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Aswan, Luxor, and the Nile River, Egypt (Post #64)

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

Hi friends!

Michele here…we have been on a whirl-wind tour of Egypt since we got here on November 17th and most recently, we have been traveling along the Nile River.

The last blog I mentioned that we were going to take an overnight trail from Cairo to Aswan. Aswan is a small city in southern Egypt and it sits right on the Nile River. Although the train compartment we were in was somewhat dirty and looked like it was from the 1950s, it was very functional and the sheets were soft and clean. We had a private sleeper car that had two single beds (one on top of another) that unfolded from the walls. Our 5 foot by 3 foot compartment also had a small sink, mirror, and we were served dinner and breakfast. (The meals were like airline meals but they were FREE – and we like free things). In Aswan that afternoon, we went to the Temple of Philae. The Temple of Philae was dedicated to Isis, who found the heart of her slain brother, Osiris on the now submerged Philae Island. Philae Island is where this temple used to be. An interesting thing about this temple is that when it was rebuilt, someone messed up and didn’t align the temple’s main entrance way with the rest of the temple. As this was the first temple we saw, we were amazed at the abundance of hieroglyphics. It’s incredible to think that these well preserved writings and pictures on the temple walls are thousands of years old. Here is an example:

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Cairo, Egypt – Part I (Post #63)

Sunday, November 20th, 2005

Hello from Cairo, Egypt!

This is Michele typing…Mike is next to me here in an Internet Cafe in downtown Cairo. After a lot of traveling (35 hours!) we arrived in Cairo at 12:45am on Friday, November 18th. We doubted our free pickup person would be waiting for us since our flight was delayed almost 7 hours. However, he was there and had been waiting for almost 7 hours as well! We arrived at our hostel at about 1:30am and were warmly greeted by the night guy. We got up late and the only thing we really did on Friday was visit the Egyptian Museum, which contains more than 120,000 statues, artworks, and sarcophagi including the treasures found in King Tutankhamen’s (King Tut’s) tomb. We saw his 25 pound gold mask that he was buried in and his 250 pound gold sarcophagus. We spent hours in this museum looking at hundreds of possessions owned by King Tut – many of them made out of sold gold. Mike also paid for a ticket to see the royal mummies. These mummies, whose bodies date back to between 1552 and 1069 B.C., are incredibly well preserved (they still have their hair!) They are once again on display after Islamic disapproval of exhibiting the dead kept them from the public eye for the past 15 years.

The next day (Nov. 19th) , we hired a driver for the day to take us to the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx and then on to Saqqara, a necropolis in the desert filled with pyramids, temples, and tombs. Our guidebook says that evidence shows the pyraminds were built by tens of thousands of highly skilled people (not slaves) and the two largest pyraminds are said to have been standing for 46 centuries. Here are two pictures (note that Mike is at the bottom of the pyramid in the 2nd picture):
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Zanzibar (and the trip from Arusha) (Post #62)

Thursday, November 17th, 2005
Hi everyone, Michele here....I am typing this from the Dubai, United Arab Emirates airport in the Middle East. We are now on our way to Egypt. In the last blog I said I would write something about ... [Continue reading this entry]

Kilimanjaro Trek – Tanzania (Post #61 )

Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Jambo! (Swalli greeting) Michele here...we are currently in Zanzibar, an island off of Tanzania (in Eastern Africa). How we got here is another adventure that we will relay later. For now, I will tell you about our Mt. ... [Continue reading this entry]

Safari in Tanzania (Post #60)

Thursday, November 10th, 2005
Jambo! (A greeting people use in Tanzania, Africa) Sorry it has been so long since we've blogged. (Michele here by the way....) We have actually been camping for 2 weeks and then we made several attempts at blogging - ... [Continue reading this entry]

From Athens, Greece to Arusha, Tanzania (Post #59)

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
Mike types... Well, its been a while since we've posted anything but computer access has been either really expensive (Dubai airport), inconvenient or impossible (Serengeti National Park). While Michele is presently writing about more recent events, i will fill in ... [Continue reading this entry]