Planes trains and automobiles... and camels, and horses, and carriages, and taxis, and busses, and trains, and in between train cars, and police caravans.

Cairo at Sunset

Tuesday, June 28 over a thousand civilians were injured in the biggest rebellion in Tahrir Square since the Mubarak debacle in February. (ok I suppose ‘debacle’ doesn’t really do it justice but you all know what I mean.)  Luckily, we left during the quite before the storm, so to speak, two days earlier.   Cairo was full of lots of overly friendly people and someone on every corner ready to rip you off but all in all, quite an experience.  That Sunday we somehow managed to dodge around the outrageous construction of the Ramsees train station in Cairo and buy ourselves tickets for the overnight train from Cairo to Luxor (about 10 hours).   Besides the domestic dispute that woke everyone up around 4am, the train ride was essentially uneventful.  Walking off the train in Luxor was like being a mouse in a field of snakes.  It was 7 am yet there was a man literally every block trying to force you into their shop or taxi.  After fighting/haggling until we were about to pass out, we finally got some snake to take us an extremely roundabout way to our destination and then charge us more for it.  Awesome.  We were tired and not up for any more debating so we gave him the bit of extra money and walked on to our home for the next few days: A cruise ship on the Nile. :) The boat was fabulous, with a pool on the top deck and three meals a day included.  Because of the turmoil of the sate of Egypt in the last few months, tourism has suffered drastically.  So much so that our “super deluxe” cruise with room and board was 40$ a night, and the boat with a capacity of somewhere around 300 had 20 guests.   Plus the summer is offseason as it is so unbearably hot in the afternoon it is difficult to go outside.  Over the next four days our schedule stayed pretty much the same everyday: Wake up around 5-6am, meet our guide, and tour sites before it got too sweltering, come back around 9, pool until lunch at 1, nap/read/lounge/pool/see another site until dinner at 8, and to bed by 10 to start all over again.  Conveniently, all the sites gave 50% discount to students—which was quite helpful as we went to more than 14 different sites in our week of being there! Wanna hear them? Ok here we go:  Cairo- Egyptiam Museum + Royal Mummy hall.  Giza- Imhotep & Saqqara, Dahshur, Giza Pyramids.  Luxor- Luxor Temple, Al-Deir Al-Bahari Temple (Hatshepsut’s temple), The Valley of the Kings, Karnak temple.  Aswan- Abu Simbil temples, Edfu Temple, The unfinished oblisk, The High Dam.  I was in complete awe at every site, but I would have to say Luxor Temple was probably my favorite.  Each day we would have a private guide so we could pick his brain about details regarding the hieroglyphics, statues, gods, stories, etc.  It was quite nice to be an informed viewer at each site—I feel like I had a much better appreciation for the sites because of it. 

            So fun fact about Hatshepsut. She found a loop hole in the law that stated that women couldn’t legally be kings by concocting a story about her conception/birth.  She told her people that she was, in fact, Amun places ankh, the ‘symbol of like’ into the nose of Ahmose and that is how she was conceived. Thus she proclaimed that it was the will of Amun that Hatshepsut be pharaoh…sneaky bitch!  

            Egypt is seriously the coolest place I have ever been and I strongly urge anyone with the opportunity to go, to go.  That being said I had a lot of qualms about the people that I interacted with while I was there.  I’d like to start by saying that my homie at the falafel stand, the wonderful George who mans the hotel at night, and basically every other Egyptian I have spent more than ten seconds with here in Jordan have a great sense of humor and are genuinely great people…  but this was not the case with people on the streets in Egypt.  Arabs stare. That is just a fact, but the Egyptians we interacted with on the street took the staring wayyy further. I have never been hissed at, yelled at, asked if I wanted sex, followed, hassled, or touched by strangers ever, ever, ever in my life as much as I did in Egypt. Most of the time we traveled as a group and had Ian with us.  His presence made it a bit better as they probably inferred that we were his wives.  However the few times I ventured out with just girls, we seriously went through hell walking down to street for ten minutes. It was, well, off putting to say the least.  By the last few days of the trip I refused to leave to boat unless we were on our way to a site. 

Luxor Temple

            Friday morning we woke up at 3am to take a police convoy (of tourists) to Abu Simble, a place way too close for comfort to the Sudan border.  When we got back to the boat in the morning we were forced to leave.  I was seriously not budging about my sentiments towards walking around (so were the other girls) so we waited in the train station until our 7pm train.  We had sent Ian out earlier in the day to get us tickets, however he was told that we should buy them on the train.  We listened.  We got on the train at 6:30pm and around 6:53pm I started to realize that we had probably made a grave error by not getting tickets at the station (that we had just been sitting in for four hours). Seven minutes was clearly not enough time to solve the problem, so we bought tickets on the train and eventually fell asleep.  At 2:00am, a man in an orange shirt gently tapped me on the shoulder to inform me that I was in his assigned seat.  F#@K. Drowsy and disoriented I gathered my things and walked through the cars looking for an empty seat. No luck.  In walking around I wondered why there were so many men standing between the cars. I thought they had jumped the train somehow. Wrong.  Apparently, at the STATIONS they sell tickets for assigned seats. Which we knew from our trip from Cairo to Luxor.  Buying a seat on the train essentially guarantees that you will eventually have to stand.  Again, F#@K.  With an extremely furrowed brow I eventually found a spot between train cars to sit on my luggage.  Me and my 10 closest Arab men friends (kidding?), and after a few hours Rachel, shared the 2x10 space between train cars. The only place available for me was behind the door. Meaning I was stepped/ had to move nearly every time anyone walked through. Which was roughly every 25 seconds.  I STOOD LIKE THIS FOR SEVEN HOURS.  The highlight was when I was able to squeeze into the Luggage cage to sit for a few minutes.  Needless to say I was not in the cheeriest of moods when we arrived in Cairo, 14 hours after we had left Aswan.  Oh and remember how I had woken up at 3am the night before.

Abu Simble Temple

            We had originally intended to spend the morning/afternoon touring the parts of Cairo we hadn’t made it to the first time around, however due to the events in Tahrir that had ensued, we decided to go straight to the airport and wait for our 4pm flight back to Amman. By 10pm I was safely back at Ziyara Inn, thriving and radiant and buoyant. Oh wait, no, I was three days unshowered, greasy, and 50 hours sleep deprived.

Disclaimer: Although I didn’t portray my trip in the greatest light I want to reiterate that all in all, I had an absolutely wonderful experience that I will never forget.