Inshallah in Aswan

Everyone will be pleased to know that we are continuing to get ripped off left, right and centre, but Egypt is remaining quite a pearl. This posed an obvious problem about what to write. What do you say if there is nothing to complain about? Do we just bang on about delerious happiness or do we try to mangle a religious reference? No prizes for guessing which route we would take.

We are down near the Egyptian/Sudanese border in Aswan, and around these parts you need to include “Inshallah”, or “God willing”, in your travel plans and most sentences. You may think you are going somewhere, but someone upstairs often thinks that you are not.

Since the last post we have been to the Great Pyramids at Giza.

They are rather large.

And also extraordinarily close to the city.

Matt climbed inside the “Second Pyramid”, and Penny went wandering, still suffering from her earlier pyramid injury.

Next it was down to Aswan to stroll along the Nile ...

Stagger up and run down sand dunes ...

And eat and dance with some Nubians ...

We had planned to take the 3 hour convoy ride out to Abu Simbel yesterday, Inshallah, but a mighty sandstorm (which knocked out the hotel air conditioner) cancelled that, so we spent the afternoon at Philae temple, a Ptolemaic temple (300BC-ish) which was flooded by the 1902 dam. However, in a wonder of modern engineering, in the 1960’s they built a small dam around it, drained the water, and moved it to higher ground.

You can get there, Inshallah, at the convenience of the cartel which runs the extortionate boats out to the island (for the same price you can hire a taxi for 9 hours or a boat for 10 minutes).

We left our tour and trekked off to Abu Simbel early today. This entire area was also moved stone by stone from low-lying and now flooded land in the 1960’s, following the construction by the Soviets of the Aswan Dam. It took 4 years to dismantle and reconstruct the temple and statues only 200 metres away from their original location. Had this feat of engineering not occurred, the site would now be completely submerged and the ancient wonder lost forever. Amazing stuff.

You only notice when you get right up close that the legs of all of the statues are completely covered in 19th century graffiti, and inside thoughtful young gentlemen have scrawled their names right over hieroglyphs.

Inshallah also has a positive connotation, of course. We had to leave the tour to go to Abu Simbel today, but that allowed us to miss 24 hours on a felucca, and the digestive problems which seem to accompany small boats in these parts.

We will make one final call on Inshallah tomorrow when we try to rendezvous with the group at a police check point near a small town in the desert. Fingers crossed.

The overnight train down here, was, of course, brilliant. This is Egypt after all.

Walking like an Egyptian

We are still in Wonderland. Egypt is quite an incredible place, mainly because of the people but also in part because of its stunning sights.

Including the mighty Nile.

Perceptive readers of the blog may have noticed an at times negative view of India. One of the things that makes Egypt so special is the contrast to our earlier tour. There are scams, but they are tried on with a smile. When you say no thank you to a tout, they call out “You are welcome, have a nice day” (only one has called us “English bastards”), when bargaining they offer you sensible prices to begin with (the only truly unpleasant and dishonest person has been the hotel concierge) and only one person has grabbed us, and that was to shake our hand. Wandering through a bazaar is like running the gauntlet of pleasantries, and the friendliness can be fatiguing. It makes quite a change from small children putting curses on us, and alleging that we have “very bad karma”.

Our first day was spent wandering through Cairo, an alarmingly large, and not terribly Egyptian town. After gawking at Tutankhamon’s gold death mask in the Egyptian museum (alas no photos were allowed), the absence of street signs in English and large-scale maps necessitated navigating by the sun through backstreets towards the Old Islamic Quarter.

We failed, had a heated discussion about the merits of doing that, enthusiastically debated whose fault it was, and then took a taxi to the Islamic Quarter. It is home to the world’s oldest continually operating university ...

And a really nice bazaar, although certainly not the hustle and bustle you would expect from guidebooks because everyone keeps wishing you a happy holiday.

We again navigated by the sun (Matt got us lost again) around the outskirts of town, dodging peak hour traffic. Happily we managed not to get ourselves run over.

Cairo is where 1973 Peugeot 504’s come to die. They are everywhere, mainly used as taxis. We tried to get one for a day trip into the desert, but had to settle for the remains of an old Renault.

We travelled through an oasis of date palm crops ...

Which immediately yielded to desert and the oldest pyramid in Egypt, at Darshur. (Note, this is not the Great Pyramid - there are 118 pyramids in Egypt, apparently.)


Visitors can climb inside, which involved pushing past bribe merchants at the entrance and crawling down a narrow alleyway into the bowels of the pyramid.

We trekked onwards to Memphis, and saw a statue of Ramses the Great ...

And then braved the wild pharaohnic hounds

To visit Saqqara, a highly interesting pyramid site

With a funerary temple in the lengthy process of reconstruction.


We also got a chance to crawl inside another pyramid, fortunately one of the very few that still has hyroglyphics and death poems carved into the wall.

That night we were entertained by the Sufi dancers, who crazily twirled in costumes non-stop for nearly an hour without suffering a brain freeze.

Cairo has been a voyage of discovery. As a consequence of our crawling through ancient tombs, Penny is now suffering severe pyramid injuries in the form of strained thigh and buttock muscles. She is stoically keeping the whinging to a minimum, though her gait and pace about town are akin to that of a geriatric tortoise.

We saw the Great Pyramids and the Sphynx today, but that will have to wait for another blog, provided we survive tonight’s overnight train to Aswan ...

Goat-herders + $300 billion = Dubai

As our esteemed Prime Minister often says, "When it comes to " Dubai, it's a bit like being Alice in Wonderland. You can touch things, smell things, and it looks like you are in the real world, but something is not quite right. Or maybe it's just odd. One thing is for sure, going from central Delhi to central Dubai in 8 hours (2 of which were spent in taxis, mind you) is like jumping in a pool and suddenly finding yourself in the lost city of Atlantis, but surrounded by gold, Porches, diamantis and a peach cocktail the size of a small child.

We have come to expect the unexpected. Or maybe we have just learned what can be achieved with money, the will to build and half the world's Pakistanis conveniently located in the middle of the desert.

We have enjoyed a few days rest and recuperation at Chez Sally, potentially the most outstanding and salubrious accomodation we have encountered on our global trot thus far. When you are far from home you appreciate the little things, like fresh milk in the fridge, a washing machine, and an abundance of hot water at your ready disposal. And here is the glamourous manager of Hotel Sal, sporting an eclectic display of fine wares from the sub-continent.

A couple of days after arriving, Sal very kindly sent us to the Burj al Arab, the world's only "7-star" hotel, and the most famous landmark in Dubai, for an extravagant high tea.

We started with Salmon Wellington and a glass of Moet, because that is what you do when you are an expat, followed by a constantly replenishing tower of sweets.

We were eating in the Sky Bar, which juts out of the Burj over the ocean, affording a great view of Dubai either side.

The Burj has great and gawdy interior design, luxury goods stores, a few aquaria for good measure, lots of security and plenty to stare at. This is the Wave Hotel next door, which also has its very own waterpark.

That landscaping can be contrasted with the slightly more natural surrounds of the neighbouring Emirate Sharjah, where Hotel Sal is located.

There are "souks" (small, strip malls) of all descriptions scattered around Sharjah and Dubai. You have to travel a fair way out of town to buy groceries, but apart from that you can get pretty much anything in the middle of town, such as vast wads of gold and bling ...

Cute and exotic (likely smuggled) animals - (the bird souk had galahs and peacocks, as well as flourescent pink chickens, just in case you are in the market for them) ...

And shiny lamps and sheesha pipes ...

After a few days wandering around the local area, we trooped off to Oman for some boating, eating and snorkeling, courtesy of Cheryl and Peter (many thanks again). We understand there was a bit of a land grab when the British departed in 1971. The UAE got all the flat bits, and Oman got the crazy jagged lunar landscape of the tip of the peninsula.

Oman is working hard on its own craziness, though. There was a stunningly opulent (read: overpriced) hotel perched on a ledge, which wanted $15 for a coffee. There is also a residential subdivision on a cliff a couple of hundred metres above the sea. Apart from strange property deals, the main industry in the part we visited is the smuggling of American cigarettes to Iran in exchange for goats. You could not make this stuff up.

We used the Hotel Sal Driver Service yesterday to visit the Mall of the Emirates. The opulence and extravagance were mindblowing. This is the valet parking hall (Matty D eat your heart out):

This is not a snow globe, this is a ski slope in the mall. It is up to 50 degrees outside in summer, but -3 degrees in there. And yes, that is a luge track for the kiddies.

There are also overpriced homewares shops as far as the eye can see. Here are the ladies being ex-pats in a shop which specialises in Chinese-made MDF furniture for $2,000 a piece.

After that, we did in fact find Atlantis. You may be familiar with the "Palm" development, which is an enormous stretch of reclaimed land which will house 160,000 people and several hotels. The monstrosity of a hotel at the top of the Palm has been completed, and includes a house-sized aquarium themed "The Lost City of Atlantis". The bed of the aquarium is scattered with life-sized fake space ships, which are patrolled by a bull shark, manta rays and squillions of fish.

So that's the crazy stuff.

Dubai will shortly have the tallest building in the world, and it would not be fitting to make a post about Dubai without the Burj Dubai, which some say is Dubai sticking up its finger to the world and showing what it can achieve.

There have of course been some near death experiences. Taxi drivers are particularly rough here and hate driving between the different Emirates. Matt almost got us lynched in a large carpark argument with one driver who stopped in a car park miles from home and refused to go any further. Hew threw our money on the ground and had a tantrum worthy of a 2 year old, all the while screaming at us in Arabic. We spent the early evening running around backstreets and constantly changing direction just in case he was following us.

So, that is Dubai. Next stop is getting scammed and molested in Cairo.