A Weekend in Rehab, New Cairo

I've spent the weekend, ie Friday and Saturday with a friend who teaches here in Cairo. It's been wonderful to catch up with her after six years and to meet her husband and four month old son.


On Thursday I got to visit Christy at her school and sit in on one of her classes. Then I walked to the nearby Festival City Mall, an enormous brand new mall with so many American and stores and restaurants I was overwhelmed. There are a number of incredibly Western malls in New Cairo. We had a yummy lunch with some of her friends at a Lebanese restaurant at one on Friday.




We also visited one of the nearby Coptic Orthodox churches. It was much busier than we expected as we think they were celebrating Ascension day. However I got to go into an extension of the church that had the most beautiful paintings all over the ceiling.


Visiting with Christy I've got to see a little of a different side of Cairo, some more regular Egyptian experiences such as visiting the souk to taste beautiful sweet treats and buy yummy bread. The range of bread is amazing, last night we went to a bakery in the souk to buy bread at 8:30pm from a bakery that cooks 24/7.


Christy's husband also cooked me a traditional meal from his home town. I particularly loved the pasta. It is sauteed in butter, then covered in water and when all the water is absorbed it is ready. He also introduced me to Egyptian beer, it comes in 500ml cans and is 10% alcohol! It's perfectly acceptable for the Coptic Christian population to drink alcohol. They're about 10% of the total population.



It's been great to catch up with Christy and meet her family.

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Back to Cairo

Today began with a 5:15am departure from the hotel in Lucie to catch our 1 1/4 hour flight back to Cairo. The hotel provided breakfast bags, mine came with 13 cutlery sets! They quickly replaced the cutlery sets with the food items I was missing.

On arrival in Cairo we headed to the Khan el-Khalili bazaar where we were met by another armed security tourist officer, who joined us for our mosque visit. He was much nicer, so I managed to sneak a photo but later found out he posed for photos with other people on my group.


With our long sleeves shirts, long pants and scarves on our heads we headed into Al-Azhar mosque. It was most interesting to be inside a relatively new, two hundred year old building. Many parts of it had been taken from ancient temples. I loved the carpet with prayer mats printed on it.




The bazaar was basically a much bigger version of the Luxor bazaar but many shops were closed, a reflection of our being there at 10am and reduced tourist numbers. It did have a much better jewellery selection, so I was able to purchase a few necklaces. Much of the market was unfortunately items made in China. Though there were interesting spices, powders and lots of dates available.




We've been upgraded for our last night in the Barcelo hotel, to deluxe rooms as we had to wait an hour before our rooms were ready, though we were there 2 hours before check in time! We had a final tour dinner at a local bbq restaurant, yet another great Egyptian meal.

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Karnak Temple

Karnak Temple is incredible, 60 acres of temple built over 2000 years. Because it was being continually added to it has many different features in one place. It was also never completed so there are many hints about ancient building practices. It is also connected to Luxor Temple via an avenue of sphinixes that runs being our hotel. The perfect final ancient temple visit for my Egypt trip.







These mud bricks were how they accessed the high parts of their building projects.


A guard with a papyrus broom.


Very quickly making me a falafel sandwich for lunch. Falafel here is made with fava beans, so much better than the chick pea version we get in Australia.


A rooftop dinner near our hotel, views of Luxor Temple, the Nile and the Valley of Kings. If only it was dark by 6:45pm but at least they're well lit up.

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Luxor West Bank

Due to the forecast of about 40℃ we headed out at 7am this morning. Poor first stop was the temple of Hatshepsut at Al-Deir Al-Bahari. By 8:30am we were desperate for shade. The temple is built into the side of a mountain, with only parts open to the public, principally the second and third floors.




We then headed to the Valley of the Kings, a standard admission ticket gets you entry into three tombs. We visited the tombs of Rameses 3, Rameses 9 and Merenptah. Merenptah was my favorite for its sheer size but they were all incredible. The tombs that can be visited are regularly rotated to try and minimise damage to them, primarily the paint wearing off. Tour guides cannot talk inside the tombs and as of last year photos can't even be taken outside of the tombs. This is because when cameras were allowed outside, the guards were very open to being bribed by tourists to allow them to take photos inside the tombs. Even when new guards were bought in, within a fortnight they were being bribed/encouraging bribes. The tombs were incredible, the colors are so bright despite being so old. The incredible workmanship in a tunnel dug out of a mountain without modern machinery amazes me.

After a quick stop at the Colossi of Memnom we checked into our very well air conditioned hotel. The afternoon was spent doing a little shopping, after lunch at a local dive.


This evening an African restaurant on the West Bank sent their boat to get us and we motored across for a yummy rooftop dinner. The view was great, both of the East Bank lights and watching the people on the street. Coming back we could see the Valley of the Kings very well lit up, for security purposes.

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Final Day on the Nile

We left the ship at 6:30am to catch a horse and carriage to Edfu Temple. The horse and carriage situation was interesting. Basically, post revolution the first tour group that came back attempted to use a bus to get to the temple from the river. The horse drivers rioted and destroyed the bus, telling the tour companies how dare you bring a bus when we are here trying to make a living. The problem is the drivers are aggressive, the horses aren't that well treated and especially with the current downturn are pretty thin. The sellers at Edfu Temple were also the most aggressive we've encountered so far. It was 30℃ at 7:30am, so thankfully we were only there for an hour, as we had to quickly get back to the ship before it departed again.

Despite the annoyances Edfu Temple was well worth visiting, it is beautiful. It seemed even taller than other temples and again was beautifully decorated with incredible hieroglyphics.




The rest of the day was spent cruising. About noon we went through the dam lock, during this time we were entertained by sellers on row boats. They'd throw items up to us in the hope we'd buy them. They'd call out in English, French and Spanish to see what we spoke. I don't think anyone on our ship bought anything despite their desperate attempts.



The views from the boat were pretty consistent, a narrow strip of green by the river and then sandy desert. With the occasional small town. It was so hot that I didn't even want to go on the sun deck to swim. We arrived in Luxor at 3:30pm and many on our ship quickly scurried off to see the temples. I'm so glad we have two days here and can go out in the mornings and avoid the worst of the heat. We've voted for a 7am departure tomorrow morning for this reason.




At 5.45pm, when it had cooled down a bit, we headed into Luxor for a quick look around. It was amazing to get off the ship and be right outside Luxor temple which is in the middle of down town and see families hanging out next to it.

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A Day on the Nile

You know it's a good day when you have read an entire novel by 2pm. The sun deck of the cruise ship is definitely a great place to read, as is my room. We don't have balconies instead we have sliding doors for windows, so it is lovely to sit listening to the water and watching the world go by, especially with a glass of Egyptian wine in hand, Obelisk white is my favorite so far. I'm sailing on the Nile Dolphin but there are no dolphins in the u


Apart from breakfast the first item for the day was a feluca ride, a traditional Egyptian boat. Whilst relaxing for us it was a lot of work for the captain to be continually changing sails as we came back against the current. These industrious young boys rowed out to us using plywood scraps as their oars, asked what language we spoke and then sung to us.


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A lovely lady in our tour group very kindly lent me a swimsuit so I was able to take advantage of the roof top pool, after finishing my book. Then at 4:30pm we visited Komombo Temple. The carvings were a little different to what we had seen in other temples. The birthing scenes made me think of my friends at His House of Hope and all the women there giving birth so quietly. Apparently the birthing chairs had circular holes in them for the baby to come out through.




Attached to the temple is the Crocodile Museum, as the temple was for a crocodile god. The mummies of crocodiles didn't seem quite as freaky as the human mummies.


Tonight's evening activity is a traditional dress party, which has helped sales in the onboard shop. I also visited the jewellery shop today, I have some lovely silver earrings and I'm waiting for my cartouche to be engraved, with my name in hieroglyphics on it.

PS. This is what happens when your ship only has 40 passengers but a capacity of 150, at least it was a change from this morning's swan and a heart.

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Abu Simbel

Today's main activity was visiting the two temples at Abu Simbel. The two options for getting there are a four drive in a military convoy (for fear of breaking down, not secure) or on Friday's a 45 minute flight. It all amazes me that we left Aswan at 10am and then flew back at 1pm. The temples were incredible, especially inside where no your guides or photos are allowed for fear of garbage to the carvings. It is also amazing to consider that they were relocated in the 1960s (as were 15 other temples), because of the Aswan High Dam.





Upon arrival back in Aswan we transferred to our cruise ship for our first of nine buffet meals! We don't sail until tomorrow at 1:30pm, so this afternoon a few of us visited the Nubian museum, which was very interesting abd psychiatry so fir me as these proper ate probably the people if Cush from biblical times who resided in Sudan.

There was a problem with the Egypt Air computer system so another lady, Janet and I didn't receive our boarding passes until everyone was almost on the plane. We were placed in business class, which just meant we were at the front of the plane and got a juice before take off. Upon disembarking we got our own private bus to take us into the terminal. The driver even stopped so we could take a photo of the welcome sign.

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