When Mohsen invited me to visit him and his family in Egypt, I said yes even though it turned out he was kidding. I seriously wanted to go! Eventually he came around to thinking it was a good idea too.

June 24, 2001 - Aswan, Egypt

Greetings from very hot Upper Egypt (south)! After a few days in bustling Cairo I took an early morning plane down here for a cruise. I arrived Wednesday afternoon, after traveling for many hours. I'm not exactly sure how many because of time changes, plane changes, and generally sleeping through all of them. I was delighted to have empty seats next to me much of the time, which made for comfortable snoozing.

Upon arrival, Mohsen met me at the airport and we drove to his apartment, which his wife and he have kept all these years (~7) that they've lived in the US. I left my backpack and we all headed out to meet Mohsen's mother-in-law (Nevein's mother) and to go shopping for jewelry. We went to the bazaar; I don't know if it's THE bazaar, or just one of many. There were narrow alley ways with many shops, the merchants all wanting to invite us in. There were glass bottles, copper pots, and fancy mosaic containers decorated with mother of pearl. There was gold and silver jewelry, baskets, t-shirts, scarves, and scarabs. There aren't any prices and I wasn't brave or determined enough to embark on trying to negotiate with them. Pretty much they try to charge foreigners a ton, which is reasonable given the disparity of income, but it's hard to make sense of what is too much under such conditions, with no basis for comparison.

Thursday we had a real tourguide for visiting the pyramids! Mohsen's friend loves his job as a tour guide so much that he spent his day off driving us around and telling us about the ancient Egyptian culture and orchestrating our visits very smoothly. We started in the ancient capital of Memphis, where there were not too many tourists. We took pictures of Ramsees II statues that had been recovered after subsequent generations had tried to destroy everything. We went inside a pyramid in Sakkara (I think that's the same as Saqqara, latin spellings of Arabic words vary). The outside was crumbled stone, covered in the sand that blows from the desert, but inside was intact, repaired, and mostly empty thanks to dedicated thieves who chipped their way through granite to get to the tomb. We were the only ones inside, and it was lit. Our guide described the colors as they used to be, though now they are all faded to grey. Time and tourists and air have damaged what had been preserved for so long!

Nevein and Daniel in Memphis (June 22, 2001)

Of course we posed for pictures near the famous Great Pyramid, which is, I think, the father's of Cheops. Cheops' is there too, and another, smaller one. A very fascinating tidbit we heard was that the pyramids were NOT built by slaves who were killed so they couldn't pass down the secrets of building them, but they were built by people who wanted to do that work to honor the pharoah that they believed to be (a representative of?) their god. That's why the pyramids got smaller as the people became less devoted, not as many devotees to do the work.

Friday I visited the Egyptian Museum, and zoomed through thousands of years in 2 hours. Tutankamen's collection takes up 1/2 the second floor (and there are only 2 floors) of the museum, it was quite a treat that collectors found that before thieves so that there is so much preserved for us to see, in our eternal effort to understand the mysteries of time unimaginably long ago. In the cyclical nature of time, I wonder how long it will take for the current civilization(s) to (re)learn all that the ancient Egyptians seemed to know about science, for example?

Today I embark on a cruise downriver on the Nile. It's a long story, in a way, but Mohsen and family convinced me that it's not necessarily safe to to travel down here alone, and I didn't really have time to take the train as I'd originally planned. Getting the flight and cruise ticket reservations was an adventure in itself! It took a few hours to ascertain that this time it was going from Aswan to Luxor, instead of vice versa, and then in the meantime the Egypt Airlines agent had sold me a ticket at the fare for Egyptians and drove all the way out to where we were to make the adjutment (so it wouldn't have to come out of his pocket).

The cruise boat is incredibly luxurious; it's interesting that it could be priced as it is and, comparatively, the flight from Cairo to Aswan was rather expensive! However, in my reasoning I determined that I needed to come here now because I do not know when I will be back in Egypt, and I do not know how long the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings will maintain their colors, their shape, before time takes its toll.

I hope to write again from Austria, and if not there (where the adventures will be fewer and the relaxation more) then from Croatia.

Be well, and collect your own stories to exchange with me upon my return! I'm taking lots of pictures, but still it is impossible for me to capture a country on film. My eyes see so much more than my camera does!

Egypt pictures II