Egypt

Alexandria and Cairo

When staying in Egypt is wasn’t straight off the plane and onto a Nile cruise and trip to Jordan, we actually had a few weeks of downtime in Alexandria, staying with Mary (Rach’s mum). And boy did we need the relaxation after Europe.

Mary’s balcony

And while it was awesome to lax out at Mary’s, some of the things you do in Alexandria would be considered thrill rides in other countries.
The roads for example, hail a taxi (beaten up old lada) and go for a nice drive along the water front. This bing a high speed chase along a 7 lane motorway where apparently lanes are just a suggestion. Or the backstreets where an intersection is controlled by whoever beeps first gets right of way.
Or cross the road don't use the pedestrian crossings as local drivers will speed up for you, (tourist = 20 points) just find a local pedestrian also crossing and use them as a shield as you weave through speeding traffic.
Or walk along the sidewalk, but watch for loose concrete paves and steel reinforcement poking out.

Basically the roads aren't all that great.

Kafr Abdo (upmarket alex), view from the apartment.

One of the main experiences of actual life we experienced in Egypt was the Islamic festival of ede. We didn’t really know what was going in the week on leading up to the festival days but there seemed to be an excess of livestock tied to peoples shops and milling around the streets. Mary then filled us in that they were to be sacrificed on the main celebration day.

On Ede eve we went out to dinner with john (from the nile cruise) and then a café afterwards where mary mistook the ‘ede’ decorations for a childs party.

Cow tied to a street sign

So on the actually slaughter day Rach decide to have a indoors day (good move) while Mary and I were keen to see what all of the fuss was about. Well a walk down ‘crazy street’ and we were hit in the face with blood, killing, celebration and children using blown up stomachs/bladders as soccer balls. Blood literally covered the street.

Decorating the mosk (don’t think they’re xmas lights)

Although we may not find the animal sacrifice thing all that palatable one positive is that a lot of the meat and dried skins are donated to the orphanages and the poor.

Getting back to something we do know about, Zachariah (visa guy from kens work) invited us down to support his rugby team. They were surprisingly good and the Alex boys totally kicked Cairo’s butt. There’s no way that I’d want to play on the rock hard field.

At the catacombs, only real touristy thing to do in Alex.

Cairo

On the way back from the Sinai we had a couple of days stop to do all things Cairo. This includes Pyramids and Egyptian Museum.

Picture this, you’re on your way to the Pyramids in the back of a ‘1970 lada’ (read: taxi) and as you get close random guys on the street start waving and trying to hail your cab but you tell the driver to just carry on. One persistent fat man will not give up though and sprints about 200m before the cab has to pull over for traffic.
He then forces the drivers window down and starts yelling, ‘you going to pyramids, you like a camel or donkey?’ ‘you know the price, very good price.’ We then pretened to know Arabic and tell him to shove off and the taxi to keep going. He catches his breath gets his running shoes back on and sprints after the next car with a white face in it.

The pyramids themselves are a bit of a touristing conundrum for us. Sure they’re really impressive and old (understatement) and we should have just been slack jaw staring at them. But because you’ve seen pictures of them all your life you just know what to expect, and like everywhere else in Egypt you have to fend of the merchants and camel hawkers. As one travel writer said, ‘looking at the sphinx is like meeting a famous actor, you just thought they’d be bigger in real life.’

One positive is that if you’re willing to walk a few hundred meters (further that most tourists are) then you can look back at them in the peace and quiet.

Anyway we are totally over this part of the world and wanna go somewhere where the speak english and people don’t hassle at every corner.

America here we come.

[*]

Well we are finally out of Europe and into Egypt, we had a week in Alexandria to chill out with Rach’s mum (Mary) and rest-up from the previous few months of travel. Our first planned trip was a present (cheers Mary and Ken), a Nile cruise. We flew from Cairo to Luxor, which was cool in itself. The flight path was over the Nile the whole way and looking out the window you could see this green line snaking it was through the landscape off into the horizon with endless desert either side.

First view from our window

Straight after checking into our lush (well above our normal traveling standards, thanks again to Mary) room on the boat we headed off with the tour group to our first temple, Karnak temple. It had huge columned rooms, obelisk (plural) and statues galore.

Our group included us, John (aussie guy who was at our table for dinners), three Canadian couples, some other randoms and three young Aussie families with three kids each, that’s nine kids total!

Luxor temple

Two big statues outside the valley of the kings, Ramsess really did love himself

After the valley of the kings we went to another temple nearby (pronounced hot chicken soup). At one point Rach had to head off too the loo, when I found her again she was with the guy above. Apparently after a short conversation, with Rach, ‘Mohammed’ wanted to make her his forth wife. Jamie was almost swayed by his offer of; 2 million chickens, 1 million goats and 2 dogs. Pretty sure he was joking, but who knows.

This is the life.

Galabaya men swarming the boat

One of the highlights of the cruise had to be the innovative sales techniques employed by the Galabaya hawkers. Their process involves the following;
- without even waiting for the boat to slow down they row their dinghy’s besides the boats and grab onto whatever they can.
- They tether their dingy to our boat.
- While being dragged along they heave plastic bags full of there wears onto the top deck of the boat.
- If you want to buy you have to barter like hell with the men below.
- If you don’t want to but you toss they plastic bag back.

We were in the tossing back category, Rachel making a game of trying to land the bags perfectly back in the dinghy’s. Bags were flying everywhere, many fell in the water but were quickly fished out, wrung out and thrown back up to the next tourist that dared to poke there head up or make eye contact worth someone below.
One over zealous and under cautious hawker got his dinghy trapped between a concrete wall and our cruise ship. As the crack of timber rang out the hawkers jumped ship onto our boat, but fortunately there vessel popped out the back no worse for wear. Rach was horrified but watching crew members told her not to worry it happens almost every week.

Typical temple crowd, Asian tourist and suited teenage Egyptian guard with AK-47

This dude totally ripped us off when buying some scarf’s.

Edfu temple, I think??? They were all starting to look the same

Egyptian girl totally letting loose on the belly dancing floor

us at Egyptian party

Total vertical jump

Feluka ride

Dip your finger in the nile and you are destined to return

Abu Simbol

Our cruise actually finished in Aswan (where the big Nile dam is). But (thanks again Mary) we had an extra place to go. So a quick flight down over Lake Nasser and we were at Abu Simbol. We are so glad that we got to go here, there is only the two temples but what temples they are.

Ohhh Ramses is it a wee bit nippy outside

Total commitment to the photo…..after ‘landing’ Rach did an impromptu roll with added knee/elbow graze.