Egypt

The city of Cairo is enormous, and seems to go on forever. In fact, it stretches almost to the pyramids of Giza. Some parts of the downtown architecture are quite lovely; build in a European style in the mid-1800s, it seems like they could be modeled on avenues in London or Paris. But in the outskirts, there are endless gray apartment building, balconies strung with colorful laundry.

The pyramids themselves were absolutely amazing, almost hallucinatory because the images so iconic. I thought about how the Grateful Dead played a concert in Giza, sometime back in the ‘70s. How incredible that must have been! The pyramids are enormous; giant stones brought from far away, using thousands of people to put them together. The outside stones which formed the decorative veneer were stripped from the pyramids centuries ago to build the Muhammad Ali mosque in Cairo’s Citadel.

We arrived in Cairo and spent a few hours in the Minerva Hotel; we were planning to take the overnight sleeping train to Luxor. The Minerva is a hostel in the middle of downtown Cairo; very young, hip, Egyptian men run the hotel. They organized some tours for us, organized an Uber to the train station, and were generally super-helpful. Declan and I walked over to a place called Gad to get falafel and hummous, and then to a gelato place. Everywhere we were, people were so nice and friendly to us. “Where are you from? United States? Welcome, thank you for visiting Egypt and please enjoy our city!” Downtown Cairo has many buildings from the mid- to late- 1800’s; some of the blocks look they could be Paris or France. The Nile River is there; there are many embassies and fancy restaurants overlooking the Nile. I didn’t see any beer or wine on the menu at the restaurant that we visited, but there was a little shop down the street from the Minerva hotel called Drinkee’s, where you could buy some beer and wine.

We had planned to take the overnight sleeper train to Luxor; I had downloaded some Google images of Arabic numbers to help me recognize the correct train and the correct platform. Not too many people spoke English at the Cairo railway station; I guess I must have looked a bit panicked, because a nice man named Ali offered to help me. He was an Egyptian electrical engineer working in Qatar, home on holiday to take care of his uncle. He made sure that we got on the right train.

And the sleeper was lovely! It seemed a bit like “Murder on the Orient Express”, but we had our own private sleeper car with a sink and a place to store our luggage, and a very nice conductor named Sameer who brought us dinner and breakfast. He woke us up as we approached Luxor. I loved looking out the train window and seeing the sugarcane farms in the morning light. Women dressed in their djellabas, working in the fields. Everything was so green and so fertile compared to Cairo.

We had arranged to stay at an AirBnB overlooking the West Bank of the Nile; Mohammed’s driver picked us up at the train station and brought us back to the condo. Such a treat! Very nice condo with rooftop deck, overlooking the Nile and Luxor Temple. Sitting on the deck, overlooking the Nile, listening to the call to prayer from the surrounding mosques, it was hard to believe that I was really there!

The first day we toured the West Bank of the Nile: Valley of the Kings, Hapshepsut Temple, Colossi of Memnon. Our guide was Aladdin, who was an Egyptologist and an archeologist. I felt bad about my own level of preparedness; he was way overqualified to be a guide for me and Declan. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun as a god, so the West represented death, and the East represented life. All of the tombs are on the west bank of the Nile, in the land of death; all of the temples and palaces are on the east bank, in the land of the living.

We visited the Valley of the Kings and saw the tombs of Ramses IV, Ramses IX, Merenptah, and King Tut. King Ramses II lived until he was 97. He had many children and many wives; Merenptah was his 13th son, but the older sons had died by the time Ramses II had died. The tomb of Ramses II is closed, and much of its contents have been looted. Apparently, kings began constructing their tombs as soon as they rose to the throne; additional work on the tomb continued throughout their lives and their reigns. King Tut died at the age of 19, so his tomb was very small. But because it was very small, it was not discovered by tomb raiders, so when it was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, it was nearly intact, with the famous golden mask of death (22 kg of gold!) and the three sarcophagi: inner, middle, and outer sarcophagus.

We saw the graffiti of the early Christians in some of the tombs, as they sought refuge from some of their oppressors. We saw lots and lots of hieroglyphics; Declan got a necklace with his name sounded out in hieroglyphics. It is amazing how much we know about the ancient Egyptian culture because of their writing; we know so much less about places like Angkor Wat and Easter Island. We saw tomb paintings of a goddess swallowing the sun at sunset and giving birth to the sun at sunrise; the night is divided into 12 hours, and the deceased must journey to the next life during those hours. The embalming used by the ancient Egyptians was amazing; the mummies survive, thousands of years later! We saw King Tut’s mummy in his tomb in Luxor; the archaeologists apparently thought it would be too risky to move his mummy. The Egyptian museum in Cairo has a special mummy room (for an extra price); we saw there the mummies of Ramses II and Hapshetsut, among others.

Inside the tombs there was always an Egyptian guide, willing to take a photo or let you cross a forbidden barrier for a little baksheesh. We saw the Egyptian god of fertility, with a large,erect penis, and we saw the Temple of Hapshetsut.

I am embarrassed to say that I did not know anything about Hapshetsut, but she was one of the most powerful women in history. She was a true Pharaoh, and she wore a ceremonial beard to demonstrate it (“the first badass transgender Pharaoh!” crowed a gay couple that we met, two American men from Atlanta and Florida). Hapshetsut was the daughter of Tutmoses I, and the only child of his marriage to the queen. Unable to have another child with the queen, Tutmoses I had a son, Tutmoses II, by his concubine. Hapshutset married her half-brother, but he was much younger, so she assumed all the power. They had a son, Tutmoses III, but he was sent away to school at a young age, and Hapshepsut had all the power. She built many things, she sponsored many military expeditions; she explored Punt (Somalia) and planted some trees from Punt in front of her temple. She was eventually murdered by her son, Tutmoses III, who then sought to erase her image from much of the temple. There is some more recent research that says that maybe she died of cancer from some face creams, but our guide espoused the murder theory. The mummies are in such good shape that they can even do DNA analysis on them, but they are not quite sure which mummy is really Hapshetsut.

We went back to the AirBnB condo and had a lovely dinner prepared by Mohammed’s private chef. That night, we took a boat across the Nile to see the Sound and Light show of the Karnak Temple.

The Karnak Temple has been described as the world’s largest open-air art museum, and it is really breath-taking in its scale. The sound and light show was a great introduction, to have the Karnak Temple mostly to ourselves in the quiet of the night. The next day it was buzzing, but we so much enjoyed the hypostyle columns, the obelisks, and the sphinxes. There were statues honoring papyrus and lotus. Some of the Karnak Temple was damaged in an earthquake in 27 BC; it was also damaged by flooding. Part of the reason that the Aswan Dam was installed was to protect the temples from additional flooding.

So much history, and they are still discovering things! Aladdin, our guide, spent a lot of time at the house of his grandfather while he was growing up. His grandfather lived above an ancient tomb, and he and his cousins spent time playing hide and seek in the ancient tomb. Now, Aladdin spends about five months per year working on an archaeology project with a German team, behind the temple of the Colossi of Memnon. As we drove around the Valley of the Kings, he would say, “those are some statues they just discovered in 2006!” and I wondered what it would be like to come back here, in the future.

Two days in Luxor was very short; we took the overnight sleeper back to Cairo. A taxi driver came out to the platform to ask us to choose his taxi. We chose him, and walked out to his old, beat-up car. Although I showed him the card from the hotel, and showed him the Google map, he kept getting mixed up on the way to the Minerva Hotel. When we finally arrived and I paid him 200 Egyptian pounds, he kissed the money and touched his forehead in thanks.

Back in Cairo, back at the Minerva Hotel, we took a day tour of Saqqara (oldest pyramid in Egypt, with stairs leading up to heaven), Memphis (Declan stayed in the car to read while I saw the enormous statue of Ramses II), and finally the pyramids of Giza. We rode camels out to the pyramids; Declan did his “flossing” dance in front of the pyramids to send to his friend Gabriel, we saw the Sphinx, and we had lunch at a tourist place with a great view overlooking the pyramids. Which gave me the worse diarrhea I have ever had!

The last day in Cairo, I let Declan stay at the Minerva in the morning while I went to see a market and some historic mosques. “You left Declan in a hotel in Cairo by himself?” Ziv asked me later. I was reminded of my father’s observation that I “have no threat sensor”, but Declan was very happy to be at the Minerva. I am worried about all his screen time, but it is very difficult to control him, and the screen time. I think we are at the part of the trip where he has seen a lot of historic things, and it is difficult for him to process, and he misses his friends.

In the afternoon, we went to the Egyptian museum and saw some mummies and the King Tut stuff. Very amazing. The Egyptian Museum is enormous, housing the contents of many of the tombs and the temples, but it is not very well organized or labeled, so you are not always sure of what you are looking at. From there, we took a cab to a sushi place called Fuego, as a special treat to Declan; a little bit of drama with the cab driver and the Google map. The cab driver had an ancient Mercedes, and a cassette deck, and some diabetic testing strips; he did not take kindly to Declan giving directions from the Google map.

At the Cairo airport, on the way to Jordan, a shuttle bus took us from the terminal to board the plane directly on the tarmac. I was surprised to see a late-model Porsche drive up to the plane, and a woman got out. She hugged a young man goodbye, and then she followed us up the steps to the airplane. I wondered who she might be, and if anything like that ever happened in the US.

On to Jordan!