This is Kate – I thought it was time to let Matt have a break from writing the blog. (Matt: The truth is that I outright forced her to write this section.) We are in Alexandria right now, we just went to see the catacombs which were like something straight out of an Indiana Jones set. Now we’re waiting for our train back to Cairo. Today is the last day of our middle east adventure. Tomorrow we start our West Africa leg by flying to Ouagadougou (what a fantastic name), the capital of Burkina Faso.
Egypt has been great! There is so much to see here and, despite having heard so many bad stories about being hassled etc, we have found the people very friendly and the travel pretty easy.
We started in Dahab (after taking the ferry from Jordan). Dahab was a good place to start. It’s a very relaxed town, not at all like the hussle and bussle of all other towns we visited. It also had great restaurants and I was pretty excited to find that they all sold banana and chocolate pancakes – yum!!
Dahab’s a great location for diving in the red sea. So, I left Matt behind to have some R&R while I went on a few dives. The absolute highlight was seeing a huge giant moray eel – probably at least 2 metres long!I also went on my first night dive which was fun. It took a while to get used to being able to use a torch under water.
We then had a 10 hour bus trip to Cairo and spent a couple of days wandering around some of the major sites, including the pyramids of Giza. The pyramids really were as amazing as I had expected them to be and I fulfilled my dream of going inside a pyramid. It was quite expensive and there was nothing to see inside so Matt was not so excited about it, but I still thought it was great.
The Egyptian museum was wonderful, particularly the mummy room and the Tutenkarmon display. We had fun buying some souvenirs from the souks and smoking a sheesha in one of the cafes there. We had our first Sheesha (waterpipe, hookah, nargileh, it goes by many names) in Dahab, where I was absolutely terrible at it and kept coughing, but my Sheesha smoking has now improved (nothing to be proud of I’m sure).
Our first night in Cairo happened to coincide with the soccer match between Egypt and Algeria (if Egypt won by 3 goals they would win a place in the world cup). I have never seen anything like it! The game started at 7.30 and the whole of Cairo seemed to be out on the streets watching it on big screens set up specifically. So, of course we went along to watch it too. They got 1 goal within the first couple of minutes of the game and when all seemed lost they scored a second goal in the very last minute. The whole city went crazy with good-natured celebrations. The streets were packed with people dancing & singing. Everyone was soo excited. People were really happy to see us in amongst the crowd and we got “welcome to Egypt”‘d and asked to pose for photos hundreds of times that night. (We assumed we were incorrect about the 3 goal thing, but we found out later that scoring 2 goals meant they were tied and it went to a rematch to decide it in a few days – such a celebration for a small result.)
We then took the sleeper train down to Aswan. We had a nice comfy cabin to ourselves. I was soo glad we weren’t in a seat as the 12 hour trip turned into a 16 hour trip. From Aswan we joined the 4am convoy (unfortunately it’s next to impossible to travel any other way) to Abu Simbel, which was definitely worth losing sleep for.
Thanks to Agatha Cristie’s ‘Death on the Nile’ I had ‘always’ wanted to take a steam boat down the Nile. I was pretty adamant that this is what we were going to do, but we had no idea if it would actually be affordable. It turned out to be an absolute bargain! Unfortunately the little steam boats have now turned in to huge cruisers and we ended up with the ugliest monster of them all – called the Aton. But the inside of the boat was lovely and so were the buffet meals. It was great to spend time sitting on the deck, watching the nile go by. We stopped at a couple of temples Kom Ombo and Edfu on the way to Luxor.
In Luxor we spent a day on the east bank visiting Luxor Temple and Karnak temple and then took a day tour of the west bank, visiting the valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, temple of Hatshetput and the Colossi of Memnon. The inside of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Queens were beautiful as the carvings have retained their colours. (Matt: for the record, the rematch of the soccer game happened while we were in Luxor – they lost, we got a good night’s sleep.)
We took the sleeper train back to Cairo and visited some more pyramids a little further out of town, Dahshur and Saqqara. Dahshur pyramid was great because we were the only tourists there. Unfortunately this also meant we got targeted by the tourist police, who are always best avoided because it usually ends up with them demanding baksheesh (a tip – and they aren’t the only ones of course) for some unwanted service, like pointing something out to you that is already extremely obvious. Anyway, we were able to go inside the pyramid here, which was great fun and even better than Giza because you can go in quite a long way (with a torch) and we had the whole pyramid to ourselves.
The boring story of the visas…
The rest of our time in Cairo was taken up with trying to work out the nightmare of visas for west africa. Once in West Africa most visas can be obtained at the borders, which is what we were planning on doing. But the problem is getting there in the first place. Every embassy we approached wanted to see return airfares that fall within the period allowed by the tourist visa. As we were wanting to travel overland and had no idea of an end date we couldn’t satisfy these requirements. It also didn’t help that the Embassies are only open for visa applications on certain days for limited hours and that our time in Cairo happened to coincide with holidays for the ‘feast’ (that marks the end (or possibly beginning) of the pilgrimage to mecca). Also, some airlines wont let you fly if you don’t have a visa, even though you can buy a visa at the airport on arrival. Basically we were banging our heads against a brick wall every step of the way. In the end we decided to purchase a ticket in to Burkina Faso (as visas can theoretically be obtained at the airport) and out of Mali (as we can then get a visa at the embassy in Ougadougou or at the border). So that’s that. I think we’re both just glad that we can still go, despite having to cut our plans down significantly. Although, it’s not 100% we could still be denied by Royal Air Maroc (despite asking them) or not get a visa at the airport. Time will tell.
After this, not sure how reliable internet access is in Africa so the blog might re-appear around christmas (when we return to the UK) or it might continue on regardless.
Here are a lot of photos.
