Writing is proving to be harder than I thought now that I am home; there are distractions and tasks competing for my attention at every corner! At any rate, here I am, writing the next page of my story on this Friday night.
At the outset, I would like to explain that I am not up with NAMES of pharaohs, tombs, temples, etc. For 15 days on end, day and night, we visited monument after temple after tomb intensively, relating to thousands of years of ancient Egypt! Where I can remember or have recorded names, I will relay them. Otherwise, forgive my not keeping up with all the titles!
On the evening of 9/26, we went to the "Light and Sound" show at the pyramids. Some of the other light and sound shows I have been to include the Persapolis in Iran and the Bridge over River Quai in Thailand. By comparison, this light and sound show was 'average'. The sound recording was an aging, British English sound. I found myself dozing off in the midst of it, and was surprised to later hear that many of our companions had been doing the same! We all felt they could have done a better job!
In the morning of September 27th, we woke and had a sumptuous breakfast in the hotel's dinning room with a couple from our tour-group. There is something to be said about Egyptian hospitality: I never spent a day in Egypt...anywhere in Egypt, when someone didn't serve me a HUGE, multi-coursed/multi-variety buffet breakfast, most of which were accompanied by a live chef cooking egg dishes to order! (I only realized how grand these breakfasts had been once I got to my bed & breakfast in Amsterdam later on this trip!)
After breakfast, we got on the bus for our morning excursion to Memphis, one of the ancient Egyptian capitals. (This excursion was optional; so not everyone in our tour group was with us. At the suggestion of my travel buddy: Barry, we had signed up for EVERY single optional excursion! Barry and I turned out to be the only two people in that category, which made for a VERY busy and full trip!)
On the way to Memphis, Amro--our tour leader, confirmed that Cairo had a huge trash problem. The government had hired some European trash-collecting companies to do the job in Cairo. The Europeans asked the Egyptian public to drastically change their garbage delivery habits, along with a hefty hike in their monthly trash bills. The result was a disastrous chaos, which ended up in people abandoning their trash in the streets, waterways, and yes, in the great Nile! At the time of our visit the problem was persisting, the signs of which were visible along the route we were traveling.
Memphis, of course, was fascinating. It was in ruins with the usual tourist-track gift shops, complete with the barrage of young Egyptian men trying every trick in the book to get tourists to buy! We saw a larger-than life reclining statue of a pharaoh, the complete view of which entailed walking all around, and then climbing to a second storey terrace to get the top view. Then we saw scores of sphinxes, smaller than THE Sphinx in Giza, that in the ancient times were lined on either side of the road leading to the temple. We also saw other busts, statues, and relics, all subscribing to the ancient Egyptian temple-building style.
On the way to our next destination, we passed by a date-palm-grove, where men were harvesting fresh dates by climbing all the way up to the dates, the way their ancestors had done through the millennia . We were lucky, Amro told us, since fresh harvesting only happened one week during the year, and this was it! Amro went and got us an abundant supply of fresh dates, on which we gorged our faces on the bus. They were of two kinds: the kind that is availabe in California and elsewhereb -- black and juicy, and a drier, purple kind which I had never seen before. This strange member of the date family was hard to chew on, and it left one's mouth with a numb feeling, same as when one ate a persimmon.
This date grove was located at the very edge of the great Sahara Desert; Amro told us between where we were and the Atlantic ocean, encompassing the entire width of North Africa there was nothing but desert, making the grove the last bastion of greenery until western Morocco!
Thereafter, we visited an ancient tomb in the middle of the desert in a region called Sakkara. There were two military personnel guarding the area - one of which was sound asleep in his booth.
The walls of the underground tomb which had belonged to an ancient noble family bore vivid embossed images and colors that had survived the eons. Amro lamented the hordes of tourists visiting the tomb nowadays, for our very breaths and sweat created humidity in the enclosed space that was eroding the colors even as we spoke! He said the government might close this tomb to the visitors along with many other cites in the near future.
Then we walked to yet another temple in ruins, and some truly ancient pyramids--that supposedly served as training ground for the pyramids of Giza which came many centuries later. As we did the math, we realized one of these pyramids were significantly older than the time when Moses had walked those grounds!
After that, we got back on the bus and on to a carpet weaving workshop. This arrangement seemed to be part of the world-wide tourist trap of being herded to a factory, watching a decorated demo of what they did there, and then being led into a showroom where not so subtle pressure tactics were applied on the tourists to buy the not so cheap products.
Upon completion of the tour, we went back to Le Meridien Pyramids. Barry and I then walked over to the nearby Felfela Restaurant where we consumed a sumptuous lamb stew and rice meal, complemented by lentil soup. Later, we enjoyed a peacful time at the hotel, sipping beverages at the poolside in the cool Cairo September evening.
Explanation of pictures (Top to Bottom):
1. A guy up some 50 meters on a date palm tree,
2, 3. The larger than life statue of a pharaoh, Memphis,
4. One of the sphinxes that used to line up the road to the temple in Memphis,
5. The estern edge of the Sahara Desert outside of Cairo,
6. The temple at Sakkara,
7. The carpet weaving workshop,
8. A toothless, old man at Sakkara who posed with me for a "Bakhshesh" (and you thought I was short!)
9. The remnants of one of the oldest pyramids (if not the oldest) that served as the training ground for the Giza Pyramids which came much later,
10. A guard sound asleep in Sakkara. The Step Pyramid built before Moses is visible in the background.
11. The Step Pyramid up-close,
12. The night at the Giza Pyramids' "Light & Sound" show. One of the pyramids is visible (all lit up) in the bottom left side of the picture.
