Egypt: compelling, chaotic, challenging.
Our week in Egypt was amazing and has been the most challenging and rewarding destination of our entire trip. Some of you (rightly) questioned the wisdom of traveling to Egypt in the middle of the summer, pointing out that it would be hot. We might have brushed off the heat as perhaps an inconvenience in our travels. It was not just uncomfortably hot, it was basically dangerously hot. The heat was truly something to be reckoned with, managed, and avoided (one in our group ended up with heat exhaustion). We would rise early in the day to enjoy temple visits in the morning before the worst heat, as well as activities in the evening after sunset. We couldn’t drink enough water, carried it everywhere, used wet bandanas, and spent most afternoons huddled in our hotel rooms or by the pool. As our friend Aubrey commented, the relentless heat helped us in the end to better understand Egypt and its people.
The one upside to the scorching temps was that we enjoyed a slower tourist season in an amazing country. You can see from the first picture in this post that we could tour absolutely unbelievable temples with just a handful of other people.
Here is Indiana Jonah at the Temple of Edfu.
Beyond the pyramids, I didn’t really know what to expect in coming to Egypt. Living in the shadow of the pyramids are Egypt’s lesser known cities and ancient sites, mostly temples and tombs. The temples are flat out spectacular! They are huge and incredibly well preserved. You can walk through them basically unhindered.
Below was my favorite… the Temple at Karnak and its Hypostyle Hall. A maze of 134 enormous and towering columns. This was a temple to honor Egyptian gods was built upon by dozens of pharaohs over a span of hundreds of years. Unlike ancient sites in Rome or Greece, your allowed to walk right inside the temple, strolling amidst a creation 3500 years old. In places you can still even see the original paint that highlights some of the hieroglyphics.
I have a new appreciation for the ancient Egyptians. They knew how to build something that would last.
In Luxor we enjoyed the Luxor Temple after sunset. Which was a great way to visit another amazing temple, this one dedicated to the Pharaohs (not the gods). Of course it’s “cooler” at night (in the low 90’s), and they have wonderfully lit the temple which creates shadows that help to highlight the many intricate carvings and hieroglyphics. For all of our time in Egypt we were accompanied by a local Egyptologist as our guide. We enjoyed the explanations of the stories told through the hieroglyphics. Below on the right, at the Temple of Luxor (if I recall correctly), is a pharaoh giving a detailed account and tally of every little thing he recently offered to the gods. On the left, the combination of the lotus and papyrus symbolically unites Upper Egypt (southern Egypt) with Lower Egypt (northern Egypt). What you cannot see in this picture in that the two plants are intertwined around a trachea and below it are lungs. The temples are filled with this imagery of life and the unification of the two parts of Egypt.
The temple at Luxor is breathtaking in size and granduer and because it’s preserved so well you barely need to use you imagination to picture what the temple must have looked like long ago.
We’ve enjoyed and have been amazed when visiting Gothic churches constructed in the 1500s. But when you walk through these temples constructed over two thousand years before that you can’t help but be awestruck by the Egyptians.
And of course the Pyramids…
Below on the left are the three boys- Jonah, Elliot, and Arthur in front of the pyramids. Lidia is on the right. Note that one of the pyramids on the right has a white cap. Originally, the pyramids of Giza were covered with a thin veneer of limestone most of which has eroded away. One pyramid still has its limestone cap.
Being in Egypt involved more than being shuttled from site to site, though that was our main day to day situation. We were able to observe a bit of Egyptian life and talk with a few Egyptians who live and die by the tourist economy. Some places we visited were clearly impoverished. Of course we knew we’d see concentrated poverty. Nonetheless it’s still shocking to see up close. Traveling can give you a better idea of how most of the world lives and survives. It can also feel good to see a USAID project along the banks of the Nile employing Egyptians to help make things better where they live.
I could never really could tell how people felt about me as an American… and because most people we interacted with were there to help us and as such were likely due a small tip… i felt like I was never really getting an honest interaction, but a bit of an act that people would put on for me to make me happy so I’d tip them. The tipping culture in Egypt is omnipresent, and the process was a bit mysterious. Many of the people you interact with on a tour such as we took are due a tip. It’s usually small, 50 cents or perhaps 5 or 10 bucks depending on the service. The constant tipping requirement puts you up close to the financial desperation many people probably live with. Thinking that in the off season the person driving your tour bus might not have worked for a week and could really use a nice tip to help them at home… It was nice to have a positive exchange rate, such that when I tipped someone like $4.50 (about 100 Egyptian pounds), it would be like a days wage for them… But having to do this same minor (to us) financial interaction 10 times a day with 10 different people was hard and at times frustrating. We wanted to get it right and make the transaction respectful and smooth. It took a while to get the process down, but we did. While the sites and temples were incredible, what we saw and experienced during this part of our trip shed perspective onto our lives, and for that, we are grateful.
Since 2011 Egypt has suffered from sporadic terrorist attacks. Each attack rocks the tourism economy as potential visitors get scared off from visiting. Imagine 50% of your economy nearly wiped out every so often… This uncertainty coupled with us being in the country in the off season we were faced with some pretty desperate people. We didn’t witness very much begging but there were many sites were the people selling tourist stuff were clearly pretty desperate for your business. Salesmen were aggressive and not really afraid to approach you. We traveled most days with a driver, a guide and an armed guard… which we learned is more or less required by the tourism police. I never really felt unsafe but we were more cautious about venturing out on our own than most other places we’ve visited.
Egypt, given the extremely hard times, is a bit run down in most places. It’s endlessly dusty given that the whole country is basically a big desert, so places feel a bit dirty which is unfair of me to say. The vast majority of the buildings are drab block construction and in various states of completion. They definitely have a trash problem, as in trash collection is poorly done perhaps and litter in general is basically everywhere.
Traffic is just crazy, I wouldn’t want to drive in Egypt. The roads are mostly clogged and traffic just ebbs and flows in waves of chaotic madness. Honking your car horn is a requirement: friendly honks, angry honks, honks when passing, honks when not passing. Scooters, of course, weave everywhere, street signs seemed haphazard, and the traffic police love speed bumps. Ugg, it would take some getting used to. Towards the end of our trip, I realized that the traffic here is best described as like one of the pages from Richard Scary’s ‘Cars and Trucks and Things that Go.’ There are vehicles of all sorts, shapes and sizes going every which way. Many kinds of cars and trucks that you’ve never seen before… I’m quite sure I saw a pickle car with a gold bug in it…
One reason we enjoyed Egypt as much as we did was that we got to travel with some of our favorite people in the world — the Lopatins. After visiting Luxor and getting a crash course in hieroglyphics from our amazing guide, Dalia, we took a small boat down the Nile River for two days as we headed towards Aswan. A boat. Down the Nile River. It was as great as it sounded, and I know that Jonah and Elliot felt like the boat ride was the highlight of their experience in Egypt.
The boys — Jonah, Arthur, and Elliot kept all of us on the boat safe by taking turns on “croc watch.” They swear they saw a ‘pack of crocs,’ though our guide assured us that North of the Aswan dam (down stream) there are no crocodiles. Our crew (of 10!) was very friendly, and they let the kids try to steer the boat.
While docked for the night, our guide, Mahmoud took us on a tour of a local farm. He picked fresh dates (below) and mangoes for us. It was kind of great.
The Egyptian home-cooked meals we had on this boat were delicious. This was a scene from breakfast, but the lunches and huge dinners were pretty impressive, given that it was all prepared in a tiny kitchen on a boat.
For real. So hot.
After cruising southward, we stopped at the First Cataract (which is a rocky rapids) and we enjoyed two nights at an historic hotel. The Old Cataract was kind of a magical oasis from the heat. Notable past guests include Agatha Christie and Winston Churchill. It was almost too nice for us (the kids called it ‘old people fancy’). Aubrey and Lidia held a book club over High Tea on the Terrace. Among other things, they discussed “Death on the River Nile” by Agatha Christie.
The lobby at the Old Cataract…
Our final stop of the Egyptian trip was Cairo. We first visited a huge market area… a labyrinth of shops: jewelry, nicknacks, housewares, clothing, lamps, souvenirs, textiles, street foods… everything you could think of.
The kids got necklaces with their names written in hieroglyphics…
Our first evening in Cairo we went to a Whirling Dervish show. We watched a the man pictured below spin continuously for about 30 minutes before we had to leave… apparently he would spin/dance for another 30 or 40 minutes… Watching this enthralling show made you dizzy.
Oh, and one day we road camels in the Nubian Desert outside of Aswan. The camel Jonah and I rode was named ‘King’. Lidia and Elliot’s camel, ‘Monica’.
Special thanks to Aubrey Lopatin for helping to plan such a fun and memorable adventure! thanks for joining us!
