Our Adventure of Egypt

Well we were excited we had to get to the airport by 4am to leave Heathrow at 6am for a connecting flight from Zurich in Switzerland. So waking up at 3.30am wasnt a problem as we couldnt really sleep anyway. So taking us only 1hr we got to see the beutiful country side of Switzerland and even flying over the Swiss Alps where the mountains just popped up over the clouds you could see the fresh snow and the little villages stuck in the big valleys, we were definatly putting this place on our list of things to do in Europe.

We were spending 9 days in Egypt including travelling from Cairo to Luxor by train and then travelling down the Nile towards Aswan seeing all the sights along the way. In Cairo we saw the Great GIza Pyramids and learnt alote about the history of Egypt and the Pyramids which is really interesting. There is so much to see in Egypt there are countless temples, tombs and pyramids to see which are so old and the carvings on these temples and pyramids are in so much detail still today it was like it was done with a machine but it was all by hand and everything in the acient world was built out of limestone which looks awesome alote better than the stuff i used at home with my walls i would have luv to have worked here to help built the Acient wonders.

As we were coming in to Cairo we could see the city was covered in a brown haze and everything seemed to be just one colour everything looked dusty and outside looked very hot and everything outside of Cairo was just sand and lots of it as we got closer to the ground it look as if we were going to land on a dirt runway in the middle of the desert

Another thing we noticed is the poverty here there are kids as young as 6 or 7 controlling these donkeys on the road and others are just looking through rubbish on the side of the road. We saw lots of rubbish just dumped on the side of the road for people to just look through we saw many kids just playing in it.

When we arrived in Cairo is was a little bit of a shock this is the first 3rd world country we have been to and there was so much poverty and the streets were extremely dirty and full of rubbish, they basically just dump all there rubbish in the street and theres lots of donkeys and camels just in with the cars on the the roads with 10 year old kids riding them. We went with a tour group which was lucky because the Egyptian people are extremely pushy and if we were on our own you would be mobbed by everyone begging you for money or getting a taxi when you dont need one so it was much better being with a tour. They would come up to you with their camel and if you sat on it they would not let u off without you giving them money. We had an experience at one of the Pyramids where a Egyptian was dressed up as a police officer and he grabbed my camera and took some photos of Jodey and I and I had to pay him to get the camera back, it wasnt much we only gave him equivelent to 2 pence which is only 5 cents Australian. Things here are unbelievably cheap. But coming to Egypt its good to experience it as a whole experiencing the good and the bad.

We got a train from Cairo to Luxor which takes approximatly 10 hours this was an interesting experience. The train was classed as a 5 star train we got on and the trains seat were so dirty we had to put something down first and some windows were smashed everytime another train went past it would make a hell of a noise and wake everyone up. The toilets were very smelly and we avoided using them. This was the only train but it was an interesting experience.

What made up for this was our Crusie down the Nile the boat was awesome we had a swimming pool on the top deck with all you can eat buffet and the weather was awesome it was about 40 plus every day but the heat is alote different here. The people we went with were great some were from Spain, Ireland, Columbian, English, Irish and Aussies we made some great friends. We just sat around on the boat and drank lots of there beer and relaxed in the sunshine. The sunsets on this cruise were very picturest.

The Pyramids were awesome the way they were built many years ago we went in some of the tombs and passageways in the pyramids which were very costrophobic and hot but the art work thats in these were very amazing. We went to a place called the Valley of the Kings where all the Kings were buried in this valley among the cliffs and hills there must be 30 or 40 tombs here some still undiscovered with some of the kings still in them mummified. Some of the tombs are over two hundred metres long all dug out by the Egyptians many years ago just to bury one king. As you enter there is so much colour and artwork which tells many stories about the King and the history of Egypt but all the art work is all pictures and scribings. When your there it feels to cereal its hard to imagine something like this even exists and the history here is just like being in another world.

Another place we visited was a place called Abu Simbel which was just by the Sudan border South of Egypt and the only way to get out the was an armed police escort due terrorist attacks, this leaves at 4am for the 3 hour drive through the desert. A convoy of approximatly 30 buses full of tourists were on this escorts due to a terrorist attack back in 1997. The drive through the desert is long and the road is so straight and there is absolutly nothing out there except white rock and white sand. When we arrived there was a huge mountain and on the other side was a huge temple carved into the side of the cliff . Going inside the temple was lots of big main room and corridors with huge coloumns holding the roof up and all this was dug into the side of the cliff. This has got to be one of my favourite destinations ive been to and would highly recommend it to anyone.

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