boggling amount of history and, nicely, much drier & warmer than the UK in December.  If anyone has the inclination to head over that way, I recommend it – we had no safety issues and the country could really do with more tourists to get back to where they used to be.  I’m glad I took my first tour, as I’m sure having to deal with transport in Cairo would not be too much fun independently.  I can also whole-heartedly recommend on the go tours and, in particular our guide Hesham, as well organised, professional and very knowledgeable.

Africa, history, travel

Luxor and Valley of the Kings

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By dawn, the landscape had changed dramatically to sugar plantations – one of the main industries in these parts

Off the sleeper train a little later than scheduled at around eight o’clock it was a much more pleasant and quicker drive through downtown Luxor to our hotel. Most of the hotels are on the east bank of the Nile, as was ours, and we were able to check in early. That provided much needed shower & napping facilities.  The rest of the day was free-time that was spent by the pool, looking out over the Nile, reading and walking around parts of Luxor.  With tourism so lean, the vendors were their usual pushy selves but easy enough to get past – so long as you didn’t utter so much as a syllable to them.

It wasn’t much of a walk to get to open fields and donkeys from the hustle of the main hotel district

The optional trip that night, that everyone went on, was to view Luxor Temple all lit up.  We spent a good hour wandering around and the yellow light really did well for the temple and its sandstone – it was quite a sight.  As always, the history behind the columns, statues, colossus, multiple sphinxes (there were so many, they formed an avenue – in the past stretching all the way to Karnak), carvings and other artwork was transfixing.

Four of the group opted for the super-early wake-up call to go ballooning over the Valley of the Kings.  The rest of us only had to get up at six to breakfast and then cross over the Nile again to drive through the sugar plantations (with their own narrow gauge railway spreading throughout) to meet the ballooners.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly visiting Valley of the Kings.  A barren valley on the west bank of the Nile (burial sites were in the west as that was where sun god Ra went to sleep each day), I could easily see why dig season is only winter – the summer heat and lack of shade must be something horrendous with all that rock around.  The kings started having their tombs hidden in this valley after the pyramids were obviously too easy a target for grave robbers.  So far, sixty-three tombs have been found and three of the ones I went in stretched well into & under the hillside – staggering to think of the effort that went in with only hammer & chisel (the same goes for almost all of the sites we saw).  Out of the elements, a lot of the funerary and mythology works are well preserved and easily hold one’s attention as the tunnels stretch steeply further and further down to the tomb.  Unfortunately, no photos in here.

Back to the logic of probably never coming back, I paid the extra to see Tutankhanum’s tomb – only discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter.  As the king died so young (in his late teens), his tomb is very small compared to many of the others – but plenty of possessions to take with him to the afterlife still managed to fit in there.  The sarcophagus and mummified remains are still there, but most of the rest is in the Egyptian Museum.

The many colonnades of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple got more and more impressive as we walked closer to it (it’s not far from the Valley of the Kings) – still plenty of statues to see there too.

Back in Luxor, the last temple of the day (east bank) was Karnak – which is a huge complex, where you enter under the watchful eyes of these rather curious ram-headed sphinxes.

The most impressive part of the complex, I thought, was the Hypostyle Hall in the Precinct of Amun-Re of over five thousand square metres with one hundred and thirty-four massive sandstone pillars – mostly elaborately carved.  Most are ten metres tall, while some are twenty-one metres tall with a diameter of over three metres.  The underside of the caps of the pillars still have some of the original colour on them, so that was interesting to see and try to extrapolate and think what the whole complex would have looked like when it was recently completed.

The huge single-piece obelisks are also worth beholding.

It was back on the sleeper train for the night back to Cairo and a far more hectic pace – although arriving on Friday, it would be the weekend and a little quieter.

Africa, engineering, food, history, travel, vehicles

Pyramids!

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With the overnight flight and the immediately-after day trip to Alexandria to recover from, most of Christmas Eve was spent doing so with a lot of sleeping, eating and reading.  The evening trip to the Pyramids was another add-on, but with the logic of “I’m not likely to be here again in a hurry” it was a bit of a no-brainer to hand over a few more Egyptian pounds.

Six of us went along and I got my first taste of Cairo traffic – more on that later. The result was that we missed the first, English, sound & light show that night and after a short tea stop we went to the Italian version of the show – luckily we had the English version on small radios.  This was the closest I had been yet to the Pyramids & Sphinx and the various lighting made them a spectacular sight – not that they aren’t usually, but there’s something different about it being dark all around.  The audio of the show went some way to describe the story behind these huge structures and some of their features which was good, but not nearly as wonderful as sitting marvelling at the age and immensity of the achievement.  Decent photos were difficult with a phone and a point & shoot – mostly because by the time one realised that the particular lights and colours were good for a shot, they had changed.

It wasn’t too early a start to Christmas Day – especially compared to those no doubt sharing houses with excitable early-rising children.  Meeting after breakfast, it was our first time together as the whole tour group.  With this being my first multi-day tour, I prefer to travel independently but wasn’t really keen on that for Egypt in its current situation (hindsight supports that decision), I was well pleased to see that there were only ten of us on the tour – a nice small group.  Hesham, our guide for the week, took us through some of the points about being tourists in Egypt and what would be happening on the tour before we loaded on the bus (one of the many small ones we would use for the week).  Riding along with and shadowing us for the day was our guest from the Ministry of Tourism – an unobtrusive guard keeping a sub-machine gun well hidden beneath his jacket.

With the traffic markedly better than the previous night it wasn’t long before we were in the parking lot and feeling pleased with our fortune at travelling to Egypt at this particular time.  With all the upheaval in the last two years, tourism is well down in the country (Cairo hotels are only running at six percent occupancy!) and the industry is hurting.  But this was our gain as there were very few people, comparatively, at all the sights we went to; no where was this more noticeable than at the Pyramids which were going on for deserted.  The downside of this is that the vendors selling tat (souvenirs) really have to work hard to make a sale – some found this a little overwhelming, but dark glasses with eyes front, hands in pockets, not uttering a word or giving an opening worked well for me.

I digress, I was thrilled to see the only remaining wonder of the ancient world (they really don’t look like they are going anywhere in a hurry) and get up to close to the many large limestone blocks that had been hauled and positioned four and a half millennia ago.  We had plenty of time to wander around and take photos and avoid the vendors in the sunshine.  Although a lot warmer and drier than the UK, it wasn’t ever too hot – as you can see by the icebreaker sleeves in the photos below.

Beside the Great Pyramid/Pyramid of Cheops, mandatory wearing of Christmas presents. Thanks Adele – & yes, that is a sheep driving a Massey Ferguson tractor.

Looking towards the second pyramid, Pyramid of Khafre, which still has some of the smooth outer layer at the peak

Most of us went down a very steep staircase and then up another to get to the centre of the Pyramid of Khafre. Despite the mildness outside, all that limestone really holds the heat – it was really hot in there

Panoramic photostop

Much time spent holding, pushing, lifting pyramids. Guide Hesham & Radley; unfortunately none of the efforts on my camera really worked out

Camel riding – that was a bit of fun for three quid. All the handlers/herders/whatever were good fun & took plenty of photos

A brief visit to the Sphinx and funerary temple beside it

We headed south to see some pyramids earlier in the evolutionary chain, this one a step pyramid and another bent pyramid

Back at the hotel in Giza after a most excellent day looking at many pyramids, big and small, there was enough time for a shower each before heading to the Giza train station for the overnight sleeper train five hundred odd kilometres south to Luxor.  I was initially due to go on the, separate, seater train overnight but decided a bit of extra money was worth it for something resembling sleep and extra security.  It was just as well we left in plenty of time for the station as the twenty kilometre (12 mile) trip took us close to an hour and a half in what has to be some of the worst traffic everywhere.  Strangely, fuel is heavily subsidised bringing the cost down to about twelve US cents per litre (!) – this just adds to the traffic woes as an over-abundance of vehicles compete for position on worn out, unmarked and unsigned roads.  This chaos does lead to some great sights though – best of the trip being the passenger standing on the front bumper/fender of a large lorry/truck cleaning the windscreen as the vehicle drove on; absolutely nuts.  After an hour or so the traffic thinned, about the time we drove past the massive crack running down the length of part of the elevated highway.

We all managed to make it to our cabins and settled in for some food and a bit of sleep.

Train food is not all that different to plane food

The only part of the train that made me feel like I might be in an Agatha Christie novel

Africa, city, history, travel

Alexandria

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After another fantastic early Christmas meal laid on by Trish, it was off across London on the rails dragging suitcases behind me to Heathrow.  A pleasant overnight flight (most of which I tried to sleep through) on Egyptair and the new Cairo airport confirmed my expectations that Egypt would be similar in affluence in Turkey; however, these were quickly dashed as we (four other Kiwis & I that were going on different tours with the same company) were driven across Cairo and Giza to our hotel.  There was much excitement in the van (sleep deprivation may have been a contributing factor) when we sighted the famous pyramids looming up behind the multitudes of unfinished multilevel houses (I can’t really go so far as to call them apartment blocks).

Wisely or otherwise, I had arrived in Egypt the day before I needed to and opted for a add-on day trip to Alexandria.  So under-rested and underfed I joined a few other day-trippers on the small bus to the coast at 7.30 am.  Climbing on the bus there was a smell of diesel pervading and the floor at the rear of the bus was very slippery – it turns out that on such a long trip (200 km) in Egypt it pays to carry a bit of extra fuel as in the recent climate one can never be guaranteed a supply and some of this had spilt.  From working in various industrial and chemical plants I have a reasonably high tolerance of such odours, so it wasn’t too bad; others didn’t feel the same way so we stopped along the Desert Road (much more appropriately named than the Desert Road in New Zealand as this one runs along the eastern edge of the Sahara) for hurried cleaning – I could get some much needed sustenance.

I’d heard a bit of Alexandria from Trish whose husband spent quite a few years growing up there and her father had also been stationed there during WWII – with fascinating photos to prove it [Trish, that statue that was uncaptioned in your Dad’s album was of Mohammed Ali (not the boxer)].  So I was interested to see some of the sights of the black and white photos in real-life colour. The chaos of the traffic became apparent as we approached the city – in many hours in traffic in a city of near five million I saw one set of traffic lights and no street signs.  First we had to pop down to the famous Corniche promenade to pick up a couple of South African guys that would be joining us for the day & trip back to Giza.  Eventually we made it to our first sight of the day, by which time we’d had plenty of time for Hesham (our guide for the day & also the guide on the week-long tour I was on) to explain a bit about Egypt and Alexandria.  The history of Alexander the Great’s brief rule and the extended rule of the Ptolemies and Cleopatras was fascinating – they’re still finding historical pieces from these eras in the Med.

Our first stop was the ancient catacombs, Kom al-Shaqafa, which were discovered believe it or not by a donkey in 1900 – it fell down the access shaft.  While not nearly as big as some catacombs I’ve been in, it was interesting as there was a merging of Egyptian, Roman and Greek art.  Excuse the poor quality of the surreptitiously taken photos.

A short distance from the catacombs is the well-known Pompey’s Pillar.  Set on top of the old Alexandria (I don’t know why I bother qualifying that with the word old, as most everything in this country is proper old – but then I come from a country that is not even two hundred years old) acropolis is the granite pillar (a single piece forms the twenty-seven metre tall shaft ) that used to be part of a Roman temple.  Here we started to see the first of many sphinxes.  The slight rise of the hill gave a good view of the surrounding neighbourhood.

Following lunch by the Mediterranean (where I was so hungry I forgot the rule of not eating salad that may have been washed in tap water – my digestive system survived, mercifully) we were off to the last sight of the day – the Modern Library.  On first hearing this, I was disappointed as I didn’t really come all this way to see a library.  It turns out that the ancient Royal Library of Alexandria (from around third century BC) was quite the library way back when (unfortunately it burned at various points).  The modern replacement was heaving with students (a university is just across the road) and despite the guide’s rather oddly accented English, the tour was interesting as the main area was an absolutely huge open-plan and tiered library.  The architecture is simply stunning inside & out.  It’s quite the facility and it was pleasing to see so many students spending so much time in the library – hopefully this bodes well for the country’s future.

So that was my brief visit to Alexandria, most enjoyable even if I was rather tired from the flight and hungry from not quite enough/any food during the early part of the day.