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…
As we walk past the shops and businesses in Aswan towards the Corniche (which is the name of the boulevards along the Nile in most cities), I realise it is friday, so everything is closed. Christian’s sunday is muslims’s friday…
Today we leave the luggage in the hotel. This will be picked up later by the driver, as we just take the necessities we need for our felucca-stay. We are taken by a small boat to the feluccas at the middle of the nile, where we split up in two groups (funny how automatically the two most logical groups are formed)…
On the felucca, we sail to the police station where the sailors get the permissions for sailing. Here, I call Ingvar, who is in Sweden to wish him happy birthday. The grlz n I sing as we usually do over the phone, loud, so everyone can enjoy with him. Over the felucca there is a sunscreen and over the seats there are matrasses so we immediately take on our ‘i will totally unstress’-attitude, at which I am particularly experienced…
Today we just relax and sail. We stop somewhere at the westbank (oh-ooh, wasn’t that the sunset side?!) and sit at the other boat all together and have the most amazing lunch with pasta, tuna, a kind of egg-tomato-mixture, salad washed in mineral water (very important in egypt), very tasty soft feta- cheese, pita bread, beans, all prepared at the boat!
Again we experience how well this trip has been put together, as this day of obligatory chillness is exactly what the doctor ordered; apparently for everyone… It is good to reflect on the amazing sights we have seen, the culture, the history, the people.
When on a boat with 41 degrees, the water looks tempting I can tell you… However, Jacqueline warns us not to go swimming, because there are larves that enter your body through your skin and lay their eggs. Hm, that sounds like a scene from a horror movie I’ve seen… But even without Jacq’s info, which we take very seriously as she is gradually becoming the Cleopatra of travel guides, sailing downstream over the Nile we see other reasons floating… We love the felucca, a very traditional way of sailing, but we are continuously passed by big, smog-exhausting cruiseships. And guess where they dump their unnecessities? Right! So when seeing the locals swim, wash and even drink from the Nile, I could have imagined they are immune for the larves, but are they immune for shit from diarrheeing tourists? Don’t think so (sorry for becoming so graphic).
We get other examples of the wit of egyptians from our captain Asaf, when we are continuously hearing donkeys bark ashore. “Egyptian telephone” he says. And then when we get wind after a long period of lying still, he says he called God for some wind. When we ask why he didn’t call before, he says: “he was still asleep, couldn’t wake him up!”… Two things are extra funny about their jokes. First of all, he draws this very serious face with them and second, their humour is very dutch with word jokes and stuff!
Sailing over the Nile provides us with amazing views though, in the evening of a beautiful sunset behind the palms and the desertous mountains in the background. At the end of the day, we end up without any wind, so after Geert and I have done some rowing, we wash up on the shore with the two boats.
On the other boat dinner is prepared by the crew and again it is amazing what they are able to do on one gascooker! They prepare soup, vegetables, some meats; we have pita bread and salad and we sit together on the biggest boat and have a great meal…
Afterwards, everyone is getting ready for bed, as we are awakened early by the sun and by Jacqueline (this girl has an amazing amount of energy!) to sail just a couple more kilometers to be picked up by the bus in the morning. Everyone is building his bed, putting on mosquito-repellent and lying under the blankets to start falling asleep…
And even though the matrasses are thin and it is even getting cold, I get to fall asleep watching the stars…
Some say you don’t need to get drunk, you just need to get up early.
As we rise (although ‘rise’ is a huge exaggeration) at 2:30, we get ready for the bustrip to Abu Simbel, about 280 km south of Aswan. I first thought the early hour was because of the distance, but now we see it is because of the convoy. After the attacks of ‘97 all touristic trips by bus had to be done in a convoy, and nowadays all convoys have been cancelled, except the one to Abu Simbel. So there is a huge amount of minivans, small and big buses that gather and are checked before driving inbetween two policecars. In the bus there is funny business, because of the early hour and the ’schooltrip’-nature of this excursion.
It’s good to have fun by the way as it takes 3 hours to get there. But Jacqueline again proves her worth and spirit as she has prepared breakfastboxes for everyone in the bus! Gold!
Once at Abu Simbel, we are amazed at the grandeur of this place and the megalomany of Ramses II. He had this temple built to honour the gods and to attract the nubians, who were just united with lower egypt also as his wife Nefertari was Nubian. But to do this, he had the temple decorated with huge statues of himself (4 at the entrance) and pictures at the walls of him being honoured by his army, him honouring the gods, him defeating his enemies, in short: he wanted to portray he was a god himself. And oh yes, let’s build a (much smaller) temple for my wife. Divide and conquer, basically…
Now, as the english built the nasserdam at aswan the nasserlake, which goes from aswan all the way down to Abu Simbel, was about to overflow. So in 1960 the Unesco ordered the extraction of the temples from their original places, saw them into 1400 pieces and rebuild it about 100 m north of it in an artficially build hill. I have to say, that was an amazing job considering it is a temple chopped into a rock! They even built a separate village for the workers…
We walk around the hills and see the temples where in my opinion especially the enormity of the complex (and the size of Ramses’ ego) causes my admiration…
We have coffee in the most beautiful garden with lots of birds Mohammed told us about and the most beautiful bushes of Bougainville. Then we take the bus and had back to Aswan, straight through the desert. In the middle of it, there is a lot of confusion, buses that pass each other, then are stopped, one big chaos in the middle of nowhere. Apparently, so I was told later by some dutch people in our hotel, there was a Japanese who took the wrong bus, so as they were trying to account for him, their bus had to wait for 2 hours before leaving and on the way back they still were tracking him. Either learn english or pay attention when your guide is explaining, stupid! But now we know the convoy and checks are no paper tiger…
Once back at the hotel, we settle at the pool, read, swim, drink and write… I have bought some drinks at a place where there is a small boy, who was referred to us by Jacqueline as his water was so cheap. So i go to him, to buy some drinks chips and he can even arrange a beer… So I get an official buyer’s chair and tell them what I want and they are getting that from all over the place (outisde of the shop). It seems half of Aswan is mobilised to fulfill my order! Once everything is collected I get the damage: 150 pounds! I get up, tell the owner (probably the father of the boy or his uncle) that he must be crazy and am about to leave… So then he asks me what I want to pay and I do a quick calculation and deduct half of that and say that is the max! A lot of agitated arabic is going around the shop and I can see they are pissed…
As I walk to the pool with the stuff, I realise how they realised they screwed up. I can’t decide whether the shopowners here are extremely opportunistic or a very bad judge of character; they either think they will try this approach (to say some ridiculous amount at first) until they fail or they just fail to understand how there are lots of people who would have been more than willing to pay something like 80 pounds for this if he hadn’t asked for about twice that! Now he got less than half of that… And after paying, on top of it all, Jacqueline’s protege asks me for money, as well as the boy who shows me his sweat from running around to get my beer and the guy who hasn’t done anything but just asks me for money for the hell of it (he admits this)! I direct them to the shopowner and say that am not their employer and that they have tto take it up with him!
I am realising, there are few egyptians who comprehend the importance of looking a couple of days ahead; pay even today to get much more business in the days ahead…
At the end of day we have dinner on one of the islands in the Nile; an idyllic place once again! Under the mangotrees outside we have great chicken tahjin and the most amazing nubian fruitcocktail: strawberry-, guave- and mangojuice, damn tasty! Finally, we solve the riddle Jacqueline told us about red and yellow hats and are consequently able to sleep later
We go to and come back from the island by boat, where it has almost become tradition we reside on the roof watching the stars…
Although today’s excursion is supposed to be really promising (but we start to understand all of Jacqueline’s trips are; she avoids the typical touristic ones and really plans her own things. I don’t know if this is characteristic for Koning Aap, but I love it! We get the real deal, the ins and outs, her own discoveries; she is a travelguide of the true essence), as we have a short night ahead of us, we go our own way. Relax a little, like yesterday have some drinks and have a swim…
Funny thing: yesterday we were at a nice terrace, where I was surprised by the absence of the need to bargain… Today we were back at the same place and got the bill for about 4 times the price of yesterday!
Sometimes it seems they just make up something as they go along… Not with me however, even though we had more than yesterday, I tell the guy I am not gonna pay more than the amount yesterday. And probably for the same reason he accepts (maybe also because of my stern look)…
At 17:30 we gather in the lobby for yet another one of Jacqueline’s private tours: she rented a boat to take us to the westbank for a camelride to a Nubian village; take the local ferry back and have a bite at the nile.
We dock at the foot of the hill of Aga Khan’s mausoleum. There is a place with enough camels to go around and I get on one, but as the animal rises (which is an experience in itself) Kyrah is already up in the air! High!
I apparently have the smallest camel; I reply that the size of a man’s vehicle is synonymous for his need to compensate ! We have a blast! It is amazing to ride the camels together… The camels are whipped by the boys who accompany us and guide the camels; one of them constantly lifts up the camel’s tail and hits him in the nuts! Reminds me of a very funny joke about crossing the desert without a camel…
We ride into the sunset and the nubian village, which is still authentic: another one of Jacqueline’s experiences… In the village an enormous amount of children runs towards us; authentic, poor and very commercial. One of the girls makes friends with Kyrah, so she decides to give her the cap she got the day before, which I think is very sweet. We have tea with some of the women of the village and of course they want to sell us some stuff! Well, at least they made this themselves…
So as the grlz are equipped with dangerously luring bellydance-kits (skirts and vails) we leave the village on our way to the ferry. As it is a local one, the men are supposed to sit in the back and the women in the front. The grlz are not the only ones finding that strange and want to know why. So as I respectfully explain how the islam wants to make people withstand their sexual urges as good as possible and one of the ways is to separate them traditionally, …I sit beside a guy, whom I greet “salaam aleikum”,
who greets me back with a smile, starts handing out some nice crackers and then starts watching a movieclip on his phone of some non-burka dressed women shaking their assesWell, that didn’t work, hunh?!
As the last part of tonight, we have dinner at a great place at the Nile with the whole group… We don’t stay up too late as we want to get up at 2:30 to take the first convoy to Abu Simbel (?, I’ll explain later…)
We arrive in Aswan, where our hotel, the Cleopatra is not very luxureous, but located right at the souk… Also climatewise it is clear we are much more south then cairo, about 40 degrees here, although we don’t experience the ‘blanket’ so much. Having checked in, we have breakfast in the hotel and check in, after which everyone goes their own way.
We decide to take it easy and enjoy the pool, walk around the souk a little and find several terraces where we have (lots of) drinks, ice-cream and minttea… Funny to experience again the bargaining (or lack thereof in certain unegyptian places) at which I am getting better by the day… The trick is not to feel remorse, go in for the kill! Easy.
The pool is located at the roof of the hotel, which gives us a beautiful view of Aswan (clearly smaller than cairo with about 1,000,000 inhabitants). We can see the Nile and behind it (at the westbank, as you know by now) the graves of the noblemen more or less ruling parts of egypt in the eras when faraos didn’t have as much power as before. Our day is very relaxed and we have some nice run-ins with locals (like the son of the owner of the cleopatra coffee shop (different from the dutch ones!), treating us to a lot of info about aswan and the climate).
We gather at 16:30 to take the boat of Mohammed Amari, one of the special things that we get from Jacqueline. She treats us more and more to special things, not the obvious… Mohammed is also known as the birdman of aswan as he knows the names (even in dutch) of all birds flying around; and he shows us.
I am not the greatest or most fanatic of ornithologists, but indeed, the most beautiful birds and a lot which we don’t see every day at home! And Mohammed not only recognises each and every one of them, he even does their calls… After the trip he takes us to his place at the westbank of the nile.
Everyone apparently told him he was crazy to buy a piece of land there, but Mohammed not only has a great (dutch) sense of humor, he is also very smart. Here he knows the rule is: as long as you have water! So he built his own little jungle with a goatfarm and an amazing restaurant, where we sit down to have a meal.
At this restaurant there is also crocodile achmed. He catches young crocodiles and breeds them to release them after a number of years. Needless to say I wanted to hold a young one and Daya immediately followed, as Kyrah touched it as well…
Then, at the restaurant, Jacqueline tells us we can walk up (with the word up emphasized) the dune to see a beautiful sunset. Daya, Geert and me walk up the dune to see and it is gorgeous! I do see another example of the fearless Daya, as she stands on a cliff, with a steep edge ;-/
As we were on the boat, Mohammed has a friend pass us by who has fresh nilebass. Andre, Luba and me immediately apply for changing our ordered dishes, but at night that doesn’t appear a wise choice (no guts, no glory, right?!)… It tastes like swamp a little…
The location does make up for this, though… When we have had a beautiful evening, we are taken back to the bank of the living by Mohammed’s boat. The grlz and I, Han and his son Jules ask to be on the roof of the boat, where I lie on my back and watch the stars, mesmerizing and wishing we could stay there to really forget time Egyptian style…
Our first day in cairo was a blast! The chaos, the indifference about their city (there is not a wastebin in sight, ever!), how you are thrown back and forth between completely trustworthy people and absolute thugs that try to steal your money; it is fascinating!
So today will be a groupthing: we are going to Gizeh and Saqqara, seeing pyramids and the sfynx! We get up at 6:15 to gather in the bus, that leaves at 7:30. It is already becoming a nice group; try making a couple of jokes and see how they react… That seems to work fine!
Although we have Jacqueline, who is an amazing guide with extreme knowledge about Egypt, we have an extra guide Heba, cause that is the law! Heba is a beautiful girl with bad english. Basically. So as Jacqueline tries to give us the right information, during the day she gradually gets into a pissing contest with Heba. Where the dutch rule, by the way ! Anyway, Heba does her best and knows a lot…
We arrive at the pyramids of Gizeh: the big one of Cheops, the smaller one of Chefren, his son and an even smaller one of his successor Mycerinus. Around the pyramids, there are about 600 mastabagraves for noblemen and very small pyramids for the queens. The plateau of Gizeh was the necropolis for the city of Memphis, which was the capitol of Egypt and located for political reasons at the border between upper and lower Egypt. Pyramids are located at the west side of the nile, whereas the palaces of the faraos were located at the east side, where they were blessed by Ra (as the sun rises)…
A couple of us go into the pyramid of Chefren, but where I was expecting a maze of corridors and rooms, we ducked into one long corridor to see the open tomb…. Once outside, we stopped at the outside of the valley of Saqqara and have lunch (nice meats) at the most idyllic place… Lovely!
Then we went to Saqqara, where the oldest real pyramid is, the one built by Imhotep for Djoser. Pyramids have developed from mastaba’s, which were graves in the ground, over which they put big stones, because otherwise jackals would eat the remains (and without remains you were really lost in the afterworld). And one thing led to another; ‘you have a grave with one stone, I build one with 6!’… Before you know it, you are building pyramids like Cheops, that are 230 m wide!
Djoser had a stairpyramid built, not big, but the first real one! Around all the discoveries done, mainly dutch archaelogists are still recovering artifacts, temples and tombs.
From Djoser it is a small step to Teti’s pyramid, which is hidden in an unattractive pile of sand and stones. Inside however, there are beautiful hieroglypics and a huge sarcophagus, still intact. Teti’s nobleman Kagemni also has a beautiful mastaba, where we saw amazing hieroglyphics about everyday life and animals! This is where the pissing contest is finally decided by Jacqueline (and Heba even goes back to the bus) as Jacqueline did her thesis on mastaba’s and their hieroglyphics!
Back in the bus we go back to cairo, where we have about an hour to do some shopping for the nighttrain to Aswan (wasn’t it ‘Nighttrain to Cairo’ ?) and have a quick meal. We pass the KFC, which for the time we have seems a good alternative to rice and tahjin. Funny thing is (and I joked about this when Jacqueline told us on the bus) it is run by deafmutes as a kind of community care restaurant… My joke obviously was “how to order?!”, but it seemed I was the dumb one. The guy at the counter was so astonishingly efficient in taking my order (pointing at the menu, holding up fingers to count and pointing at the drinks to see which one; how simple!) and even succeeded in expressing his surprise and praise for the blondes once again…
We were very satisfied with our community support…
At the hotel we were taken by bus to go to the trainstation. Apparently, the train in Egypt (if this is a usual one) is very different from dutch trains. The seat recline, are twice as wide and even I was able to sleep in them! It is not a excessive luxury as we have about 12 hours to go to Aswan. It is almost kind of surreal, travelling about a 1000 km to the southernmost city of egypt…
Until 9 o’clock, cause we set the alarm to go into Cairo by ourselves. I booked the excursions, but promised myself and the grlz that we would just see. And today, the first step into this historic and chaotic city, is a day we want to enjoy by ourselves.
So after a nice breakfast, we dive into Cairo, a city that has a minimum of 16 million people, but several taxi drivers told me 20 million! That there is such a big difference is not a surprise if you hear that off the hill with the citadel, there is an enormous amount of graves (the ‘city of the dead’), that used to be outside of the city walls, but as those walls belong to cairo as well, there is an estimate of 1,5 million people living on those graves, with schools, supermarkets and such… Hm…
But anyway, this reflects in a huge chaos. Although, chaos doesn’t begin to describe it… I guess it must be comforting and the only reason you are able to live in such a garbage dump with smoke curtain, that basically life is the will of Allah (inshallah)… Deal with it, it’s fate!
So where especially the grlz were slowly getting used to this, we took a cab to the Islamic quarter and ended up in the al-Azhar mosque. We were planning to get in, when a nice man (though everyone wants to be paid for everything!) suggested to lead us around, which was fantastic! He explained a lot about the rituals and especially Kyrah had a lot of questions for him, for instance: why do women and men pray separately? 2 reasons. 1: there aren’t as many women praying outside of their homes, so give them a smaller room and 2: looking at a woman’s butt when you raise your head to Allah can be quite distracting, although my personal comment would be ‘inshallah’!
I understand, why there were so many students still coming here, although it hasn’t been the university location for quite a while, but it is so relaxing and quiet. Lots of students outside discussing the Koran, football or (maybe even) girls.
So outside of al-Azhar we get into Khan-el-khalili and have a nice drink to prepare for the souk! The only words i memorised for the souk are “la, shokran” (no thanks) possibly accompanied with a fierce look on my face! We walk onto the main street in Khan-al-khalili and indeed, there are people who want to sell something… And what keeps surprising me is that everyone keeps selling the same shit! Why not diversify?
Anyway, we keep on walking through the souk and walk towards the northern wall, where we need to look for a place to relieve ourselves … Walking past the wall brings us to a very cute, local, small restaurant with very interesting sausages and meats… So after having helped d grlz we get into the small restaurant with sawdust on the floor and just locals…
I mime the guy i want some of his varieties and get a not very tasty broth, but the sausages and pita bread (that you get with everything) are amazing!
Now, as i walk with d grlz through cairo i notice it’s similar to italy 30 years ago when you’re blue-eyed with blonde hair; everyone wants to be in the picture with you! If i had asked money for it like the egyptians do, i’d have earned myself a summer home in cairo!
Anyway, in the restaurant they draw the attention of an older, well-dressed gentleman. It turns out he works for the government in traffic planning. I can just withstand to make a smart remark about the challenges for him, and as he speaks very decent english, we get into some conversation, after which he offers to give us a ride to the citadel. I really don’t want to, but i do have to be suspicious about this unfortunately. But as the man notices my hesitation he swears no charge and after we paid the owner next-to-nothing but with a big tip, we get into his car. Underway we have very animated conversation and indeed, having reached the citadel and the mohammed ali mosque (no, not the fighter!), he only wants to be in the picture with my grlz. Which seems like a very reasonable trade! How this restores my faith in the egyptians!
…walking downhill from there, we hassle some with cabdrivers to get to the southern, coptic part of cairo… Although Jacqueline told us black ones are to be negotiated with, white ones have a meter, we end up for a nice price in a black one with a meter! A meter in piasters, however… Never mind, for a nice price he takes us past the cemetery where people live on graves and drops us off in coptic cairo. This part doesn’t impress us that much, so we take the subway back to central cairo to windowshop a little and have some drinks and food. And again, no funny business, neither at the shoe store where we all bought nice shoes nor at the cafe we were next…
In the subway, it is funny to see how respect plays an important role here: a couple of young boys immediately get up, as some older, well-dressed men step in and sit in their places. Then, the older men offer my grlz the places next to them! Nice to get to grips with the social standings! Blonde grlz rule!
We planned to go to the souk for dinner, so we take a cab and walk around a little until we see the group at the egyptian pancake restaurant. So we sit down and order some pancakes and wait for Jacqueline to pick us up to go to a local music-singing with dancing darwishes and an old-men’s choir.
Walking there i slow us down constantly for the most amazing pictures of mosques at sunset, but we are on time for the show and I must say the show is fascinating! Although most of the songs are about Allah, which is my favourite topic , the darwishes and the band are great to obesrve. And most importantly, we are the only tourists; apparently it really is a local gathering, which I do love very much! Observing two bourka-dressed women getting into a verbal fight over seats, seeing some of them clapping and singing with the reverends and some people even get into a trance (which is not so surprising as it sounds)!
More pictures on the way back, after which we get into a cab and head back to the hotel again, as we wanna get up early to go to our first pyramids, Gizeh and Saqqara! Yahoo!
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 ;-(
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…
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 
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…
. 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…
