Thinking Back on "Ancient Egypt"

"Interesting and Informative" pretty much covers Lee and Heidi's instant response to our fifteen days spent exploring Ancient Egypt when asked our reaction by friends and others. Our Overseas Adventure Travel tour was very well structured, nicely paced and brought together a very companionable group of travelers we very much enjoyed being with throughout the trip. Our guide, Ibrahim Taha, proved an inexhaustable source of information and used each site we visited to provide yet another link in a chain of knowledge that allowed us to acquire a wonderfully broad and nuanced understanding of just what "Ancient Egypt" was all about, what it represents -- historically, culturally and religiously -- in the long pageant of world history.

While Lee's approach as a Trip Leader for the Smithsonian in Japan usually focused on providing sufficient background information to tour participants BEFORE we disembarked to explore a particular site (thus allowing folks to wander on their own, exploring their own particular interests), Ibrahim instead kept us together, paused the group in front of an object or a bas relief or a temple facade, then used it to point out details and interpretations of what it was we were looking at so as to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the larger site.

This approach proved essential to our growing appreciation of Ancient Egypt since none of us carried around a visual image bank filled with all the variety of gods or architectural motifs or decorative designs needed to grasp what it was our guide was explaining. We usually had enough free time afterward to explore on our own anyway, but Ibrahim's selective approach to whatever or wherever we were always helped keep us focused on the important aspects of the place we were currently visiting while also threading it into a larger tapestry enlarging our understanding of the culture we were exploring as a whole.

Putting together our exploration of Ancient Egypt with the contemporary culture in evidence everywhere around us was accomplished to a certain degree through three home visits and an afternoon round table discussion with Ibrahim but still left us a bit frustrated. We often seemed to be subject to the "party line" ("Egypt is safe" -- not the terrorist bastion we might have feared; "Everyone - Muslims, Christians, Jews -- gets along just fine;" "No one imposes restrictions on women; it's purely a matter of personal choice"). Some inquiries about aspects of contemporary life were essentially brushed off with minimal comment. There's so much more we'd like to have learned.

We still experienced modern life sufficiently to gain a feel for contemporary Egyptian society and culture. Traffic in Cairo, particularly, often gave us the opportunity to observe life along the road and, again, our home visits always added specific detail.

Clearly tourism is an economic mainstay, but neither of us would say that it was all that welcomed an intrusion, however necessary. After all few tourists were there to learn about modern Egypt, and the "Ancient Egypt" many came to see was of little interest to today's Egyptians. Those is contact with foreign travelers were inevitably gracious and courteous but not particularly warm and welcoming. Not that all tourists were worth the effort -- we saw enough evidence of disinterest and cultural disrespect to warrant the disdain lurking just below the surface among some of our Egyptian hosts! Europeans, especially, seem to have come to see Egypt the way Americans often view Mexico, as a vacation escape destination, not as a distinct modern culture worth getting to know.

Trip highlights: for Lee, the Temple at Kom Ombo visited while on our Nile cruise; for Heidi, our visit to the Nubian Village family in Aswan. We both liked the camel ride through the Sahara and the Aswan market stroll. Aswan was a favorite stop. And we enjoyed our time in Cairo, too, on many different levels -- just riding around town was great fun!

Looking back to the blog entry on our anticipations, Lee would have to say he found Egypt less trash strewn than he thought it might be; the touts, less problematic (but still a major distancing factor preventing us from fully interacting with or enjoying our surroundings). The abysmal povery of India wasn't present either, replaced to some degree by the disconcerting drab and dull appearance of Egyptian women, particularly older married women. Egyptians in general struck us as a bit angry with their collective lot, discontent but without evident hope for the future motivating their behavior or outlook on the world. The food was good but little distinguished it from "Middle Eastern" cuisine in general (except for the cool hybiscus tea -- absolutely delicious!).

So, there you have it. Some preliminary observations drawn from our current thinking about our Egyptian travel experience. The last entry should direct interested readers to a set of images drawn from the more than six hundred photographs we amassed while there -- look for it soon ...

Spiritual Cairo

Our last full day in Egypt the "Greenies" (as our guide referred to our subgroup - the color of our Overseas Adventure Travel bus placard - the other group had an orange sign in their bus window) we spent exploring a set of representative religious worship sites mostly located in Old Cairo - two Coptic Christian Churches, a Jewish Synagoge and a Muslim Mosque.

One Coptic "hanging church," also known as the Church of the Virgin Mary, was built atop the ruins of a Roman guard tower; the second (the Church of St. Sergius) honored one of the places where Joseph and Mary tarried after fleeing to Egypt with the Baby Jesus. Both churches were beautiful,, filled with colorful icons and carved wooden screens and chapel altars.

The Jewish Ben Ezra Synagogue was itself once a Coptic church (dating back to the ninth century) but had been sold centuries ago to the Jewish community; today, however, although there are eleven synagogues in Cairo, there are only about two hundred Jewish families, so services are seldom conducted. Instead the sites are maintained by the Bureau of Antiquities (due to their age and cultural significance to Egyptian history as representative of the first Christian communities outside the Holy Land and the long-standing interaction with Jewish life and history).

After lunch in the heart of the French-inspired "downtown" area at Falfela, we drove up to the Citadel, the highest point in the city, to visit Sultan Hassan Mosque, to listen to a lecture on Islam's basic principles and beliefs and to get a view out over the (very smoggy) cityscape below.

Then, late in the afternoon, it was off to the Khan al Khalili market, the largest in the city -- and a mighty disappointment. The once local spice market that grew into Cairo's most important commercial center, al Khalili now appears to function primarily as a tourist trap filled with "Made in China" Egyptian souvenirs endlessly and persistently hawked by very aggressive touts. We were exhausted after just fifteen minutes of battling them off in the souk's narrow alleys before we retreated to the relative calm of a street-side cafe for a bit of cool and sweet hibiscus tea.

Over the course of the day we saw lots more of the city in general as well.

Our Farewell Dinner followed at the Blue Nile where we ate Chinese while gazing out at the huge luxury hotels lining the Nile riverbank and nicely lit by the evening's brightly shining full moon - a nice ending, indeed, to a most interesting and informative day.

Now it's time to sit back and evaluate the whole experience! Look for those comments once Heidi and Lee recover from our homeward flights, first non-stop from Cairo to New York City on Tuesday and then on to Cleveland Wednesday afternoon.

"See the Pyramids Along the Nile..."

For those of us of a certain vintage, that phrase "See the pyramids ..." brings to mind a certain song title ("You Belong to Me"), a romantic ballad, probably from the late nineteen-fifties. Well, today that's exactly what we did! When we put to our tour group the question of what the SECOND line of that set of song lyrics was, however, no one had a clue. So I guess whatever else we should go see on our international travels, we won't be inspired by any other suggestion from this particular song...

At any rate, we were up and out of our hotel by eight this morning but got caught up immediately in Sunday morning traffic. The Egyptian weekend runs Friday through Saturday, so Sunday begins the work week. Plus this particular Sunday, many private schools began the new school year, and parents were accompanying their offspring to school just like at home. That made for some especially crowded streets!

However, the slowed traffic provided a great opportunity to observe numerous aspects of daily life: fashion-conscious teenage girls in head scarves and VERY tight jeans; school kids wearing brand new backpacks; career women driving spiffy foreign automobiles (not the banged up jobs of their male counterparts); a lone garbage collector valiantly attempting to gather up a mountain of trash from overflowing street-side dumpsters.

We realized as well that there were neither stoplights nor crosswalks anywhere along the divided boulevard we were traversing. Everyone entering from a side street had to turn right, then watch for a break in the median strip to make a U-turn if headed in the opposite direction! Pedestrians just wandered out into the traffic whenever and wherever they needed to cross the street! Yet there was no evidence of "road rage" anywhere around us as our twenty minutes journey essentially doubled because of the traffic crunch - amazing!

When we first caught a glimpse of the pyramids from our minibus, a collective gasp went up -- we even applauded! Here, at last, we were actually seeing the sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. We made three stops on the Giza Plateau to gape at the awesome sights before us. Some clambered into the second pyramid; others posed for photographs on camel-back with the pyramids in the background. Lee took thirty-five pictures! Interestingly, it wasn't until our third stop where we were first able to see the Sphinx that the power of the place truly sunk in...

We also visited a museum housing (on the very site where it was discovered) the "solar boat" that transported the body of the second pharaoh buried here to his tomb. Discovered completely disassembled (over 2200 pieces) in 1954 in thirteen layers piled into a stone lined chamber at the base of the second pyramid, the boat has been put back together and is now beautifully displayed. Seeing it proved one of the day's true highlights for Lee.

Following an absolutely delicious barbecued chicken lunch served in a delightful shaded outdoor garden, we headed off to Saqqara to explore the beautifully preserved mastaba ("noble tomb") of Ptah-Hotep and the Step Pyramid, predecessor to the great pyramids of Giza.


On the distant horizon, we could also make out the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid, other progenitors of the "mature" pyramid style preserved closer to Cairo.

The drive our and back allowed us the added opportunity to see more of rural Egypt as well.
On our return trip to Cairo, we stopped briefly at a rug weaving school to marvel at youngsters whose dexterity allowed them to tie five knots a second on the rug looms they tended to in such a focused and disciplined manner.

Exhausted by then, we returned to our hotel -- but many of us rallied in time to make it to a sound-and-light show back at the pyramids this evening. The best part of that experience was being able to just sit and look at these marvelous wonders (the "real thing," not some cardboard mock-up) under the light of a full moon without vendors or camel drivers or the tourist crowd hassling us - truly a time to remember!

Back to the Big City

We flew from Aswan to Cairo this morning on EgyptAir, then drove for about an hour across the city to the Giza area on the West Bank of the Nile River. Even though we were here only a brief time earlier, our arrival was like returning to familiar surroundings. Cairo, as a result of our earlier visit, had become "recognizable."

Our accommodations for the last three nights of our tour are at the Amarante Pyramid Hotel, once the palatial home of a famous Egyptian movie idol from the 1920s. The hotel is located between the two major roads leading out to the pyramids, both streets lined with lively retail establishments, apartment houses, coffee houses and restaurants, Unfortunately each store is seeming responsible only for the public sidewalk right in front of the shop itself. Neither do there appear to be any general standards enforced regarding how that area should be maintained, Consequently pedestrians -- who often are forced out directly into the busy stream of traffic crowding the street from curb to curb -- need to pick their ways very carefully as they move along the edge of the roadway.

Heidi and Lee went out for a walk this afternoon into the midst of all this chaos but came back earlier than expected because of the difficulties associated with just walking from place to place through all the dust and the noise and the uneven (and sometimes treacherous) terrain.

Back at the hotel we shared a pizza for a late lunch, then decided to go swimming -- only to realize that the drop in temperature by some twenty degrees between Aswan and Cairo made the pool water feel awfully cold with the temperature of the air "only" in the high eighties!

This evening we all went to a home-hosted dinner provided by a divorced woman with two sons who lives in the same apartment house (one designed and built by her architect father) with her parents, a brother and an uncle (together with their respective families). Gharda works with the Swiss Movenpick hotel chain in a managerial position and, besides serving us a delicious buffet dinner, freely and candidly answered all our questions about her life, her family and her views on a host of other subjects. It was an enlightening evening, one of those special touches Overseas Adventure Travel does so very well.

Since, aside from the evening's dinner, this was pretty much a "down day" for us, Lee has raided Heidi's camera for her best images, presented here as a kind of highlight reel of our experiences thus far from her point of view. See how many of the scenes you can identify on the basis of what the blog entries have told you so far ...

What a Day!

"So, how'd your day go?"

"Well, let's see. From in front of the ruins of St. Simeon Coptic Christian Monastery high on the West Bank across from Aswan this morning, we remounted our trusty camels to ride out as a caravan into the Sahara Desert over the sand dunes to a Nubian village on the banks of the Nile River here on the outskirts of Aswan, Egypt..."

Now THAT's a response you're not likely to hear every day of the week, perhaps never more than once in a lifetime, in fact; but that's how we spent the morning today. Who'd have believed it?

Then, later in the day, after a trip buy motor launch to lunch on a private island in the middle of the Nile and an afternoon spent napping and lounging by the pool, we attended a sound-and-light show at the Temple of Philae and dined at Makka, a really fine Egyptian restaurant in downtown Aswan.

So how's your day been?

Reassessing Presumptions

Preparing for our trip to Egypt, Heidi and Lee began checking the weather daily a couple of weeks before we left. Luxor was always warmer than Cairo; Aswan was warmest of all. (Of course, the sun was ALWAYS shining!)

Furthermore, Aswan stood on the map very close to the southern Egyptian border with Sudan. It was as far south as one could sail on the Nile River. Not surprisingly, then, we assumed Aswan would be a real desert outpost, a backwater oasis on the edge of nowhere in particular, a dusty little town with little to recommend it.

As we drifted "upriver" on the Nile, these initial assumptions seemed to be correct: Luxor was much smaller and more provincial than Cairo; Edfu, smaller still; and Kom Ombu, smallest of all.

Imagine our surprise when we found ourselves in a thriving, prosperous, quite modern city of half a million people!

Our hotel is marvelously situated on a hillside overlooking the city center and the Nile with its lovely long riverside promenade. Today we had lunch at the Aswan Moon, a open-air, floating restaurant on the river right downtown cooled by a nice breeze and overlooking a falucca-filled section of the riverfront.
We also drove out to visit the Aswan High Dam constructed in the 1960s with Soviet aid this morning.
We were then were ferried over to a small island housing the rescued Temple of Philae rescued (together with more than twenty other ancient archeological treasures) from Lake Nasser's rising waters.

And everywhere we have gone, we have encountered open, friendly and welcoming local residents, Even the ubiquitious vendors seem a little less annoying.

Many of them are Nubian, original inhabitants of much of the land now submerged by the waters behind the High Dam. Early this evening we learned a bit more about their history and culture at the Nubian Museum across from the hotel.

Of all the places we've been here in Egypt, Lee thinks he wouldn't mind returning here someday -- just to relax in the desert sun!

Ir doesn't hurt at all that the city is also home to some of the world's best perfumes and the very best Egyptian cotton ...