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Sharm El Sheikh

Posted by Jim St. George on December 6, 2018
Posted in: Africa, Egypt. Leave a Comment

Lunch by the pool. Pretty nice!

Our last stop in Egypt was Sharm El Sheikh, a tourist hub at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Technically in Asia, the city is a quick flight across the Red Sea from Hurgada and is sometimes known as the “City of Peace” in recognition of the many international peace conferences that have taken place here over the years. That name was a bit harder to maintain after Islamist terrorists set off a series of bombs, killing 88, in an attempt to damage the tourist industry and thus Egypt’s economy. To be sure, the attacks certainly did damage the economy though it didn’t have the longer-term impacts the perpetrators had presumably hoped for. In more recent years then-President Hosni Mubarak flew here during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and it was here that he resigned.

Acres and acres of beautiful grounds

Our experience was significantly more peaceful, this proving to be one of the more beautiful places we have been in some time. We kept looking around at the lush gardens and beautiful pools, lounging in our beautiful room wondering how in the world this could be only a small amount more expensive than the Oberoi over in Hurgada. Take my word for it, if you need to choose between the two, come to Sharm!

As much as we liked our five nights here, it sure started badly. Our flight across the Red Sea was an afternoon flight so we didn’t get to the hotel until perhaps 7:00 PM or so. Except when we got their the hotel said their records showed we hadn’t prepaid our reservation so they were going to put a large “hold” on our credit card to charge us when we checked out. Except we had prepaid the reservation and had both an email attesting to than and could show them our credit card statement online that had the charge. In the small number of cases where something similar has happened the management takes a copy of the email, gives us our room, and figures out their mistake. Not here. Their response was effectively “You made that reservation on Hotels.com; we’re not responsible for it.”

This guy seems to have a good life. And presumably never gets bad treatment from the hotel front desk.

Oh my God. We ended up spending an hour sitting in the lobby, first explaining it to them, then arguing with them, and then finally getting Hotels.com on the line. The help desk there got it straightened out and finally the front desk gave us our key. When Mark explicitly asked for an apology – it was clearly and completely a mistake in their system – they declined to do so.

A bad way to start, but it ended up well. Mark gets pissed about stupid behavior like this so he prepared to talk with the general manager the next day. He Googled the guy, saw his photo and then at breakfast when he saw the guy went right up told the story. To his credit the GM didn’t try to explain or justify or anything like that. He apologized and said he would fix things. Ultimately he offered us an upgrade (we declined; we liked the room we were in better), comped our dinner that night (including wine; nice touch), and saw to it that for the next four days staff bent over backwards to make sure we had a nice stay.

The view from the breakfast area down to the sea

And we did. There wasn’t much to do besides just hang out at the beach but that’s always one of favorite things to do. The one thing Hurgada had over Sharm El Sheikh was that the snorkeling there was better, but otherwise there was nothing not to like about hanging out, reading, swimming, eating, enjoying the lush grounds … you know, the usual. A nice way to finish our month-long stay in Egypt.

Except it wasn’t quite over. We were to catch a flight to Cairo and then a connecting flight through Dubai to Brazil. And I think the airport at Sharm El Sheikh was probably the worst airport experience we’ve had ever, anywhere. The security lines were just insanely long, slow, and messy. It was crazy, at least 30 minutes, probably closer to 45, before you could get to the check-in counter, check your bags … and go through security again. It’s not as though security was tight, though. As we finally got right near the front where one guy was slowly checking IDs as people kind of massed around him, trying to get his attention so he would take their ID and let them through, I saw a Chinese woman just walk past while he was distracted and go to have her stuff x-rayed.

So a terrible finish to go with our terrible arrival. In between, though, it was close to perfect. Now on to Brazil!

Sunrise over the resort

And sunset

More prettiness from the grounds

Big excursion – one night we left the hotel to go to a Thai restaurant in a Hyatt hotel. It was good but just a hassle to deal with taxis so otherwise we pretty much just stayed at our own hotel.

Boston Bear loved the place too. They set him up with a tiny pillow and little blanket that was just perfect for him. He’s bugging already to go back!

Luxor

Posted by Jim St. George on November 25, 2018
Posted in: Africa, Egypt, UNESCO World Heritage Site. 1 comment

The tomb of Tutankhamun in Valley of the Kings. Seeing it spelled like this I recognized that “ankh” is the Egyptian symbol of life while “amun” was the Egyptian sun god.

We sailed north from Edfu to Luxor, arguably the most important site of Ancient Egypt. Known to the Greeks as Thebes, the city grew in prominence from about 2000 BC when it was the capital of Upper Egypt (note that I’m finally getting used to the fact that Upper Egypt is in the south, referring to the upper Nile, which flows northward into the Mediterranean) until by 1550 BC it was the political, religious, and military capital of all Ancient Egypt. Its local god, Amun, rose in prominence with the city and he soon became associated with the sun god Ra as the “king of gods,” Amun-Ra. Together with his wife Mut and son Khonsu, the moon god, they ruled as Egypt’s divine trinity. (Wait, a big god father, a mother who is worshipped, and a son also worshipped as a god; I’ve seen that pattern somewhere. It seems like a good model to copy if someone were creative…) By the time of the conquest of Alexander the Great in 323 BC the city had fallen into ruins but he came to pay respects and essentially claim the mantle as the new Amun-Ra.

During those thousand-plus years, though, there was a millennium’s worth of wonders built and today Luxor is known sometimes as the world’s greatest open-air museum: temples of Karnak and Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens across the Nile. With so much to see we were glad to have three days here to drink it all in.

Sunset on the Nile. We’re on the east side of the river, meant for the living, while the west where the sun sets and things go to die is for the Theban Necropolis.

It might be worth mentioning that modern history hasn’t been as kind. Luxor was the site of major 1997 attack where six Egyptian terrorists killed 62 tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut, devastating the tourist industry in Egypt broadly and Luxor specifically. The 9/11 attacks just four years later, followed by a terrorist attack at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005 and the revolution in 2011 that removed long-serving President Hosni Mubarak, didn’t help. Today the area seems remarkably calm; tourism is still reduced but there’s lots of security and – from a purely selfish perspective – it’s a lot more fun to tour the sites without massive hordes.

The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, site of a great burial chamber and a terrible terrorist attack. On the other side of that imposing hill is the Valley of the Kings.

What’s all to see in Luxor now? A lot. First on our agenda was Karnak, a vast temple complex just a couple miles from the modern city center. How vast? After Angkor Wat in Cambodia Karnak is the second-largest religious temple in the world. And if you’re wondering – I was – in our travels Mark & I have been to seven of the 10 largest.

At any rate, construction here began at the start of the second millennium BC and lasted all the way through the Ptolemaic period after Alexander’s conquest. Some 30 pharaohs contributed to the construction giving it diversity and complexity unmatched anywhere. The largest part of the temple is dedicated to Amun-Ra, an area consisting of 134 massive columns, though there are all sorts of areas in the temple worth exploring. An obelisk or two that have stood tall for some 3,500 years, massive pylons (the Greek term for the monumental entrances to Egyptian temples), lots and lots and lots of stone carvings. Truly an amazing site.

Mark and our guide Rena in Karnak’s Precinct of Ra with just a small number of the 134 columns surrounding them

From Karnak we made a relatively brief stop at the Luxor Museum. By now it was late in the day and I wasn’t really up for it but when your tour guide tells you to go, you go. And I was really glad I did. Inaugurated in 1975 it is much, much smaller than the great Egyptian Museum in Cairo but at the same time much easier to digest; the museum prides itself more in the quality of display than the quantity. And the quality is spectacular, including a couple mummified pharaohs and some stunning sculptures.

This statue of Thutmosis III, from the 15th century BC, was buried in sand for years and thus today looks as fresh and young as it did all those centuries ago

Also in the Luxor Museum was this statue of Akhenaten, husband of Nefertiti and (probably) father of Tutankhamun. Not only did Akhenaten try (unsuccessfully) to get Egypt to abandon her polytheistic roots in honor of his preferred god Aten but he even tried to change the art style as this almost El Greco-esque piece displays.

Then there was Luxor Temple itself. Built about 1400 BC, it seems to be a temple dedicated to kingship itself and may have been where Egyptian pharaohs were crowned. The entrance to Luxor Temple is a bit unbalanced; the single obelisk on one side needed another to balance it off. Well indeed there was once another obelisk there and it turns out I’ve seen it many, many times: it’s the obelisk that now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris! And I was intrigued with a temple within the complex that was supposedly built under the orders of Alexander the Great in honor of … himself.

The Temple of Luxor

Then it was across the river to the various necropolises that were built on the west bank (the sun sets in the west, so that side is all about dying apparently). The Valley of the Kings is the star where from the 16th century BC until the 11th pharaohs had tombs cut into the rocks and were buried in lavish style. While many of the tombs were robbed and ransacked the tomb of a distinctly minor king who died at the age of just 19, Tutankhamun, was found nearly intact in 1922.

A small section from the tomb of King Tut

Our last major site was the Mortuary Temple of Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, dating to the 15th century BC. Hatshepsut was an interesting figure. She was, you see, a she, not very common among ancient royals. I mean, some 3,500 years later the U.S. still has issues with elevating women to high office, but I digress. But Hatshepsut reigned for at least 21 years and perhaps as long as 50 years, donning a fake beard and dressing as a man, but definitely a woman. She ascended to the throne after her husband died and left only a two-year-old son to succeed him. Hatshepsut ruled in his place and, as he grew older, came to kind of resent his mother. On her death he succeeded on his own and had all her names erased from the temple. Still, she is regarded as one of the great Egyptian pharaohs though not necessarily as the nicest mom in the world. She opened major trade routes for Egypt and is considered one of the greatest of Egyptian builders.

One of the side rooms in the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. The room itself is gated off and weird thing here is that it was entirely unlit; with the naked eye you could see nothing. If you put your iPhone up to the gate though it could adjust and see inside just fine. Wow, just wow.

After all that, I have to admit that I’ll be glad to spend a few days not touring old temples. And it’s worth adding that if I had it to do over again, we wouldn’t have done this on a cruise. We’re not cruise people, you see, and don’t usually like organized tours of any sort. I had this romantic notion of cruising down the Nila ala Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, but in practice there was more anchoring in a couple towns than actual cruising. We’d have been better off staying in hotels where we could experience the contemporary scene along with the great ruins and then maybe taking a day cruise or two to experience floating on the Nile. But – and this is a big but – I learned a tremendous amount from our guide. Until now Ancient Egypt has always been a big, vague empty spot in my understanding of ancient history but this was about as good an introduction as you can get. Good enough that I’m now reading a history of Ancient Egypt that I just never would have been able to understand before. So in that sense, mission accomplished.

Gorgeous, colorful columns in Luxor Temple

An obelisk in Karnak that has been standing right there for 3,500 years

A statue inside Luxor Temple. Ramses II? I’m not sure but they usually are…

I think I got good luck from touching his toe

Amenhotep III from the Luxor Museum. The quality of the stuff here was amazing.

A small colorful chip from a tomb recovered in Luxor

Mark on the walkway into the Valley of the Kings

Mark’s not a big fan of snakes, so this three-headed snake in one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings got his attention

Every square inch of these old temples was plastered, painted, carved, and made beautiful

Some of the hieroglyphics in one of the tombs. I learned a lot during our week on the Nile but I still can’t read this (yet).

More of the glorious interior of some pharaoh’s tomb

We loved these grand columns

The Avenue of the Sphinx in Luxor has only recently been excavated. Connecting Karnak with the Luxor Temple it was a major thoroughfare for religious festivals during Luxor’s heyday.

More of those sphinxes

Hot air balloons in the early morning sky above Luxor. Fortunately none of these exploded.

Life for the locals on the Nile

And life for us on the Nile. We upgrade to get a nice outdoor space … so we can hang our laundry out. The neighbors likely think the Clampetts just moved in.

Aswan

Posted by Jim St. George on November 17, 2018
Posted in: Africa, Egypt. 3 comments

Here we are in front of the smaller temple at Abu Simbel

A funny thing happened as we started our Nile River cruise: our boat didn’t go anywhere. Well, that’s not exactly true, but we spent the first three nights of the seven-night cruise tied up a few miles north of Aswan. We took two short trips on the river but didn’t actually move downriver toward Luxor until our fourth day. A little strange for a river cruise, but there was plenty to see those first few days.

Day 1 was a very early flight out of Cairo down to Aswan. We knew the cruise company was going to pick us up at the airport but weren’t too sure what would come after that; we would get in by 8:00 AM and didn’t expect they’d have our room ready on the boat that early. To our delight, though, they took us right to the boat and let us on, much better than having to cool our heels waiting. The only strange thing as far as we were concerned was the distance from the Aswan airport to the city itself, something like a 45-minute drive. What’s that all about? Here we are out in the middle of the desert where there’s a whole lot of nothing, everything is flat and dry, and they put the airport way out there? Strange.

Sunset on the Nile

So, after checking in and chilling out for a bit it was time for lunch and then an afternoon journey first to the Aswan High Dam and then on to our first temple. The High Dam was built in the 1960s and, along with the Hoover Dam and Three Gorges Dam in China, is one of the largest in the world. The annual flooding of the Nile River, based on annual rains in its East Africa drainage basin, made the Nile River flood plain one of the most important agricultural centers of the ancient world. Strange as it is to contemplate given its massive desert, Egypt was known as the “breadbasket of Rome” during the empire’s heyday. But at the same time the flooding could be disastrous: unusually high floods could ruin an entire year’s crop while low floods could leave farmers unable to plant adequate fields. Thus damming and controlling the floods was a major priority after the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952 and the start of the Egyptian Republic.

One thing I learned in all this was that the High Dam – the construction of which I have vague memories of from my childhood – wasn’t Egypt’s first dam on the Nile. Way back in the late 19th century, when Egypt was a protectorate of Victorian England, the English built what is now known as the Low Dam a few miles downriver from today’s High Dam. It was a nice little bridge, but wasn’t at all up to the job of managing the mighty Nile.

Our approach to the temple at Philae

So we drove down to the High Bridge with our guide Rena and discovered that, well, there’s really not a lot to see. You get a nice view of the northern edge of Lake Nasser, one of the world’s largest man-made lakes, but as it’s some 300 miles long it’s really just a tiny speck of the lake. What you see, though, is beautiful, as blue as any lake water I’ve seen save for perhaps Lake Tahoe. Sadly we didn’t see any crocodiles though; there are thousands of them but again, it’s a big lake.

Next stop was the temple at Philae which, a temple to Isis, one of the great goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon, built about 250 BC under the Greek Ptolemaic rulers. It was said to be one of the burying places of Osiris, husband of Isis, and thus was a major tourist destination in its time; indeed, it was so holy that birds didn’t fly above it nor did fish swim near it. That’s their story, at least.

Philae temple

This was the start of learning about Egyptian temples but for me the most interesting part of it was that in the 1960s UNESCO led a successful effort to move the massive temple. The island it was situated on was just a bit upstream from the Low Dam, constructed in the 1890s and was nearly always at least partly under water. As that was not sustainable over the long term UNESCO had this fantasy of cutting the temple up block-by-block and moving it to high land about half a kilometer away. And astonishingly to my mind at least that’s exactly what they did. The various buildings were chopped into 40,000 pieces, moved a bit, and reassembled. Amazing.

Day 2 was a trip to Abu Simbel, massive temples just north of Egypt’s border with Sudan. To get there you drive back out to Aswan’s distant airport and take a 30-minute flight, then drive out to the temples. All I can say is “Wow!” I thought the temple at Philae was impressive, but wow. They date to the 13th century BC, built during the reign of Ramses II as a monument to, well, himself, and his favored wife Nefertari. The exterior was carved out of the mountain while the interior is just chock-full of carvings and art and all that. And did I mention that it is well over 3,000 years old?

Mark in front of the entrance to Abu Simbel. Back in the 1960s they cut out those statues from their original rocks to move them here to higher ground.

And then on top of all that these temples, too – a big one for Ramses, a smaller one for Nefertari – were also moved, in this case to avoid being submerged when the High Dam was built. This was even more difficult than moving Philae, as the (massive) exterior had been carved directly into the mountain. But over several years and at a cost of some $300 million in today’s dollars, UNESCO again led the effort to save these historic treasures, moving them to high ground and replicating nearly identically the setting of the original site. Really impressive, but then it would have to be to justify flying all the way down there just to see them.

One sad thing to note here is the impact Egypt’s 2010 revolution has had on tourism and thus on the lives of people dependent on that tourism. Our guide here told us that once there were 17 flights a day into Abu Simbel while now there are only three or four. They say tourism is starting to pick up again but it’s sad to see people paying such a high price for finally turning out someone like Hosni Mubarak…

Of course, some people still make a living on tourism. This is Rena, our tour guide. It seems pretty unusual to have a woman tour guide in a Moslem country but she’s really good.

Day 3 then was another temple, Kom Ombo, a dual temple to a crocodile god (Sobek) and a falcon god (Horus) that dates to about 150 BC. This time we sailed to near the temple and then, after our guide Rena did her usual great job of explaining things and showing us how to read hieroglyphics, we sailed back to Aswan. For me the highlight of the day was a tour of Aswan’s botanical garden. We took a “falouka” – the Egyptian sailboat – out to an island and discovered this lush garden. We’ve been in botanical gardens in poorer countries that are just sad but this was nice.

Aswan’s botanical garden, a surprising oasis in a poor place

Now, after our first three days around Aswan we sail north. More river, more temples.

Looking out over Lake Nasser

The temple at Philae, moved stone-by-stone to this island out of harm’s way

Mark and I at Abu Simbel

The massive statue at Abu Simbel

Here’s a strange one. At Kom Ombo, a temple dedicated in part to the crocodile god, there are lots and lots of mummified crocodiles.

Mark and Rena at the botanical garden

Our boat ride back from the garden

A whole bunch of faloukas (faloukae?)

Mark on the falouka

One night on the boat there was a little reception and some local Numidian culture. This is a guy dancing like a whirling dervish, just spinning and spinning and spinning.