Friday, 25. July 2008, 10:13:00
About time I posted this one...
"Ladies and gentlemen. Get ready, get excited, because this is the moment you have been waiting for your whole lives". Every temple, pyramid, felluca (boat) ride, tomb, and museum..these are the words our tour guide gave us. After the first 5 times I thought it was a joke but by the end of the trip I realised that he was right. I can't pick a favourite experience in Egypt. I'll write a few of our best experiences though but it's unfair to have a favourite when you have to choose between the Pyramids of Giza, the Luxor Temple, the Valley of the Kings and everything else.
So to start with, I can harp on about our tour company, On The Go Tours. I would certainly recommend them but I think we got lucky with the tour guide we got. This was a 9 day tour of Egypt, letting us see the main sites, "hassle free" and we had everything done for us. This was also our first time in a tour group and we weren't optimistic about the experience.
Well we started off well. Though the plane landed 3 hours late, getting in at 3am in the morning, there was an On The Go person to see us through customs and get our visa's and that. Just as well as Cairo airport is chaotic. I don't mean organised chaos either. We got taken straight out of Cairo and put into the Oasis hotel in Giza. Don't stay there, the one next to the pyramids is far nicer and doesn't give you the runs with bad rice.
We weren't yet on the official tour, that was the next day so we had a nice day to relax, get some sleep, and appreciate the pool. The next morning we had bit of a group meeting, met our guide Waleed and found that most of the people on the tour with us were Kiwi's and Australians, some moving back home like us and passing through Egypt on the way.
First stop was the Pyramid's. I was ready to go home happy after seeing those. Does 'man they're big' suffice? No one can tell for sure how they were built even. Crazy. We saw the Sphinx too. It looks just like the picture out of Asterix and Cleopatra!
So we now boarded an overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. We had a sleeper carriage but unfortunately I didn't do much sleeping. I have to have complete silence for me to sleep so it's pretty hard on a train. Even with the noice cancelling headphones. What a geek.
So Aswan is heaps south, towards Sudan, (15 hours on the train) and we got put up in a nice hotel on an island in the middle of the Nile. As an anagram of myself I knew the Nile almost personally. Without sounding like a complete idiot...it is quite big isn't it (the Nile). So this hotel was 5 star (proper 5 star, not Egyptian 5 star), huge pool (two of them in fact) and a massive bed that would fit me and my 5 future wives (Trin doesn't know about this move wives thing yet so keep it quiet yeah?). From Aswan we got and did a bit of market shopping, saw a big Dam, a renovated temple, and ate at a Nubian restaurant with a power outage. That was quite entertaining as we didn't realise there was no power until about half way through the night. The waiters were all using their cellphones to see
.
The next two nights we were spening on a Felluca, which is a traditional Egyption sailboat. We had about 12 people on ours with a crew of four. We sailed north up the Nile, against the wind, all the way up to Luxor on the second day. During the day the Felluca was great. When there was no wind we could just swim along in the Nile behind (or sometime in front of) the boat. Toilet stops were interesting. I've got my 'squat' down pat now. At night though, I just once again could not sleep. The first night we just slept in a random spot on light mattresses on the Felluca under mosquito nets. However huge river boats kept going past pumping out Arabic drum & bass / opera (the only way I can describe it) so sleep was difficult. I found the next morning that my leg had stuck out of the mosquito net and those boys had an absolute feast on my foot. 6 days later and they are still itching but I've found some magic turkish stuff that is making them die down. Do I hear sighs of relief around the world onmy behlaf? There should be.
So I'm really bad at names of places and temples so sorry this is all a bit vague. Those Lonely Planet people must spend a lot of time jotting down the names of places they went to and when. Their guides would be pretty useless otherwise wouldn't they. "go to this place around the corner from the church, down a narrow alley and turn right at the tree, order the meat dish with spices". I won't be holding my breath for a call from them as their latest correspondent (posted to some sinking south pacific island no doubt).
Back to Egypt...(or is it the future?).
Post Felluca we got a nice night in at the Luxor Hotel (you'll never guess where that is), we were absolutely zonked and had a good afternoon nap before visiting the Luxor Temple. See, I remember that one. It was my favourite one too. Waleed gave a fantastic talk and it really brought together all the little bits he'd been talking on at each temple. Though we were very sleepy we had to get up at 4:15am the next morning as we were doing hot air balloning over Luxor. It was magic. I don't like heights but somehow the balloon doesn't seem take that into account. It's really different. I think this was the highlight of the trip for me but it doesn't seem fair as that's something you can do in any country. We had a crazy dude flying the thing though. He was playing 'how low can we go' and the answers were a little frightening. I felt sorry for the poor people that were sleeping on their beds of their roof and woke up to see a huge balloon 10 metres over their beds with 25 tourists taking photos of them. Ha ha, always wear PJ's to bed!
We also visited the Valley of the Kings, the tombs were damn hot and Carnac Temple with it's hippodrome and lake. There's plenty more to tell but I'll remember Egypt for it's sheer number of amazing sites and unfortunately I'll remember a night of the Felluca where three Australian Veteneraians would not stop talking about horse uteruses and such. Ick.
On to Turkey now.
WIDGETIZE