The two most important words any tourist in Egypt needs to learn: La shokran. No thankyou.
Learn them. And learn them well!
I’m going to write this blog entry more like a travel diary. So be prepared for a long post.
A couple of things: LE is Egyptian Pounds (at time of writing, US$1 ~ LE5.5). Backsheesh is somewhere between a tip and a bribe.
Additionally, Rough Guide/Lonely Planet/Travel guide of your choice are full of shit. Every single one I read said “Egypt doesn’t get cold in winter. It’s still warm“. Bullshit. Egypt DOES get cold in winter. I wasn’t entirely unprepared, but I really wish I’d packed more long sleeved shirts! I’d packed jeans and long pants for cultural reasons, but then mainly only packed short sleeved t-shirts. I did pack a fleece jacket and one long sleeved shirt. Not sufficient. It’s windy as hell in some places and since you’re effectively in the desert, it does get cold. Ignore the guide books. You don’t need full winter woolies or puffa jackets or anything, but you do need long sleeved shirts, long pants and a couple of jackets if you’re going in winter.
Day 1: Getting to Cairo
Flying through Singapore. The plan was to pick up a couple of bits for my DSLR camera at Singapore airport. Bad idea. Turns out they don’t sell batteries or lens filters for my model Nikon in Singapore airport. Which is insanely dumb considering they sell the camera, which in itself is a 2008 model. Not a good start to the trip.
Was met at Cairo airport by a rep from Geckos (the tour company my trip is with). The rep got me my visa (on arrival) for me for US$15 from one of the banks. Interestingly, many websites I read before I left said not to let the tour reps get it for you because the rep will try to rip you off and tell you it’s US$20 or something. Didn’t happen to me. The banks that sell the visa’s also do foreign exchange. I’d bought up a whole heap of US$ before I left because I’d been told that changing AU$ in Egypt could be problematic. The exchange rate at Christmas time was about LE5.5=US$1 (LE3.5=AU$1). Transfer to the hotel was pretty painless. Traffic in Cairo was totally insane, though it must be said I did arrive at 7.30am and therefore hit peak hour traffic.
The tour left from Pharaoh Hotel in the Dokki area of Cairo, so I’d booked a night’s pre-tour accommodation because of flight schedules. Even though I arrived at 8.30am, they let me check in straight away and have access to my room. I thought this was pretty awesome, since most other places will make you wait until 2pm or whatever to get the room. Staff there were relatively friendly, though that could have just been them trying to swing a tip. The hotel was basic, but it was clean, and for a budget style hotel, it probably beat my expectations. I do have to mention a couple of things though…The water pressure in the showers is for shit. And it’s noisy! I had a room facing the Nile. Great view and all, but it backs on to one of the busiest thoroughfares in Cairo. You hear the traffic 24/7, and with the constant beeping of horns, you can barely get any sleep. Inside the hotel is quiet, but the noise from the traffic borders on unbearable.
No funny tummy.
Day 2-3: 2 free days
Sleep. Eat. Drink. Sleep some more.
Ventured out on my own for the first time to have a bit of a wander around the area near the hotel. Bad idea? Didn’t get more than 10m outside of the hotel before I had 3 offers for taxi rides. They just wait outside the hotels where westerners stay and pounce the second you walk outside. But I just used my favorite 2 words: la shokran. And they go back to their hiding holes. A little further down the street, and probably my only bad experience in Cairo. Was just walking down the side of the street and some guy walks past me and shoves me in to the street almost in to the path of an oncoming car. But then the same guy grabs me and “saves me” from the traffic. Then the guy wants backsheesh (a cross between a tip and a bribe) for “saving me”. What an asshole. I just walked off then, a little shaken. Another 20m down the road and I get accosted by some guy in the street who wants to chat. He’d seen what happened in the street and told me to be careful of the traffic. He then started up a conversation with “where are you from?”, “where are you staying?”, all that usual type of thing. I lied a bit since that was the advice I’d been given. Don’t tell them where you’re staying. Anyway, since I was just wandering around checking the area out, this guy tells me that he’ll show me where some of the shops and stuff are. So he turns me in the direction I’d just been coming from and shock of all horrors, he leads me to his shop. The Australian shop. It’s covered in mini Australian flags, those tacky clip on koalas, and a table covered in Australian people’s business cards. He even offered to show me his “visitors book”. Apparently what happens is that he pretends he can’t write english and gets tourists to write “fake letters” to people in the book praising him and his shop under the guise of “I’ll mail them later”. Quite a scam he’s got running. But I was aware of what was going on and walked out in less than 30 seconds. So after my attempt to venture out on my own, I was a little ruffled from the experience and went to the little corner store across from the hotel, grabbed some food and drink (they sell pringles! only very expensive pringles!) and went back to hole up in my hotel room.
The night of day 3, I met up with the rest of the tour group for a pre-departure meeting. Geckos runs small group tours (max. 15), which was awesome. You could really get to know the people you were travelling with rather than the Contiki type tours where there’s 50 odd people. There were only 3 solo travellers on our tour: me, another female and a guy. Everyone else was couples, and there was one family with a kid, but he was 15 or so. Then there was our tour leader. A local Egyptian guy from Cairo. A character to say the least!
Still no funny tummy.
Day 4: Pyramids, Sphinx and the Egyptian Museum
The pyramids were awesome! I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but whatever it was, this by far exceeded it. It’s one thing to see them on tv and in books, but seeing them in reality? Makes you think “Holy shit! They really exist!“. Seems stupid, but that’s the way I felt. We went inside the 2nd pyramid which cost LE30 (it’s apparently insanely difficult to get tickets to go in the Great Pyramid since they only sell 150 tickets per day for it and they don’t say what time they go on sale each day). There wasn’t much to see inside, it was really, really cramped (you had to duck as the roof was really low), and photography was banned.
This is possibly one of my biggest complaints about the whole trip actually. The bans on photography everywhere. They claim that it’s because they’re trying to preserve the insides of the monuments. And on some level I understand that, especially inside tombs where flash photography could wreck the ancient paintwork. But inside the pyramids? Why? There’s nothing in there. The only reason to go inside the pyramids is to say that “I’ve been inside the pyramids”. What could photography possibly wreck in there? I think this is just some bullshit excuse they tell people in order to sell official photos and souvenier books outside the monuments. And even inside the tombs with the paintwork, ban flash photography, I have no issue with that. But there are people out there who are perfectly capable of turning their flash off on their cameras. Non-flash phot0graphy does no harm. Yet again though, I put it down to a money making scheme. Ban photography and then force all the tourists to buy photo books from the scamming street stall owners outside. They’ve got a good scheme going.
Then there were the touts for the horses and camels outside the pyramids. A few of us went for a wander to take some photos of the outside of the pyramids, and couldn’t walk more than 10m in any direction without being harassed by someone offering us a camel ride. Again, say la shokran, and move on. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more harsh and say Emshi, which means “go away”. If you show even the tiniest bit of interest, they won’t leave you alone. As we were getting on the mini-bus to move on to the next bit of the pyramids (for better photo ops), we saw some poor kid getting seriously harassed. I think the kid (maybe 14 or so) had taken a photo of a guy on one of the camels, not realising that doing so required payment. Yeah, you can’t even take a photo of a camel without having to pay for it, let alone going for a ride on one. I don’t think this kid even realised what he’d done wrong. There were 2 guys on camels boxing him in so he couldn’t move, yelling at him, demanding money. Dunno where the kids parents were, but he eventually got away from them. Not sure how though. Kid probably crapped his pants. But seriously, for two grown men to have a go at a kid like that, a kid who wouldn’t have even realised what he’d done wrong, I found it really sick. That being said, I duped the camel owners and got photos of them by using my zoom lens on my SLR 
Another thing. Tourist police. If you’re genuinely in trouble, they will help you. But in my experience, they’re really there to make money out of you. Need a photo taken? They’ll take it for you. For a price. Need help finding something? They’ll tell you where it is. For a price. I get that they’re not particularly well paid, however they’re basically running their own scams. Just be wary of anyone offering to do something for you or offering to help you. They expect payment for it. Even the police.
Then off to the sphinx. Only a short walk from the pyramids. You can surprisingly get quite close to it, though not on it. Looks awesome! Again, 50 million people there trying to sell you stuff. At this stage I still found the constant “you want to buy *insert item here*?” amusing. It didn’t last much longer.
Off again, this time to the Egyptian Museum. No cameras allowed. Seriously. They take them off you when you go through security screening, and you can pick them up again (for a small price of course) when you exit the museum. We left our cameras in the bus since our guide told us this before we went inside. Unfortunately we only had 2 hours or so there as it was quite late in the day by this point. Really, you could spend days there just looking at everything. There were the highlights though. King Tut! There’s a few big rooms dedicated to the artifacts found in Tutankamun’s tomb. The funery mask is awesome! So awe inspiring to see it in real life. This is where I got peeved about the no photography thing. There was also the mummy room which contains the mummies of a bunch of dead guys (cost LE100 on top of the general museum admission ticket)! Seriously though, I wasn’t overly impressed by the mummy room. Was a bit “blah” for me. Others loved it though, so to each their own I suppose.
Back to the hotel and we wandered off to some hole-in-the-wall falafel joint for dinner where the locals eat. I am now in love with falafels. They make them differently in Egypt. Use green beans rather than chickpea. Yuuuuuum!
Still no funny tummy!
Day 5: Free day – Coptic Cairo and Khan-El-Khalili Bazaar
Free day today, so we decided to hire a mini-bus and a driver for half a day (8 of us, ~LE150 each). First we headed off to Coptic Cairo to see the more modern history of Cairo. Mainly churches (we’d been told that going to the Coptic museum was a waste of money, so we didn’t bother). We went inside the Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and Synagogue. The Greek Orthodox church had a service on when we got there, so I didn’t feel comfortable going inside the actual church. Others did though. To me it seems hypocritical to go inside a church when there’s a service on if you’re a publicly avowed atheiest. Again, that’s probably just me. The architecture inside all of them was amazing though!
Then we went off to the Bazaar. A big open air street market. I think I heard just about every pickup line on the planet in that place! Funniest line though: “Oh my lady! You look Egyptian!“. Huh? I’m white, fair skinned, blonde…On what possible planet could I possibly be considered to look Egyptian? But it was all part of the fun and games. The harassment here was constant, never walking more than 1-2m without someone trying to sell you something. But at the same time, it was nowhere near as bad as I’d thought it would be. If you said la shokran or no thankyou (since you did sometimes default back to english), they left you alone. People had said “they’ll follow you down the street and won’t leave you alone”. I found this to be bullshit. Put a smile on your face, say la shokran, and walk away. It worked for us.
This was also my first (and by no means my last) attempt at bargaining in Egypt. I managed to get a 100% cotton embroidered t-shirt for LE20 (bargained down from LE40). One of the other guys on our tour though was the bargaining king! Managed to get everything he wanted at insanely low prices. Should have taken him with us wherever we went to do all our bargaining for us!
Lunch was a hilarious affair. There were 8 of us all looking to have lunch somewhere in the bazaar. Walking down one side street, the cafe’s all realised this. Three different cafe’s then started fighting with each other to decide who should get our patronage! So funny! Our driver had recommended this one place though, a pancake house, which was one of the 3 fighting over us. So we went there, but we’re still not sure who was winning the argument! Pancakes in Egypt are weird though. Not like what we’d get at home. Imagine sort of like a pita bread type thing where you fill it up with your filling of choice? They make their pancakes like that. They put the filling on the inside rather than pouring/putting it over the top. Was nice though!
Tonight was Christmas eve though! So the hotel put on a “Christmas dinner” for all the guests. The food was pretty ordinary to be honest, but it’s a budget hotel, so edible was probably the best we should have hoped for I guess.
And off again. This time to catch the overnight train for the 1200km trip from Cairo to Aswan. The train of doom as I so eloquantly put it. It’s supposed to be a 12 hour trip. Took us close to 17 hours. And the toilets of doom. We had been warned prior to getting on the train that the toilets on board are pretty bad and to try not to use them (and you need your own toilet paper, but this is true of toilets all over Egypt). But 17 hours without peeing? It’s hard. It got me about 13 hours in (which if the train had arrived on time wouldn’t have been an issue!). And to say the toilets were rank would be the understatement of the century. Hold your breath, don’t touch anything, and disinfect yourself afterwards. And maybe you won’t retch for the next few hours. My advice? If you can, ditch the train and fly to Aswan
Still no funny tummy!
Day 6: Aswan
The hotel in Aswan was pretty nice, called El Nile. A good view over the Nile, as I’m sure will come as a shocker. Totally wiped after the train ride of doom, so didn’t do a lot. Saw all the horse and carriage rides along the Nile waiting to take people for a ride (both figuratively and litereally). The horses there are in really bad shape though. Severelly malnourished, sores all over. Do them a favour and don’t go for a ride on one unless the horse is in good condition. In the evening we all went for a ride on a felucca on the Nile. We’d been supposed to do it earlier in the day, but because the train was almost 5 hours late, we turned it from an afternoon sail to an evening sail that included a traditional Nubian dinner and a visit to a Nubian village. The Nubian village we visited was on Solheil Island (sp?) and was interesting. They live in mudbrick type houses, though they seem to have all the mod-con’s like airconditioners, fridges, freezers etc. Then back to the hotel to crash. Early start in the morning, 3am wake-up call to go to Abu Simbel…
Still no funny tummy!
Day 7: Abu Simbel, Philae Temple and the Markets
3am wake-up call to get on the bus at 4am for the 3 hour drive south to Abu Simbel. Too many cranky people at that hour.
Abu Simbel was totally awesome though. They had to move it when they built Lake Nasser near the Egypt-Sudan border last century. So it’s now about 400m or so from it’s original location. It’s pretty spectacular. Admittedly, it was smaller than I expected based on the pictures I’d seen of it, but spectacular none the less!
Again with the photography ban, but here I ended up buying an “Abu Simbel photo book” type thing for LE20, so better than nothing I suppose. I also bought a couple of statues to take home, which were supposedly basalt. Yes, I should have known better. I really should have known better. I was dubious right from the start when I saw how smooth they were. But I bargained the guy down from LE1700 for the two, to LE300 for the two. I figured, hey, awesome deal! But turns out they weren’t basalt. They were this really high quality resin stuff. They seriously looked like basalt. And the guy did get his lighter out to show me that they didn’t burn so they weren’t plastic. Apparently this resin stuff they make them from doesn’t burn. Our tour leader laughed at me when we got back and I showed him. Not the end of the world. They weren’t real basalt, but they do look cool, and will make a good present for my parents. I’ll find some real ones and keep them for myself!
Arrived back to Aswan around lunch time and then a bunch of us decided that we wanted to go and see Philae Temple. This is another temple that had to get moved because of flooding. This one only got moved a few hundred meters and you can actually still see the small island that it was originally located on. Again, pretty spectacular. We had a guide here, but she was pretty useless. We actually had guides at all the temples/monuments. Most of them were ok I suppose. The guy at Abu Simbel couldn’t tell the difference between a hibiscus plant and a bougainvillia plant though. That cracked all the Aussies up.
Back to Aswan again and get to our cruise boat for our 3 day cruise from Aswan to Luxor on the M/S Nile Treasure. My room was at about water level, so got some cool views. Smelt a bit like diesel though, which was a bit offputting and did give me a bit of a headache. We don’t depart until tomorrow though.
Off to the markets in Aswan as apparently there’s some fancy dress party on the cruise boat. Need to buy a galabaya (sp?). Ended up buying a shorter one though, because at least that way there’s a possibility I might wear it at home. If I’d bought a full length one, I’d never wear it again. The markets were an experience though. We were on a pretty short time schedule as we had to be back on the boat by a certain time. But half the shop keepers wanted to keep us hanging around in their shops for a chat. I know it’s bad manners, but we ended up having to walk out of one place because they were taking too damn long to go off and find the galabaya’s we wanted in our sizes. We did say we didn’t have much time. What did they expect?
Still no funny tummy!
Day 7: Nile Cruising
On board the M/S Nile Treasure. My thoughts on the boat? Not bad. Rooms were nice, got your own bathroom, there was a pool up on the top deck, sunlounges, small gift shop. My only real complaints were the fact that below top deck the boat constantly smelt like diesel, the crew would freely let themselves in to your room for no apparent reason, the cleaning staff would just walk in to your room without knocking (which almost caused some major embarassment) and drinks were a total ripoff. The cruise was supposed to be all-inclusive, but that apparently doesn’t include drinks. So instead of paying LE2 at the shop for a big bottle of water, you have to pay LE8 on the boat. And they don’t let you bring drinks from “shore” on to the boat. They check your bags and stuff. It was really rude and insulting.
At some point I also managed to get a cold. Knocked me for 6. I’m guessing it’s because we’d been in and out of airconditioning for days and the big temperature jumps probably just threw me.
In the evening we went off to see Kom Ombo Temple. It’s kind of got a Greco-Roman style to it. In some places you can even see where the Romans have vandalised it and there’s Christian crossed carved over the hieroglyphics. Sort of an ancient graffiti I guess? Really interesting though!
After the temple visit, it was time for the fancy dress party. Most people made at least some attempt to dress up in galabayas, so it was a bit of a laugh. Alcohol in Egypt is really expensive though. Where ordinarily in Australia you’d pay about ~AU$8 for a rum and coke, in Egypt you pay the equivalent of ~AU$14. So the fancy dress party was a bit sobering with those prices. Good fun though.
Still no funny tummy! But got a cold 
Day 8: Temples and Luxor
See, in theory, we were meant to arrive in Luxor around lunchtime. But this is Egypt, and the Egyptians have no concept of time. So we arrived around dinnertime. Meaning that half the stuff we were meant to do in Luxor, we never got to do because we arrived late.
So in the morning we went and saw the Temple of Horus at Edfu. I like Horus. The story of Horus is just intriguing to me. So this was fun. I got injured at one point as inside the temple there’s a shrine to Horus. And there’s this mass stampede of people pushing forward towards it to get a photo of it (even though it’s roped off). I was the only one of our group game enough to brave the masses to get a photo. I did get one, but I have the bruises to prove it!
After that we got back on the cruise boat and went through the lock and made our way to Luxor. Our last night on the boat. The cruise was sort of fun I suppose. Something different at any rate. If I did ever go back to Egypt again I think I’d pay more money and do a cruise on a nicer boat though. As much fun as it was, the smell of diesel giving me a constant headache is not an incentive to return.
Still not got funny tummy, but still got the cold.
Day 9: Luxor, Hot air ballooning, Valley of the Kings…
Another early start. Up at 4.30am or something ridiculous to go over to the other side of the Nile for our hot air balloon ride. I’m still debating whether it was worth it. It cost close to US$100 each. And in principle, I had no problem with that. I really wanted to go up in a balloon over the Valley of the Kings. Only, when we got to the balloon site, we find out that we’re being crammed like sardines in to a basket with 18 other people! It was cramped, half the people in the balloon couldn’t see properly, and we got nowhere near the Valley of the Kings. It was my first time in a hot air balloon, so it was a good experience from that point of view. But a total fucking rip-off. We thought we were paying to go up in groups of like 4-6 people to go over the Valley of the Kings. But no. And they also don’t tell you until after you’ve paid and you’re about to get in to the balloon that technically photography is banned! I swear there was almost a riot when the asshole from the balloon company tried to pull that one out his ass. Then when we landed again, we got swarmed by locals trying to sell stuff and begging for money, food etc. By this point our whole tour group had well and truly had enough of the constant harassment, but we still tried to deal with it in good spirits. Only there was this one kid who came up with a donkey and one of the other people in the balloon took a photo of it. I’m sure you can picture what happened next? You need to pay for the privilege of taking the photo of the donkey. But this kid wanted money from everyone because he was sure that the person who took the photo was going to share it around. Yeah, newsflash…Most of us already had photos of donkeys and horses since we had zoom on our cameras that let us inconspicuously take the photos. We all said no to this kid who then started begging us for food, since he saw that most of us still had leftovers from breakfast (which you get on the way from the trip from the Nile to the balloon site). The kid reckoned he was starving and needed food. Wrong. He was well under 5 foot tall and easily weighed 80-100kg. Fat chance in hell he was starving, pardon the pun. So we all got out of the balloon and were all walking back to the cars to go do our next thing for the day, and this kid starts to follow us. By the time we got in to the mini-bus, he’d found half a dozen of his mates who were then surrounding us banging on the side of the mini-bus trying to get us to give them money and food. It’s really quite disturbing. Looking at the size of these kids, you’d suggest they need to go to fat camp or something. Yet they’re outside begging for food because they’re starving? Bullshit. And no, they weren’t bloated from malnourishment. They were just plain fat. This kind of thing really pissed me off because I’m sure there are genuinely starving kids out there who needed the food. But with kids like this constantly harassing the tourists, nobody is going to want to give anybody anything, so those genuinely in need miss out.
Anyway, after a somewhat disappointing hot air balloon ride, we made our way to the Valley of the Kings. Here you could go in to 3 different tombs for the cost of the entry ticket in to the Valley itself, but you could also purchase additional tickets to go in to see King Tut’s tomb (LE100) or the tomb of Ramses VI (LE60). I got a ticket to go in to see King Tut’s tomb, but didn’t bother with Ramses VI since our time there was limited and I’d rather see the other free tombs. Apparently they only ever open a limited number to the public and they change which ones they open every couple of years. The queues to get in to any of the tombs are quite long, and then you’re herded around in a constantly moving line and you’re only in each tomb for about 5 minutes before the line moves out again. I would have loved to spend more time in some of them, but that’s not the way it works I guess. Also, photography is banned inside all the tombs. The fines for taking photos are big. We saw a few people get caught by security and get hauled off to the security office, where apparently fines can run well in to the 10’s of thousands of dollars (US$) and you lose your camera. I ended up buying a photo book type thing for the Valley of the Kings from one of the touts walking around selling them, since the photo ops from outside the tombs were more or less non existant. He wanted LE150, I got it for LE20. Never pay what they first ask for, and be prepared to walk away if you don’t get the price you want. But I digress, then ventured in to King Tut’s tomb, which is actually where his mummy still resides (it’s not in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo like many of the others that they’ve found). It’s pretty amazing in there and I’d personally say it’s worth the extra LE100 ticket to go in and see it. His tomb was much smaller than I expeceted though given the amount of artifacts that Carter et al. found. The tomb must have been crammed roof high with stuff to be able to fit it all in!
Then we moved on to the Valley of the Queens. Didn’t stay there long though. Got tickets to go in to a couple of the tombs there. There was a mummified foetus inside one of them which was a little weird. In one of the tombs, 4 of us were in there wandering around and the guard removed one of the security barriers and showed us this “hole” (struggling for a better word). It might have been a hidden passageway or something, I don’t know. But then he demanded backsheesh for it. See, this is the problem, people do this shit without you wanting it and then demand payment for it. We were resigned to the fact we wouldn’t get out without giving him money, so we each gave him LE1 and got the hell out of there. He came after us shouting “only LE1? What is this? I want more!“. Dude, seriously, you just tried to give us illegal access to a restricted part of a tomb, yelling about it publicly where there’s tourist police around probably isn’t the brightest idea! Though maybe they’re in on the scam and are taking a cut of the profits? It wouldn’t entirely surprise me at this point. We would have loved to visit Nefertari’s tomb, but apparently it’s been shut for a couple of years now (I think for restoration work?). So there’s no chance of buying tickets to get in to see it at the moment. Plus, apparently it’s a bit like the Great Pyramid at Giza, even when it is open, they only offer a very limited number of tickets every day and getting them is next to impossible. I have to say though that the Valley of the Queens is much less busy than the Valley of the Kings. Queues at the Valley of the Queens were more or less non-existant. On the way out though when we were waiting for our mini-bus to show up, we saw a brawl between 2 taxi drivers. Was a little scary actually, because at one point they’d both picked up big rocks and were about to smash each others heads in! One of them then went back to their taxi to grab their gun! Not sure what the argument was about, possibly a customer according to our tour leader who could understand Arabic. But then all the street stall owners decided to crowd around and jeer them on/try to break it up. Eventually the cops showed up and it all dispersed. A little bit of chaos in the day does everyone a bit of good…Right?!?!
Off we went again, this time to Habu’s Temple (ticket LE30 each). Can’t quite remember a lot about this one, but we did get to see an ancient toilet! Made of stone. They must have frozen their asses off in mid-winter! Off again to the Alabaster Factory! Finally, I could make up for the stupid statue mistake I made in Abu Simbel and buy some real basalt statues. I managed to get one of Horus and one of Anubis for a total of LE850 (down from LE980, not as much room to bargain in actual real shops), they’re about 15-20cm high each. I like them. They’re currently sitting on the mantle at home 
Then we took off to see Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple. I didn’t buy tickets to go in and see it, though I think they were about LE50 each. You could get decent photos of it from a distance, so I didn’t bother. Didn’t stay there long though before we had to leave for our donkey ride. Yes, you read right, donkey ride.
Keep in mind, I still had the cold that I picked up on the cruise boat. My head was blocked, my stomach hurt, and I generally felt like crap. The last thing I wanted to do was go donkey racing from Hatshepsut’s Temple back to the Nile (about 7km). But it was the only option and was part of the tour. So on I get, planning to just trot slowly the whole way. Also bear in mind that I don’t like horses much. So I wasn’t entirely keen on donkey’s to start with, even before I got a cold. But I was a good sport and decided to go along with it all. Only when we get on the donkeys and start making our way to our destination, the 2 guys who own the donkeys thought that we all needed to be running. So they kept whacking the donkey’s on the ass (again excuse the pun), so that they would run faster. This made an already somewhat uncomfortable donkey ride pretty much unbearable. I felt like puking my guts up half the time. When I kept telling them to stop making the donkey run faster because I didn’t feel well, they just laughed and thought I was joking! Then they made it run even faster. It wasn’t until about 5 minutes before we got to the Nile and I had to get off and be sick that they finally realised that I was serious. Though by that point I was just so pissed off and angry with them for ignoring my pleas for over an hour that I just got back on the donkey, trotted slowly to the end of the journey, got off and walked away. Possibly if I’d been feeling better, I would have enjoyed myself more and been less pissed off with the whole ordeal.
We then made our way back across the Nile and walked to our hotel. The hotel we stayed at in Luxor was called the Sunset Hotel. It’s about a 15-20 minute walk from Luxor Temple and is sort of (ok, it is) a bit of a shithole. I didn’t like it. It was too far from anything interesting, and it was pretty rundown. Now ok, it was probably more what I expected from a budget tour operator like Geckos to put us up in. But after the reasonable quality of the other hotels and cruise boat we’d stayed in during our trip, this one was a massive letdown. We went off to the Luxor markets after dinner for a bit of a wander. There’s actually an expat Aussie woman there who owns a little shop (fixed price, no bargaining) with reasonably well priced stuff. You could probably buy it cheaper at one of the street stalls where there’s also a bit more range, but there’s genuinely no hassle in the shop, you don’t have to worry about bargaining (which by this stage was getting a bit tiresome), and the woman herself is lovely and loves to have a bit of a chat. If you’re tired of the hassle of shopping in Egypt, I definitely recommend visiting this shop as a getaway from it all. We stayed in the markets till quite late and most vendors were shutting up shop when we left (around 11.30pm). Got taxis back to our hotel. Some kid had followed us from the markets to outside where we were finding taxis. Wouldn’t leave us alone. Begging for money. I guess I’m used to the situation where when people beg you for money and you say no, they leave you alone and move on to the next guy. Not in Egypt. You say no, and they still keep at it. Annoying the crap out of me isn’t going to make me feel more sympathetic to your cause and make me give you money! Taxis finally arrived and we made our getaway, though the kid did try to get in one of the taxis at one point. Do they ever give up?
No funny tummy, but still got the cold
Day 10: Temple of Karnak and the drive to the Red Sea
A little bit of a sleep in today! Finally! Well we didn’t have to be up until 7.30am, which on this trip, was a sleep-in! We got the horse and carriages to the Temple of Karnak (part of the tour). I wasn’t entirely keen on the idea given the state of some of the horses we’d seen on the trip so far. But our tour leader made sure that we got ones that were in good condition, and when we asked him to ask the drivers if they could not use their whips, that was ok too. While I may not like horses much, I’m against animal cruelty in a big way. The driver even let me have a go with the reins at one point. Was a bit of a laugh and definitely a different way to get around Luxor! The temple itself was staggering in size. It’s huge! And still reasonably well preserved. They’ve even got a “rock garden” type area off to the side where bits have fallen off at various points in time and they’re just chunks of rock with hieroglyphics on that the restoration guys will eventually put back together. You even got to see an old mudbrick type ramp which gives the archaeologists some idea as to how they build these monumental structures. Really cool, and probably one of the temples I enjoyed visiting the most. After a few hours we then made our way back to the hotel again on horse and carriage to checkout and begin our drive to Hurghada on the Red Sea.
I won’t bore you with the details of the 5 hour drive. It was boring, through a rocky desert. And by this time my head had cleared up from the cold, but I’d acquired a cough. I imagine sitting in a mini-bus with me for 5 hours when I had a cough probably wasn’t pleasant. Sorry! We arrived in Hurghada in the late afternoon. Went out to a seafood restaurant for dinner. Was pretty awesome and about 1/3 the price of what we’d pay for an equivalent seafood meal at home. Good food too! Back to the hotel and more or less had an early night. After the constant go, go, go of the temple hopping it was nice to just relax for a bit.
Still not got funny tummy, but got a cough.
Day 11: Hurghada, snorkelling and New Years Eve!!!
The place is full of Russians! Seriously! And they have no manners. At all. Queues are a foreign concept to these people. You get in the line at breakfast…Russians don’t line up. It’s a free-for-all. Realised this pretty quickly. They genuinely don’t seem to know (or care) that they’re rude assholes. I know I’m generalizing, but I didn’t meet a single one in the hotel restaurant who had any manners, and the way they treated the hotel staff was abhorent.
So it was windy and the weather was pretty average. We were supposed to do a trip out to the reef to go snorkelling (and a couple of us were considering paying extra to do a couple of dives). But the diving company said the visibility was for shit and we’d be wasting our money. Finally some honesty and people not trying to take your money! Loved it! A little disappointing about the no diving, and everyone else wanted to cancel the snorkelling since the weather was pretty average. So instead we did a glass bottom boat ride out in the Red Sea over some of the smaller coral reefs. Was windy and fridgid, but what the hell, I was on the Red Sea so I jumped in the water! I did have bathers on, so it wasn’t entirely unplanned. The water was actually really warm. It was just freezing as hell when I got out and the wind hit me
Eventually made our way back to shore and back to the hotel. I went to the jewellery shop next to the hotel and bought a few pieces. Got a stirling silver bangle, a stirling silver and lapus scarab pendant, and a white gold cartouche ring with my name on it (takes 24 hours for them to make). All up I got it for LE1850 (~AU$520 given the exchange rate on the day). The white gold cost about what I expected, it’s never cheap. But I do have to say that the silver was more expensive than I was expecting. You pay for jewellery by weight for the most part (based on the daily cost of gold/silver/platinum on the metals exchanges), and then pay a small “workmanship” charge on top of that. We were told that you could generally bargain jewellery down by 10-15% maximum because you can’t bargain at all on the cost of the metal, only the workmanship charge. I got LE100 off what they originally asked. Not too bad I guess.
Since it was NYE, the hotel had this compulsory dinner thing on. It was really not good. Full of Russians again. Joy. We figured with what the tour company had been forced to pay for us to attend this compulsory gala dinner, that you know, there’d be table service and maybe some drinks (even just softdrinks/water) included. But no. Serve yourself buffet. And sky-high drink prices. We thought what the hell, it’s NYE, we’ll get some cocktails. Bad idea. I ordered a strawberry daquiri. It was served at room temperature (warm), the drink hadn’t been strained and was full of chunks of strawberry, yet it cost me ~AU$15. Someone else ordered a margerita and it was served in a tumbler, without ice! I mean seriously? WTF?!?! We ditched the dinner at around 10pm and went back to the hotel to get ready to head out for a real NYE party at Ministry of Sound.
Yes, Hurghada has a MoS! Cost us LE150 each for a ticket, but that got us a table and a drink each of our choice. Pretty good deal really considering it was NYE. Got a taxi from the hotel to the club and so began our run-in with the locals for the night. At the dinner thing that the hotel put on, they had party hats and streamers and masks and stuff on the tables. We took them with us when we left to go to the club. So we get out of the taxi and not 2 seconds later one of the guys gets set upon by this kid (no more than 7-8 years old by my reckoning). At first the kid started begging for money, but by now we’d been told enough times not to give them any because if you give money to one, all their mates want some too. We soon learned that this didn’t just apply to money. In order to get the kid to piss off and leave us alone, the guy gave the kid his party hat. Big mistake. Kid goes and gets his sister and says “you give me something, now you all have to give my sister something” while looking around at the rest of our group who were still wearing their party regalia. Oh no. We wanted our party gear to wear in to Ministry of Sound! No chance in hell they’re getting it! First kid realises we weren’t going to give in and goes and gets almost a dozen of his mates (these are all still kids mind you). This group of pre-pubescent kids then surrounds us and starts trying to simply grab the hats and masks off of us. Gets even better when they start trying to grab at the purses of the females in the group! I mean ffs! The whole thing was just really disconcerting. These are kids. You want to be nice to kids. But they were effectively trying to rob us! Kid or not, I’m not going to put up with that shit from anybody, anywhere in the world. In the end, we were bigger than them and just walked off. Didn’t stop them chasing us all the way to the door of the club though. It’s crap like this that makes me not want to spend my tourism dollars to go back to visit a place again.
I digress. The club was alright. On the beach, so you could theoretically walk about barefoot. But it is a club, and clubs mean broken glasses, so probably not the wisest idea. The DJ was pretty average in my opinion. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t particularly like the style of music he was playing. Hip-hop. Blah. I like the traditional Ministry of Sound stuff. House, trance, techno. Not this Sean Paul love fest the DJ had going on. Then the stupid twat had the gall to miss the New Years countdown! Seriously! Midnight hit and nothing happened. 10 minutes later I think he realised he’d forgotten it was NYE and did the countdown 10 minutes late! Pathetic! Anyway, we hung around till about 2.30am and then headed back to the hotel since we had to be up the next morning (but not till about 10am) to drive from Hurghada back to Cairo. As we were about to leave the club, I had to deal with an asshole Russian guy who didn’t seem to know what the word no meant. I mean sure, guys hit on you in clubs, hardly a novel concept, and sometimes you might even choose to hook up with them. But generally when you say no, they move on to their next potential conquest. I said no to this one guy, way too touchy feely for my liking, about 10 times. Still didn’t seem to realise I wasn’t interested. One of the guys in our group had to intervene. Guess the affluent Russians who frequent this resort town are used to getting whatever they want? Unpleasant experience. But NYE was relaxing and fun 
Still no funny tummy, and cough starting to subside.
Day 12: The drive from Hurghada to Cairo
Need I bore you with the details? It’s an ~7 hour drive from Hurghada to Cairo. The only highlight was driving past the Suez Canal. There’s a couple of offshore oil rigs along the way. And you get to see all the ships lining up to go through the canal. I did learn something though, that the Suez Canal is the biggest money earner for the Egyptian economy. Honestly, I would have thought it was tourism considering the costs to get in to all the temples/museums/tombs etc and the number of people that visit the country every year. But no, it’s shipping! Learn something new every day!
Got back to Cairo around dinner time and we checked back in to our Cairo hotel (Pharaohs Hotel in Dokki). Then went out for one last dinner as a tour group at a traditional Egyptian restrauant out near the pyramids in Giza. Food was alright I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly hungry. Was a long day and I was tired.
Back at the hotel and some of us said our goodbyes as some were leaving the next day. Exchanged emails/facebook details/other contact details. Filled out our tour surveys. Then we basically all went and crashed! It’s been a long couple of weeks.
No funny tummy, and a minor cough.
Day 13: Goodbyes and flights home!
So one thing I forgot to mention in all my above daily entries was that just prior to New Years, Israel bombed the fuck out of Palestine. Decades old fighting flaring up yet again. Many hundreds dead, so yeah, all over the international news. Shock of all horrors, my parents saw it on the news and also heard that they were threatening nuclear action. Thus started the raving phone calls demanding that I “get the hell out of the Middle East right this fucking second“. I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Firstly, I was nowhere near the Israeli border. Secondly, Egypt was trying to negotiate the cease-fire agreement. Thirdly, I was nowhere near the Israeli border. Parents however, do not seem to grasp these facts. They just see chaos in the news, hear the words Israel, Palestine and Egypt in the same sentence, and therefore automatically assume that Egypt’s at war with Israel! Seriously though, Egypt is fine, at least at the time of writing this entry. My mother was just glad to hear I was flying out today.
So in the morning at breakfast I said my goodbyes since I was leaving just after lunch. Tipped the tour leader. He was pretty awesome. Let us change the tour itinerary (within reason) to suit the group since there were some things that we wanted to see that weren’t on the official itinerary. Really flexibile with it all. Nothing like Contiki which is run more like a boot camp and you can’t change anything. Sort of one of the benefits of doing tours like this in a small group I guess. Easier to please everyone.
Sad to be heading home from such an awesome trip. But also happy to be getting back to normality.
The airport was a bit odd on the way out though. I still had a bunch of LE leftover and figured I’d buy some souveniers after I’d checked in and passed passport control and then exchange the rest of them back to US$ or AU$ after that. Bought my tacky souveniers (keyrings, bookmarks with the hieroglyphic alphabet, mini pyramids etc.) and then realised there was no foreign exchange place after passport control! There’s 3 bank desks that do exchange, but they’re all at the check-in area. Something they conveniently don’t tell you before hand. So now I’m stuck with several hundred LE that I can’t exchange at the banks in Australia. I might stick it up for sale on Ebay or something so some other tourist can buy it off me before they embark on their Egyptian adventure.
The flight home was craptastic. I’m going to leave that rant for another blog entry though. It’s not relevant to Egypt. It’s airline specific.
And guess what? I survived 2 weeks in Egypt and didn’t get funny tummy!!!!!!! So blah to those oh so gracious friends of mine who said “it’s not a matter of if, but when you get sick in Egypt“. I didn’t get sick! Yes, I caught a cold, but that hardly laid me up in bed and over the toilet for days. How do I think I managed to avoid it? I took a bottle of alcohol based Dettol hand sanitizing gel. It’s quick dry stuff that you squeeze on your hands, rub them together and it dries. Use it every single time after you handle money. Use it every single time before, and after, you eat. Don’t eat salad unless your tour guide says it’s safe (since they wash it in unclean water sometimes). And only drink (and brush your teeth) using bottled water. That’s what I did and I didn’t get sick. Not sure if that works for everyone, but nobody on our tour got sick and that’s basically what everyone else did too. So take that advice as you will.
And thus ends my epic Egyptian adventure! Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed being there! I know this entry does have some not so nice things to say, but I really did love this trip.
Geckos was a really good company to do this sort of trip with. I was really expecting a budget trip, but it was nowhere near what I’d thought to be budget. I thought it was a sort of middle of the road type thing. We didn’t have to camp, all the hotels were reasonable (private bathrooms, hot water, flushing toilets, elevators), a decent cruise boat, small tour group, great tour leader, knowledable Egyptologists at the sites…Highly recommend them really (though as I mentioned previously, their pre-departure setup needs some work). I may even book through them again in the future, which is more than I can say for Contiki!
Will I go back to Egypt? I’d like to. But if I do, I expect I’ll just go to Alexandria (since I really want to see the library there and didn’t have time on this trip) and I’d also like to go over to the Sinai Peninsula and see some of the stuff over there (though that will wait until the tensions with Israel are well and truly settled down).
