Ever since I went to the King Tut exhibit in New York when I was still in school I have wanted to go to Egypt. I finally decided that the time had come when OAT (Overseas Adventure Travel) advertised a two-week trip, one week of which would be spent on a steamer on the Nile. How tough could it be?
After a total of 30 hours of flying and waiting in airports, I arrived in Cairo at midnight looking and feeling like a limp dishrag. OAT (bless them) had someone meeting my flight, picking up my luggage, pointing me to the shortest customs line, and putting me on the bus to the Semiramis Hotel downtown.
There I got the schedule for the next day—get on the bus at 8 a.m. (after breakfast) for a trip to the Grand Egyptian Museum. I collapsed without much unpacking and set my watch for a 7 a.m. wake up alarm. Magically, I slept through the night and woke up refreshed. Excellent breakfast too. Met some of my travel group and, especially, our guide Elia Takla. The Museum is fantastic. It is designed in three ribbons flowing up an unending staircase: Pharaohs, the Upper Crust, and Working people.
It was fantastically interesting, but pretty scary for me; I don’t do stairs without railings and there was nothing to hold on to but Pharaohs as you climbed, or even worse, came down. But I made it.
Not kidding about the stairs. All polished marble. View at top: Great Pyramid, Valley of the Kings
Lots of sphinxes in the museum, but this (in the Valley of the Kings) is the largest ever found.
There are many more wonderful days to talk about, but I have things to do and places to be. See Egypt if you have a chance. The History is unbelievable: they were writing things down 2700 years B.C. That’s 4800 years of written history and the documents (mostly stone) are finally being read. I
Going with OAT was definitely a wise decision I made. They had people who could unsnarl any knot and our guide (Aswan-born, also Canadian now) was a PhD in Egyptian history with an clear way of talking about what we were seeing. I got the idea that he could have talked about, for example, this sphinx for 10 hours without any repetition. Fortunately, he tailored his comments to what we were curious about and what we needed to know. Maybe I’ll write more about the boat Nefertiti section of the trip and the places we went on both sides of the Nile. Visits included going into the famous temple of Abu Simbel and the neighboring one Ramses II built for his wife, Neferteri. The visit I made to the Met in New York was part of a fundraising campaign to save these temples from the rising waters of Lake Nasser. I even saw the Aswan Dam that built the lake that caused the temples to need to be saved. All those things I read about when I was 15 or so have become real to me because I’ve seen the results of all the work. Take a trip on the Nile; you won’t regret it.
More photos here.