Luxor :: Egypt
First some water, then some desert with big rock things in it.
Places: Dahab, Hurgurda & Luxor.
Coolest thing I did: Regained my love of diving.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Too many things. I learned how to make a Karnak temple. It takes alot of time, slaves and mud bricks.
After the tense edge of Israel, Egypt was a nice change. Well, when I say Egypt, I mean Dahab. The only thing of note on my way in was it was so quiet at the land border with Israel that I had to wait 10 mins while they warmed up the xray machine to scan my bags. Oh, and the border guard had no idea where Aqaba was, even though we could see it from where we were standing.
Dahab was and wasn't what I expected. It was once a Bedouin village that a few people used to stay in and get stoned alot. But that was before anyone I've ever met went there. It's lost it's hippy edge and now is a beach front of identical cafes, cheap hotels and dive clubs. It is, however, not as bad as it sounds from that last sentence. People are friendly without being overbearing, you can spend an afternoon doing nothing if you want and no one cares if you eat or drink during Ramadan.
I think I've also been feeling alot less tense because of the presence of familiar faces. On the day I arrived in Dahab, Tim came down from Cairo to meet me. He'd been there the week before to get his dive license so he'd negotiated good prices for dives, hotels and the like in advance. Everyone at the hotel knew who I was and why I was there so it was nice. They were good to us, and it seemed not only because we gave them enough money to educate another 3 generations of their children. A couple of days later, I also managed to get a cab out to pick Yvette up from Sharm airport so there are now three of us wandering about Egypt. After months of hardly seeing anyone I know it;s good to have all these familar faces again.
The diving in the Red Sea is as good as anyone had led me to belive. I was in two minds about going diving again after a four year gap but it all came back to me very quickly. We did six dives over the days we were there and it was all as good as anything I did on the Barrier Reef. My favourite was a spot called the fishbowl, where you go into a cave and all these schools of little glass fish (clear ones you can see the skeleton of) swim around you, lit by shafts of blue light from the outside. If you dive (or have four days to learn) this is the place to come. I'm back loving it again and can't wait to get another chance to go.
The day before we left we decided to climb Mt Sinai at night and watch the sun rise over the desert. This is a good idea, except you don't start climbing until 11pm and it's bloody cold. We made it to the top before 3 so decided to have a sleep at the top and wait. We rented some matresses, lay down in our sleeping bags and shivered to sleep. We were awoken by the sounds of the several thousand (ok, I probably exadurate) Russians that had come up on tour busses behind us. They seem to have the same lack of personal space skills as they do at home so there were Russian women walking on us where we slept. The sunrise was spectacular, but the lack of sleep made the monastery where the burning bush less impressive. All three of us had a case of the angries and all those Russians didn't help when we got down there. It was a bit of a write off of a day.
We caught the ferry to Hurgurda on the other side of the Red Sea that afternoon. We manged to get ripped off by a taxi driver and wander around yelling "NO!" everyone who spoke to us while we looked for a place to stay. Thank god we all slept well and were in a better mood the next day.
We caught the bus to Luxor and that's been all good. Luxor is nothing short of amazing. Temples you can't see over, big tall statues of gods and lots of picture writing. This Ramses bloke was a bit of a raving ego maniac and seems to have decided to put 12 m tall statues of himself up everywhere, which make for good pictures.
We saw alot of tombs where the highlights are the carvings and paintings on the walls. And the odd stone coffin. We even saw into a burrial chamber where the remains of the Pharohs kids were still in there, one with his mummified guts hanging out. At bit gross, but I took a picture anywho.
I think Yvette was laughing at my Egyptian maths jokes (does anyone know their bird times tables? Bird times eye is bird, bird time hook is water) just to be polite. I thought I was being rather witty.
When you go to the west bank of the Nile here, the best temples are those in the Valley of the Nobles, where they burried scribes, high priets and other blokes with alot of cash. These tombs haven't had many tourists in them and as a result the colours on the walls are still intact without restoration. Tim told me this and I didn't belive him. You won't belive me either and you'll go around the Valley of the Kings with all the other tourists, just like I did. It's good to carry on a tradition.
The temple at Karnak is the big one. It's the most intact and the guide we got made it a whole lot better. I have to say I'm adverse to guides since Morocco and all those blokes who took me around without knowing anything more than I did, but the others convinced me in the end. This bloke knew lots of stuff and we learned a very small part of it for the princely sum of 5 pounds sterling. You can't get over the scale of some of these things. As a result I reckon given several thousand tonnes of stone, lots of mud bricks and close to a million migrant labourers I could build the exact same thing in Doonside. I'm considering it as a project for when I get back home.
The concept of "Back home" is now a bit too close and it scares me. What will I do when I don't have to pack all my stuff into a backpack every morning. I can't remember what that was like.
From here we are off to the South (which they confusinly refer to upper egypt) to see more old stuff. We're meeting Lee too, which is yet another familiar face to add to the group. Then it's back to London on the 3rd of December, via Bucharest. So I will get to visit Romania after all, even if it's only for the time it takes to change planes. All the Londoners brace yourselves for a imminent Steviling. Sydney gets its turn the week after.