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I’ve had a great time in Egypt but…

My god I can’t wait to come home!

See you all soon!

Abu Simbel

One of the optional excursions we’re going on is to visit Abu Simbel, it’s pretty close to the Sudanese border. It’s a couple hours ride from Aswan… the INSANE thing is that you have to go in a convoy, all the tour buses meet and have police escorts, one in the front, one in the middle and one on the back…. and then they spread police officers on the buses too!!

The place is going to be amazing but the ride might be a little stressful!

Pyramids and Egyptian Museum

Today was the first day with our tour group, we visited the Egyptian Museum early in the morning, there’s so much stuff there and it’s so packed with people that you don’t know where to look! One thing I found insane was that they had most things out in the open, you could touch them (you’re not allowed, but you could). Even things like wood sarcophogii, things that will get totally worn down by everyone pawing them!

We paid extra and checked out the mummy rooms, freaky stuff! It looks like skin on bones all the “meat” is gone!

We spent the rest of the day visiting the giza plateau where the pyramids and sphinx are. The locals hassle you so much and are extremely aggressive, really they’re hurting themselves, I’m at the point where they could be offering me a million dollars and I wouldn’t look at or acknowledge them. The craziest part is that even the tourist police are in on it, they touch you, try to put things in your hands, try to shake your hand, give you picture advice… all in all GET ALL UP IN YOUR GRILL.

The highight of the day was going inside a pyramid! It was extremely clausterphobic but totally worth it! You down diagonally down at like 45 degrees for 40 meters and then it opens into a few rooms. The air in there was pretty horrible, extremely stinky, humid and hot!

Not going to write much more because we’re about to head out on the bus. I doubt there will be any new posts for a couple days while we cruise the Nile!

Hope everyone is doing great!

Yesterday… a day packed with disappointment

We thought we’d start the day visiting Zamalek since it’s supposed to be very nice to walk around… not so much. All the embassies and expensive banks are on the island there but there are walls everywhere so it’s a pretty lame walk. We did however get to go up the Cairo tower, the highest structure in Cairo, it gave us a great view of the nile and the city (and smog!)

Next we thought we’d check out the zoo… that was a mistake, they didn’t even hide the fact that they rip tourists off, in English it had the prices for Egyptians and foreigners, foreigners pay about 10 times the price! We left the zoo pretty soon, kids were following us asking for money and it was a place filled with dispair.

That night we met the tour group, a bunch of Australians, a bunch of English people, a single New Zealander and a 2 Montrealers. We were informed that there’s no internet on the cruise boat (basically all the trip!). I’ve been keeping a journal so I’ll still post those days but it might be after I come back.

Instead of taking the train we will be bussing down to Aswan… 14 hours!!

Hiring a taxi personal taxi driver…

Today was our best day in Egypt yet!

We met with some of the other Canadians we originally met at Ahmed’s wedding for breakfast, they’re ending their trip today and offered to take our suits home! YESSSSS, I’m so glad I don’t have to carry that along for my tour, it literally took up about half of my bag!

The neighborhood surrounding their hostel is SOOOOO much nicer than the one surrounding our hotel. It’s basically a European neighborhood whereas our is… well it’s different! We ate at a really nice restaurant (where Jimmy Carter once ate!) that had a stained glass ceiling and aquariums all over the place. The columns for the tables came out of the floor but where of the same material, it looked really cool!

After we dropped the girls back at their hotel we caught a cab to go to the Giza pyramids. Along the way we mentioned that we wanted to ride a camel around the pyramid. The taxi driver was more than happy to take us to “his guy”, he even offered to wait while we were gone and too drive us to a restaurant overlooking the pyramids (waiting for us again) and then drive us home. The guide he took us too was actually very good, we went out on the camels (man are they weird looking animals!) and toured around the pyramids, we didn’t want to go in since we will be doing that with our tour in 2 days. We refused offers to be able to climb the pyramids (in the morning and for a massive bribe I’m assuming) and to enter a different area of the pyramids. We took some great pictures, lame poses and everything! The dessert is so peaceful… especially compared to Cairo! After our tour was done we got dropped off in a papyrus store and perfume store (of course!) The papyrus store was actually very neat because he showed us the process for making the paper. Once it came time to tip our guide we offered him 100 EP (the tour cost 400EP for both of us), we knew he wouldn’t accept that but we figured 150EP would be the end…. nope, he made us to 400EP, the price of the EFFing tour, so an 100% tip. Whatever we gave it to him, it basically made the camel ride cost 80$ in the end, not bad.

The restaurant our taxi driver took us to was fantastic, we had extremely fresh pita and dip, prawn, calamari (I really enjoyed it, normally I hate calamari!), rice and a fish. DELICIOUS.

Our cab driver took us home and chatted to us the whole time. We had agreed on 120EP for the whole trip earlier but we gave him 150EP since we really thought he did a fantastic job.

At the hotel we met some Canadians (Alberta and Thunder Bay) and chatted to them for a while. It was a great time, we tried to pass on all the things we learned over our first couple days in Cairo.

Tomorrow our tour starts! … at 7PM
We’re going to take a relaxing day, go check out the zoo here and walk around Zamalek which is where there are many embassies and mansions.

Alexandria!

So yesterday we had our day trip to Alexandria!

I was rocking 3 hours of sleep when we got up at 7 in order to make it downstairs in time for our 8 AM pick up…. Around 8:30 we had front desk call our tour company, the tour was delayed until a 10:30 pick up since Friday and Saturday are the “weekend” here and the library wouldn’t be open at the right time for us. We popped back upstairs and slept for an other hour and crawled back downstairs when it was time to leave. We ended up having the same TopDeck driver that drove us to the hotel from the airport, he’s a pretty cool dude!

The drive to Alexandria took about 3 hours, I slept for abut 2 hours and 45 min!

Once we met up with our tour guide he told us a bit about the history of Alexandria and how it was invaded by the Persians, then the Greek, then the Romans, then the Arabs, then the Turks, then the French, then the English. He showed us where the old light house was where there is now a castle built with some of the original stones from the light house. Apparently you can dive and see it! Same thing for Cleopatra and Marc Antony’s palace. 

Next we visited some catacombs. They were originally discovered when a man’s donkey fell down a deep hole! The inside has hierogliphics and sculptures that are a mix of both Roman and Egyptian mythologies, very rare. The catacombs are slowly being destroyed by the water table unfortunately so they’ll be gone in our lifetime the guide thinks. It was very interesting because the guide is an Egyptologist and has worked in the catacombs so he had all sorts of inside info!

Before visiting the new Alexandria library we stopped for follafle (I have no idea how to spell it), IT WAS DELICIOUS.

The new Alexandria library is beautiful, I strongly suggest you look it up online. The architect put a lot of thought into it! Something about is the sun rising from the primordial water and it’s shaped like a sun dial too.

We took our transport home in the dark, the Alexandria dessert road is very weird, there were speed bumps and u-turn jogs every 20 km or so!