(images shamelessly borrowed from many places, mostly www.balesworldwide.com)
Well, basically, we flew in to Cairo, and stayed at a nice hotel that was well within site of the pyramids. We visited the cairo museum, and in particular had a jolly good look at all of Tut Ankh Amen's luggage for the afterlife, but also lots of other really old stuff, like 3000-year-old papyrus. That evening, we went to the sound+light show at the pyramids, which was really good, and was also a good excuse for Estelle to try out all kinds of long exposures on her new camera :-)
The next day we visited the pyramids in daylight. They're really truly enormous. You've seen them on the telly, and you know they're big, but you get there by coach, and they're truly enormous. Just looking at them, you can see they're really really big, but then you notice that it's made up of hundreds and hundreds of layers of bricks, except the little people walking around the side are just over 1 brick high, so they're not bricks, they're truly enormous chunks of rock. It's amazing. We went into the 2nd pyramid too - the Great Pyramid was closed for restoration work (apparently some vandals sprayed grafiti all over the inside), but the 2nd pyramid is almost as big... in fact from a distance it even looks BIGGER because it's on slightly higher land. You go through the metal-detector-archway thing, and get your bag checked (there's quite high security all over the place since "the incident" in 1997), then you go into this small hole in the side, and start walking. It's going quite steeply downwards, not quite enough to deserve steps, but they've put boarding down, with horizontal strips on top to stop you slipping, I'm sure you know the stuff. It's not high enough to stand up, you have to crouch quite a lot, and obviously there's not room for lights on the ceiling, so they're sort of built into the handrail that they've put in. There's not a lot of width, either - if there was someone THIN coming the other way, they could probably get past, but if there was someone fat, forget it. Luckily, after shuffling downwards for what seems like ages, you get to a wider, taller, flatter bit in the middle, where there's plenty of passing room and you can stretch your back a bit. It's then exactly the same, only upwards, again for ages, and just when you think you must be about to reach the other side of the pyramid, you in fact reach the burial chamber in the middle. There's LOADS of space in there - it's about 30 ft high, 15 ft wide, 30 ft long, probably. There's some grafiti in there from the bloke who discovered it in 1818 or thereabouts, and a coffin-thing, and a large bloke who shouts at you a lot, hurries you around and out, and expects for a tip for it. There's a LOT of tipping in Egypt, it's really part of the culture. You go to the loo, and a bloke pulls a hand-towel out of the dispenser for you and expects a tip for it, for example. Luckily MOST of the tips were included in our package - guides, drivers, porters, etc etc, but there were still plenty who still expected tips from us aswell! Whilst at Giza we also saw the Sphinx, of course!
The next day, we flew to luxor at some unearthly hour of the morning, and did karnak and luxor. the sheer age of these things is astounding. 2500 BC, 4500 years old, well over twice the age of our calendar, for goodness sake! and these things are still standing, and still have an awful lot of detail! There's heiroglyphics everywhere, of course, and back then the gods walked the earth, and there's pictures of the gods and goddesses, pharaohs, etc etc. Every now and then, you see a hint of colour that's still there, and try to imagine that instead of being sandy, everything would have been painted in amazing bright colours.
This is really brought home the next day, when we got up early (again) to visit the valley of the kings. It's got to be done early in the morning - it reached 42 degrees C when we were there, and was due to get alot hotter later in the day obviously. Here though, there are deep tombs cut into the sides of the valley. This is real indiana jones type stuff, long sloping tunnels with ancient carvings everywhere, and here, because they're deep underground, and have been sealed for ages, protected not only from the sun but also from the air and from visitors for thousands of years, there are REALLY VIVID colours - bright white background with reds and greens and blues and yellows inet into the heiroglyphics. We'd already seen hints of colour on some of the other temples, but this really allowed us to put 2 and 2 together - not only are these things really huge, not only were they built many thousands of years ago, but they also had damned PRETTY painting once upon a time! Incredible!
Hat Shep Sut's temple was nearby too, technically in the valley of the queens next door. She was a bit contravercial at the time, because all the pharaohs were supoposed to be BLOKES, but when one of them died, she came up with this story that her mother had had sex with the sun god Rah, and she was the result of their union, so she had the right to rule the kingdoms of upper and lower egypt. The high priests backed her up on this (and that's the most important thing, because EVERYONE listenned to the high priests), so she was made pharaoh. She built this huge temple, 3 layers, loads of columns, and the walls describe this story. Her mother visits Rah looking nice and slim, and leaves with a bulging pregnant belly, and Hat Shep Sut is born later, hence having the right to rule, etc etc. In a lot of statues and carvings she has to look fairly strong and manly, because she's supposed to be mean, tough, and powerful, but she's still female. When the next pharaoh eventually got into power, he was obviously very upset that some WOMAN had dared to get in when he was the one true rightful ruler (can you imagine?), so he defaced her temple. We're not only looking at an ancient temple, we're looking at ancient vandalism!
From luxor we were on a nile cruiser called the "Nile Beauty", which, compared with the others we saw, was quite possibly the nicest boat on the nile. It was AMAZINGLY relaxing - as soon as you get on board, you feel at home. The crew are really friendly. The rooms are not cramped, and are very tidy. There's a nice swimming pool, although it obviously had to be pretty small - about 3 strokes long, in fact, 4 if you take the diagonal! Breakfast was self-serve, but there was so much choice that it ended up being a large breakfast. Lunch was a full 4-course meal, which was really too much for some people, particularly considering the heat. We had afternoon tea round about 17:30, very english! Then another huge 4-course meal for dinner. All very high quality too, and very nicely cooked. When cruising, it didn't rock noticably, despite the unexpected width of the Nile. We got a tour of the bridge and the engine room at one stage, quite interesting, although it was difficult to know how seriously to take them when they're telling you how many wives and babies they've all got!
The boat had something like 50 cabins, all of them twins or doubles, but we only had about 35-40 people on it our week, so it certainly wasn't cramped. Our party (Bales Worldwide Tours) was the largest, in fact, with 19 people. Mothers with their sons, mothers with their daughters, couples of all ages, a few singles of a variety of ages, even a couple of old ladies who once used to be teacher and pupil. Nurses, professional musicians, architechts, all kinds of people, and we all got on very well, it was great. We also had a BRILLIANT tour guide, Tarek, who stayed with us from the moment we arrived in egypt to the moment we left. He was great, he really knew his stuff, and he was a lot of fun too. He did a great job of keeping us all moreorless together, happy, informed, and not too exhausted. He was also very good at getting us good bargains... Someone tries to sell us a local stringed instument, and they start at 50 egyptian pounds, and we haggle them down to about 18, which we thought was quite good, then along comes Tarek, and we say "Tarek, how much is this worth?", and he says "oh, about 7", and the trader instantly accepts 7 and moves on to pester someone else.
At Edfu, there's a large weir and a similarly large lock - it has to be large enough to take the nile cruisers, some of which were a fair bit bigger than ours. This obviously takes a long time to fill and empty, and considering most of the cruisers seem to be doing moreorless the same route starting at moreorless the same time of the week, there's basically a fair queue that forms at Edfu. The locals have caught onto this, so they're out there in their rowing boats, swarming around the cruisers, trying to sell you rugs and clothes and stuff. The boats are quite tall though, and the only deck that's anywhere near the water is the door that gets you to reception, and the traders aren't allowed on board, so what they have to do is wave their stuff around until you show the slightest hint of interest, then they quickly wrap them around their arms, stuff them into plastic bags, and throw them right up onto the top of the boat where the customers are. This is quite a height, believe me! You're supposed to get the stuff out of the bag and have a look at it, decide whether you like it, and either throw the clothes, or your money, back down in the bag. Obviously people occasionally miss though, and the bags end up in the Nile, but they float pretty well, and the traders go chasing off after them. Quite a laugh, anyway!
There's a temple at Edfu too, which we visited by horse and carriage the next morning. Again, huge, very well preserved, lots more heiroglyphics, lots more carvings of the pharaohs conversing with the gods, lots more really ancient history. This is one of the best preserved temples, with very little defacing, very little quarrying by the locals, although still very little colour because of the actin of the sun. Usually you have to look up in places, where the sun can't get under the roof, and there's long lines of vultures painted there that are supposed to protect the people walking underneath.
One of the most amazing things we saw was the unfinished obelisk in an ancient granite quarry. This thing's enormous, like 300 foot long, 3 times bigger than cleopatra's needle in london, and nearly twice as big as any obelisks that are still standing today. It's made of granite, and, unfortunately, it's cracked. We're talking about granite here, not sandstone or anything, but REALLY hard rock, really really hard stuff, the stuff that modern workmen still really hate. They didn't have modern tools. They'd slowly chip at it with other hard rocks, they'd pour oil on it, and burn the oil until the rock was red hot, then they'd pour water on it to try to get it to crack. They'd drill holes in it, put wood in the holes, and pour water on the wood to make it expand, and again, hopefully make it crack correctly. All this, in really hot weather. We had to walk up the side of the quarry to where we could see it, and some of us were nearly passing out from the heat. You see it, and it's VAST. The theory is, they finished it, they tried to lift it out, but it cracked, so they just left it there. All that work, wasted, but you can't help thinking, if it hadn't cracked, they'd have got it out of there, somehow, and they'd have got it all the way down to the Nile, a fair coach ride for us, they'd have probably put it on a vast boat, taken it somewhere more useful, got it ashore, got it to a temple somewhere, and got the damned thing upright, but it's ENORMOUS and we probably wouldn't stand a chance if we wanted to do it these days!
Kom Ombo was another temple we visited. This one was built RELATIVELY recently, IE it was only a few hundred years BC instead of a few thousand! This was built by the greeks, who were trying to get the egyptians to adopt their gods, so they were trying to convince them that they were the same... "we've got different names for them, but look, they're the same gods!" sort of thing. Lots of defacing here from the ancient egyptians themselves, of course, who didn't want to accept the greek gods.
Visiting the Aswan Dam and the High Dam was really strange. After all this stuff that's so damned old, we've got hydroelectric dams, built very recently! The Aswan dam was built with the help of the british, but wasn't good enough, so they built the High dam with the help of the russians. Both are really vast, particularly the High Damn, which is really vast, and responsible for over 80% of the country's electricity. For some reason, the water that comes out of the turbines, they don't just let it slosh into the river, they project it diagonally upwards, forming enormous arches of foaming white water, hundreds of tonnes every second. There were some stats on the number of megawatts that each turbine was responsible, and the ammount of water that went through them, but they were so unbelievable that I've already forgotten them!
Above the high damn, there's lake nassar, 300 miles long and up to 50 miles wide. this flooded the sites of about 19 temples, but they've managed to rescue something like 16 of them, which is pretty good. We went to visit the philae temple, which was about 75% underwater by the time it was rescued. They basically had to cut it up (the ancient egyptians might have been able to move entire solid pillars, but they're too big for our modern machinery! ha!), then move it off of the flooded island onto a nearby island that wasn't flooded. In all the ancient temples we'd seen, everything lines up - the outer entrance lined up with the inner entrance which lined up with the outer hall of columns which lined up with the inneer hall of columns which lined up with the outer sanctuary which lined up with the inner sanctuary which lined up with the offerring table which lined up with the place where the gold statue of th god itself used to sit... But because this new island wasn't quite the same shape, they couldn't reassemble it entirely correctly, and it doesn't line up any more, which is a bit unfortunate, but it's still beter than sitting in the water falling apart I suppose.
It wasn't just historical sites we visited though... Along the way, we visited a perfume factory and saw them glass-blowing to make the little perfume bottles. Quite a stunning variety of techniques involved, some of them things you'd never expect to be able to do with a material like glass. We visited an alabaster carving place, and watched them making jars and stuff. We went to a jewelry factory. We went to a papyrus factory, where they take the papyrus wood, which is a bit like thick cane without the knots in, they cut the bark off, cut it into really thin strips, soak them for a day, lay them in neatly overlapping patterns, press them, then hand-paint them. In theory, given the right conditions, they'll last another 3000 yeas like the stuff we saw in the museum... Unfortunately we wanted to bring ours back to an english climate, so they'll last a fraction of that time.
On the last day, we took a ride in a felucca, which is basically a local sailboat. Again, quite relaxing, quite pleasant. We went around kitchenner island, which has a sort of equivalent of kew gardens, and we saw lots of wildlife and stuff. We then flew from aswan back to cairo, stayed overnight at the post airport hotel, then flew back to england.
The security has increased a lot since 1997, when there were people taking pot-shots at the cruisers and there was "the incident" at Hat Shep Sut's temple. They've now got those metal-detector things like in airports, at the entrances to all the main hotels and all the main sites, and x-ray machines at most of them too, and a very noticable, but not TOO offensive police presence. Enough to make you feel safe, enough to notice when the traders are trying to rip you off and do something about it, but not so much that it's intrusive. There was also usually a policeman sat on the bank wherever we moored up, and on a couple of occasions we even had a plain-clothes police escort with us on the coach to carious places.
It was a great holiday, made particularly great by our brilliant tour guide, it covered plenty of the main sites, plenty of local culture, it was very classy, fairly well paced - lots crammed in, but not TOO crammed, and it really wasn't very expensive either. www.balesworldwide.com, specifically "treasures of the nile", I'd reccommend it to anyone.