Walk like an Egyptian!

From temples to mosques, pad thai to falafels, jungle to desert, tuktuk to camel (?!) and hot to... still so freakin HOT!

Landing in Egypt, we had our preconceived ideas of what to expect.  We imagined Cairo to be a fairly modernized big city, similar to how in Thailand, Bangkok is a whole lot less Asian than the rest of the country. We’d seen the sand dunes of Oregon and the desert in Phoenix, surely this would be somewhat similar! Needless to say we were astounded with Egypt and how different it was from our original picture of it. Luckily our culture shock was eased by the fact that my parents shouted us two nights at the Cairo Marriott as a birthday present! We got to live in the lap of luxury, gazing out from our 19^th floor balcony looking out over the Nile and Cairo city.  We could even see the tip of the Giza pyramids from here. With an early check-in (7am!) and a late check-out, we squeezed 3 full days in at the pool and fitness centre and our swanky room – a great way to get over jet lag and chill after some hardcore sightseeing in Cairo! Thanks mom and dad!

Not bad... :)

Living the high life, enjoying a glass of wine on our balcony in Cairo!

Speaking of sightseeing, Cairo has taken a major hit in the tourism department. Since the revolution, most travel advisories are saying to avoid travel through Cairo whenever possible. Luckily we didn’t have any problems or safety concerns at all while we were there (mind you we were staying at the Marriott), other than being told not to go near Tahrir Square because of protesters. When one thinks of Egypt, probably one of the first things associated with it is the Pyramids. As impressive as they were, they were basically a ghost town – maybe 15 tourists around the whole place! We couldn’t believe that such a hotspot tourist destination could be so dead! This was bittersweet for us – on the one hand we got some great pyramid pics with no one but us in the foreground; on the other hand, the ratio of tourists to guys trying to coax you into buying a camel ride is about 1 to 30.  It was really frustrating not being able to walk two steps without having to turn down a camel, a horse, an Egyptian Cadillac (horse and carriage), photos, guides, you name it.  Everything in Egypt has a price and will doubtless lead to someone asking you for “baksheesh” (money). Even if someone comes up to you, asks if you’d like them to take your picture and you say “Yes, thank-you but I am not going to pay you money ok?”,they will swear up and down that you’re a friend and they would never even think of asking you for money…. And then they will ask you for money. Always. So in the end we ended up just getting a damn camel ride – I mean, can there be a more quintessential Egypt experience? Let me just say that those things feel nothing like riding a horse. They have a lot more sway, and getting up and getting down is a roller coaster ride! It was a fun experience and our guide was really good and friendly and gave us some good tips for sightseeing that day. To be fair he did earn that extra 20 Egyptian pounds that he took because he ‘didn’t have enough change’. Like I said, always. Anyway, the rest of our time in Cairo involved seeing a few churches and Old Cairo city, navigating through the insanely busy metro to experience local forms of transportation (and avoid getting ripped off on taxi fares), attempting to make it through an old market without actually having to buy anything, and drinking the best orange juice I’ve probably ever had, for just 20 cents, with a bunch of locals at a stand on the side of the street! We had a great time navigating Cairo amongst the friendly locals and then being able to kick back at the pool in the hotel to relax after a long day!

Best OJ ever!

Egyptians pronounce this as the 'Sphinkus' - priceless! Body of a lion, head of a man, hair of a woman = awesome!

The traditional pic, what a great personal photographer!

For the next few days in Egypt we left the comforts of our new luxurious lifestyle and jumped on a night train to Aswan.  Getting off the train here was probably the most overwhelmed I have ever felt from culture shock.  Not only were we bleary-eyed from sleeping on the train and stepping into 45-degree heat that makes every mundane task just a little more difficult, but the city was experiencing a sand (dust?) storm for the first time in a couple of years. Everything was covered in a fine film of brown dust and people walking down the street would seem to disappear in the cloud. The air felt thick with dust and we had our big bags on and no map to have any idea where we were going.  Enter taxi drivers, hotel owners, camel riders, restaurant owners, preying upon the lost look on our faces, and trying to disguise the dollar-signs in their eyes with the façade of ‘trying to help’… like I said, so overwhelming and frustrating, especially when you’re on a budget and need to find somewhere decent to stay that also happens to be cheap and have air conditioning (that works). The good news is that that was our hardest day in Egypt!! 

Shisha!

Still, we had a great time trying to dance with some kids at a local fresh juice stand and yes, I tried shisha for the first time (and probably the last - as expected, I don't really 'get it').  Anyway, we spent the next day on a mission to Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel is one of the most incredibly intact temples we have seen.  What makes it even COOLER is the fact that they moved the entire thing 200m up a hill over a period of 4 years to avoid it being submerged when the Aswan dam was constructed! Egyptian logic required us to awake at 3am to make the 3 hour drive to the temple -mental! We had to also go in a government-controlled convoy, which was quite awesome I must admit. It was a long drive straight out into the middle of nowhere, but seeing that huge temple was totally worth it! Asides from Abu Simbel and the discovery of falafel sandwiches for only 1 EGP (delicious!!!), Aswan just really wasn't our flavour and we decided to move on. 

One of the towns we passed on the trains. Doesn't it look like an old photograph from back in the day?

The dust / sand storm and our first view of Aswan.

The incredible Abu Simbel, way out in the middle of the desert.  Pretty awesome :)

So damn big!!

On to Luxor, a much nicer city, home to Valley of the Kings, and the most tourists we saw in Egypt. Our favorite sight was not actually Valley of the Kings but rather Karnac, the largest temple complex ever built by man.  It seemed to be never-ending, with impressively huge sculptures, obelisks, sphinxes, and all of it amazingly well-preserved. In the heat I kept having to give pep-talks to myself, “you’re only here once, suck it up!”, “nowhere is hotter than Angkor Wat”, “don’t drink too much water or you’ll run out and you don’t want to have to pay five times the price of water back in the city, do you?”, “how the hell can anyone be wearing long sleeves in this weather”,.. At Luxor Valley of the Kings we were able to see three tombs, with colourful pictures and hieroglyphics lining the walls as you walk down into each one.  The colours are still so intact it makes me think they must've painted them, but I'm hopeful that it actually is legit.  In any case, we had another jam-packed day of sightseeing and finished just in time to jump on a 19-hour bus ride (actually maybe this was the worst part of Egypt) to Dahab, where we would go diving again, yeah! 

So damn big!

The impressive Karnac - I can't believe I never even knew this place existed!

Dahab was the highlight of Egypt for me (and I’m sure for Chris too, though he gets more excited about old ruins than I do)! The reason we extended our stay in Egypt from 5 to 11 days was because we had heard that the diving in the Red Sea is some of the best in the world.  Back in Thailand posts I described how awesome the feeling of diving is, and we loved it just as much in Dahab.  We spent two full days (3 dives per day) diving at sites near Dahab.  Not only are the fish life and corals beautiful and diverse, so are the dive sites diverse in their layout.  We did one dive where we got to go down inside an underwater canyon, swim through and pop out on the other side; we dove the Blue Hole, an 800m hole in the reef where in the middle of it you are surrounded by 360-degrees of corals and marine life; we entered on shore through a hole where you go through a small-ish tunnel and pop out at the coral wall, where you float along the reef wall being pulled by the current and if you look the opposite direction there is nothing but blue water that appears to be infinitely deep. We dove a shipwreck called Thistlegorm, a English world war II supply boat that was bombed by the Germans (and sunk) in 1941, which is now rated as one of the top wreck-dives in the world.  We got to tour around the outer decks and see the giant propeller, guns and tanks on the deck, and then we went inside to explore the three levels of the boat, where we saw trucks holding hundreds of motorcycles, piles of soldiers boots, spare airplane parts, and the captains quarters including kitchen and bathroom. To cap it all off our last dive was at Shark and Yolanda reef, our favorite dive to date.  We saw schools of absolutely massive fish (an arm’s length long and almost as wide), soft and hard corals, and Chris even saw a shark deep down below us (just a small reef shark or something). It just had everything and being a more shallow dive (18m) we had a longer time down below to explore and observe the interactions taking place on the reef.  To cap it all off, when our boat was leaving the last dive site, five or six dolphins swam up to the front and followed along with our boat for a good 10 minutes. Heaven!

Our dive guide and one of the crew members.  It totally sucks we can't take pictures underwater, but here we were on our way bay from a perfect day in and on the water!

One of the many deserted resorts around Dahab. The main area was populated though!

Camel in traffic!

Egypt wasn’t somewhere we had originally planned on traveling to, just an added bonus.  As a country it has so much to offer- city life of Cairo, historical sights and wonders of the world, and beach-side towns with endless snorkeling and diving opportunities. Coming from Thailand, Egypt is a Whole New World! Speaking of Aladdin songs, I’ve had many in my head since we’ve been here, specifically “Price Ali, mighty is he, Ali Ababwa…” -everyone here is named either Mohammed, Ahmed, Hassan, or Ali. Outside of the delta, Egypt is the most barren land we have ever seen.  The deserts we have seen before have at least some small trees, cacti, or brush.  Egypt has only rocks and dirt, as far as the eye can see.  The standard buildings all look the same: rectangular brick rooms stacked up like lego blocks except for everything is brown. We have never seen so many incomplete housing or building products. Sometimes we’d pass a place that looked completely deserted, a city where 75% of the buildings were empty or incomplete- these made conditions look that much more harsh and the land that much more barren. We were completely puzzled by this as even in Cairo there were hundreds of buildings that were vacant. We asked Oolesh, our dive guide, and he explained that it was because of Mubarek and the revolution.  The streets of the cities outside of Cairo were navigated by run-down donkeys with carts, camels and horses. While in Cairo both women and men could be found who dressed in Western style clothing, elsewhere the men wore full-length gallibayas (long shirts, down to the ground) and turban-style white headdresses, and the women showed only their face and sometimes only their eyes wearing their bur'as. A different world and as a female traveler, I was extremely grateful to have Chris by my side.  It is a great place for one’s confidence, as no matter how long a bus ride we’d been on or how much of a sweaty mess I was, Chris would still have someone telling him he was a lucky man (yay!) and he even got asked “How many camels?”.  Priceless!

Typical mode of transportation.  Can't help but feel bad for the donkey :(

It might be a surprise to some that we found Egyptians to be some of the friendliest people we have met on our travels so far.  Yes, in the touristy parts of town and top sightseeing destinations, you could feel the desperation for ‘bakshish’ and would constantly be fending off harassing vendors.  Still, we had some unforgettable encounters with people outside of these areas.  On the buses and trains people would go out of their way to try and speak English to us and make sure we were headed in the right direction.  We had a coffee shop owner teaching us phrases to say in Arabic that helped us to get by during our visit.  A man invited us into his shop for mint tea and we stayed and chatted for a good half hour (mostly he told us about his three different wives and their stamina in bed – very odd!), after which he gave us a free bag of ginger tea (‘Natural Viagra’ he said with a wink –ew!) and sent us on our way not asking for anything. All of the people running the hostel we stayed at in Dahab went above and beyond to make sure we had anything we needed. Even on our last bus ride, young Egyptian soldiers asked the bus to stop as we were passing the airport and saved us what could easily have been an hour-long taxi from town. 

These adorable kids were just fascinated by us! We hung out while we were waiting for our fresh-squeezed orange juice and danced to some traditional music.  One of those perfect spontaneous moments in life!

All in all, we learned so much in Egypt, and though it was overwhelming and we had some of the longest and worst bus rides we’ve had in the last five months, we saw some amazing things unlike anywhere else in the world. We hope that now that Morsi is president, changes will come for Egypt that allow the people to live more freely and the tourists to return to Cairo and the rest of the country.  The camels need the work!

We can't believe there are only two months left in our travels! We can't wait to discover the roads of Europe, and return to Western civilization!!! 

Missing everyone back home, hope the weather in Vancouver is improving! 

Lauren and Chris :)