Luxor and Dahab

Okay, so it has been a while. I have had a crazy, but wonderful time and when I can choose between scuba diving in the red sea and writing on my blog the red sea gets the priority. But more of that later.

I last wrote about the amazing adventure on the felucca and I now have a couple of pictures to add to the description.

This is me standing infront of two donkeys. Why not? Actually, I just thought the little baby donkey was really cute and had to stop to take a picture. This is also right next to the toilet, can you see it? It is the green shrubbery in the background. Welcome to Egypt!

Here is the felucca that we sailed on. We would zigzag across the Nile all day and than stop once in a while to enjoy a traditional meal made by the felucca boys.

As I last mentioned, the felucca took us to Luxor. This is a town I have really been looking forward to see because a lot of the archaeological goodies of Egypt are here. Despite being absolutely disgusting (no more details needed) after the two day adventure on the Nile, we made a short stop at Edfu temple, before going to the hotel.

Edfu looked a lot like Philae although it was in a slight worse condition. It is also possibly one of the earliest Christian churches in Egypt.

This early Christian painting covers the older ancient carvings of the original decoration of the temple, but because there is no writing it is not possible to accurately date the paintings. However, the theme and the style suggest a very early period in the Christian history. Isn't that cool? A lot of the temples here have been altered and often disfigured by the Christians, it was there way of getting back at the tyranny and oppression that they experienced. Although it is sad to see the remains of an angry mob, it is interesting to see the feelings of a people as marks on a wall. I guess that is a lot of what history is all about.

I know I have already given one history lesson, but here comes a short other. This small boat is called a Sun Ship. Usually they are a lot bigger, this is only a model. They were used in ceremonies in ancient Egypt to carry the gods across or down or up the Nile. This one was inside Edfu temple, in the room known as the sanctuary or the Holy of Holies, which was, as the name implies, the most sacred room in the temple.

After a beautiful shower and using a real toilet I felt like a new person. The rest of the day was spent just relaxing and enjoying the pool on the top of the roof with a beautiful view over Luxor.

Once rested we headed off to Luxor temple.

Ramses and I

Our guide was great at explaining the history of the temple. He really wanted us to understand the history of a certain pharaoh named Haptshepsut (don't quote me on the spelling), the only female pharaoh to rule Egypt. To make sure that we understood the somewhat complicated history and family relations of this remarkable woman he had us act it out and since everyone knows what a wonderful actor I am (please understand the sarcasm) I got to play the leading role as Hatshepsut. Fun fun!

Afterwards we went to an Egyptian pizza place where they stuff you pizza with meat, the only way to make pizza! Afterwards we went to the zouk where I was offered two million camels. After considering it a while I thought "nah" and kept on walking.

Later on I was walking down the zouk with a few of the others from the tour group. Two other girls and one guy to be exact. This number didn't go unnoticed by the locals who would keep repeating as we walked by "Three wives, three problems!" After a while I found out that it was extra fun to finish the sentence for them...

The next day we went to Valley of the Kings. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before! I loved it so much! Despite the heat it was an incredible experience. The tombs are so beautifully decorated and so impressive, it must have been amazing to have seen them when they were new and fresh and full of all sorts of treasures. I got to go to Tutankhamun's tomb as well and stayed there so long that the guard inside had to kick me out in the end so that other people could come inside too.

It is not allowed to take your camera inside the Valley of the Kings so the best picture I have is the following that I took from the parking lot:

You can recognize the Valley from the pyramid shaped mountain.

I could go on and on with descriptions about the amazing colours in the tomb and the interesting scenes of the pharaoh and the scale of justice and Isis and Osiris taken from the book of the dead, but in the end all I can say is that if you ever have the chance to go, DO! It is an amazing experience. These colours have survived in amazing condition through thousands of years. How often does a house need to be repainted in our days?

Until the evening there was nothing planned for the rest of this day but a few of us from the group decided that we hadn't seen enough temples yet, so we set off to see two more: the temples of Habu and Hatshepsut.

Habu's temple was impressive becuase a lot of the colour had been preserved, but I was mostly excited to see Hatshepsut's temple. I studied this temple in an art history class I took and I think the story of Hatshepsut is fascinating. Hollywood should really consider making a story of her life, or maybe not actually... Anywho, the temple really was beautiful, although extremely hot. The placement of the temple makes it one of the warmest places on earth, according to the travel book the Italians in our group had with them.

Hatshepsut's temple

In the evening we went to an orphanage that the tour group sponsors. It seemed like a really decent place and a good place for kids to grow up. They had about a hundred kids or more ranging from the age of seventeen years to one week. After a tour of the place we were allowed to play with the kids if we wanted to. I rushed off to do so as soon as I had the chance. I ended up spending the whole time playing with a cute little kid who had a bandaged arm, although that didn't seem to slow him down at all. We had a blast throwing things to each other and counting together in English and Arabic. He also taught me some new words, all of which I have forgotten already except I think a stuffed animal is called a babu or something like that. I would have loved to stay longer and played but I really enjoyed the time that I had.

There was still one more temple to see so Thursday morning we headed off to Karnak temple, the biggest one so far. It is actually a temple complex made out of six temples. To get there and back we took rode a horse and carriage. I got to sit in the front both ways since I shared the carriage with one girl who didn't like horses and another girl who disliked animals in general...

Karnak Temple

Karnak Temple was the last thing we saw in Luxor before heading off to Dahab. Usually, the tour group takes a ferry across the Red Sea, but the ferry was sent away for repair and now the company is having the hardest time getting permission to put it back on the water becuase the Egyptian government want their own company so they are trying to ruin the current company to eliminate all competition. So instead of the ferry we took a buss through the night. I hardly slept at all, but who need sleep when you are on an adventure! The next night there was also very little sleep, because this night we all hiked Mount Sinai. We left the hotel at eleven in the evening, got to the foot of the mountain around one, and reached the top of the mountain around three or four in the morning. The sunrise was beautiful! It was a little cloudy so I didn't actually see the sun until it had risen a little bit but it was fascinating to see how the sky changed colours from black to blue to orange to pink and then blue again.

We hiked back down and reached the bottom a little past seven. Then a few of us waited outside St. Catherine's monastery until it opened at nine. The monastery was built to protect the legendary burning bush. Because we where tired and hot and hungry we didn't stay long, just long enough to see the monastery and the beautiful icons that they have, and then snap a picture of ourselves and the bush.

St. Catherine's Monastery

I will be posting a separate post soon about my wonderful experience scuba diving. Below is a picture of a supermarket in Dahab, the town where I got my certification.

The four days in Dahab where wonderful! I spent most of the time scuba diving, and the rest of the time relaxing by the pool or walking down the markets talking to the locals and practicing my Arabic. I think they enjoyed my attempts at speaking Arabic and one guy went around his entire store telling me the name of different things in Arabic. In the end all I can remember from my lesson is one sentence: "mia mia walla firax gamayia", which literary translated means "one hundred percent better than the market chicken", and is used when you want to emphasize that you are doing really well.

We arrived back in Cairo on Saturday. Only four of us returned to Cairo, the rest of the twelve were travelling on to other destinations and adventures. Although the trip was officially over we spent the day together exploring a little more of Cairo. We went to the Muhammad Ali Mosque, which is a beautiful citadel built on higher ground so that it overlooks the city of Cairo. I asked the tour guide what was so great about Muhammad Ali and the only thing he could think of was that he was the one who brought tobacco to Egypt. In addition to bringing the tobacco he is also considered the founder of modern Egypt. My tour guide also wanted to make sure we all understood that the Muhammad Ali of the mosque was not the the well known boxer of the same name. Apparently this had confused some people in earlier tour groups...

The first half of my adventure is sadly over. It has been amazing and I have seen, heard, done, and tasted some wonderful things. But the next adventure is just as exciting. I have to learn to live in Cairo, a wonderful but crazy city. I am very excited for this new semester :)

My new hometown for the next four months...

On the Nile

The last couple of days I have spent sailing down the Nile on a traditional Egyptian sailboat called a felucca. It has been a very interesting experience. Sometimes it has been wonderful and other times I have really missed the luxury of modern facilities such as toilets.

The view from the felucca has been beautiful and breathtaking. The banks are lined with palm trees and other greenery and in the distance there is always the desert with Nubian villages in bright colours scattered here and there. It is also fun to see the camels, donkeys and water buffalo that come to the water edge to drink.

The felucca would stop at different times of the day when we would eat and swim. Swimming in the Nile is the best relief from the heat, which becomes rather intense after sitting for a long time on the boat. The food was amazing too! The felucca boys who sailed the boat for us made some lovely traditional meals, usually swimming in fat, but who thinks of their cholesterol intake on a trip like this? One night they even made a fire on the beach and pulled out their drums and entertained us with traditional music and dance! I tried joining in but I do not think I will make a good Egyptian entertainer...

There are no pictures for this blog. I am sitting at a tiny internet cafe in Luxor since the hotel does not have any wi-fi, so they'll have to wait till I come to Dahab in a couple of days. I am super excited for Luxor, this is where the valley of the Kings is! We drove past the Winter Palace, which is a hotel in Luxor. I think that is the hotel that Amelia Peabody stayed in, a character from my favorite book series.

Cairo, Philae temple, and Abu Simbel

Here comes my first post about my adventures in Egypt. So far I have been here three days but it feels like several weeks already. It is amazing all the things I have seen and done so far.

The first day was Cairo, which included the pyramids. They are absolutely beautiful! From a distance they look as if they are built out of lots of tiny lego pieces and it isn't really until you get all the way up to them that you realize how big each individual stone is. They are all about as tall as I am, and although some might argue that it is not very tall, it is still a large chunk of sandstone.

Me chilling out on the Great Pyramid

I also got to go inside the Pyramid of Khafre and, although hot and really stuffy, it was wonderful to enter the kings chamber and see the sarcophagus he had once been buried in. Inside the chamber was also an Egyptian who gave a short lecture on what exactly it was we were looking at. Poor man! I thought the heat was bad enough for the relatively short minutes I was there, how he could stand it I have no idea.

After the looking at the pyramids up close we drove a little off into the desert to try a little camel riding and get the panoramic view of the pyramids.

Camel riding isn't nearly as horrible as everyone had told me. I was expecting a thrilling, somewhat scary and very uncomfortable experience from everything that I had heard, but it was far from it. I actually really enjoyed it, and would love to try it again. It is offered in Dahab so I know at least one thing that I will be doing there. True, the camel never really went too fast, except this one time when the boy leading my camel saw that I was really enjoying myself and asked if I wanted to go faster. I didn't have time to respond to his question before he started encouraging the camel to pick up the pace. I have to admit that I maybe didn't feel quite as safe right than... But I still loved it!

The next place we visited was the Sphinx. Here I am picking its nose:

I thought the Sphinx was magnificent! It just looks so incredibly royal, even without a nose. Unfortunately it is not possible to get right up close to the Sphinx, I guess that will have to wait until I am a famous archaeologist and they ask me to help excavate the mysterious tunnels underneath, but for now it was still wonderful seeing it from where I was allowed to stand and observe. It is supposed to be a guardian of the pyramids, although there is some disagreement as to the age of it and some with more extreme views have suggested that it predates the pyramids, but it definitively seems to be guarding something. Annoying tourists perhaps... if that is the case it is failing miserably...

At the end of the day we went to the Cairo Museum. It isn't allowed to take pictures inside the museum so I don't have any fun pictures to show you, but just imagine me jumping up and down with excitement and then rushing through the museum to try to soak in as much of it as possible!

The next day we went to Philae temple. It was built by the Ptolemies when they invaded Egypt, and is built in a beautiful greaco-roman style. The temple was later used as a Christian church so almost all of the engravings of the Egyptian gods have been carved away. It was especially interesting to go into the room known as the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of the temple according to the Egyptians, and see every single face, without exception, disfigured. In one case the whole face had been chiseled out. The archaeologist leading the tour said that the face had been thrown into the Nile in disgust but I don't exactly see how they can know that, although it does give a good picture of how the Christians felt about these gods, and the Ptolemy elite that had caused them so much damage.

This was my favorite engraving. It looks like he is dancing! Actually he is about to decapitate all the prisoners that he has caught... But I think it is fun to think of him as dancing...

Philae temple. None of the columns seemed to have any particular order. There would be two that matched, than an odd one, and another different one and than maybe the same one as the one before and well... it was kind of weird...

The Nile!

In the evening we took a boat to a beach along the Nile. I hadn't brought my swimsuit with me but jumped in anyway. It was one of the best decisions I have taken so far. The cool water was wonderfully refreshing after the heat. It is the warmest part of summer right now and during the middle of the day it gets between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius, or about 100 to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Nice and warm.

For dinner we went to a Nubian village and ate in a traditional Nubian home. Their homes are beautiful, yet very simple. They paint most of their walls blue to keep them cooler during the warm summer days and paint one wall yellow and red to help reflect the sun in the cooler winter times. For a roof they mostly use dry palm leaves except for a small part that is more solid. During the summer they sleep on the roof that is more solid. It must be so wonderful sleeping underneath the stars and feeling the breezed from the desert, I would love to experience that some time. The brightly coloured houses reminded me of Kardemommeby, a town from a Norwegian children's story.

In traditional Nubian houses it is considered good luck to have a crocodile in their house. Personally I would think I had terribly bad luck if I found a crocodile in my house. They let them grow to be a couple meters long and then eat them. The ones in this house where still kind of small so I got to hold one! And almost give it a kiss.

Actually, it looks like I am strangling the poor thing... but you try hold a crocodile! It is scary, even if it is a small one.

Today I was up at 2:30 in the morning to go to Abu Simbel. The early hour was to prevent us being stuck in the middle of the desert too late in the day when the heat is unbearable. We also had to time are leaving so that we could catch the police convoy that would take us there. Any tourists to Abu Simbel are police escorted to make sure that nothing bad happens on the way. Don't think I will go into more detail on that... Abu Simbel itself is absolutely amazing and one of the best things I have seen so far. Both inside and out is a so beautifully decorated and detailed. The statues of Ramses II are enormous. He definitively wasn't unsure of himself.

Believe me when I say that these pictures really can't give you the real impression of how wonderful all these things are, but I hope this first blog has given you some idea of the amazing things I am seeing and doing here! So far I haven't been offered any camels but I have been told that I have magical eyes and look like an Egyptian...