Happy Thanksgiving!

We made it safely to İstanbul. So far we love this city, but we're thinking of you all and missing you tons. Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you're staying warm and are enjoying family and turkey! It was cold and rainy here today, but we stayed warm wandering around the bazaar. We'll post a more thorough update later.

An Egyptian Wrap-up, Minus the Embalming of Course

We've finished up our travels in Egypt, so before we get too far removed I wanted to relay some of our favorite observations of Egyptian idiosyncrasies.

Enjoying dinner with a new friend

There are metal detectors everywhere, hotels, tourist attractions, malls, etc. But the interesting thing is that you routinely walk through them, set them off, and keep on going. The "guards" are busy talking and not paying attention. They are obviously just for show, some pathetic attempt to make tourists feel safe in the wake of the bombings of the 1990's.

A church in Cairo's small Christian area

Everyone smokes, everywhere. About 80% of our taxi drivers smoked at least one cigarette while we were driving.

A busy touristy market street

Gas is very cheap, much cheaper than southern and eastern Afrıca. In Uganda and Kenya gas was about 6-7 dollars per gallon--closer to 1.50 in Egypt. As a result, there are many more people driving their own cars around the city and far fewer minibuses. The taxis in Africa (since I've stopped thinking of Egypt as Africa) never drive around without passengers and almost never have more and two liters of fuel. But here, they drive around all day with empty seats and full tanks. So for the first time in our trip taxis became our primary means of transportation.


Many of the men here have large callouses on their foreheads. I'm sure you can guess why. We both thought of it as a well-earned outward show of piety!

Cairo, and Egypt in general, is very safe. We got lost one night in Cairo for about 45 minutes, never felt scared--quite a contrast to Nairobi where we couldn't walk half a mile after dark!

Reading about İstanbul in a Cairo park

Many people leave Egypt feeling like their trip was ruined by all the hassling tourists get. It's a little overwhelming. Everywhere you go along the main tourist streets men (and sometimes women) give you the same old lines, "Come see my shop, very cheap, looking is free." "You want a carriage ride? You know how much?" "You from Australia? G'day mate! No? England? Germany? China?" "You want boat ride? One hour 15 pounds. Why no?" "Maybe I give you some information for trip to Abu Simbel?" "Lucky man." "Where you from? Which state? Oh! I have a brother in faketown, made-up state. Maybe you come see my shop?" It gets old, so old in fact there are some stores whose signboards read "NO HASSLE SHOP. FIXED PRICES."

A final Egyptian sunset

Every price of every item is negotiable. You can buy a can of Sprite for 15 pounds or 2, depending on your patience.

It was also clear that after six months on the road Kim and I were starting to miss some of the comforts of the western world. We may not like to admit it, but while in Egypt we:

-Ate McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC, Chili's, Hardee's, TGIFriday's, and Cinnabon.
-Drank Starbucks coffee.
-Went to 4 American movies, including one in a VIP theater with leather reclining Lay-Z boys for seats.
-Used the internet almost every day--I'm caught up on The Daily Show, and I have Facebook now.
-Spent the better part of three days in Cairo at a fancy western-style shopping mall--shopping. eating, and watching movies.

We have arrived safely in İstanbul, and typing this entry on a Turkish keyboard has been challenging to say the least. All these ıIİşöçğü keys keep getting in the way and I have to type shift-2 to make an apostrophe, CTRL-ALT-Q to make @, and some other interesting combinations that have spawned some interesting language! İt also meanş that İ,m goıng to be lookıng for an ınternet çafe wıth an Enğlısh keyboard next tıme!

ps...Let the cheesy jokes offcially begin. We will be in Turkey for Thanksgiving!

Scuba Duba Doo!

First off, Michael gets credit for the blog title. I asked him for something clever and that's what I got. We're now certified Advanced Divers!! Whoo hoo! For the lay person this means that I can use a compass to swim in a square while 45 feet under water, I have felt the drunken feeling caused by too much Nitrogen in the blood (110 feet under), and I have been doing homework for the last three nights. The diving here is fantastic. Today we did one called "The Blue Hole." We started by entering the water and dropping almost vertically through "the bells." It's called "the bells" because it's a passage so narrow that your air tank will probably hit the rocky walls and make a sound like a bell. When you 've made it down about 100 ft you have to remember to add air to your BCD (buoyancy control device) because the bottom is still nowhere in sight. You swim along a wall of coral reef with countless colors and spectacular fish ascending slowly along the way. Finally you swim over the top of the coral reef, and you're inside a giant cylinder of coral 200 feet across and 400 feet deep. Around the edges are more fish, shrimp, starfish, and divers, but when you swim across the middle, you lose sight of everything. It's just an abyss. I love it here! Dahab is a really chilled out place. All of the restaurants serve seafood, pizza, pasta, and hummus. Most of them have "bedouin style" seating--giant pillows on the floor--instead of chairs, and are right on the water. And everyone who comes here wants nothing more than diving and beer. I can hardly wait to dive tomorrow!

p.s. On our last day in Luxor we went to the West Bank. There are hundreds of tombs there at the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Tombs of the Nobles, and in the artist's village--Patty this was before your warning. You're not allowed to take photos, but for a little baksheesh, this guy didn't have a problem with one measly picture. This is the tomb of Joe Schmo...you can imagine what the pharoah's tombs were like!

Luxor

Three days ago we cruised up the Nile on a ship to Luxor. It's quite a place. As you walk down the street you have to simultaneously dodge and refuse rides from horse drawn carriages and blue and white taxis. The 3000 plus year old magnificent Luxor Temple is right in the heart of town, and McDonald's--which sells the tasty McArabia--is literally across the street. We've decided all of the western restaurants charge too much for food that's mediocre at best, while the local food is unbelievably cheap yet fantastic. Today we slept in late and had a schwerma and felafel on our way to the museum. We wandered around the market for a while, enjoyed a fruit cocktail with pomegranate, banana, guava, apple, and orange juice, and had koshary for dinner. Then we went to a rooftop cafe overlooking the Temple and River for coffee, sheesha, and a beautiful sunset. Luxor TempelView from the cafeBeautiful sunset

Entrance to the market Yes we know how lucky we are!

p.s. Kudos to Brooke for all the comments she posts. Sandy and Andrea get honorable mention. The rest of you should step it up! We miss you, and it means a lot to hear from you!

Feats of Engineering, Past and Present

A few days ago we traveled to the southern part of Egypt to visit the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. It was a fascinating day that left us exhausted and awestruck in many ways. It started at 2:45 AM, as the only way to get to Abu Simbel is with the convoy from Aswan that leaves at 3:30. It's a three hour ride, ending just 40 miles north of the border with Sudan. We were allowed just about two hours to view the temples before joining the convoy back to Aswan.

Four Colossi of Ramses II

Statues of Nefertati and Ramses II

The two temples were stunning. They are well preserved inside and out, although very little of either is "outside" as they were both carved into a sandstone cliff. The colossal statues of Ramses and his queen Nefertari adorn the temple entrances. Inside each the pillars and walls are carved floor to ceiling with painted reliefs showing various religious events and festivals. The intricacy of the details and the precision of the construction is truly a testament to the ancient Egyptians' skills at the height of their empire in the 13th century BC.

A scene showing Ramses II offering Lotus flowers to Nefertari

Admiring the fallen face of one of the statues

Fast forward to modern times. As the population of Egypt grew and demand for electricity and arable land outpaced supply, the government undertook a project to build the "High Dam" at Aswan. It was finished in the 1960's, and it is a true accomplishment of modern science--controlling the floodwaters of the Nile and providing much needed farm land and electricity. However, conservation was clearly overlooked. As the waters of the Nile rose to create Lake Nasser, people around the world took notice that the temples at Abu Simbel, and many others along the river, would soon be permanently under water, lost forever. A massive effort by many foreign governments and private companies was made to save those monuments. They cut those temples up, block by block, and reassembled them on higher ground. So what we visited was actually the temple of Ramses II, the original, but moved to a new location. Incredible!

The Aswan High Dam

The temple at Philae

I find it hard to believe that a country whose tourism depends on its glorious past came so close to losing such an incredible piece of history. It also provides a little perspective as to just how much exists in Egypt, knowing that the loss of temples like Abu Simbel and Philae would not have crippled Egyptian tourism. There is far too much to see here, and I think I would get bored before I could visit every temple and every tomb, but I am happy to have visited Abu Simbel without a SCUBA tank!

Salam

We left our hotel in Nairobi at 2 a.m. last Sunday to catch our plane to Cairo. With such an early start, we decided we'd just do a bit of wandering and maybe catch a movie on our first day in Egypt. It took almost no time for us to fall in love with the city! Trying to cross the street here can be quite a challenge. There don't seem to be any traffic laws. A two lane road can easily have five cars across, but we quickly figured out how to use the Egyptian pedestrians as shields. There are people sitting around drinking tea or smoking Shisha all the time. The stalls selling food look and smell amazing. There are endless stores with glass vases and perfumes, paintings on papyrus, western clothing stores, car parts, and anything else you can imagine. We'd heard Cairo was very dirty, but coming from southern and eastern Africa where you're never more that 100 yards from a dirt road, this place is "very cosmopolitan!" As we were walking around eating ice cream and french fries from McDonald's (first in over 5 months), we met Abdul. He invited us into his shop and gave us a cup of tea. We chatted for a while and Abdul suggested we share a taxi to the pyramids at Giza. He said he'd introduce us to his friend Mahmoud, who owns some stables, and then he'd have us over for dinner. It sounded like a great plan to us. We ended up riding camels to the pyramids and watching a beautiful sunset.

The dinner at Abdul's house was delicious, and we felt so honored to be invited!

The next day we went back to Giza and went inside one of the pyramids and got a better look at the Sphynx. We also got to see the Red Pyramid at Dashur--the first true pyramid, and the Step Pyramid at Sakkara.

Then Mahmoud had us over for dinner two nights in a row! Mahmoud is a really funny guy, and his family situation was interesting to us. In Egypt it is legal for a man to have four wives, and Mahmoud is working on getting number four. His father picked out the first one for him, and they're not a good match. He picked out the next two. The second is beautiful, the third is a good match mentally, but he's pretty sure he has the whole package in wife number four. He has six boys, one girl, and one of his wives is pregnant. Each wife has her own house and he spends two nights a week with each, and the whole family gets together for a big dinner on Fridays.

There is a lot more I could write, but we're taking the night train to Aswan in about an hour. We've uploaded more pictures. Click on the link to the left if you want to see them. We also updated our phone number, so feel free to call or send an SMS any time.