i didn’t quite post everything yet from our amazing trip to Egypt; when we went snorkling in the Blue Hole in Dahab, i bought one of those very simple (but as you can see here at least pretty effective) small throw-away camera’s…
i asked Sylvia to take the name literally after developing the pix (thanks, Syl!)…
now, the pictures don’t do justice to the immense feeling of freedom beneath the surface. what i also loved was how al of the fishies accepted our presence as if we weren’t there… i don’t know how many different species we have seen, but it must have been at least 50!
One of the nice things about working in a different country, I feel is to use the (little) time off to see new things, work and play, so to speak…
So after my class in the morning on friday, where we are really on a roll and have good discussions, I hurry to the appartment to get my things. I walk over to the busstation to take the expressbus to Busan, the 2nd city of Korea. A funny thing, this expressbus. Costs next to nothing, and drives to all the major cities, really easy. also, because of the distance it stops somewhere at some parkingplaces with shops and toilets at the side of the highway to get something to eat and drink in the bus (i really don’t see bus 182 from Leiden to Alphen do that ;-( )…
i arrive in one of two busterminals in Busan in the west of the city.
but as always, my experience is that when you take a couple of minutes to understand the subwaysystem of these types of cities, you go anywhere, anytime at no cost… and Busan os no different!
so i take the subway to my hotel, nice and neat, next to a big business center and close to one of the major beaches, Haeundae beach. from my room, i give my friend Sung Min a call; gonna meet him later. for now, i start walking, my favourite means of transportation when it comes to getting to know a city… i cross the river from my hotel and ignore the biggest shopping mall in the world (according to Guiness anyway, for what it’s worth), the Shinsegae Centum City mall… then i walk into the Suyeong area, a nice, kind of messy folky type of neighbourhood. when i get hungry, i pass a japanese restaurant, where the waitresses are very giggly and the food looks amazing; enter Arvid!
the sushi indeed is fantastic and i get the giggly waitress passing me and giving me new dishes, looking great and tasting better! too bad we cannot figure out the english fishnames used in the sushi…
i walk back to the hotel to meet up with Sung Min and it feels as if we saw each other yesterday. he first shows me Haeundae beach and although not very applicable to the two of us, this is a very romantic place (proof of which are the couples sitting on the benches at the cliffs)… the start of the beach is this around the (apparently) famous Westin hotel and you follow the wooden walking paths around the cliffs ending up on the actual beach. this beach has a very classy audience, couples walking hand-in-hand and people having drinks at the boulevard. so are we. we sit down and keep up the catching up; this is one of the things i like so much about talking to Sung Min: i can ask him anything i want about his culture and he can ask me anything about mine…
we walk back to the car and shows me the other beach,
Gwangalli beach. this beach has a totally different atmosphere: there is a rockconcert going on, many young people, nice and noisy, fortune tellers at the beach (“you will be very relaxed real soon”); very vibrant! sung Min shows me the raw fish market here: a big hall at the ground floor of a huge appartment building, where there are all kinds of reservoirs with water and the most exotic fish in them. the idea is to indicate which fish you want to eat and then to have it delivered to any of the restaurants on one of the floors above… indeed, all of the floors above the groundfloor are restaurants!!! Sung Min and i are not hungry, so we go to the Thursday Party, a great bar at the boulevard, where we do some drinking…
when we walk back to the car, which is parked at a parking lot, the owner asks Sung Min where i am from and starts to Hiddin-Gu me (Hiddink is a dutch football coach who has pushed Korea to a higher ground when he was their coach and consequently is considered the reincarnation of Buddha here..). i get a drink from him, nothing alcoholic (probably because he drank most of that himself) and he starts to become kind of affectionate… Funny thing is, that in the Netherlands if you would approach a man like he does, you are wondering if you ended up in a gay-bar. i have understood, that because of the invisible fence between men and women (especially when you are not married), men amongst men and women amongst women are very physical in that they are very used to touch each other, even when they don’t know you so well, like my new friend. after we part from our friend, we get into the car and head back to my hotel where Sung Min drops me off. i say goodbye to my friend and fall into an amazing sleep…
saturdaymorning i get up and head downtown to Seomyeon to have some great coffee and a muffin at one of the international coffee places… nice jazz!
after my coffee i walk about over all of the little markets where it is great to be able to pass and look without having to say ‘la, shokran’ every time! by the way, maybe there is a lesson here: people work for their money, so far so good. but principally everyone works for his money! it is a shame if you don’t work! because if you are not in an office or a store, you can always grow vegetables and sell that?! you continuously see mainly old ladies at the side of the road, pealing peas, organizing carrots or leaves of lettuce and putting them into containers, cleaning fish or cutting chickenlegs; activities of which you thought they were just done by machines, but where they prove the contrary… but it is also a social gathering, your friends are sitting here as well or visit you ‘at work’, you have your family with you; this is Maslow visually explained!
i pass the markets on my way to Busanjin market through the “i-got-the-most-amazing-old-shit-for-sale”-market… i love walking the back-alleys. like in Seoul, they are crawling with small booths forming one particular type of market. and it is so funny: no matter how many restaurants there are, they are building and starting new ones everywhere! and in all of these markets there is a whole lot of the same! like in all of these countries there is absolutely no diversification. now that intrigues me, although i do like the customerorientation: it is very easy to find specific stuff!
i take the subway to the last, most northern station to take the bus to Geyong Ju. at this time, the subway is nice and busy for me to observe all kinds of different people and how they differ from their peergroups in Holland! young women, grandfathers with grandchildren, young teenagers, schoolchildren, old people, twenty-somethings… and in everything they seem more naïve than their counterparts in Holland. younger and more carefree, without the feeling to have to be tough and distant; at least that is the impression i sometimes get in Holland. people here are carelessly sleeping in the subway and others look at you totally open, straight in your face; try doing that in 010: “what’cha looking at catweazle? am i wearing something of yours?!”… even in the street, people bump into you, but never aggressive, just absent-minded: “sorry” (in korean)…
Sung Min told me to bring an umbrella by the way, because very bad weather was expected; apparently the RKMI (republican korean metereological instituut) has the same capabilities as the knmi in Holland; the weather is amazing! so now i am in the expressbus once again and again, this is an amazing means of transportation! flexible, comfortable… i really don’t know whether this would work in the Netherlands, but here it is fantastic (please in Holland with dutch drivers, cause i haven’t encountered any good one here; gas/break/change lanes/break/gas and then there is no car in sight, can you imagine what they do when they pass a truck!!)…
after about 40 minutes i arrive in Geyong Ju and the hotel is just around the corner. now, i understood this place is actually kind of a big, open-air museum with large distances and around the corner at the hotel, i saw a rental-motorscooterplace… hmmm…
although the two boys tell me i need an international driver’s licence, i self-confidently point at the little motorbike at mine and add i already did this once in korea (true, but that was a small moped at Jeju-island!)… Anyway, 50 or 125 cc, they ask me… duhn. the 125 is pretty fast (down the mountain, wind in my back about 125 km)… Cool wind in my hair (under my helmet), warm smell of the kimchi… anyway…
they explain to me how to get to the most beautiful places, Bulguksa temple and the Seokguram grotto… it seems simple and later it actually is, but the map is not to scale, so everything seems much closer than it is. these two places are about 30 km down the valley; thank god for my scooter! so hit the gas and head down to Bulguksa. the whole area stems from the Silla dynasty and this temple is about 1250 years old… beautiful complex with all kinds of prayer-areas and buddha-statues… from there i get to Seokguram and i like this even better: a small temple carved into a rock up in the mountain with a normal front… the buddhas in it are also carved in the mountainrock, really beautiful! small but lovely!
from there i drive back along all kinds of remains; a temple here and there (but after Bulguksa and Seoul, more of less), i pass the Anapji-pond, where king Munmu founded a big pond with temples to house animals and plants (foreseeing!), Cheomseongdae, the oldest astronomical obeservatory in East-asia (for what it’s worth) and the Daereungwon royal tombs, which are tumuli, big hills under which the royals were buried…
A little bit later than i should have i return the motorscooter, but they don’t mind and i go for a bite. Then i notice, that the rest of Geyong Ju is really nothing much. I find a nice restaurant where i have some meatsticks and a plate of undeterminable (at least
for me, as i don’t speak Korean ) meat, which is not so good… I impersonated a chicken and the girl nodded, but if this is chicken, it is very tough parts of it… I’ll just leave it… (later, when i ask Paul, he says they were the chins of chicken…)
after dinner, there is really nothing much to do here, so i get back to the hotel…
the next day i take the amazing bus back and check in again at the Haeundae Centum city hotel. i am visiting william and veronica, two former students of mine, about 10 years ago. they have gotten married and are living in Busan. William invited me to celebrate his birthday with them and some of their friends.
we had a great lunch with all guests in a nice italian restaurant and drinks up in their beautiful appartment overlooking the ocean…
After this relaxed atmosphere, drinks and nice people it is very hard to get myself moving again. but i want to do a little more sightseeing so i thank them for their great hospitality and take the subway to Jagalchi, the famous fishmarket… it is the most crazy amount of fishbooths and fishstands that you can imagine and then you have the inside market still…
i walk over to the other side of the main road and enter a vibrant area, where it is immensely crowded and very energetic. not so at the hotel where i return, because most of the guests are probably preparing for another day of congresses and seminars… i have to say, i love Busan, the way it is built around all of those mountains in the city, creating different areas… loved it!
let’s go to sleep and return to the vibrant, energetic Gwangyang in the morning…
nothing really exciting today, except for my father’s birthday; yeeeeej!… Other than that, we are being transferred from Dahab to Cairo. We are not sad, just a little melancholic…
it gives me time to contemplate a little in the bus and think about this amazing country we have seen so much, but still too little of these weeks.
it is the beauty every time when visiting another country; get to meet the people, understand their habits, get into their customs, try to speak at least a very little bit of their language and be amazed at their environment, which is so ordinary to them, all of this without any prejudice or judgement… And boy, have we done this these last two weeks!
as i mentioned, a little boy’s dream to visit the land of pharaos, pyramids and temples and so much history. i was amazed, both at the things i knew to expect and the things i didn’t know to expect. and as usual, when looking at a different country, a land of fascinating contradictions. on the one hand the most amazing cultural and historical beauty and on the other hand excruciating filth and dirt. about both, by the way no one seems to care too much! in some areas the people have amazing sophistication, in others they are rude and primitive. a land of extraordinary accomplishments with amazingly underdeveloped solutions for some of the problems they face…
and the people: amazing to try to understand their motivations and goals in life a little. i know people who were complaining about the salesmethods here. i think if they came from those backgrounds, they would be motivated too, to pull some out of those european and american walking wallets visiting their country! and then the polution by some of the eastern european countries, especially russia! it is really incredible, but they still find it necessary to carve their names (“vladimir/moskow”) in rocks in the coloured canyon, take pictures in the tombs when that is forbidden and even leave their undoubtedly infallable presence carved in the stones and tombs themselves!!! it is a shame, but hey, with all the money in the world, you can’t buy class!
then the public interest commercial against extremism; i guess every country has its demons, right?! by the way, Jacqueline will get back to me about what the exact payoff is of this commercial. you will know as soon as i know… by the way, i just found the video on youtube: watch for yourself…
also, i keep being intrigued by the way the Islam is embedded in this culture; the prayer times, the ‘human church bells’, the enormous richness of the mosques… but most importantly, the impossibility to ban certain intrinsic human urges; “we have determined that sexuality is restricted to the marriage!”, yeah, like that’s gonna work!
the Nile fascinated me so much: how this river indeed is the main artery of this country, literally feeding it, fertilizing it, but only for about a couple of hundred meters on both sides! behind that, it is desert and rocks… but no matter how important their blood vain is, they keep polluting it with the waste-equivalent of cholesterol: dirt, bacteria, human excrement and garbage, a whole lot of garbage!
and even in this bus, driving straight through the sinai desert, where no matter how hot and infertile it is, there are still people living here… we drive under the suez canal and end up in this traffic frenzy, close to cairo… three lanes, but you can easily drive with six cars and trucks alongside each other! a horrible accident apparently causes this pile-up and we finally end up back at the hotel. the grlz and i have already decided to have a small bite at the dd-kfc (deaf-dumb-kentucky-fried-chicken) and end up in bed, not too late…
at 00:30, we get to the airport and i have not had a smoother check-in in my life (must be the hour…)! and the flight is also as smooth as it gets. back home, we are picked up by my parents and we have an amazingly relaxed sunday, where we celebrate my father’s birthday together with my brother’s family…
we were all amazed about this gorgeous country…
but most of all, as usual i guess, i was impressed with my grlz, amazing, special, extraordinary grlz…
our last full day and then tomorrow we will head back to Cairo, away from this dolce vita to the chaos..
but hey, we have one more day! this is the only excursion where in this case Kyrah is not coming. We have arranged for her to stay with Han and his son Jules to enjoy the pool, swimming and games as Daya and I, together with Peter, Mia and Geert and Jacqueline of course visit the coloured canyon. I am especially curious having visited those famous canyons in the US. the coloured canyon is a canyon located in the sinai desert, which gives it an extra special touch to my taste…
we are taken by a small bus and have mohammed with us as our guide. on our way to the sinai however, we see these small communities in the middle of nowhere, where you could really not imagine anyone living there… except… the cousin of mohammed. we pick him up as he looks like a member of the bedouin-tribe guarding the canyon.
simple: if you have one of them with you, you enter for free, if you don’t, you pay.
so we don’t, and as we exit the ‘main’ road, we wish we had put on our sports-bras (and i am talking ’bout the men)… the jeepsafari is included in the tour (but without the wild animals)… finally we arrive at the canyon and walk down into the gorge. it is indeed a beautiful canyon with amazing colours of all of the minerals. sometimes we see a tree and a specific type of bush of which it is absolutely incredible it can survive in this heat and drought. the same goes for the incidental animal like those funny-looking gekkos.
i have to say, the hike is not as far or straining as i thought and Daya walks the distance with ease too, like a regular mountain goat… but the hike is nice and the views are amazing!
when we get back to the hotel, Kyrah has had lots of fun and is very relaxed and Daya and i get into the pool immediately. we do some more snorkling, although the surf is kind of heavy…
we relax like mad and later we walk down main street Dahab to spend the last couple of pounds the grlz got as pocketmoney. finally, they decide to get some henna-tattoos and i have to say, they look amazing! (mostly because they come off!)…
then being the last night together, we have dinner at Nemo’s, as far as i am concerned the best restaurant of this trip. mostly, because i choose the most amazing seafood… the guys come in with a huge dish with all kinds of fish, shrimp and lobster, so after some bargaining, i ask for a plate with white snapper, huge tigershrimps (the monsters were about 30 cm!) and lobster and Mia and Geert join me. as we down some of the msot amazing
shakes so far we get the same plate, but now with the stuff grilled on it! hmmm…..
we sit by the pool with an ice-cold beer under the stars overthinking our sins and the long trip ahead tomorrow…
today is a day, where we have nothing to do… no excursions, no trips, no culture… watch how we are struggling with that!
Daya and i do some snorkling here in the ocean and even here, we see the most beautiful fish. one of which is on my plate at night, as i order grilled barracuda, which is really tasty… of course we have all of our dishes accompanied with milk- and fruitshakes…
after a magnificent day, exploring the last cultural parts of our journey in the valley of the kings, the temple of Hashepsut and Deir-al-Medina, we are picked up by bus and head over to the airport of Luxor. although it is a short flight, Kyrah is able to enjoy the perks of business class after being upgraded … born for greatness, I am sure…
the flight was amazingly calm and after we arrive in Sharm-al-Sheikh, we get on the bus to go to Dahab; a (although we don’t notice that yet at night) very relaxed, less-touristic village, originally founded by bedouins… after arriving i put the grlz to bed, and head over to the pool to have a beer and sit at the Gulf of Accaba; so this is where the relaxing starts!
and in the morning, as we rise and I show the pool overlooking the Red Sea to the grlz, we do get a little crazy! but first we are taken by jeep to the Blue Hole, which is one of the most beautiful places to dive and go snorkling, rumour has it…
driving there is already an experience with Shaggy on the wheel; a happy egyptian with the naughty humour of an immigrant in London, where he undoubtedly picked up his english wife, for whom he created 2 facebook-pages (to hide his egyptian conquests for!)… Shaggy stops abruptly to put on his safety belt as we approach some policemen, cause, as he claims “doesn’t have a licence nor id”… no problem, as he starts singing very loudly and gives the policemen (does he know them?) some cigarettes… “by the way, if you are ever in Maastricht, go to my brother’s place, he will make you a special price!”
arriving at the Blue Hole is fantastic! we go to yet another place of one of Jacqueline’s friends, head up the stairs to lay on the second floor, outside, with some sunshading, relaxing in the pillows and having some more of those fruitjuice-lassies, yeah baby, this is living! Jacqueline explains the principles of snorkling and the grlz listen carefully… having more trainers and teachers here pays off, as I take Daya under my wing and Kyrah is guided and helped by Mia (who used to be a swimming instructor as well.
after the first trials and scares, the grlz become used to the technique and get in the water, where the coral is only 10-20 meters wide, after which the blue hole starts: we look into the deep, which is supposed to be up to 100 meters deep (well, I wasn’t able to check..). here the beauty starts already; we see at least 40 different types of tropical fish, one more colourful than the other! purple and yellow, bright blue, rainbow, you name it, we even see a stingray with small fishes on his back, amazing! I take pictures of the fish and as we speak my Sylvia is developing them… I will update this post when i have them…
finally, after having lunch, we get in at a place Les Belles, a little north of our hide-out and swim all the way back. it sure is amazing, seeing even more fish and for me also seeing the grlz having fun and staring at all these fish!
after headed back to the hotel, we enjoy the pool, the beach and the sea…
then we are awaited by a guy with four horses, as i promised Kyrah, we would ride anything we could ride on this holiday, so the only things missing from our list are… horses!! we all get on one and i tell the guy Kyrah knows how to ride and ask him whether she can gallup a little later. it is very nice for Kyrah, because after the guy notices she can ride very well, he lets her do her thing…
so we get to the beach and walk south and then Kyrah just starts running along the seashore into the sunset… very nice and indeed, she is so happy! Even Daya and I gallup, but the more we gallup, the more we admire Kyrah for having so much control over these animals!
then with a small group, we go to the “funny mummy”, another one of those amazing places, this time we lie in pillows right at the Red Sea… I wonder what the poor people are doing…
we have another feast of fruitjuices, beautiful dishes and yes, i have my first shisha (waterpipe)… really nice, although i wouldn’t start this habit at home; this atmosphere is amazing for this…
satisfied, we walk back and fall into a deep sleep preparing for a day of nothing tomorrow…
after a glorious day of doing nothing, we are very ready to see more…
we pack all our stuff and have it stored in the hotel, because tonight we take the plane to Sharm-al-Sheikh and the bus to Dahab. we gather in the lobby early to take the bus.
…as I already mentioned, the pharaos considered the eastbank of the Nile as the side of the living, so that’s where they built there palaces and most of the cities. the westbank was the side of the dead, as the sun sets there. that is why they built their tombs, pyramids and graves there.
now after a period of building pyramids, they realised that creating these immense constructions might have been wise for everyone to find them, but at the same time that also attracted thiefs and robbers. bugger…
so the pharaos started creating their tombs in the valley of the kings, a desolate, mountainous place, where they dug their tombs in the mountains and hiding them by camouflage. now, as you don’t know where your predecessor dug his tomb, it could be, that you strike that tomb. so then you have to go a different way (if you’re nice) or just kick out all of the old stuff and put in your own (‘the king is dead, long live the king’)…
but funny things can happen too… as Tutanchamon was only 9 when he became pharao, he had a highpriest Ay as his righthand. this guy was in his nineties so it was logical to build the tomb for him first… however, Tutanchamon died first of complications of a broken leg and malaria. so then they put his mummy in the grave for the highpriest for Lord Howard Carter (or actually a 12-year old boy, who discovered the lid to the tomb when they were packing up things to leave) to discover in 1922…
we take the bus very early for reasons of heat and tourists (the first of which works, the second doesn’t or maybe it is even much busier later in the day). we arrive at the valley and are guided by Azza, a friend of Jacqueline’s. she takes the time first to explain about the graves and which ones you can visit, as you can only visit three tombs of about 10 that are opened to the public. they say it is to preserve the tombs, but i think it is because of employment reasons. at every tomb there are officials to pierce a hole in your ticket to indicate you have visited one… hm. what is a little annoying, they walk with you inside, indicate amazing spots to take a picture that I really wouldn’t have found myself (yeah, right!), tell you this is an amazing tomb (I saw that myself walking in, thank you) and then, in the end there is that inevitable fingergesture of the middlefinger moving fast under the thumb… now i understand we are rich tourists and i understand where they come from, but i find this a little ridiculous. never mind, i just do my trusted ‘la, shokran’, works every time!
after Azza’s very nice explanations, we start by visiting the furthest one, the grave of Tuthmosis III. good choice, because everyone starts at the beginning, so there is almost no one yet. also, this is one of the most beautiful ones with a lot of hieroglyphics of everyday life and the stairs and corridors to get there. the grave of his successor, the IV is also beautiful and we visit a third one, which wasn’t finished ;-(
then as Azza explained, you could buy an extra ticket to visit either Ramses V/VI or Tutanchamon’s grave. we take Ramses’s as this is one of those examples, where VI stumbled on V’s, because he reigned only very short and decided to use that one, nice! it is beautifully decorated and preserved very nicely.
and indeed, you ask, where are the pictures?
there are none. you cannot take pictures in the valley of the kings, so after some fierce negotiations once again, we have a separate booklet and postcards of the valley, scans of which will follow later…
next on the list is Daya’s tomb, the temple of Hatshepsut. she was considered as the most successful female pharao and reigned a relatively long period. she wanted to be recognized as pharao so much, that she acted as a man in a lot of ways, wanting to be called king and his majesty.
it is an amazing complex built against a huge cliff, but not her idea, however. it was inspired by the smaller temple of Mentuhotep, right next to it… perfect symmetry and yet another example of megalomany by the pharao. personally, i think this was essential to be an accepted ruler in those days…
you can imagine that in those days, it wasn’t easy to get to the valley of the kings. and that that might have become a problem as you do have to build it, right?! so their solution was to build a village called Deir-al-Medina for the artisans and builders of the valley. now, of course this was kind of jynxing your life, right?! I mean, you live on the westbank, for Ra’s sake… well, they just drew a line through the middle of the village to create a west-side and an east-side
(sounds like the FC Deir-al-Medina supporters club)…
don’t get me wrong, the village is nice, but what is really interesting are the tombs they created for themselves. because that was were the artists could really get it on! in the valley, they worked on assignment, but here, do did their own thing. so you see their experiments (i saw pictures where they started to draw abs) and colors that were very new and unusual, beautiful!! also, only since two days a new tomb had opened, where we saw even more unusual and new pictures by the artists, nice!
and sorry for keeping the group waiting, but i wandered off through the village finding the temple of the village behind it, where another official led me around in the temple (‘couldn’t have done it myself’), which had beautiful pictures and hieroglyphs…
back in the bus, we are taken back to the hotel to swim and relax a little more, have something to eat and prepare for the trip to the last stop of our journey, Dahab, a bedouin village with diving and relaxing written all over it…
So we walk around the souk a little and the grlz want to send some oldskool emails (postcards) so we sit down at a teahoust again, where we have water and minttea. This place is cool. The owner sits down with us and we get some hybiscusdrinks on the house and have to pay next to nothing! A good experience once again…
Then, we buy some gifts and walk around the souk once more. The pool lures us and we humbily follow…
The only plan we have is a donkeyride at the westbank, whereafter we will meet the rest of the group to have dinner. So we go by ferry and in front of the restaurant where we had dinner yesterday, we are awaited by our host from yesterday, who arranged the donkeys and is apparently riding with us.
No saddles just a cloth, but Kyrah cannot wait to gallup with the thing . The beauty is, we ride through authentic nubian villages, where life just seems to have stood still… Children playing in the… uhn… sand (I was gonna say streets, but that seems like a gross overqualification), a furniturebuilder transporting a bench on his back, it’s like being in a timemachine…
We ride for over an hour and back at the restaurant we meet the rest of the group and have dinner almost next to the restaurant of yesterday. And once again it is amazing…
Looking at the eastbank, the lights at luxor temple are particularly enchanting…
Although some are finding the starting hours of the trips we make a little early, I am glad we start this early, because it is still bareable and not so crowded at this hour. Today we do the eastbank: first we visit Karnak-temple, a huge compound of all kinds of temples and halls, constructed by many pharaos over a period of 2500 years between 3000 and 500 b.c.
And indeed, having seen it yesterday at night enhances the experience greatly!
Some of the story we understood and combined with the explanations of our new guide Khaled I get a good impression of the importance of Karnak. It was founded for the god of gods Amon, when Luxor, or Thebe as it was called back then, become the capitol. And many pharaos built chapels, obelisks, temples, walls and statues. I talked about the megalomany of the pharaos? Well, just a small story as one more illustration: queen Hatsjepsut, who was stepmother, sister and grandmother of Tutmosis III (Jerry Springer, eat your heart out!) got an obelisk from her father and put it at this temple. But you know: mine is or will be bigger than yours, so she had two obelisks built of her own, much bigger than the old one. But the Gods punish immediately: one of them fell and broke before it was lifted…
Here by the way, we get more proof of how far ahead the egyptians were in terms of architecture. The front wall/pylones are amazingly high and to ensure their stability, they already invented and built foundations! Dig a hole 5 m deep, put layers of sand and rocks to the surface and then build the wall. Also, as the Nile flodded the temple every year, they built what is now known as the Holy Lake to function as a drainage system: all of the excess water streamed into this lake ensuring the absence of water under the constructions!
Aside from Khaled’s wonderful explanations, it seems all of the guides like to do small theater. To illustrate their stories they pick out people from the group and give them roles. I was Ramses II, Kyrah Cleopatra and Daya was queen Hatshepsut… It would make for an interesting science fictionmovie with atimemachine, but whatever!
Next on the list is Luxor temple, which is not so far from Karnak (3,5 km as I already mentioned). In front there used to be two obelisks, but as one main archeologist was De Champilion, the egyptian Mohammed Ali gave one of the obelisks to France as a gift. This obelisk is at? Tthe Place de la Concorde, right! Inside of the temple, you can see the edge of where the sand used to be about 7 meters above our heads. And on top of that in the 11th century, they built a mosque. Think they did that to nag the old religions? Nah… So now, as they excavated the rest of the temple the mosque is on kind of a plateau in the middle of the front portal of the temple… Altthough the temple is beautiful, we are becoming a little blase: another temple?! But I personally see the bright side: can you imagine how much culture they had, that we can become so blase? Exactly.
Just in the sphere of observation: I sometimes get lost in the origin of things.
In the taxi, I see an amount of old-fashioned cassette tapes on top of the dashboard and I wonder if they would still play at all… And my mind automatically goes back in time to when the artist was in the studio recording his/her masterpieces of which he/she was absolutely sure it would become a hitrecord… And maybe it was played; it was sold at least, but now this tape ends up in an egyptian cab… How I would love to see that in a condensed timeframe!
Anyway, the last on the east bank is the Luxor museum. Not very big and I think also not very big collection of artifacts (as most of it was robbed during ancient times), but the stuff that is there is very beautiful.
The rest of the day is very relaxed as we hang by the pool, have some drinks there and basically just chill.
We just decide to walk the egyptian souk and back through the back streets of Luxor. This is so amazing! Dirty, naked children running around the streets and here we are the only white people… Beautiful to see and experience and I tell the grlz how I always love to see these parts of a place as well, as this is not touristic or prepared; this is real egyptian!
At night, we walk to the riverside and take the ferry to another one of those amazing places at the Westbank; we sit on the terrace and have fantastic food, fish, beef tahjin, all kinds of vegetables; amazing night.
And when one of the girls in the group proposes to start dancing, we dance and the grlz are taught how to bellydance with the skirts we bought at the nubian village…
When we are back in the hotelroom I see an absurd commercial by the way. Although I don’t understand arabic it is a commercial against terrorism as if they want to discourage youth to become extremists! Pictur a black and white commercial where clowns with red wigs first play funny and then seem to execute a woman! This is just a plain horrormovie!
Well I have to say, falling asleep was almost as romantic as waking up, it is just so horribly early!!!
Again we are experiencing how waking up early induces great jokes and humor and we gather on the biggest boat to have breakfast… The boats start to sail again, well, sail… there is no wind so we are just floating a couple of kilometers downstream. The bus has picked up our luggage at the hotel and picks us up to go to Luxor and visit the temples of Kom Ombo and Edfu on the way…
After saying goodbye to captain Asaf and his crew, we hop on the bus and get moving.
Kom Ombo is close, about 45 km… Arriving there we see a beautiful temple, very big dedicated to two gods, Horus and a local god called Sorbek, a crocodile god. An amazing complex, which even looks more special at this early hour… Here I experience the best negotiator so far: a young boy wants to sell me 4 for 5 LE (egyptian pound) or 10 for 10 (quantum discount I presume)… Well, the grlz have a lot of friends, so… They are scarabees and they do have a special meaning as it is one of three gods representing various stages of the sun during the day, namely sunrise. This stands for hope, starting something new, positivity… I like.
We step into the bus again and head for Edfu, which is a little further, about 70 km.
So great to be in the bus driving through this (or any) country, as you really experience the people and the surroundings. We see some local markets, a sugar reed factory, where all reed is droven in by anything that moves, from donkeys to huge trucks… We see graves chopped into the mountains, people waiting at busstops (special? You betcha!), in short, I love cruisin’…
Apparently, some tourguides say Edfu is hell on earth.
Well, it sure is lively and there are a lot of people walking up, down, left and right the road… Everyone seems busy and in this town you see, actually a lot of them are. I see chopshops, butchers, bakers, paintshops and as always people selling shit. On the street.
So we drive through Edfu to get to the temple. This is my new favourite! It is so big and with an enormous amount of chambers and corners, outside and inside and most importantly: both the hieroglyphics as well as the paintings are still very much intact!
Must be the climate functioning as a preservatory; it is so amazingly hot!
It is here, that I negotiate some more to get ourselves some gifts, a nubian mask (that resembles the ones I bought in Salvador; logical, as this is also a representation of an native-african ghostrepellent) and a rababa, a twostringed violin…
From Edfu to Luxor is a somewhat longer trip, but then we arrive at one of the cultural centers of the world. First thing that I notice is the enormous contrast, because aside from the Luxortemple and Karnak complex, Luxor is one enormous building pit. Only the main roads are asphalt and all small ones connected to it are just sand. We have a hotel looking out at the Luxor temple, but they have discovered that there was a sphynx row of 3,5 km linking Luxor temple to Karnak. So they are excavating this row leading to the obligatory relocation of everything in its way (our hotel for one has to move within 3 years!
And I don’t think the objectionprocedures work quite the way they do as in Holland)… Maybe archeo-logical (although I believe it could very well be blended into the environment much better, linking different eras together, you know Rotterdam-style), but it also generates a crazy, ugly, dirty inner city!
The hotel, like all hotels has a great location and is reasonable. The pool and restaurant/bar at the roof is a big plus; we see us ending up there after one of the excursions enjoying the water and weather with some food and drinks. The warmth is crazy these days: 45 degrees, which is hot even to their standards; fortunately we are handling it gracefully (and where possible by the pool!)…
It is about 3 o’clock as we check in and head for the water. A crazy notion, as we are so close to a temple built about 4000 years ago; at the spot where we are now, workers were sweating their asses off so many years ago!
We are having dinner with the group and head for the touristic part of the souk. Exiting the hotel to the left you can go left for the egyptian part and right for the touristic part. I also plan to go with the grlz to the egyptian part one of these days…
At a great restaurant we have a nice meal, where the highlights of the egyptian cuisine become increasingly clear: pitas with various pastes (sesame, humus and garlic-types) tahjins and kebab-like dishes… In about half of the touristic places they don’t serve alcohol and I absolutely adore the fruitjuices (as I always do)… Simple, yet extremely effective mixes like strawberry, guave and mango (even though it is not mango season yet).
This is the first time by the way, I get offered a stable of camels for my youngest daughter; the restaurantowner has a son and for 1000000 camels I ask him to feed her well .
After dinner we walk to the hotel, where a minibus takes us to the sound and light show at Karnak temple. As we will visit the eastbank tomorrow, it is very nice to see it by night beforehand (especially as I love nightphotography!).
And I must say: the show is amazing, even though some of the story gets lost in the oldfashioned language and bad soundenhancement. But it is fantastic to see this huge complex by night…
Satisfied we return to the hotel, where we notice that our airconditioning has been fixed, which is not a superfluous luxury in this heat…
) meat, which is not so good… I impersonated a chicken and the girl nodded, but if this is chicken, it is very tough parts of it… I’ll just leave it… (later, when i ask Paul, he says they were the chins of chicken…)
