Guess what? When you live in London your Egyptian vacation doesn’t have to end when you come home! Those acquisitive Brits brought a lot of the good stuff home during their colonial heyday. To be honest, it felt a bit strange to see the statues, sarcophagi, and mummies in the British Museum. I felt like […]
The guided part of our stay in Cairo may have ended when the driver dropped us back at the hotel after lunch, but we were far from done with Cairo! We still had Egyptian pounds to spend and space in our luggage to fill. I was feeling headachy, so I took some Excedrin and a […]
Last day in Egypt! The day got off to a bumpy start when our original tour guide canceled for health reasons and we got one of the office administrators instead (he was a sweet guy but his English wasn’t as good and he was both awkward at playing host and painfully apologetic for everything). Eventually […]
The Nubian village was our last stop in Aswan; in fact, we brought our luggage with us on the boat so that we could hop right into the taxi and head to the airport. It was a quick flight back to Cairo where we met our driver. Since it was only 3pm by the time […]
After exploring the reedy islands in the Nile, the boat brought us to a small Nubian village on the west bank of the Nile. Nubians are an ethnic group, with a culture and language distinct from Egyptians, who live in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Their traditional homeland was flooded by the Nile dams and […]
Our last morning in Aswan was gorgeous! As if trying to make up for the terrible weather the day before, the air was clear and cool and perfect. We went out on a boat to explore the many little islands that dot the Nile at Aswan. This part of the Nile is called the First […]
Our guide said that if you wanted to see all of Egyptian history in one spot, the temple at Philae would be the place. It was begun by the ancient pharaohs, expanded into a temple for Isis by the Greeks, further expanded by the Romans, defaced and converted into a church by the Christians, mentioned […]
Aswan was the last stop on our cruise, and while there are certainly things to see here, we had planned to use it as a jumping-off point for a more ambitious journey to the great temple of Abu Simbel (an additional 3-hour drive away). We got up at the ungodly hour of 4am and were […]
We sailed from Edfu up the river to Kom Ombo where another temple from the Greco-Roman period of Egypt stood on the shore. Despite the blistering heat — at 3pm we were at the worst time of day for this, with temperatures well over 100 F — we climbed out and went exploring. We didn’t […]
Our first stop up the river was the Temple of Horus at Edfu. We arrived sometime during the night and took a horse buggy into town to see the temple. The temple here is the best preserved of all the temples we saw. Aside from the early Christians’ attempts to deface the “pagan idols” the […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 