33. Ancient Egypt and natural wonders

Cairo

And so it was we used the travel agency services of Flex our “agent”, thus we knew exactly how to behave in Cairo and what to expect. By the miracle of baksheesh they got us onto the 1pm bus even though it was already leaving when we got to the bus station and we still needed to buy tickets.

It was while on the bus that I saw my third incident of violence in 24 hours out of the window. This one involved the police hitting a man again and again in the face. He then got pushed over and kicked before he picked himself up and limped away. We have never seen such blatant violence anywhere else and we were to see more.

On the four hour bus ride was we fell into conversation with a young man called Amir who turned out to be Egypt’s tennis star. He was very well travelled having played tournaments in US and Europe. He also had an American Muslim girlfriend. He was on his way to Cairo to sort out his National Service Exemption papers. He invited us to stay with him but when we declined he said he would like to show us the best part of Cairo so we arranged to meet that evening. He was extremely generous - we could not pay for anything - and because of him we saw the historic Islamic area full of amazing mosques and bazaars.

Cairo is a huge polluted and dusty city - full of cars (5 million), people (20 million) and tourists. Taxi rides are scary and fast in battered cars but the sights are incredible. It feels like a cross between Delhi and Shanghai. But the sights you see are many and all amazing and cannot be compared with anything we have seen before.

The Pyramids at last

We were up early and after a Egyptian breakfast took a taxi to the pyramid site ticket office just 10 minutes drive from our hotel in the Giza area of Cairo. The pyramids are basically in the city and we could see the tops of them peeping above the city from the top of our hotel.

The houses immediately surrounding the pyramid area are made from mud brick, home to some very poor people. The roads are dirt and the transport is mainly donkey or horse and cart. The men wear loose cotton kaftans made from white or cream cotton often with a scarf twisted on their head. It truly feels like you have stepped into a history book. Of course it is hot and dusty. Desert surrounds the magnificent pyramids - people look like ants against them. We decided to take a pony and carriage rather than a camel to ride in style around the sight .

The pyramids were built over 4,500 years ago and are still complete except for pollution taking its toll in the past 25 years. Most modern buildings in Cairo will be gone in 45 years, never mind one thousand - it is mind boggling how long these structures have survived. At Giza there are nine of the 90 pyramids in Egypt plus the Sphinx and it believed that they were built not by slaves but farmers during the annual flood season as a work creation project by the Pharaoh’s. There are many theories about how they were built but an Egyptologist assured us that they used very long ramps of mud bricks and small stone to transport blocks up to the next layer and drop in the huge stone Sarcophaguses’ before completion.

We spent the afternoon wandering the Egyptian museum - an unbelievable collection of pyramid and tomb treasure but displayed in a big dusty clutter with few labels. Apparently a new museum is being built and we would love to return to see the pieces displayed better. Having said that it was well worth the visit - especially to see Tutankhamen’s death mask (solid gold) and the inner and middle sarcophagi (also solid gold) which were all exquisite.

Luxor
We took the night sleeper train to Luxor and arrived refreshed enough to tackle a few sights. As soon as we were out of our hotel after dropping off our bags we were accosted by a horse drawn carriage driver. After he offered us such a low price we could not resist we clambered up into Ali’s care.

Ali is 20 years old and has four sisters and a mother to support - he drives for ”the company” his father used to work for until he died of a heart attack last year. Ali has a fine head of hair which he gels into a very smart style. He strikes a handsome figure as he stands on the front of his carriage with reins in his hands as he looks behind before urging the horse across a road. Like all Egyptians he has bad teeth (though better than most) and lives and sleeps in his one item of clothing - the kaftan. Of course he ended up staying with us all day, taking us to Karnak (and I thought that Carnac was in France, B) and more. At one point Ali asked us “Is there a river Nile in England?” to which I replied that we had a river Thames but it does illustrate how important the Nile is to Egypt. Without the Nile Egypt would be desert, there would be no farm land and no Pharaohs.

Sadly the day ended with a bad feeling. As we approached the hotel Ali called to someone who came running up to help us off the carriage. We had the feeling that this unpleasant man was Ali’s pimp and he muscled in on the payment (£3UK) and tried to take Ali’s tip (£2 UK) while also trying to demand a beer from us (Ali was still drinking the one we had given him and he displayed this triumphantly - mistake). The next day Ali did not turn up as planned and his friend Ali 2 told us he was in hospital with a bad eye and stomach and we are concerned he got beaten up by this very aggressive man (though everyone says he was not).

Karnak
This is an enormous temple complex both in height and land area. Columns, statues and obelisks - many over 45 metres high - carved out of single blocks of stone tower over you while every surface is covered in painted carvings. The colours, where they have been protected, are brilliant and Mohamid our guide showed us how the colours were all natural by painting my hand with six he scrapped from the stone floor. One cannot explain the wonderment of standing in this near complete home of the Gods built on the banks of the Nile over 4,000 years ago.

The town president has decided that all the ancient monuments should be exposed including a 3km long road lined by Sphinx connecting Karnak with the Luxor temple. This road is amazing - especially the bits they are still exposing as this gives you more of a perspective on history. And we were on it in a vehicle that has been around since ancient times. Unfortunately (as with the Valley of the kings, Nobles and queens on the West Bank) as the sand covered the monuments villages were built over the years on top. These are now being knocked down as excavation work progresses and several communities have been relocated or made homeless depending on who you believe. Ali said some people are so upset that they have become ill. This is understandable as the villages are also ancient. However, when the work is complete Luxor (already well cleaned up with little litter, no stray dogs or cats and few touts, with a growing number of well renovated monuments) will be amazing.

Luxor Temple and museum

The next day we thought we would try to walk everywhere - no upsets this time we hoped! We got to Luxor Temple early and on foot but sadly not before we saw another fight developing between a carriage driver and a Felucca skipper over a customer. Business is hard and supply is over plentiful so everyone is fraught.

The temple is splendid - more colossal statues, columns and pylons (huge walls), beautiful
paintings and carvings. We wandered, paid the odd 10p (EP1) to be shown a special colour or carving and marvelled. As with Karnak flooding had been a worry for the ancients and mud brick walls had been built to surround both complexes from the Nile as it became higher than the surrounding land as centuries passed. In turn,as people forgot why the temples were built or the meaning was lost, these mud bricks were reclaimed for building houses. So silt and sand filled the temples and houses were built on top of that, the exposed stones of the temples became like rocks and they were used for knife sharpening, tying animals to and shelter for fires. Evidence of these can be seen half way up the columns and walls that have now been excavated.

As the day heated up (we are talking 35C in the shade) we made our way to the fantastic modern museum where some newly discovered cache of complete statues are displayed, along with two mummies retrieved from the USA, now lying in state.

We ended another full day sailing up the Nile on a Felucca - a sailing boat unchanged since the days of the Pharaohs - to watch the sunset. Unfortunately another unpleasant incident occurred on the water. Ali 2 (all men here have one of four names) - a 24 year old - skippers the boat with his 12 year old boat boy doing the running. The boat boy is tiny but is so tough as he has to do most of the pulling lifting and fending. The Feluccas are 20+ foot long, heavily built from steel and wood with a mast and long boom that stretches fore and aft of the mast carrying one large cotton sail. The sail is lashed to both the mast and boom and is controlled by sheets (ropes) at both end. The mechanical advantage is small so it is hard to tighten.

The boat boy had to pull and guide the boat (Endeavour) around all the other Feluccas then hold it head to wind while the sail was set, push us off into the current of the Nile and leap aboard. He then had to trim the sail, drop the keel (wt at least 25kg) and anything else that Ali2 wanted. He worked hard but soon Endeavour took off and was sailing very nicely upstream. I saw two girls in rowing boats and watched them as they strained to catch us up. They were aged about 10 and 12 dressed in old clothes and it soon turned out that their father had sent them out to us to ask for money, which they did very loudly and incessantly. We told Ali2 that we would not give them money and thought it bad that their father had sent them out to us. Things suddenly got very complicated. Boatboy jumped into one of the rowing boats and grabbed the girl. She had a stick to defend herself but of course boatboy was stronger and grabbed it and went to hit her. I screamed at him to stop and shouted at Ali2 to stop the boy. Father also was shouting from the shore. Bear in mind that the current is about 3 - 5 knots and the row boats and us were very rapidly parting company. The girls started to row to the shore carrying the boy away from us and towards the angry father. We tacked round and Ali yelled at the girl to bring the boy back - which she did as boatboy still had the stick. We left the girls crying and the boy went to sulk after Ali2 shouted at him. Andy and I were very upset - especially by the sight of the boy standing over the girl with the stick over his head about to hit her very hard.

It took us all about 10 minutes to settle back into our cruise and watch the sunset.

We returned to Luxor temple to see it lit up in the dark accentuating the carvings before going for a small meal in a fabulous restaurant and then bed.

Footnote - People management methods have not changed since the Pharaohs in Egypt. A big stick and shouting is what the pharaohs did and this practice continues today so it is not surprising that we are seeing so much shouting and cowering and also goes some way towards explaining boat boys behaviour.

Valley of the Kings
Mohamid, our Egyptologist guide from Karnak, picked us up with his driver at 6.45 am. We were to cross the Nile to the West Bank. Most of the Pharaohs and many noblemen and artisans have their tombs here. In fact the whole of the desert bordering the Nile here is one big cemetery.
Originally people were just buried in the desert sand to be mummified - the hot sand drained the bodily fluids and left the skin, hair and nails intact. If a body resurfaced the Egyptian who discovered it would have a nasty shock! However nobles started to demand that their bodies were not lost in the desert but put in a tomb and this lead the Egyptians to experiment with the art of mummification.

What we were going to see were the dry tombs carved into the sandstone mountains at the edge of the desert into which the mummified bodies were placed. While the owner of the tomb was alive he used his workers to borrow hundreds of metres into the rock, creating corridors and chambers and then decorating the walls. To show how important the person was, scenes from his life were painted on the walls thus giving historians a vivid picture of life in Ancient Egypt. They also painted scenes to please the gods and frighten the evil spirits. As soon as the person died the money stopped so, often, the burial occurred before the painting was complete. On the other hand, if the noble or pharaoh lived a long life he would have many chambers and corridors. A recent find has miles of corridor and dozens of chambers. Treasure was rarely put in the tombs as the opening was obvious though some may have been in the huge, single stone carved Sarcophagus into which the body was placed as these were thought to be impossible to open.
Because the tombs have been protected from the sun the colours are still vivid to this day and took your breathe away. It is quite an experience to clamber down into a tomb and see it intact, how it was left 4,000 years ago.

Little has changed for the ordinary Egyptian in 4,000 years. Life is very tough for people at the bottom of the social scale. They get shouted at, occasionally beaten and paid very badly (a soldier is paid just EP100 per MONTH - this is £10 per month, well under the $2US per day which the WHO states is poverty line). The farmers still use buffalo to pull wooden ploughs and walk behind scattering seed. Many use donkey and cart as transport and the sailing feluccas still ply their wares on the river. The Nile continues to be essential to Egypt and its survival - its silt to fertilise the farm land, its water to provide drinking water and water for its crops. The Nile is currently at its highest but it is at least 5 metres lower now than even 30 years ago - it no longer floods and so the fertile silt needs to be dug out and spread by hand.

Diving and silver wedding anniversary
We are now chilling in Dahab on the Sinai peninsula. As planned on our 25th wedding anniversary we dived on the amazing and spectacular reefs here. We had a lovely and very special day (1st June) and Andy even managed to get a huge bunch of beautiful flowers delivered to our room. We spoke to Fay who arrived in Azores after 4 days of 40 - 50 knots of wind and speeds of 21 knots on Windrose while crossing the Atlantic back to Europe. Sadly we did not get to talk to Piers but had an email so know he is also fine.

What an amazing 25 years we have had.