Egypt

This is late, sorry.

Egypt was insane.

I arrived in Cairo at around 11 PM. The hostel I picked offered free airport pick up, which I ended up being really grateful for since even the airport was chaotic. People were offering me taxis before I was done walking out of the welcome gate.

The traffic in Cairo is unlike any city I've seen; pure chaos, an endless stream of horns and absolutely no traffic laws. It's like a giant city-wide game of bumper cars. And the urban sights of Cairo are unlike anything I've ever seen, on the one hand there are huge steel buildings, heavy traffic, fast food on ever corner; on the other hand there are also herds of goats running through the city, men riding bicycles with huge crates of pitas on their heads, men on horseback, donkeys with fruitcarts. It's really hard to stop staring in Cairo, it's just so...interesting I guess is the word I'm looking for.

Anyways, as soon as we arrived in the Hostel, after seeing Cairo in its full chaotic glory I decided for the first time to sign up for a group tour of the major sights of Egypt: Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Edfu and others that I'm probably forgetting. I normally shy away from organized tours but just based on my brief experience with Egyptian traffic I figured having designated rides everywhere was probably a good idea.

So I started in Cairo, seeing the pyramids and of course the sphinx.

OK, so here's when things got tricky.

I arranged a tour of Giza through the Hostel, which at the time seemed like a really good idea. They offered a really good price for rides to everywhere we wanted to go in Giza with the same guy who gave us a ride from the airport. The only problem is that

A. in addition to driving me to the pyramids, the sphinx and the places I asked to see, he also drove us to a papyrus factory, a perfumerie and then tried to drag me to a carpet factory and a market

B. he told me that it was impossible to get around the pyramids on anything but a horse or camel. Now, granted, I probably shouldn't have been so gullible, but he flat out lied and told me the ONLY way to get in to was to rent a horse for a big price complete with a tour we didn't want/need. So I rented a horse, saw the pyramids, and also saw that it was in fact VERY possible to get to the pyramids in a car. On the one hand I got to embrace my inner Indiana Jones, on the other hand, I had to pay for a freaking horse.

His name was Rambo, by the way.

Aside from that little complaint, Giza was a great deal of fun. I kept feeling like I should pinch myself for finally seeing in person what I grew up seeing on posters and postcards and in movies. I mean, the pyramids! It's hard to beat that.

After Cairo it was down to Aswan on a night train that lasted roughly 14 hours. From there I checked into a hotel and went right to sleep (I tried to shower but the faucet in the hotel broke clean off). The next day I woke up at 4 AM and saw Abu Simbel, which was my first really major temple. There had been a solar alignment two days before, which would have been cool, but missing it meant NOT running into 22,000 tourists, so maybe missing it by a couple of days was alright.

After Abu Simbel I boarded a felucca, which is a very traditional Egyptian sailboat. It was sort of laid out like a giant bed with cushions and pillows everywhere. There were about 8 people on board total, and every one got their own little section of the big bed/boat thing to sleep on. Honestly, the felucca was probably my favorite part of the Egypt trip. Everyone spent the whole day chatting and laughing and watching the sun set over the Nile. We ate lunch and dinner (both vegetarian meals; falafel for lunch and squash curry for supper. Yum!) aboard the felucca and then breakfast the next morning (pita soaked in egg and fried and then served with fig jam. I called it 'french pita) and it was paradise. At night I swam for a bit in the Nile. I was a bit worried about catching some diseases, but here I am almost a week later and disease free so I think I made out OK.

I don't have any picture of the felucca because my iPod died in Abu Simbel and I thought fishing out my laptop to recharge would ruin the ambience of the authentic bed/boat so I held off.

After the felucca we were on our way to Luxor, seeing Kom Ombo and Edfu on the way.

Then in Luxor I saw Karnak and Luxor. Karnak is the largest temple in the world, but honestly at that point all the temples were starting to look alike to me. What I found interesting were the avenue of sphinxes, which apparently used to connect the two temples for roughly 5 km. Luxor itself was much more enjoyable than Cairo, safer, quieter, and not quite as much hassle (I had been warned ahead of time that as a western woman I would probably get harassed quite a bit, and in Cairo I got sort of used to it. However after a certain it didn't bother me so much, I just found it really really annoying). The horse drawn carriage drivers in Luxor were very aggressive, they even followed me up and down the street as I walked places. The trick was simply to ignore them for as long as humanly possible. With pedestrian hasslers, I just pretended to be Spanish (saying, 'No entiendo, solo espanol' with a heavy lisp. No one in Egypt speaks Spanish).

The next day I saw the Valley of the Kings, which was expensive. I opted out of King Tut's tomb because it cost extra and really all the coolest parts of it are already in NYC. The other tombs I saw were very colorful and well preserved and very interesting. No photographs allowed though, sorry.

I skipped the Valley of Queens (my tour guide told us that Nefertiti was closed and that without that it wasn't interesting) but I did see the Valley of the Workers instead, which was incredibly interesting. The workers, being artisans, picked the most stable location for their tombs and decorated them with images of themselves with their families and in their homes. It was much more informative about life in ancient Egypt than with the tombs of great rulers.

That night I sat around with the group and listened to Rocky Horror Picture show and talked about everything. When conversation fizzled after many beers were had by all I went to bed.

I had a lazy day the next day, chilling by the pool and taking videos of the prayer chant when they came up over the intercom (I'll load it as soon as I figure out how) and said good-bye to the friends I made on the tour, including a married and expecting couple from Singapore, two girls that just got off the Peace Corps (note-to-self, join Peace Corps and go to Mali) and a couple of hilarious guys from Sweden, one of whom is in a punk rock band though he's pretty modest about it.

Then it was back to Cairo.

Back at the Hostel I met two German guys and one teenaged Egyptian kid in the lobby. Their names were Ben, Paul and Lucky, respectively. Ben worked in a school in Alexandria and was saying that most women that travel in Egypt end up going back because they can't handle the Egyptian men (the harassment is pretty absurd in Egypt). I told him I found Egyptian fairly harmless, they're all bark and no bite is what I said, (which is true, while I was cat-called and given every line under the sun not one man in Egypt ever went too far as too actually touch me, which was for the best since I would NOT be OK with that). He raved about Alexandria which makes me sort of sad that I didn't get to see it.

Later on they invited us to dinner with them. They ordered the Egyptian equivalent of a cheeseburger for me: meat mixed with hot peppers and cheese served in a fried pita. It was delicious. Afterwards I had a drink called sahlab, which was like hot coconut milk served with crushed peanuts and raisins on top. It was delicious, and really a very good way to end a very exhausting trip.

Or it would have been, except when I got back to the Hostel there was yet another protest forming outside near some government agency and riot police forming right outside my window. I could have spit over the side of the balcony and hit one of them. Then the hostel worker tried to charge me twice for the same room and there was one last terrifying cab ride to the airport. That was probably a more approprite way to end the Egypt trip.

Anyway, I'm writing this from Bratislava, which was the next stop after Budapest. I'll write about Budapest (LOVE Budapest. It's wonderful.) tomorrow.

Final wrap up: I've seen the pyramids, set foot in a whole new continent and survived what I can only describe as the most blatant reoccurring display of sexual harassment I've ever encountered. It was definitely an adventure.