Well It's A Marveous Night For A Moondance

I'll preface with this blog entry with an apology for dropping off the face of the blogging planet! After Cambodia I was in Australia for a few weeks before I headed home and completed my circumnavigation of the globe! I'm now picking up again from the trip to Egypt and Jordan with my best friend Dan!

As I write this we are on our way to Abu Simbel which is a town in southern Egypt by Lake Nasser, about 40km from the Sudanese border. We woke up bright and early at 2:30am because the only way to get access to Abu Simbel is by police convoy and the only convoy leaves at 4am! It’s actually pretty peaceful to watch the stars outside the window of the minibus, that is, if you can forget the gazillion other tour buses on the same convoy! In reading about the city, there appears to be two main highlights, both temples built by Ramses II, and then the lake of course.

Last nigh (August 27th) we had a nice ride down the Nile to a small island town. Until a few years ago, the island was uninhabited but when they built the High Dam and flooded the Nubian land, they gave the island to the Nubian people. We hiked around the island and viewed an amazing sunset from the roof of a primary school and then headed to the home of a Nubian man for dinner. The dinner was great, even if I didn’t know what half of the dishes contained! There was a dish involving potatoes in a tomatoe sauce of sorts that was delicious! I am going to have to see if I can find the recipe for that and Nubian bread somewhere.

We arrived in Aswan about 11:30am on the same day. This, after a relaxing 14 hour night train from Cairo. Other than the frigid air con and some jolts that seemed as if we’d hit a cow on the tracks, it really wasn’t too bad. I even got a few hours of uninterrupted sleep!

Still working my way backwards, we arrived in Cairo on the 25th. Our hotel was one street away from the Nile and had some amazing city views from the restaurant on the 10th floor! We did the quick tourist run through Cairo, seeing the pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, and the Egypt Museum. Dan and I paid to go into the Great Pyramid which was pretty cool. When I say cool, I definitely don’t mean the temperature! The inside of the pyramid was warm and muggy and I was sweating by the time we finished the climb to the last chamber. It was well worth it though. The chamber had amazing acoustics and your echo seemed to go on forever. I want a room like that in my house some day!

When we first arrived at our hotel, Dan and I decided to take a walk around town. We were quickly cornered by a friendly Egyptian man. By the way, if you ever meet a man in Egypt and forget his name, there’s a good chance it’s Mohamed. This isn’t a stereotype, we have had two taxi drivers, our tour guide and this man from the street tell us the same! (They were all Mohamed!) Anyway, Mohamed did a great job of reeling us in with his schpeel and we ended up back in his shop where he and his cousin sold Papyrus scrolls with paintings on them. Who knows if they were real or fake, I took one for the team and ended with one in my hands. Hopefully I can get in back into the US!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m going to eat my boxed breakfast and enjoy the stars!