King Tut, Cleopatra, Indiana Jones....now us.

Guides: Salah (Jordan) and Akram (Egypt) were our guides. Both gentlemen were very good guides. I think Salah's job was a little easier since he only had a group of 8 under his care. He is a well-educated man and former army officer with great skill in personalizing his chats with us on various topics. He knew the history of the sites we visited and also was able to provide relevant context to help us understand what we were seeing. Akram is a university educated Egyptologist with a wry sense of humor. He knows his material well and was quite good at handling our group of 22 with a wide range of physical abilities and age range (up to 88 years young). He could read much of the ancient inscription on the walls of temples and tombs and was able to identify the individual cartouches. I know our trip would not have been nearly as enjoyable had we not been fortunate enough to have these gentlemen assigned to our groups. As an aside, both guides enjoyed frequent coffee refi...

March 3: Sakkara and Giza - The Great Pyramid and more An almost 10 hour day kept us busy visiting sites near Cairo. Off at 7 am, our first stop was at the site of one of the best statues of Ramses the Great and the Alabaster Sphinx or Sphinx of Memphis. The statue of Ramses is now horizontal and under a roof for protection. The legs had broken near the knees so the conservators display it on his back with viewing ramps at two different levels. Sunrise over the Citadel in Cairo The carving is highly detailed. This statue shows much more anatomical subtleties in the contour of the muscles, knees, and elbows. Even the details of his eyes are much more detailed. Nearby this statue sits a small Sphinx made of alabaster and again showing great detail. This statue is much smaller than the Great Sphinx at Giza, being about 3 metres long and perhaps a little over 2 metres high. Statue of Ramses the Great The alabaster Sphinx Selling freshly roasted sweet potatoes with his ...

March 2: Luxor to Cairo We were up fairly early today for breakfast and disembarkation from the river ship. Travel to the airport and the short flight to Cairo went smoothly, but we sat on our parked bus at the airport for close to an hour with the excuse that we were awaiting a police escort. One of the guides pointed to a policeman trying to look important and told me quietly, “They are happy when they can make people wait.” By the way, the police escort never showed up and was not needed for our drive to the downtown hotel. Below, our last view from our room on-board the ship. The hills in the background are the location of the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. Eventually, we arrived at the hotel, probably an hour later than expected. Last time we were here, before the Nile cruise, the hotel was full and busy with an international meeting of Arab security officials. Lots of guys with poorly fitting suits jackets that bulged over their sidearms commandeered ele...

Monday, March 1: Esna Temple and Luxor This morning, we walked from the ship through part of the town of Esna. Akram led us via short 'touristic market’ and then through a local neighborhood in a very old part of the town. We saw only a handful of non Egyptians there. Locals, mostly men, were in small cafes having their morning conversations. Others were in tiny shops or behind open air stalls selling goods and produce.  One older fellow was using an very large and very old iron to press clothes. On the steps of a mosque, a couple men sat chatting, one smoking his hookah. Under some cloths, suspended above the ground, some kind of meat hung, aging and letting the blood drip away. Three women in traditional moslem attire sat by the road chatting and joking. Few children were around, except for a couple too young to attend school. Some citizens of Esna A couple shops had big sacks of cotton balls right off the plants. Others had stacks of old mattresses. ...