السبت

For our last day, we elect to laze about in Rehab, visiting the souk and returning to the restaurant we first had dinner at for a final lunch. Excellent lentil soup.

Then we are off to the airport to start our long journey home. Cairo’s international terminal is chaos and insanity. The lady at the check-in counter for Emirates was talking on three cell phones while processing people in line. Dubai’s airport is way more hopping at 2AM than it was at 2PM so our two hour layover was just long enough to make our next gate. On the last leg of our journey, I said to the guy seated next to me, “when I woke up this morning it was 36 hours ago.” The standard intercontinental journey.

I’m glad we made this trip and that we did now while things are stable enough not to be too dangerous but also not terribly crowded with tourists. I’m also glad to be getting back to potable tap water.

الجمعة

The state department issued an email alert warning us to avoid Tahrir Square today and tomorrow. Good thing we hit the adjacent museum already. Instead, we are headed to Memphis and Saqqarah, but first a stop at the camel market. Our tour guide, Maget, admits that he hasn’t been here since 2009 and seems to be having a ball and taking lots of pictures himself.

That was so much fun! Sometimes they get a little excited and make a run for it so we have to keep an eye out and quickly duck out of the way. That aside, they are actually very sweet animals that don’t bite, spit, or kick. And they ride in trucks!

Not all of them make it to the market, so outside is a stretch of road with the remains of the unlucky. Though, as most of the camels purchased are intended to be slaughtered for food, lucky may not be the best descriptor for them.

Carolyn tells the driver to go to the nearby Dandy Mall for lunch, thus avoiding another potential bad, overpriced lunch in favor of the guaranteed blandness of Hardees. All malls, all over the world, are the same place.

Also, because Friday is part of the weekend, there is almost no traffic in Cairo. What little congestion we see is concentrated around gas stations as there is a gas shortage happening.

In Memphis, we visit an open air museum on the grounds of what used to be a temple. They have a building with a gigantic statue of Ramses II that I am not sure the photographs do justice.

On our way to our next location, the driver stops for some Egyptian peas and shares a few handfuls with us. They’re more like lima beans than peas. Either way, pretty good as an early afternoon snack.

Saqqarah centers around the great step pyramid – the first of the pyramids built. There are several other pyramids in the area as well.

The step pyramid is built inside a smaller Memphis made entirely out of limestone so that the King could take it with him. At the time, this was a new building material. Rather than rely on it, the locals shored up the structure with mud bricks just in case. The ruins of both Memphis actual and mini-Memphis are on the west bank of the Nile now. Before the massive civil engineering project that brought the river under control, though, one of the branches of the wider, wilder Nile ran between the two areas so it was still life on the east and death on the west.


On the way back, our driver takes advantage of having tourists along to cut in line at the gas station.

Dinner is at Lemongrass in the local Marriott. They have dim sum sans pork, which is an odd experience. Dessert was an amazing rose flavored flan at a Lebanese restaurant in the same hotel.

الخميس

We started less early this morning with a quiet drive crossing the Nile by bridge before picking up our tour guide on the west bank. Our first stop, Valley of the Kings, doesn’t allow photography. The tour guide tells us a bit of the history of the place and then sets us free to explore on our own. We only visit 3 tombs, in various states of decay as most are not open to the public. Bill seems to be bothered by the vultures hiding in them, but I’m enjoying looking at the differences between carved and painted figures. Our guide seems pleased that I am asking the correct questions – one of the tombs we visit is unfinished, but he left that out of the original talk.

Our next stop is the ever present tourist trap that exists on every tour in every country everywhere. This one is better than most (I am looking at you, giant grocery store in the middle of nowhere, China) in that there are actually some guys outside carving the types of things being sold inside. Bill had just said last night that he thought we should ask our tour guide if he knew a good place to buy alabaster, so I guess it will do. Not that what they are selling is actually made there, though it takes a few pointed questions to get a straight answer on that. Also, they served complimentary beverages. We picked up a few baubles we liked for probably more than we should have spent, but way less than they’d cost us state side. There seems to be some gift “custom” plied on tourists where they give you a gift and you elect to give them some amount of money. I totally stiffed the guy that handed me some stone charms and a rock sample while Bill was overly generous to the other guy for a couple of scarabs so we’ll just call that even.

Our next stop involves another lecture before being set free to wander on our own after a short ride (that is consistently referred to as “the Walt Disney”). We’re the first aboard, so obviously we’re the best target for a couple of kids selling resin cats and hideous beads. I respond to every polite question with “no” including “where are you from?” Bill is less firm and gets a lecture from one of the kids about how he’s poor and we’re rich and he can’t get a job or go to school so we have to give him money to keep his family from starving. When that doesn’t work, he heads out for easier targets. After snapping a few pictures and realizing that my camera battery is critically low on charge, we head back down. The same kid greets us again to discuss his dire circumstances and try to get us to buy stuff we don’t want. I told him the problem with his argument was that it assumed I have a heart. Bill asked him why he was wasting his time on us when we obviously weren’t going to give him anything and there were plenty of other people on the car he could be talking to instead. He stuck it out with us for the entire ride anyway and was pleasant conversation all the way back while trying every button to see which one might result in a little cash (did we have kids, if he was in America he would help our people, doesn’t he look like Obama, I am sure I’ve forgotten a few). I wished him the best of luck, but still didn’t give him anything besides the chance to practice his English.

The vultures on the west bank are not nearly as annoying. Some even take no for an answer in the Valley of Queens. We aren’t allowed to take cameras into here either, so I have no images to show why using archeological sites as munitions storage is a bad idea.

We had a late lunch that is actually quite good. Our tour guide joined us, so I figured it wasn’t going to be terrible or he’d have made himself scarce. We chatted about politics and religion in relaxed tones. He is a very likeable and knowledgeable young man whose services I highly recommend if you are going to be in the area. Let me know, I have his contact info.

Our last stop is the Colossi of Memnon and then it’s back to the hotel to pack and enjoy just a bit more luxury. Several more guests have arrived since we checked in two days ago. They may be up to 35 rooms at this point. It’s starting to feel crowded. We’re headed back to the airport.

الأربعاء

This morning we got up at 4:30 and stumbled down to the hotel lobby for our ride. While I wasn’t able to get Bill onto a camel in Giza, he was totally up for a hot air balloon ride, even though it involved two boats and great heights. Again, it is strange and kind of nice that nobody is here. Nice for us, that is, not for all the people working in the tourism industry in a tourist area with no tourists.

The ferry ride to the west bank included coffee and twinkies. We were seated with some other guests from our hotel and I got to chat with a man from Nottingham about Hong Kong. He lived there for a while about ten years ago. On the other side, we are divided up into different vans to go to the launch site. Bill and I somehow end up in a van with the film crew that videos the flight and tries to sell DVDs which interested us not at all. At the launch site, several balloons are getting underway.

We’re the last people to get into ours and then we are off. This is a new experience for both of us, and one I genuinely enjoyed. We got a wonderful view of the tombs and the west bank area.

We also got two flights as a group of tourists arrived late by train (George told us the sleeper train had gotten less reliable) and our balloon landed out on a flat, sandy area near a road to pick them up. It was so fast they didn’t take the time to drag out the steps. As the British lady next to me said, “they’re just chucking ‘em in!” That made for a slightly more crowded flight, but I was able to finagle my way back to the outside corner, so I didn’t mind. The second landing was a bit more interesting. He brought us down in the middle of the farmland much to the annoyance of the farmer. And to the delight of children who got to dance around laughing at the balloon deflating and beg for change.

Our van on the way back didn’t even include the film crew (I guess they went where there might be business), so we had a private ride to the docks followed by a ferry to ourselves. Paradise so exclusive it only includes us.

After breakfast, we headed back out with a new tour guide with a couple of archeology degrees under his belt who is looking into getting a doctorate. When we get to Karnak Temple, he asks if we want the lecture tour, the highlights tour, or just to be left alone to wander around. Being the sort of people who watch things on the Harvard Youtube channel, we obviously opted for the lecture tour. I’m pretty sure that the vast amount of typing Bill has been doing is a summary of the history, so I’ll stick with observational commentary.

Bill tried a couple of times to get the tour guide to talk about the drop off in tourism and his responses were evasive. He seemed quite determined to project the current experience as typical even though we mostly had the place to ourselves.

There is a downside to having the run of the place – the vast number of people who are trying to get money from you have not decreased proportionally. While in both Karnak and Luxor Temples, so long as our guide was in sight, nobody bothered us. His philosophy was that he’d give us a tour with a lot of history about the structures, point out places where the original colors were still visible, explain some of the scenes carved into walls, and then he’d give us some time to wander around and take pictures on our own. As soon as he was out of sight, the vultures would descend.

I read Bill’s comments about feeling bad that he’s ignoring people trying to be nice at the pyramids and my response was that he’s never been a single woman. He feels bad because he is making the mistake of letting them define his context. And those were guys with services and products to sell.

These guys don’t have anything but the desire to take your money. They are constantly calling out to you, “Please, sir, please ma’am, let me show you this, there’s a photograph here, there’s a story to this panel.” Whatever they can to try to lure you into an isolated area and then make the universal gesture for greasing their palms with your cash because they’ve just done so much for you.

I decided it might be an interesting experience to see how they operated and let one lead me off in Luxor with only a token of resistance on my part. He was super polite the entire time that he was forcing me into an isolated area, taking my hands to make me touch some carving he didn’t explain, tugging at my camera to take a picture of me I wasn’t interested in, generally playing off of the societal expectation of politeness to keep me from yelling at him or running away before asking for money. I handed him a twenty, which is about $3.30, because it was the smallest bill I had. Pretty generous for someone who has done nothing but waste my time and harass me, but I did elect to try the experience. He held the bill up and said, “No, you don’t understand, 100.” I laughed at him and walked off. So, yeah, douche bag frat guys have the same operating principles. Here’s the picture. Obviously worth every penny.

Shields back up, here are some pictures of Karnak Temple.

And Luxor Temple.

After our tours, we returned to the comfort of our hotel and again wiled away the rest of the day enjoying the weather and relaxing as boats glide. Sipping drinks on the banks of the Nile while the sun goes down is a pretty nice way to end the day.