March 14th and 15th – Siwa Oasis

The bus ride was borderline miserable. It was cramped, uncomfortable and worst of all freezing cold. We arrived around 6 am, it was all we could do to stumble to the nearest dive hotel and convince them to let us sleep. We found one quickly and passed out until mid day.

When we awoke we found a tiny little town. It is basically a Bedouin village with tourism flair. It isn’t, however, a huge tourist hub so it up to this point retains its small town charm. We found some breakfast before settling on renting bikes for the day to explore the spring, lakes and monuments surrounding the town.

We went by a couple old run down temples and what is supposed to be the former oracle of Alexander the great. We then came upon a spring (one of many in the area, but the largest and most accessible) that had been concreted on the sides and resembled and enormous well. There was also a nice little coffee shop there run by a friendly young British woman. We got changed and jumped in, spending some time enjoying the cool spring water. After we got out, we dawdled around the shop and were preparing to leave when I had a minor incident with the lady's dog resulting in a little blood and a big hole in my pants. She was super apologetic and we remained there for a while.

We then realized the time and that if we wanted to catch the best sunset in town over a large salt lake we would need to haul ass. We arrived just as the sun was setting, sweating and exhausted, but it was quite a view. After we made it back to the town, we had some dinner and then after consulting with family and other travelers in response to my dog bite made a trip out to the hospital. It was surprisingly smooth and I ended up with rabies and tetanus shots for nary a dime.

The next day we awoke and decided against the expensive jeep ride into the desert in favor of a full day donkey taxi driven by the amazing 15 year old driver Mohamed. He had so brilliantly negotiated us through our hospital experience the night before that we were sure he couldn't fail.

He continued to impress as we visited a hot spring, got our own desert donkey adventure spending time on the dunes and finished the afternoon by climbing the largest mountain around for an amazing sunset. From the top of the mountain you could truly appreciate the oasis. I could see in 360 degrees the desert all around surrounding the dense lush palm forest dotted with the town and a couple villages. This was functionally my final Egyptian activity and it couldn't have been more fitting.

I had booked the bus back to Alex for later that night because I had already booked my ticket for the wee hours of the morning on the 17th heading for India. When we returned to the village, I still had time to grab dinner with my friend before I had to go. It was a real treat because we remembered a tip we received the week before about a good steak hidden away in the village. It took us some time to find the hotel restaurant and a bit extra money, but for having my last beef before heading to beef-less India, it was beyond worth it.

March 12th and 13th – Alexandria

We arrived in Cairo in the morning and had to switch trains to head on to Alexandria.

We found a decidedly different kind of city. The more modern and European style city was a stark contrast to Cairo. We wandered toward the Mediterranean promenade and found a budget hotel (at this point myself and my Brazilian friend had left our 3rd friend who was headed in a different direction). There are no hostels in Alex as it lies off the traditional travel route. The city is along a huge bay and the seaside was beautifully impressive.

There is not much site seeing in Alex, but we made a late afternoon trip to the new Great Library. It is the attempt of the Egyptians to replace the ancient Great Library; the massive modern structure is a monolith of contrast along the seaside cityscape. I found the inside stunning in design, but seemingly short on books. Time will tell if the massive investment will pay off, it is certainly a boon for the University of Alexandria situated across the street.

The walk back from the Library along the seaside was great as the sun set. It also allowed for an observation, the city had a very different feel and culture, due to its tight history with Europe and also the University as a core of city culture. As we walked we saw many young Egyptian couples together walking and embracing each other, this was unprecedented for our trip. We spent the evening drinking tea and having sheesha along the seaside. We also booked a bus ticket to the Siwa Oasis for the following night.

We awoke refreshed and headed out to the fort that heads the Alex seaside near to the bay entrance. It was a busy seafront with many trinket vendors and tourists, but not foreign tourists, Egyptian. The foreigners in Alex were few and far between. It was great fun sitting by the water enjoying the view and talking with many Egyptians, local and tourists, without feeling like the sales pitch was coming at any moment.

We spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between having tea, ice cream and real food exploring the back alleys of the city. The bus left in the late evening from a bus station just outside of town.

March 9th, 10th and 11th – Luxor

We had a lazy morning and ate breakfast on the hostel's comfortable rooftop. We also did a load of critical laundry. By early in the afternoon we were ready to head to Karnak temple, meant to be the finest in the city.

Luxor is the modern site of the city of ancient Thebes. It's concentration of archaeological sites is unmatched in Egypt. It's levels of bus tourist also highest and thus the most hassle from vendors wanting an extra buck of any city we visited.

We arrived at the temple by way of public minibus and bought tickets. I convinced the guys to spring the extra bit for a guide and he was worth every penny. The nutty guide took us on a whirlwind hour tour where we got more info than perhaps the rest of our trip combined. It is quite an interesting temple, in that it had been used or lived in pretty much consistently for thousands of years. There was evidence of Egyptians, Greeks, early Christians and British exploitation. After the tour we walked around a bit more to take some photos and a closer look.

We wandered the city after and then returned to the hostel. Our evening activity just consisted of dinner and then off to a quiet bar for a beer and sheesha overlooking the Luxor temple near the center of town.

The next morning we went on an organized tour to the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Hatshepsut's temple and the colossi of Memnes. It was overall a good day and a whole lot of sites packed in. The guide, however, was more or less a useless mouthpiece spouting memorized information and thus provided little in the way of analytical information. It was also blazing hot at all of these locations.

The Valley of the Kings was certainly interesting and was more than well known to me before the trip. The site itself was not particularly beautiful, but the concentration and complexities of the underground tunnel network really amazing. We visited the interior of 3 tombs and it is pretty amazing how well preserved the color is on some of the wall hieroglyphs. As all of the things that glittered were either plundered or on display, the architecture and wall ornamentation were the highlights. We next visited the temple of Hatshepsut, the famous female pharaoh. It was grand in scale, though deteriorated. All the temples statues depicted her as a man as that is how she needed the people to view her in order to maintain her power. The valley of the queens followed and was basically an exact copy of the Valley of the Kings. Finally, the Colossi of Memnes were simply along the side of the road, very strange juxtaposition.

That evening we ate dinner with a group of travelers we met on the tour. It was a nice group of similar age and one of them would join for our trip the next day to Alexandria. After dinner we stumbled upon one of the most random, strange and interesting things we encountered. Just next to our hostel, we were invited to a wedding party in the alley. Think rehearsal dinner...Egyptian style. There was a band and I think the whole neighborhood would come by at some point. We stayed for just a couple hours, listened to the band and watched some of the men dance with a staff. The older men about were all having a great time drinking and smoking hashish. It was a brilliant sliver of real life in southern Egypt, but after a while, unsure of our place in the whole thing, we bowed out and left the partying to the Egyptians. We could hear the music from our room late into the night.

We spent the next day hanging out around the city, arranging that evenings train tickets and fussing around on the internet. We didn't accomplish much aside from eating and taking a few pictures. We boarded a nice train seat headed for Cairo and I was quickly out for the night.

March 5th, 6th , 7th and 8th – South to Upper Egypt, Aswan

Most of you may know that the 15 hour bus we took heading south was actually taking us deep into Upper Egypt as the Nile flows north out of the south. We arrived beleaguered in the morning. After resting up a bit at the hotel, we set out to explore Aswan and get some prices for the activities we knew were musts.

The bank of the Nile in Aswan is really beautiful; it is really what you would imagine in your head having never set foot in Egypt. We would experience that serenity first hand in a couple of days when we took our Nile cruise. The city itself is designed for tourists and is a big hassle, the market street is long and intensive and all the shop owners are convinced you want to buy their crap. We met some people, had some tea and scouted the scene. We decided that we would go the following day on a long day tour to what was meant to be one of the finest temples in all of Egypt. The trip left at 3:30AM so we had only dinner and a drink before getting to sleep.

3 AM obviously came round real early and the cramped mini-bus seats didn't help the situation, but Ramses II's magnificent temple at Abu Simbel 280km's further south along the Nile didn't disappoint and was probably the finest I’d see the whole trip. He built one for himself (including 4 massive statues of himself as a facade) and one for his wife to keep her happy. One fun fact about this place is that in the 60's when they built the major damn in the region they had to move the temple complex up the river bank at a cost of 40 million USD.

From there we began the long ride back and we would visit a couple other places closer to Aswan, the Philae Temple and the Unfinished Obelisk (was supposed to be the largest ever, but cracked before transport). The Philae temple was spectacularly set on its own island and is quite important to the Egyptians.

We returned understandably exhausted from the day trip. We rested, booked our boat trip for the following day, had a relaxing dinner and slept.

We awoke the next morning and set off to collect supplies for our afternoon boat trip. We weren't sure what to expect, but we collected a bag o beers and some snacks. The trip was on a small sailing vessel called a faluca. We would spend the afternoon sailing up the Nile and then park the boat after sunset and sleep on the deck.

We boarded the boat in the early afternoon and set sail around 2:30. It turned out to be the 3 of us and four French Canadians, an older couple, a mother and child, so it wouldn't be a party atmosphere. However, the trip was really relaxing; I sat on the bow in the sun and sipping cold beer as the banks of the Nile slipped by. The sunset was equally as peaceful. We ate aboard and chatted amongst each other. I was the only one brave enough to take a swim with the boat crew; apparently there is some risk of a crazy parasite that destroys your liver. I later did the research and it appears where I swam is relatively clean and unlikely to have ill effects, I simply felt like I should take a swim in the Nile. After dark, we made on a bonfire on the beach and visited a “traditional Nubian home” in the form of a slightly overpriced tourist coffee shop. We slept aboard with the blankets over our heads to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The next morning we arose early to eat a hot breakfast aboard the boat before heading to a pre-arranged mini-bus that would shuttle us to a couple sites before dropping us off in Luxor. We visited first the Kom Ombo temple (dedicated to a bad ass crocodile god) and then the temple at Edfu. They were both excellent temples, but we had started to have a bit of temple fatigue, which is inevitable when visiting so many with limited Egyptology knowledge. It is, however, impossible not to continue to appreciate the massive ancient structures.

We arrived in Luxor at a very cheap and chilled out hostel that would be a very pleasant home base for the coming days in Luxor. We briefly explored the city and found some cheap food before heading back for the night.

Feb 1st – 4th - The center of the Arab world

In the morning I boarded the day bus for the long journey to Cairo. I'm usually not happy wasting a whole day on the bus, but I was ready to move on from Dahab, as it is best for just chilling out at a beach or cafe and I am not particularly good at sitting around doing nothing. The day came and went and the hours went by rather uneventfully. I alternated between reading and sleeping. There wasn't much to be eaten, so I had simple snacks and a mystery hot dog concoction at a road side stop.

By the time I finally arrived in Cairo the sun was setting. I had a hostel picked out from the guide book and was hoping it would work out. The cab dropped me out front and luckily for me, there was room and it seemed ok. The first person I talked to as I walked in to ensure the place was livable turned out to be a Brazilian guy with whom I would end up spending the next 10 days. I settled in and came back out to make small talk and find out where to eat. He mentioned that he and another traveler were going to try and go see a belly dancing show that evening if I was interested, “why not,” I said. I was also directed by some travelers to a restaurant that I would end up eating the majority of my meals in Cairo at, Felfela. It is dirt cheap and serves the Egyptian staple quick foods, Taamia (falafel) and koshary (pasta, rice and lentils with tomato sauce).

I met the guys back at the hostel around 10. I also met another group at the same time who was just arriving and with whom I’d end up visiting the pyramids the following day. The Brazilian, myself and the 3rd guy, an Aussie, who'd also end up traveling with us over the next week headed out in search of the belly dancing listed in the guide book. We would eventually find the place after much searching and find it to be tucked in a sketchy bar street. There was no body there and no belly dancing going on, but there were 2 fat Egyptian prostitutes there to greet us. We threw in the towel on the belly dancing, but I noticed the bar next door was equally sketchy, but at least was full of local people and had sheesha and beer. I convinced the guys that all would be well and we sat down to have a drink.

It was great people watching. Old Egyptian men and large bar women of very suspect repute smoking sheesha, laughing and occasionally breaking out in dance. We managed to avoid too much contact with the girls save for one that had a affinity for my beard and would periodically come yank on it and wink at me. After the beer, we decided to head off and wander back towards our hostel. It was a good taste of Cairo for the first evening.

The other group I had met the night before woke me up and I ended up going with them on an arranged tour of Giza, Sakkara and Memphis. The 4 of us headed out with a guide and a private van first towards the most famous of all Egyptian sites, the pyramids and sphinx of Giza.

The first thing that strikes you is that the Pyramids are practically in the city. Giza is simply a district/suburb of Cairo and as you drive down the highway, you can see the peaks of the pyramids jutting above the urban sprawl, hardly the view they show on the Discovery Channel. When we arrived at the entrance we bought our admission tickets as well as a ticket to go inside the second largest pyramid.

My initial impression was very mixed. First of all, it is not the ideal way to see such a historical landmark. The entire place is crawling with tour bus tourists and peddlers eager to take their money (this is the case with most famous sites in Egypt) and the site is full of cars, buses at parking lots directly next to them and there is quite a bit of litter all around. The pyramids themselves are certainly impressive, given that they are nearly 4000 years old, by far the oldest monuments I have ever seen. They are one of those things that you just always felt like you needed to see and actually living it brings some satisfaction. However, I will say that they weren't as massive as they were in my imagination. Certainly marvels of human progress and engineering, but standing beside them I found myself thinking that I am not sure exactly how, but it seems feasible that they could have been constructed by men alone with enough numbers. For me, the alien theories and all the rest went out the window immediately.

We first walked around the “Great Pyramid” and then to the “Second Pyramid” which looks just as big because it is on slightly higher ground and the peak still has some of the original limestone casing. This was the one we would go inside of. I had been warned in advance that there was little to see inside because all of the artifacts were at the museum, but I hadn't come all the way to Egypt not to go in a pyramid! It was true though, there is nothing there. It is just a shaft about 4 and a half ft tall that you must bend to walk through to get to the burial chamber where there is a replica sarcophagus. It is brutally hot and muggy inside. The hot desert air as we emerged felt like opening your refrigerator on a hot summer afternoon.

We then headed to the scenic viewpoint where you can get pictures of all 3 Giza pyramids lined up before going to the Sphinx. The Sphinx just is, chilling just like all the pictures you see with a pyramid back drop. Getting inside the temple and getting close to it was a challenge because the sheer volume of tourists all attempting to stay with their groups and all attempting to get inside. We made it and got some photos which was the end of our Giza tour.

From there we continued our tour to the Step Pyramid at Sakkara and finally the ancient capital of lower Egypt, Memphis which is basically an open air museum at the former city site. I was amazed throughout the day and would continue to be amazed over the coming weeks how it was possible to have such narrow lush dense green of farms and palms along the edge of the Nile with almost an actual line drawn in the sand where the desert begins. It is no wonder the entire ancient Egyptian civilization was based on and around it.

We returned to the hostel in the late afternoon and rested. In the evening, I went out with a bunch of people including my tour group, the guys I went out with the night before and a couple girls I had met previously in Israel and Jordan. We had dinner, drinks and sheesha at a nice open air street with many locals all around. It was nice to spend time out in the city with a nice group of people.

The next day, I would spend again with my Giza tour group, but this time we tackled the Egyptian Museum on our own. It is a massive two story structure, not as big as the Louvre or British Museum, but it really is only 1 genre! It is also not the most well marked place, with the amount of foreigners studying Egyptology, you would think they'd be able to find some interns to slave into writing up some context. We made due with our lonely planet walking tour and the magnificence of the artifacts largely speaks for themselves.

The highlights of the Museum included the artifacts removed from the Second Pyramid at Giza which we entered the day before(nice to put it in context), the royal mummy room which had lots of really old dead people in it (creepy, but interesting) and finally the treasures of King Tut's tomb. The wealth found inside is truly amazing and the elaborateness of the sarcophagus' layers mind blowing. The shimmering gold of the inner funerary mask (the one from all the pictures you've ever seen) is so much more vibrant and stunning in person.

6 hours of museum perusing later, I was dead dog tired. When we told people how long we spent and all we managed to see they were amazed. I went back to the hostel to eat and chill out. Later that evening I went with my 2 future travel buddies to buy the bus ticket for the following night and then followed some people out to an event that ended up not existing and then had a beer on the way back before getting some much needed sleep.

I would take the opportunity my final day in Cairo (our bus wasn't until 6PM) to see the rest of the tourist spots that I had neglected thus far. I headed for the Khan al Khalili. This is the famous bazaar in Islamic Cairo, it is also the location of the most beautiful mosques in all of Egypt. I got dropped off at the mosque across from the bazaar and took a look around inside before heading across the street to the more famous mosque and the bazaar. This was the site of the bombing just a week earlier. You couldn't tell at all aside from noticing a large police presence which if you didn't know wouldn't have seemed unusual.

After visiting the mosque, I headed into the market which is notorious for its persistent hassling shop owners. This is not my scene and before I knew it, there were no more tourists around and I was in an even larger market, except only for Egyptians. It reminded me of the market in Shanghai that is next to the main tourist site, but not at all for tourists. They were selling a range of wholesale daily use items. I walked further into the maze of alleys and found some of the most appetizing street food I’d seen in the middle east and had a nice lunch among cautious smiles and wondering stares.

I walked even farther and ended up in a real neighborhood. I walked and walked and didn't see a tourist for more than an hour. The people seemed perplexed by my presence, but offered smiles in return of my own. I emerged after a while onto a main road and continued my journey through a fresh market and then onto a sewing machine market and then onto a few more themed streets of shops, eventually I ended up in a street market selling shoes. I decided I has walked enough and jumped a cab (I had no idea where I was) back to the hostel I was truly glad that I had set out to see the touristy sites, but instead was able to get away from everything and get a feel for some real people of the city.

We were off to the bus station a short time after and headed to Egypt's most southerly major destination, Aswan.

February 28th – Mt. Sinai

The day trip for Mt. Sinai left around 8 o'clock in the morning and headed for the famed mountain about 2hours away from Dahab. We were going to visit the St. Katherine's Monastery before it closed at noon and then head up the mountain and hang around until sunset.

We arrived to find a tourist/pilgrim zoo. The standard nighttime sunrise trip ends at St. Katherine's after descent and there were people everywhere. The Monastery is pretty old and aesthetically pleasing, the original structure dating from around 600AD. The interior chapel, though small, glittered with gold in the Eastern Orthodox style. The main attractions, however, left me...skeptical. First the Moses’ well, which they vaguely attribute to the time of Moses and claim that he drew water from it and secondly the Burning Bush. Its true, it is in fact a bush, but I’d be real curious to carbon date it and I'm sure the monastery would never allow it. Never the less, I saw more than one dutiful pilgrim plucking its branches to take home as relics. The monastery is a small complex, and the stop only took about 30 mins.

We then headed up the mountain. The group was diverse and interesting and the simple banter through out the day was enjoyable. I had heard varying reports as to the difficulty of the climb. There are also 2 paths of which we chose the easier to accommodate a couple older members of our group. It turned out to be a pretty easy walk. I can see how in the cold of the night or the heat of a summer day it could be a bit rough, but it was not overly taxing.

The views were also worth the trip alone, regardless of your religious opinion of the location. After only just over 2 hours with frequent stops we arrived at the top, it was still early afternoon around 2 or 2:30PM.

There was an obstacle to our watching the sunset. It was COLD at the top and we had at least 3 hours to wait until the sun would fall. I started by befriending one of the price gauging merchants peddling tea, coffee and candy bars near to the summit. I could only imagine how cold it was waiting for the sunrise on the night trip and I heard rumors of the same merchants charging outrageous rental fees for blankets. I ended up smoking a sheesha with the store owner and hanging out a bit inside the shop. Eventually the rest of the group followed suit and came in for tea at a price I negotiated.

Half the group ended up bailing early and headed down the mountain, determining that sunset wasn't worth braving the cold for another couple of hours. I stayed at the top with the remaining group, all basically the younger men, intent out of stubbornness to see out the plan.

In the end it was actually worth it, not because the sunset was so spectacular, but because it ended up being only the half dozen or so of us at the top when the time came. We had our pictures and enjoyed the silence. We then booked it down the mountain trying to make it to the bottom before losing the last bit of sunlight as we had no flashlights. We made it nearly there before real darkness set and aside from the occasional trip, we made it down with no major incidents and in about 45 mins, which had to some kind of record.

We collected the remainder of the group from the comfort of the coffee shop below and jumped in the van back to Dahab. When we returned to Dahab around 9, I grabbed a quick bite to eat with one of the guys from the trip and then made my way back to the hostel for an early night. Next stop...Cairo.