Egypt

Before leaving the UK we decided to travel to Egypt for 2 weeks. We flew into Luxor and spent 7 nights on The Nile on a little cruise boat. The boat headed South and stopped first at Edfu. Our guide Alaa told us this would be the most complete temple we would see, though at one point it was buried for years in the silt from the Nile's annual floods. The first set of pylons are enormous! This is the temple of Horus, the falcon god (man's body and falcon head).

The next stop was Kom Ombo, a beautiful temple right on the bank of the river. You can only imagine what people 3000 years ago would think as they saw this temple coming around the bend of the river. Some of the temple was built by the pharaoh Tuthmosis III in honor of the crocodile God Sobek. There are lots of carvings of the crocodile god. Under the temple they found many mummified crocodiles which we saw.

We sailed overnight and the second day the boat arrived in Aswan which is as far south as we could sail. We took a bus through the city and then a boat out to the island of Philae. Philae temple is beautiful, surrounded by rocks and flowers. It used to be on another island but after the building of the new dam it would have been covered by water, so they cut it block by block and moved it to an island nearby on higher ground. The temple honors Hathor the cow goddess. The ancient egyptians mined all of their granite from Aswan, the only place in Egypt which has granite. They would then transport it by river to building sites. After Philae we took the bus to the new dam which has created the worlds second largest man made lake. We also went to the grante quarry where there is an unfinished obelisk from thousands of years ago, still sitting in the granite. They abandoned it because it formed a crack. It was quite amazing to see the size of this thing. I can barely understand how it's possible to move such a heavy object. It would have weighed more than 1000 tons.

Ok, been months since I started writing this post and it will be hard to pick back up now. This was the most interesting trip we have taken, enough said! Here's a few more things we did!

Following these events we went to the Valley of the Kings and Queens and saw the amazing tombs.

We took our first hot air balloon ride ever over the valley of Kings/Queens and the Nile. We began at sunrise and it was an amazing ride. We landed in a farmers field and we ended the ride with a dance with the entire balloon company.

Thursday of that week we flew from Aswan to Abu Simbel, an amazing quick flight (the pilot actually flies the plane). This was amazing! It was the hottest day...

There was a galibaya party on the boat where we all dressed up in galibaya's and danced. It was ok.

Andy and I went to the museum in Luxor which had around 160 artifacts (versus Cairo's 100,000+) and saw some very well preserved artifacts unearthed at Karnak and Luxor temples.

Cairo was unbelievable, the car ride through the city was insane. I've never seen anything like it. On the freeway there are donkeys, people walking along the side. We saw a goat which got loose in the traffic being chased by 3 children dodging between the cars. The museum was huge and amazing. King Tut's treasures were most impressive.

The pyramids in Giza were the most impressive of all. We could see them from our hotel in Giza. We saw a light show at night. Cheesy! The following day we rode camels across the desert to the back of the pyramids. We climbed deep inside one of the smaller ones into the tomb at the heart of the pyramid. It was a difficult, crouched climb down and up, and very hot inside.

We drove out to the first pyramids ever built, Sakkara. These were the step pyramids and the story of the pharaoh was really interesting. It was so hot we could barely enjoy walking around them. I think at that point we were done.

The trip ended with 5 days in Sharm El Sheik where we went scuba diving in the red sea, it was amazing! Sharm is a little too touristy for our taste but it was nice to stay there for the diving. We stayed at the hilton dreams a few hotels down from the hotel which was bombed, we could see the shrapnel marks in nearby buildings.

Overall the BEST BEST experience!