Our Adventure in Egypt, Part Seven: Cruising up the Nile

Sunday, 12 November, was our day off. We didn't have to get up for anything, and we spent the day cruising south on the Nile from Luxor to Edfu. If you check out the map here, you can see Luxor and Aswan. Edfu is about halfway between them. So we had nothing to do but enjoy ourselves. So we did.

Before we left Luxor, I watched a little television. We didn't have CNN like we did in Cairo, but we had a movie channel that showed bizarre movies. I watched The Naked Gun, and the censors cut out the scene where Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley "made love" in full body condoms. Yet they let all manner of cursing go through. It was interesting. There was also a movie starring William Baldwin and some French chick. Later Graham Greene showed up. It was truly bizarre, with the French woman living two separate lives, and in one of them she's an assassin and in the other she's kind of a simpering wuss who is married to William Baldwin, but whom she doesn't completely trust. The movies had commercials, and they would tell you what the movie was called, but this movie refused to go to commercial! It was very vexing, because I was mesmerized by the awfulness of the movie and was dying to know what it was. I had to wait until I got back to home and once again had access to the magic of the Internets to find out it was Shattered Image, and the French chick was Anne Parillaud, who was in La Femme Nikita, a very good movie. You should, however, avoid this one at all costs. The last movie I watched (for a very brief time) was called Tower of Terror, which stars, I kid you not, Steve Guttenberg and Kirsten Dunst. I bet that's one she'd like to erase from her résumé!

The next morning we were scheduled to sail at 10 a.m. We slept in until well after 8, and Krys didn't even make it down for breakfast - I went down to the dining room and got her some food. We were tired, man! Our American compatriots, Jim and Alicia, had a bit of an adventure. Jim wanted to find an ATM, because the ship did not have one. Reliable ATMs are a bit scarce outside of Cairo, but Mourad told him he could find one in Luxor. Before the ship sailed, they went on a road trip through the city looking for a cash machine that actually had, you know, cash. Alicia told us later that he went to, I believe, six ATMs before he found one that was willing to dispense bills to him. Either the machine wasn't working or the bank ran out of money. I've said this before about "developing" nations - it's not the big things that you notice, because there is horrific poverty in this country. It's the little things, like banks having no money. What's up with that? Jim made it back on board right before the ship left, and all was well. We eventually needed cash too (remember, you need to tip everyone, including dogs that don't attack you and camels that don't spit on you), and we were able to find an ATM in Aswan. Still, when finding cash is an adventure in itself, you know you're in a fun country!

We left Luxor and headed south. Cruising the Nile was wonderfully relaxing, and I wrote many postcards. The boat had a pavilion on the top deck with a swimming pool (too cold to swim!) and a bar with many wicker tables. Krys and I spent a great deal of time on the deck, watching the shore slide by. When guide books say that rural Egypt is a lot like it has been for thousands of years, they're really not kidding. We passed villages with block brick houses (many with satellite dishes - they're poor, but not savages!) surrounding a mosque, and people raising various animals (mainly goats) and hanging out on the banks. It was still very neat to see the greenery on the banks and, just beyond, the desert. It's very hard to get used to it, because it's so bizarre.

We got used to the pampering, too. The Mojito was a nice boat, and of course, all our needs were taken care of. The meals were buffets, all the time, which actually got a bit annoying, because we would have a really good meal one night and then another night where maybe the options weren't as good. For the most part, though, the food was fine. It was in the dining room, however, that we first dealt with our nemesis - French people!

Most of the people on the boat were French. I did hear at one point people speaking perfect English without an accent, but that was only two people, and I don't know where they came from or where they went! The rest of the time we were surrounded by French people! Now, I have no problem with French people. Well, not many problems. The French are fine - they're weird and quirky, but that's why we love them! I love the whole "overweight men wearing Speedos" thing that they have going on, and that constant smoking? dig it, man! In Egypt, they're like most of the world - smoke away! And so the French did. It's weird coming from a country like the U.S., where we have no smoking anywhere! I wondered how many Americans actually take advantage of the free-smoking atmosphere in Egypt - are American smokers so conditioned to not smoke indoors that even when they have the opportunity, they don't take it? I don't know. Anyway. One morning at breakfast, Jim, our traveling companion, ordered a custom omelette at the omelette bar. The guy was merrily cooking it when a Frenchwoman - we called her Crazy Omelette Lady from then on - came up and demanded his omelet. The guy who was making it was perplexed and chuckled at her. She got very angry that he would not give her the omelet, even though, you know, it wasn't hers! Later, apparently, they made the guy apologize to Crazy Omelette Lady because he laughed at her, but Jim did get his omelet! This would not be the first time the French did weird things on the cruise. Crazy Omelette Lady herself would offer us some more amusement - she seemed like she wasn't having a very good time. She almost got in a shouting match with one of her compatriots one night - we couldn't figure out why, because none of us speak French! Damn.

We had to pass through a lock on our way downriver, and the trip got a little bizarre there. Many boats cruise the Nile, so there's a line at the lock to go through. We sat just north of the lock for over an hour, waiting for our turn. The moment we came near the lock the merchants swarmed all over us. Weren't we on a boat, you say? Well, yes, but they were undaunted! They came up in little boats of their own! The water was thick with men selling things. They would wave their products in the air, negotiate a price, then hurl them up to the top deck. Considering our boat was four stories high and these guys were standing on a rocking row boat and throwing straight up, that's pretty impressive! They were selling clothing, which was wrapped in plastic bags. The buyer would put the money in the bag and throw it back down. Now that's capitalism! It was pretty funny - we would be standing there and suddenly a projectile would come flying up over the rails. You had to get out of the way quickly! All the merchants could speak a little French, as they were the dominant nationality among the tourists, apparently, but they could also speak a little English. Of course, they wanted to haggle, even from 100 feet away. Krys got a shirt for 5 pounds, but when she went to give the guy the money, he wanted more. Then he tried to get her to buy a few more things. This went back and forth for a few minutes, until she got fed up and threw the shirt back. No sale for greedy man!

The merchants were funny to watch, because they swarmed like locusts to each new ship, abandoning ours (or any other one) like a stripped-to-the-bone carcass. It was certainly entertaining, which was nice, because we were waiting so long to go through the lock. Finally, it was our turn, and we headed into the structure. Nothing says quality locks like a Romanian-built lock, I'll tell you that much:


As I mentioned, we spent all Sunday cruising, and on Monday morning we went to see Edfu. It's a temple. I mean, it's a nice temple and all, but we saw so many of them, and they all blur together after a while. Edfu is stuck in my mind because that was where I decided that Krys was going to be the tipper from then on, but I'm not getting into that. Anyway, the temple was Ptolemaic, meaning it was built when the Greeks ruled Egypt between the 330s B.C. and 31 B.C., when Octavian won the Battle of Actium and Cleopatra killed herself (Cleopatra was Greek, in case you didn't know). It's a neat temple because it's very well-preserved, and you can check out the various Christian trappings that the Copts installed when they "converted" it to a church. They out crosses into the walls and placed an altar in one room. We also saw many more carvings in the rock, explaining the rituals and the myths. Lots of people can read hieroglyphics, and it's interesting to have someone explain them to you, because they make little sense otherwise. Here are some pictures from the site:





This is Mourad in action!


Jim and Alicia, our American traveling companions, stand by the big falcon statue.


Which way should we go?

We got back on the boat and headed south once more. It was another relaxing day. After the hectic pace of the early part of the vacation, we loved this portion - I highly recommend a Nile cruise if you're planning on going to Egypt (and isn't everyone?). Late in the day we approached Kom Ombo, which is not too far north of Aswan, our terminal destination. Kom Ombo is very neat to approach, because it's right by the river on a small plateau, so the view is spectacular. We docked before any other boats got there, which Mourad said was a good thing, because we'd have it pretty much to ourselves. It's nice having a tour guide and a small group, because they know when the best time to see things is, so we weren't overwhelmed by other tourists. This would come in handy at Abu Simbel, when we missed the large groups that show up there. So we went ashore and wandered around the temple. It's another Ptolemaic temple, and it's neat to remember that the Ptolemies, who were descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, tried very hard to integrate themselves into a 3000-year-old tradition. Well, it's neat on the one hand. On the other hand, it's kind of sad that the Egyptians didn't make any architectural advances in 3000 years. But that's the cynical view!



This is difficult to see, but that little shack right below the temple proudly advertised its "Internet caffe." Never let it be said that the Egyptians aren't on the cutting edge!






This is a woman giving birth. Part of the temple was dedicated to Imhotep, who was a famous doctor (among other things), so there were women giving birth and various surgical instruments on the walls.


This is a mummified crocodile. Crocodiles were sacred in ancient Egypt, and apparently they used to hang out near the site. Mourad kept telling us there were crocodiles in the water, but we never saw any.

Finally, that night we went to the lounge in the Mojito for a goofy Nubian musical fest. I say goofy not because the music was goofy - it was very good, actually - but because after the music, a Nubian dressed in "traditional" clothing came out and took people out of the crowd and made them dance around and make strange noises, which was supposed to be some sort of Nubian ritual. The Egyptians sure aren't politically correct! It was fun to watch, and it was even more fun when Mourad told the guy to take Krys and Alicia up on stage. They hopped around and made weird noises while Jim and I tried to avoid being seen. I did manage to get some pictures, even though the lighting was poor:


That night we docked at Aswan. And so another stage of our journey was completed. Who knew it would take longer to write about it than experience it????

Our Adventure in Egypt, Part Six: Karnak and Luxor

As you can tell, Saturday, 11 November, was a big day. So big I was foolish to think I could fit it into one post and not go insane. So after lunch on that day, we went to Karnak and Luxor temples. Holy crap, was Karnak cool. And huge. If you click on the link there, you can see an aerial picture showing how big it is. It was one of the highlights of the tour. Luxor wasn't as big, but it was still pretty neat. We got there at twilight, which lends our pictures of it some nice air of mystery, I think. I'm just going to put up pictures and comment about them, because they're so neat. Sound good?


The pylons marking the entrance.


Ram sphinxes along the entranceway.






Big-ass columns. That's me and our guide, Mourad, behind us.












Guys like this were ubiquitous at the sites. They would lurk around, offer to take your picture, or tell you something "secret" about the site. And then expect a tip. Krys and I became very good at avoiding them. In another section of Karnak, Krys was wandering around in a relatively secluded area when the group that had also been in there and was distracting the old men left. I rushed over to Krys and told her it was red alert - we needed to get out of there, as it was a cul-de-sac and we were trapped! Luckily, another group came in, and we sneaked out unnoticed. It was all very cloak-and-dagger!


More context to show how big these freakin' columns are. My wife is wee!


I took this picture because we were amazed by the older Russian women. Not "old," just middle-aged, I guess. So many of them had that magenta-tinted hair. In fact, whenever we saw women with magenta-tinted hair, they were invariably Russian (or, I guess, Slavic). What the hell? It was strange, and should be the subject of some sociological experiment.


This is Min, the god of fertility. You'll notice he's, um, very happy to be featured on a column!




I have mentioned that at every site, a bunch of merchants set up shop. This is a typical example. Unlike a lot of other sites, however, you didn't need to go by them to get to Karnak. So that was nice.


I love this sign at the ticket booth. If you can't read it, the windows are for "foreigners" or "f. students," which means, I guess, foreign students. Are Egyptians not welcome at Karnak? That's awfully bizarre.

It was getting late in the day, but we pushed on to Luxor temple, which is right downtown and not that big, so we decided to visit that day instead of the next morning, because if we missed it the next morning, that meant we could sleep in! So we drove to the temple, and I noticed some strange street signs. In sections of town, you could not, apparently, use your horn - the signs had horns with lines through them. That was easy enough, but some signs were triangular with an exclamation point on them. I have no idea what that meant! Suggestions would be most welcome.

We got to Luxor as the sun was setting, about 4.30 or so in the afternoon. It's a nice temple, but not as impressive as Karnak. Still, lots of pictures. Soak them up!


Every Egyptian temple has pylons like these at the entrance. Some have statues in front of them, some don't.


This is kind of neat. Sand from the desert covered up the temple for centuries, and no one knew there was anything there. So the Muslims built a mosque on top of it. That was originally the front of the mosque, but since they uncovered the temple, it's been moved to the other side, and the back of the mosque is now way up there. There are a lot of buildings like this in Egypt, where the sand gets everywhere and builds up a lot. So people were always building stuff on top of other stuff. This is just a dramatic example.







We left Luxor and headed back to the boat. Along the way we saw many, many busses. Mourad told us that the tourists come to Luxor from the Red Sea, across the desert and the mountains, and they have to travel in packs, with police escort. Not for the first time, we were very glad that we were in a small group (if four people can even be considered a group) and that we weren't on a bus a lot. The coast was about four hours away, and this was getting on to six o'clock, so these people had an even longer day than we had!

That night we collapsed. The next morning we left Luxor on our boat. Sunday was nice and lazy. We enjoyed it. But that's the next post!

Our Adventure in Egypt, Part Five: The Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Hatshepsut

Our wake-up call on Saturday, 11 November, was for 3.30 a.m. Three-thirty in the morning!!!!! That was no fun. We had to catch a short (about an hour) flight to Luxor, where we would see many, many sights and get on board our cruise ship, which would take us south along the Nile to Aswan. This, in case you're wondering, would be a brutally long day. But we saw a ton of cool stuff.

We arrived at the airport, said goodbye to our driver, Felipe, who had gotten us around Cairo without, you know, killing us (and as you can guess, any driver who can do that is a great driver), and went into the airport, where we met our new guide, Mourad, and our new travel buddies, Jim and Alicia. They were a couple from Glendale, California, and we would travel with them for the rest of the trip. We wandered around the terminal for a while until we found our gate. Oh, wait a minute - it wasn't our gate. We had to go back through the security check and find the right gate. Which we did. We went through that security check, but noticed there was no one actually manning the checkpoint. So we sat down and waited. I noticed that on the television in the little waiting area (all waiting areas by gates in airports worldwide look alike, I suppose, with only small changes in the actual amenities offered, like those "cushioned" plastic seats - we had no cushions) was a program that appeared to be a dramatization made to look like a documentary about ... an airplane disaster. Seriously. I couldn't tell, because the sound was down, but it looked like someone had made a pretend documentary, and there was footage of a plane going down and the aftermath in a small village that had been destroyed. I pointed this out to Krys, and we couldn't figure out exactly why they might be showing this footage in an airport waiting area. We have heard that Cairenes like practical jokes. Maybe they were toying with the sensitive foreigners!

So we sat for a while, and then a guard showed up. We all had to go back out and pass through the metal detector again. I wondered just where the hell this guard had been and who the hell he thought he was. We got our asses out of bed at 3.30 in the morning so we could get to the airport on time, and here he is, sauntering in with a cigarette dangling from his mouth (smoking is ubiquitous in Egypt, and I can only thank whatever deity watches over non-smokers that they didn't allow it on the airplanes) and joking around with his buddies. Finally we took a bus to the airplane, got on, and sat around. I mentioned that we sat around at JFK, but I could forgive it there, because that's a pretty darned big airport. I wasn't quite sure why we sat around on the tarmac at Cairo International, but I have a vision in my head of the pilot hanging out with the security guard, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee while laughing about those stupid tourists, who think they're going to take off on time. They wouldn't be that evil, would they?

We finally got off the ground, but not before Krys and I came up with a marketing slogan for the airline: "EgyptAir: We'll get you there ... eventually." I think it's gold, baby! About an hour later we landed in Luxor. The second stage of our journey had begun.

We landed in Luxor and went immediately to our boat, the Mojito. Why they named it after a Cuban cocktail that was apparently one of Ernest Hemingway's favorite drinks is beyond me, but after you go through the various Egyptian things you can name boats after, you start getting creative. The Mojito was very nice, and Krys took a bunch of pictures of our room and the boat itself. I'll get around to posting those at some point. We immediately got in our van and took off, heading south toward the only bridge within miles, which is way out of town. Our first stop: the Colossi of Memnon!

The statues are pretty impressive. They're just sitting there in the middle of the flood plain, although the road runs right alongside and naturally, there are plenty of merchants for your purchasing pleasure. We wandered over to the statues and ... took pictures. What did you think we were going to do, pee on them????










These last two pictures, obviously, are the merchants right by the statues. I found the juxtaposition of the modern merchants and the guy driving his goats along interesting.

The statues are in the middle of a flat plain, seemingly isolated, because there was once a temple behind them that is just now being excavated. There's a lot still under the sand in Egypt, and it will be interesting to see if it sheds any new light on a civilization we still don't know a lot about. We saw a little of the excavations as we drove by, but we had places to go and things to see! We were off to the Valley of the Kings!

The Valley of the Kings was pretty disappointing, I must say. We couldn't take pictures inside the tombs, so it might be disappointing to you, as well. However,even inside the tombs, it was kind of dull. I mean, sure, there are hieroglyphs aplenty, and there were some really weird pictures (the Buddha figures on the ceiling of one of the tombs were kind of neat), but they just weren't as impressive as the temples, probably because they were underground and couldn't really be as spectacular as when the Egyptians could flex their muscles and build on a bigger scale. So here are some of the tombs we entered, as well as the desert - we left Arizona for this?

















I did get a few pictures of the inscriptions around the doors of the tombs:




Then it was off to the temple of Hatshepsut, which is pretty keen. Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I, wife (and half-sister) of Thutmose II, and stepmother of Thutmose III. When Thutmose II died, she seized control of the kingdom and became Ancient Egypt's only female pharaoh (Cleopatra doesn't count). This is her mortuary temple, meant for posthumous worship. If the male pharaohs can do it, why can't she?




One the right side of the temple (from the front) was the Chapel of Anubis. Krys took some pictures, naturally:




This is the view looking east from the top level of the temple. The Nile is somewhere in the greenery in the background.


On the left side of the temple is the Chapel of Hathor, who was often shown as a cow. Krys took lots of pictures here, too:






After leaving the temple, we drove to the Valley of the Queens, which was also less than excellent. Again, it's not that it was all that uninteresting, it's just that it's hard to get worked up about the same hieroglyphics over and over again, especially when we would see them in far more spectacular settings (like Karnak) and not in holes in the ground. The merchants were out in force, of course, but we managed to elude them. When we got in the van, Mourad decided to take a short cut back to the boat, because it was getting late for lunch and we still had to head off to Karnak and Luxor. It was, as I mentioned, a pretty busy day! So we drove to the river and commissioned a small boat to take us across, because the bridge was so far south and it turns out the temple of Hatshepsut is almost directly across from the town of Luxor. So we hopped in, and I took a picture of Mourad looking thoughtful, as if he was deciding whether or not he should rob us on the high seas and dump our bodies in the drink! Okay, that's probably not what he was thinking - Mourad was a cool guy. We made it back to the boat for some lunch, but our day was far from over. Karnak awaited!

But that's another post. I apologize for the length of these posts and the time elapsed between them. It takes FOREVER to upload pictures, and we took almost 600 of them, so deciding which ones to put up takes a while. Sorry. I have a feeling everyone abandoned me long ago, but I'll keep writing about our vacation. You have to stick around - the French have almost entered the story!