I am so happy to have gotten the chance to visit Egypt. It is just incredible the amount of history in one country. All of the things that I saw were about 4,000 years old. It is still hard to fathom that the structures I saw were built so many centuries ago and saw so many centuries pass and are still intact.
For Egypt, I participated in a four day SAS trip with about 154 other SASers. Talk about a lot of people. We had four buses taking us everywhere. All in all it was great. It made traveling so easy. We had four tour guides that traveled with us everywhere, even by plane and back. It got a little hectic at some points with so many people but for the most part it ran really smoothly. We had picked these trips after getting on the ship so my friends and I picked the same trip. We had not traveled all together since Japan and Thailand so it was a lot of fun.
Our first day we arrived in Alexandria, we walked straight onto busses and headed to Cairo. My first impressions of Egypt were wonderful. Alexandria is a well kept city right on the Mediterranean, very picturesque. We departed later than expected and didn’t get on the road till about 1130 (my usual lunch time.) We drove straight to our first tourist stop. But, before even arriving there we were able to see the pyramids while driving through the city of Cairo. I am sure you can imagine it was quite a sight to be driving through a modern city and see these gigantic pyramids emerging from behind.
Our first stop was Sakkara which is the sight of the very first pyramid ever constructed. Our guide guided us through our first tomb and then we were able to wander around the pyramid. This pyramid was called a step pyramid, built up by levels in a pyramid shape. Not as big or as astonishing as the Great Pyramids, but still really cool. My first glimpse at the awe of “how the heck is this pile of rocks still standing over 4,000 years later?”
By this time it was almost 5 pm and we were all dying from the fact that we had not eaten lunch yet. In Egypt, noontime is not the typical lunch time. So, we had lunch when it was dark outside, at the normal time I eat dinner. The only bad thing about traveling in a group this large was our meals. Usually on SAS trips they do a good job of taking students to great restaurants that exhibit the traditional food of the country. But with 154 students in tow the only place we ever had meals were at various hotels, buffet style. While they did serve some traditional dishes the food was always catered to European tourists, so it wasn’t until the last day or so when I was able to experience food on my own. (Maybe I should have stuck with hotel food - I am currently lying in bed with the chills due to falafel gone bad – maybe that was too much info.)
Anyway, that night we went to the English showing of the famed “sound and light show” at the pyramids. It was interesting, I guess, but while viewing I really wish I was able to have seen the pyramids in day light first. They show illuminated the various pyramids and Sphinx in different colors and included lasers and told the story of the pyramids. It was interesting, definitely, but was a bit Disneyland-ish for my first view of the ancient structures. After that our tour guides took us to the largest bazaar in Cairo which was cool. All the shops sold the same touristy stuff though; it wasn’t a bazaar that a local would visit. So, we spent time at a outdoor café that lined the bazaar and enjoyed coffee and some enjoyed hookah, or shisha. This is not like the hookah in the states, it is much stronger. You will see men and women enjoying hookah at all the bars or cafes in the evening. More interestingly, you can see small groups of men smoking hookah even before noon on the streets. They will sit with their friends or colleagues and have a cup of tea, chat, and smoke hookah no matter the time. I suppose it is just like taking a smoke break at work??
The next morning was an early one (but just wait, it gets worse.) We had to meet at the buses at 5 am if we chose to make sunrise at the pyramids. This was such a good decision. They took us to the Giza Plateau which is not close to the pyramids actually, but offers an uninhibited view of all three of the pyramids with the sun rising in view. The area doesn’t open for tourists until 8 am so we felt really privileged to get to see the pyramids at sunrise. It was really cold at first, surprising to me that I felt the coldest so far on this trip in Egypt of all places. The desert sunrises (and sunsets too) are wonderful. They are hazy and pink and orange in color. The sun rose right between the pyramids and after it came up we got to ride camels to one of the pyramids and back.
You have to drive to each of the pyramids because they are not as close together as they look. We visited each of them up close which was really cool. Just seeing these humongous slabs of stone weighing tons each really gets you thinking about how the heck some one was able to put them together and build them so high and so sturdy. Apparently, when originally built they were smooth, so not leveled at all, completely flat on each side and white. It just got me thinking how it would feel to be walking for thousands of miles through the uninhabited desert and then stumble upon this humongous structure resembling nothing you had ever seen before. We visited the middle sized pyramid and actually went inside of it. They have one entry way that tourists are allowed to enter and it takes you straight into the center of the pyramid. It was quite a hunched walk to get to the center (think CuChi Tunnels) but the center room was rather large. There were painted hieroglyphics on the wall and the only thing left inside was the empty sarcophagus. All of the things that were originally found inside the pyramids are housed in various museums, many in the Egyptian Museum we visited later that day. We then drove to visit the Sphinx which offers a full frontal view of all three of the pyramids. All in all, tops the coolest sights I have ever seen.
We then visited the outdoor museum at Memphis which includes many statues from the ancient Egyptian dynasties. For lunch, we boarded a boat along the Nile River. We ate lunch and were entertained by a belly dancer and whirling dervish performer. The belly dancer didn’t really know how to move her belly, but the whirling dervish knew how to whirl. That was quite an experience. We saw another perform at our hotel in Luxor. If you haven’t seen one before, it is pretty intriguing. They dance for 20 minutes in huge skirts and do not stop twirling. It makes you sick to your stomach to watch almost, but it was fun. The chance to cruise along the Nile was awesome. The Nile is nothing like I pictured because it is surrounded by city. Just from learning about ancient history, you think of the Nile River and you think of desert and the ancient Egyptians and Cleopatra. Today, as it runs through Africa’s second largest city, it is surrounded by tall buildings, hotels, freeways and multiple bridges. I did bear witness via airplane view to the fact that there is nothing in Egypt except in the areas that fall right along the Nile. Ninety-six percent of Egypt is uninhabited desert, if you can believe that.
That afternoon we saw the Citadel, which is a very large and beautiful mosque dedicated to Egypt’s Mohamed Ali in the 19th century. It overlooks the city and offers beautiful birds-eye views of Cairo from above, if you can see it through the smog. Our last stop of the day was the Egyptian Museum which was built in 1901, making the actual museum an artifact in itself. The Museum is filled with statues, coffins, sarcophagus’s, and goods found in tombs than have been discovered and emptied over the years. It is unreal the amount of remnants there are from a four thousand year old society, even though these things are but a fraction of the actual goods in use at the time. Around all of the artifacts they have pictures of what some of the tombs looked like when they opened them for the first time. It is so interesting that the people really believed that by leaving things like jewels, weapons, or a bed in the same room as a dead human, the deceased could use them in the afterlife. A popular exhibit was King Tut’s coffin and jewelry.
That night called for an unusually early bed time due to our unusually early wake up call. I woke up at 2 a.m. the next morning and we caught a 5 a.m. flight to Luxor. Our first stop in Luxor was the Valley of the Kings. This is literally a valley in the middle of a small mountain range in the desert where pharaohs’ tombs are located. We got to walk inside of these tombs which are built right into the mountainside. The walkways to the sarcophaguses are long and are covered in floor to ceiling hieroglyphics. They are mainly tombs of Ramses, followed by subsequent number. Surprisingly, King Tut’s (short for Tutankhamen) tomb was the smallest and least embellished. King Tut is such a popular symbol of Ancient Egypt nowadays, but he was actually pretty insignificant and only reigned for six years and died at 19. Because he was so insignificant, his tomb was never looted as many of them were over the years. In more recent years, when his tomb was found it had most artifacts inside and his face covered in a golden mask (he was then tagged “Egypt’s Golden Boy.”) It was really interesting to learn the real stories behind such symbols of Ancient Egypt.
Growing tired, we visited the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, which was really cool because it was carved into this huge mountainside, had lunch as then rest time! It really got tiring being outside because this day was in particularly hot. For the most part the weather was hot, but dry. After the humidity of S.E. Asia, dry heat did not seem bad at all. After it cooled down, we visited the Luxor Temple which is a huge temple illuminated by lights in the evenings. The visits to these ancient Egyptian temples were a bit of a change from the sort of temples I have visited in S.E. Asia. They actually today don’t look like more than piles of rocks and columns. There are no roofs left on the buildings anymore, but the fact that the walls, columns, and statues are still standing is a testament to the intelligence of the Ancient Egyptians. The next morning we visited Karnack Temple, which was a larger version of the Luxor Temple. Walking through standing remnants of the compounds of these once holy structures really didn’t get old. There is so much more there than just rocks and stone. If you really think about how and when these structures were built and what they have meant to the original generation and subsequent generations in the past 4,000 years it is just mind boggling. Learning about the processes that the Egyptians used to mine these gigantic solid pieces of stone and how they maneuvered them all over the country using the Nile is fascinating. Not to mention, how they carved them and placed them where they needed to be. These temples are hundreds of feet tall. But, then again, I guess that is nothing compared to the pyramids.
That afternoon/evening we traveled back to Alexandria and said goodbye to our tour guides and hello to the ship. That night and the next day was my first experience with falafel and I am now obsessed. They did make me sick, but I won’t hold grudges. The last day, I visited the famous Bibliotech Alexandria, which is a very modern library in Alexandria on the site of the proposed oldest library in the world. We also enjoyed exploring a bit of the picturesque seaside city.
I would say, “Next, I am off to Turkey,” but I have already actually been and gone. I have become a blog slacker! Istanbul was amazing and I will write all about it ASAP. I will be back on U.S. soil in 3 weeks. Quite the mixed emotions now: excited cause I haven’t been home in 2 ½ months, but cannot believe I have to stop living these incredible experiences. As much as I miss home, I never want to stop traveling. Who is up for just heading over here and doing it with me? I wish!
