Two Wanderers

No To Terrorism

Now that the original shock has worn off slightly, we have decided to try and catch the bus to Nuweiba, and then the ferry to Aqaba, Jordan as soon as we can. We’ve asked the hotel to try and get us tickets for the first bus tomorrow morning, but it seems there is quite the exodus happening here today, so we’re not sure yet if we will be able to catch that bus. We suspect that most people are heading back to Cairo, so hopefully there won’t be a problem. the schedules seem to have changed since our guide book was published, so we may or may not make the ferry connection the same day, which would mean a night in Nuweiba.

We’ve been told that some of the hotels have arranged mini-buses for their guests as obviously there are not enough regular buses running to get everyone out who wants to leave. There appear to be a number of people still hanging around the resorts, and the hotelier did try to get us to stay, as the worst has almost surely passed, but I would feel more comfortable to get to a quieter place. Not that Aqaba itself is necessarily quiet, but it’s more of a trade port than a tourist town.

So it means that we have decided not to do the trek to St. Katherine’s, or Mount Sinai, which is a shame, but not a huge deal for us. The biggest shame is really not being able to stay in Dahab. It’s such a beautiful town, most certainly a tourist resort, but still quainter than the other tourist places we’ve been. Beautiful clean clear ocean, nice sea breeze, not too hot… It also means we will have to wait until Turkey to do any diving, but again, not a big deal.

I think the worst is over, and we will try to get back on the trail as quickly as possible. Stay tuned in the next day or two, we will let you know when we arrive in Aqaba.

-Kathy

Just a quick note to everyone to let you know that we’re all right. We were on the overnight bus to Dahab when 3 bombs went off at our destination. We were wondering why they started having passport checks every half hour or so, but no one provided any explanation, so we were quite shocked to arrive here and find out.

We’ll post further once we’ve decided what we’re going to do from here.

-Neil

Hipostyle at Karnak Temple

We’re leaving Luxor this afternoon for Dahab. An extra-fun 14 hour bus ride. Very much looking forward to the Sinai, as we’re getting a little tired of the hassle that is everywhere in Upper Egypt.

Luxor has some amazing Pharonic monuments. Karnak temple in particular is quite the complex. It’s actually several temples built over a period of about 2000 years, with even the newer bits being over 3000 years old. The other very famous site here, the Valley of the Kings wasn’t so great. The tombs, while vaguely interesting, are extremely uncomfortable to enter (too many tourists & no ventilation), and, since we can’t read ancient egyptia, after a while all the writing & drawings are just kind of the same.

Luxor has also been the worst stop for beggars & touts. More pushy than most of Egypt, and the beggars are more insistant. Outside of Karnak, there appeared to be a whole family begging/ selling useless junk, but no parents. Stewart, a guy on our tour who’s been living in Kenya and has travelled extensively in Africa, made the comment that Egypts not even particularly poor in the grand scheme of things, and many poorer countries still don’t have people begging the way they do here.

– Neil

Temple of Ramses

It’s been a bit hectic lately. Our time in Aswan seemed to have lts of spare time built in, but it all disappeared fast. We took ur first trip to a souq, and it was certainly an experience not to be forgotten. The first time out we really had no idea of prices, so ended up getting gouged. It’s hard when the prices start out as less than we’d pay for something similar at home, and then you find people afterwards who paid 1/3 of what you did for the same thing. We’re starting to get a better idea of prices now, but it’s still difficult, and tiring, to go to the market.

Our time in Aswan also included visits to Philae Temple, the High Dam and a long drive out to visit Abu Simbel.

Abu Simbel in particular is an amazing site. Two huge temples – one for Ramses II and one for his major wife Nefertari (he had 24 wives and 198 children) – that were originally cut into the cliffs above the Nile, but had to bemoved to higher ground – by precision cutting the entire cliff and moving it into an artificial mountain above it – after the high dam was built at Aswan. The downside to visiting this site was that to get there we had to go with a police convoy that left at 4:30am, the result of which is that the entire day’s worth of visitors – at least 1000 people, we’d estimate – visits in the same 2 hour window, maing it a very crowded site.

The high dam was also interesting, but more in theory than actually seeing it. It’s massive – 110 metres tall, and almost a kilometer thick at its base, it was built to stop the Nile floods and create more predictable growing conditions down river. The actual site is not so impressive, since it looks essentially like a really big, man made hill. All the water flow is through underground tunnels, and it doesn’thave the dramatic cliff appearance of dams like the Hoover Dam.

On our last day in Aswan, we visited some much less touristed sites around Aswan – Kitchener Island and Elephantine Island. Kitchener Island is a botanical garden, more of interest to Kathy than to me, but it was relaxing we got to lay with some stray cats, and heard some rather unique bird calls…kind of a gargling sound. (Recording not great, but you can hear the call at about the middle of it.)

Elephantine Island, while not as impressive as many of the ancient sites here, I found it to be the most interesting. The temples there only have bits and pieces left, and have been largely reconstructed, but what was really amazing was the town that they’re excavating. It’s only walls and stairways, but a walk around it is quite incredible, and a kept trying to picture what it might have looked like when it was in use. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really enough left to be able to get any clear picture.

We then left Aswan by felucca. The felucca trip was one of those wonderful moments in Egyptian organization. Everyone involved gets told different things. For instance, New Zealanders Marcus and Amanda had been told to be there by 11:30am, as the boat would leave before noon. Ourselves and Adrian and Barb, also from New Zealand, were doing the morning island tour together, and had been told we were expected between 12:30 and 1. The last member of our group, David from Australia, had gone to Abu Simbel that morning and didn’t show up until quarter to two.

The actual saling part of the trip was kind of fun, despite Kathy having some misgivings about the boat constantly leaning to one side. Sanitation was a bit iffy though, since, while bottled water was used for cooking, dishes were washed by leaning over the side of the boat. I didn’t suffer any ill effects from this, but Kathy hasn’t been feeling that well lately, and we’re not sure if that might be a contributing factor to it.

We had to pass under ne bridge on our way north. We figured it would be easy as we’d just watched a large cruise shit go underneath with no trouble. Turns out our little felucca was actually quite a bit taller than the cruise ship though, but it was fortunately a bit better design than most sailboats, as insteadof having to unstep the mast, we simply took the sail down, unhooked a chain, and we were able to tilt the mast in a pivot which was about 5 or 6 metres above the deck.

Our night on the felucca wasn’t all that restful. The whole length of the Nile (well, below the dam anyway) is inhabited, so there’s a call to prayer at 8pm (Kathy says there was another around 11, but I didn’t hear it) and 4am, and in between there’s still all sorts of noises…cars and trains, and stray dogs barking like there’s no tomorrow. We got through it though, but not so well rested as were prepared for our adventure the next day.

Once again, we fell vctim to Egyptian organization. Four of the seven on our boat had only one night, and the other 3 had signed up for two nights. Being part of the one night group, we gathered up our bags and walked up to the road to meed our ride. It didn’t come. After waiting close to an hour, Marcus was getting impatient, and got our captain to hail a taxi to take us to Kom Ombo, the next site our trip was supposed to include.

It’s a good thing he did, because we ended up meeting the ride that was supposed to pick us up on it’s wa out from Kom Ombo. So we missed that site, and managed to make it onto a very hot and uncomfortable van ride. Kathy and I were crammed into the front seat with the driver and stick shift, it was close to 40 degrees out, and we had our da packs on our laps, having nowhere else to put them.

Once again, we made it through the ride. We had one stop at Edfu, a Greek-built temple similar to hilae, only larger, and in its original location (like Abu Simbel, Philae was flooded by the Nile dams and relocated). The long, hot taxi ride finally ended in Luxor, where we’re staying at our nicest hotel yet, with air conditioning and a swimming pool. Almost like a western hotel, except the bathroom plumbing still only half works, but at least doesn’t leak like in most places. Also, our tour contact here is really pushy and keeps trying to sell us extras – trip to Karnak sound and light show, and when we turned that down, tried to sell us a horse carriage ride (something we see everywhere, but rarely see anyone using), or maybe just accompany us shopping. The sales pitches are getting tiring and I look forward to getting to less touristed places.

Our next stop is in Dahab, on the Sinai, the one place in Egypt that I’ve heard a lot of people say they’d like to come back to, so hopefully it will be restful.

I’ve managed to upload a few pictures. They’re a bit random, as I have a lot, and it does take a while to upload. Hope you enjoy them

– Neil

The White Desert at Night

We’ve just returned to Cairo after a three night, four day stint in Bahariya Oasis. The trip out to the oasis was a bus ride about 5 hours long. It’s only 350km, but the ammount of time it took to get from downtown Cairo to the open road was extraordinarily long.

As soon as we got there, we were served a quick lunch, and then told to quickly repack our small bags, as the desert excursion we were expecting to do the next day had been moved up. There were six of us – Kathy and myself, Heather and Marcus from the UK and Georges and his daughter Apaulina from France – who then quickly rearranged our daypacks for a night in the desert and set out in a beaten up Toyota Landcruiser that appeared to be on its last legs. Once we were actually out in the desert, we were happy to be there, as it was incredibly beautiful. Unfortunately not quite as isolated as we would have liked though, as the area between Bahariya and Farafra is a really popular area for tourist excursions, so there were a number of other 4x4s around. (on the way to our camp area, our driver stopped to help an older couple (possibly German) who had rented a 4×4 camper, and had gotten stuck in the sand. We all pitched in to push them free, much like pushing someone out of a snow drift, except that it’s everywhere, there’s no road, and you just have to get onto less soft sand.) Still, spending the night in the white desert – a part of the western desert where there are a number of white coloured rock formations that appear to be made of chalk – was an unforgettable experience and well worth the effort.

Our trip back to Bahariya from the desert was also a bit of an adventure, as we got not one, but two flat tires on our way. The second one was more caused because the spare tires didn’t have sufficient air pressure in them, so the first spare ended up blowing out after only driving about 30 or 40 kms. We had to flag down another convoy of 4x4s for help after that, and luckily they were carrying an air hose that uses the vehicle engine as a compressor, so we were able to reinflate the last tire and drive the rest of the way back safely.

Our time at the camp was fairly uneventful…we had a short tour around the oasis, which managed to miss almost all of the highlights mentioned in the guidebook, though it did take us to a warm spring where we could swim. Unfortunately, the pool didn’t appeal much to me as the sides were covered in algae. We were told that it was safe, and a lot of people jumped in, but it just didn’t look appealing to me so I just dangled my feet in a bit. Kathy was a little more adventurous and took the plunge (albeit briefly).

That’s pretty much all we did. We spent another day just sitting around the camp reading. We were too far from the town to be able to really do anything on our own, so it was just a pleasantly lazy day.

Today was a bit more interesting. The trip back took a little longer than the trip out. Mainly because it took about 45 minutes just to cross the small town of Bawiti – the main town in Bahariya where we caught the bus. The buses are willing to stop anywhere there’s someone who wants to get on, so at times they litterally drove 10 feet and stopped accross the street to pick up someone else. When we got back to Cairo, we also found out that the bus we were on was only going as far as Giza, not all the way to downtown as we’d expected. This was made worse by the fact that no one seemed to be there to meet us. However, being a bit more comfortable with Cairo now, we were able to get our bearings, and with the help of a couple of university students who pointed us in the direction of the metro station, were able to catch the metro to Midan Tahrir, which is only about a block from our hostel. So a full day, and considering we spent about 6 hours of it just sitting on a bus, quite tiring too.

Tomorrow we see the Egyptian Museum and then catch a night train for Aswan.

– Neil

Neil didn’t mention the bugs – there were a lot bugs at the desert hotel: black flies, big ants and little ants of all shapes (that managed to get into my t-shirt, which I found out when I put it on in the morning!), and big cockcroach type things, one of which managed to die in our bathroom sink. It sure made us appreciate winter that one bit more, if only for the winter-kill effect on bugs.

We’re also a little confused about the lack of fruit being served to us, despite it’s apparent availability (there are fruit stands all over Cairo, and in Bahariya, just nowhere near where we’ve been staying). Though mango juice (more like a nectar) seems to be a popular drink, and I’ve been buying it whenever I can at drink stands/rest stops.

– Kathy

Zosser’s Pyramid

Today was certainly a packed day. We got up earlyish (okay, so around 8 am) to head out and see the pyramids. Our first stop was Sakkara, where some of the earlier step pyramids are (instead of the smooth walls of the “newer” pyramids, they have several levels to them, kind of like giant steps…I guess a little closer to Mayan designs, than what most people view as Egyptian. A couple of them had not stood well to the tests of time, and from the outside look more like piles of rubble than anything else, but one, Zosa’s pyramid, is still quite intact.

We went in to a couple of pyramids – Titi’s pyramid – as previously mentioned, more like a mound of rubble – at Sakkara and Khephren’s pyramid – the largest pyramid ever built – at Giza. Both were surprisingly plain. Titi’s pyramid had a few decorations – some hieroglyphics, and some stars painted on the ceiling of the burial chamber. Also interesting about Titi’s pyramid was that it had been open to tourists since the first century AD. Visiting Khephren’s pyramid was extraordinarily unpleasant…it was even plainer than Titi’s, no writing or anything, and the number of people visiting made it very hot and damp. Entering both pyramids involved climbing down a long ramp in a tunnel about 3-1/2 or 4 feet high, the it flattens out and you go up a similarly short ramp. The ones at Giza are quite long tunnels too, and due to the number of visitors they let in, there feels like there’s a lack of air.

So that took up most of our day so far. We’ve signed up to go on a dinner cruise tonight on the Nile, so we’ll see how that goes.

– Neil

We’ve now finished our first day in Cairo. It is definately different from anywhere I’ve been before. Somewhat intimidating, and yet also very interesting. We’re staying in the downtown area, just a couple of blocks from Midan Tahrir, where the Egyptian Museum is, and there is a huge variety of people around. We didn’t wander too far from the hostel today, and in the same blocks you could see people living in extreme poverty, and people who would qualify as middle class doing their shopping. On one corner, one side of the street was a restaurant which was as sterile and modern as any western fast food chain, and on the other side of the street, the building was crumbling, the sidewalk was covered in rubble.

There are three kinds of egyptians when it comes to tourism. The majority, who are friendly to you if you ask for directions or look lost, but generally don’t much care about you, those who make an honest living in the tourism industry and want to make sure you have a good time, and the third, who seem to think you came here so that they could try to get your money without any service of value in return. Unfortunately, the last group is large enough to make walking around the streets a tiring game. On our first trip out, we were talked into a perfume shop, but after getting the hard sell, we were left alone when it became apparent that we were not going to buy anything. Having been caught once, you catch onto the pitch quickly, and become better at ignoring it. The downside is that sometimes you end up shrugging off people who are honestly trying to be helpful, which creates kind of a guilty feeling.

Apparently today is a national holiday (the Prophet’s birthday), so we are told that traffic is in fact lighter today than most days – a blessing as it was our first day to find and learn our way around. We did manage to cross the Midan Tahrir, which appears to be a huge pshycotic traffic circle, and had dinner at the Hilton, of all places. Not exactly budget, but not out of our means either, considering (the meals are not totally in line with room costs). It was a nice way to end the day, and after crossing the Midan twice, once with another tourist couple, it became a little easier – apparently the cars will watch out for you, though it really doesn’t feel that way. Neil likened it to a life-size version of Frogger. We are feeling a bit better at the end of the day than at the beginning.

So, we decided today that at least for Egypt, it might be wise to arrange a tour, so we sat down with our hostel host and worked out a custom package. So, for the next couple of weeks, we’ll have a little less to worry about (all transportation, and most meals, will be arranged for us, which means we hopefully won’t have to deal with random taxi drivers, many of whom like to scam tourists). We start tomorrow with a trip out to the pyramids, and a tour of Cairo the next day. Then we get out of the city, head for Bahariya Oasis for a few days, and then, after a brief stay back in Cairo to visit the Egyptian Museum, we’ll head south for Aswan and Luxor, before finishing a little over two weeks from now in Dahab, on the Gulf of Aqaba.

So there’s the plan for the next couple of weeks. It should be interesting. Updates may not be all that frequent over the next couple of weeks, as internet access may be limited (especially the day and bit that will be spent on a faluca on the Nile 🙂

– Kathy

Cathedral of St. Paul

Kathy has already covered some of the annoyances of Malta (mainly the traffic), but I must admit that I rather like this country. Everything’s quite close together, the whole country being only about the size of a large city, and the buildings are just amazing. The one downside to the buildings is that almost all make use of an identical colour of stone on the outside, but once you get inside them, they are something to behold.

The picture is of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Kathy touched on. The interior is almost entirely done up in marble and very colourful paintings.

– Neil

We’ve added a few photos. We’ve only been able to upload one camera so far, not that there are many more pics on the other.

A few random thoughts about Malta:

Traffic is crazy. Everyone here drives, and they don’t necessarily obey the traffic laws (or rather, suggestions). The good thing is that there are a lot of cross walks, at least in the busier pedestrian areas, many marked by stop lights. Also, many vehicles here don’t appear to have mufflers (at least not effective ones) – it is very loud here, and we are getting weary of not being able to hear each other and having to repeat.

There is a LOT of Catholic iconography (is that the right word?) – many homes and doorways are adorned with small colourful images of Mary, and there are churches on every block (all of whom seem to ring their bells at least every hour – the one just down the street from the guesthouse rings every 15 minutes, even through the night, though it’s not bothersome enough to keep us from sleeping). Although the exterior of the buildings are very plain stone, the inside of the one cathedral that we visited today (St. Paul’s, in Mdina) was very colourful, and very ornate. The artwork was quite stunning, in one dome it was done in 3d – there appeared to be some mobiles or something similar hanging from the top of the dome, that blended in with the painting, that made it appear 3 dimensional. Quite unique.

The whole country seems to be under renovations. There are cranes and large trucks everywhere, and again on almost every block, there are one or more buildings that have either been demolished, or appear bombed out, that are being rebuilt. It’s neat to see very old buildings, nearby rather new buildings, with a bombed out shell in between them. I didn’t get a picture of it, but right near the gates of Valetta, there is a building that appears to have been almost totally bombed to the ground, only partial exterior walls remaining, that has been converted to a parking lot. Why rebuild it when you can use it for parking? On that note, it appears there are no rules for parking, except that if you park in some of these lots, don’t expect to get out until the end the day – many vehicles are quite literally blocked in.

~Kathy

Our flights to London were long and relatively uneventful. Our seats wouldn’t recline properly and we found it almost impossible to sleep on the transatlantic leg, so by the time we got to London, we were already feeling kind of tired and irritable…and that was only 11:30pm Edmonton time.

Not ones to let that stop us, we did head into the city all the same to try to see some of the sites. Wait, not quite yet. First we had the drama of storing our bags. Our onward flight to Malta left from Terminal 4 and our flight from Toronto had arrived in Terminal 3. So you’d think, no problem, we’ll just store our bags in Terminal 4 so we don’t have so much mucking about to do later in the day. Two hours later, we were on the tube to the city centre.

I don’t know as anything we did in the city really qualifies as being of much interest. We stopped by Geoff’s hostel – a friend of Kathy’s who is staying in London for the next year or so after arriving on the same flight as us – to drop off his bags and then tour the city. We did get to see parliament and Big Ben, and then tried to walk from there to London Bridge. We didn’t quite make it that far, and ended up abondoning our quest in favour of getting lunch at an English pub. We didn’t do too badly in finding a pub, and ended up with excellent fish and chips at a not completely outrageous price at a place that looked quite fancy and upscale in Southwark. (I cannot remember the name, it had the words old and arms in it, but I can’t remember what was in the middle)

Over lunch, though, we crashed. There was an incident where I spent about 10 minutes trying to find my sunglasses, after failing to notice them in the first place that I looked (being my pocket). So we returned to the airport several hours earlier than planned.

Luckily, they allowed us to check in for our 8:30 flight at 3:30, and we were told of a quiet sitting area where we’d be able to sleep once we got through security. I was able to sleep quite soundly for about an hour, though Kathy didn’t do nearly as well, before having to leave because that room was extremely cold.

Somehow we muddled our way through the last few hours until our flight finally left, half an hour late. The Air Malta plane was very cramped with no entertainment, but they did serve up a very good dinner, and that, combined with no longer being able to stay awake made the flight go reasonably quickly. Until the kids (and there was an unusually large number of them sitting close to us) all started crying for the last 45 minutes of the flight.

We finally checked in at our guesthouse, where we were the only guests last night, at 2am, and promptly fell soundly asleep.

– Neil