el Jefe

Day 2 in Luxor, with this morning's first stop being the Temple of Karnak... Construction began in the Middle Kingdom (around 2000-1700 BCE) and continued all the way up to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (305-30 BCE) with most of the buildings dating from the New Kingdom (16th-11th century BCE). The temple is huge and is believed to be the second most visited site in Egypt after the Giza Pyramid complex......... Okay, this has been sitting in Saved since March, historical research holding it up for the most part, and I have since travelled to several other places and things are getting backed up...lol...time to move on... So the condensed version of this is: Karnak is cool, probably my favourite temple visited on the trip...the site itself is a maze of temples, statues, carvings and frescoes, with the ... read more

Made it back safe and sound from Abu Simbel and boarded the boat that would be our home for the next few days as we made our way up the Nile to our final destination of Luxor. Lazy first afternoon, followed by an equally lazy morning before we finally set sail, and after all the idleness of the previous 24 hours I was looking forward to the days only stop: Kom Ombo. The boat itself was pretty cool with four or five levels of rooms, a dining hall, bar/dance room and a rooftop patio complete with bar and small pool. Our room felt more like a hotel room than a cruise boat room which was nice, and with only 150 or so folks on board it never really felt all that crowded...food was good, entertainment was ... read more

After another uneventful drive from Alexandria we were back in Cairo and headed to the train station for the overnight train to Aswan...cool! Was looking forward to this, trains are one of my favourite modes of transportation, an easy and relaxing way to both cover ground and see the countryside...as most of the trip was at night we wouldn't see a whole lot but did have the morning fortunately to catch our first glimpses of the Nile and some greenery after all the desert and sand of the previous couple of days...a good laugh as well, our cabin opened to the one beside us with Bruno and Allan, some funny times...and lo and behold there was my bag waiting for me at the station! With clothing options starting to get a little thin it was a ... read more

Cairo-nothing more needs to be added, one of those places in this world that conjures up visions of ancient civilizations and cultures...the magical home of Pharaohs, Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and the Nile, could not wait to get exploring... Funny, Egypt was never really on our radar for some reason, it had come up in conversations over the years but never really stuck strangely enough...with international travel opening up we started chatting about where we should/could go, and unexpectedly we stumbled across an Intrepid tour that seemed to check all our boxes: majority of the major sites covered, small group, all sorts of modes of transportation (Planes, Trains and Automobiles! And buses, feluccas, Ubers, boats...lol...) and about twelve days which is a decent length. Tacking on some beach time on the Sinai Peninsula after the tour seemed ... read more

After three weeks of constant moving, activities and being on someone else's clock we were certainly looking forward to some R&R on Zanzibar...starting with four days on the beach in Jambiani, we couldn't have picked a more perfect spot to give our poor muscles some down time after the Kili adventure we had just finished...and no more camping! Lol...while I really enjoyed the tenting experience the thought of a proper bed and ensuite for the remainder of our time in East Africa was more than appealing... Half the climb group were heading to Zanzibar as well, so we hung out together for a bit at the airport before saying our final goodbyes...flight was interesting in the fact that the cruising altitude was actually less than the summit of Kili, that brought some serious perspective to the ... read more