Walk Like an Egyptian

Egypt has been a busy busy ride! We have seen the sun rise the last 5 mornings and been to bed about midnight most nights. We have slept on trains, buses and boats and will be sleeping in the desert under the stars next week. What an experience.

After arriving at our hotel at 5am last Saturday morning in Cairo we were woken again at 9am to visit the Egyptian Museum, Muhammed Ali's Mosque and Coptic Christian Cairo. We missed the sound and light show at the pyramids as we thought it could be all cheese but we did see the famous pyramids and the sphinx the following day. We opted out of the camel ride although did decide to go into one of the pyramids. Not a great decision if you dont like enclosed spaces!

We enjoyed the markets in Aswan the following day and weren't hassled too much. After an early night we received our 3am wake up call for the tour to Abu Simbel, King Ramses II temple which is the south of Egypt. We had to catch a plane to get there and arrived before sunrise to an incredibly enormous and beautiful temple! It was definitely a highlight: 4 huge statues out the front and incredible hieroglyphics inside. The temple had been moved up on to a hill in the 1960s after the risk on flooding from The Nile. It was cut into thousands of pieces and lifted to a hill about 60 metres higher. This in itself seemed like just a huge a mission as actually constructing the monument. You have to see it for yourself!

From there we spent two nights on a Felucca (an open aired sailing boat with no motor that just drifts along the Nile with the current given the lack of wind). I thought it would be a little boring and rough but what an experience! We spent two days swimming in the Nile (yes I cant believe we did that!), reading, chatting and sleeping. We stopped for loo stops and food (not together) on the banks of the Nile all prepared by our Felucca captain and his friend. We had a camp fire and Egyptian belling dancing lessons taken by our rather eccentric tour leader. It was brilliant though Chris will fill you in on one exception to the fun...

On one loo stop on the felucca, I (Chris) was in calf-deep water about a metre from the 5 metre wide felucca. The floor of the boat is covered in mattresses. A wave of stupidity came across me and I decided to throw the camera about a metre onto the felucca. As I did, it bounced 3 times like a cricket ball off a crack on the WACA pitch and teetered on the edge of the felucca where it stayed for about a second. From there, it fell Nile-ward... So we now have a dead camera. It appeared as though I had killed the memory card also, however now in Dahab I have left it with a guy who should be able to extract our files of Cairo, the pyramids of Giza, and sunrise at Abu Simbel which is the highlight so far by a mile (and cost another GBP230 or Aussie $575 to do). Fingers are crossed.

Anyway...Luxor was extremely hot but the Valley of The King and Queens was incredible. Saw King Tutankhamen's temple and all sorts of other well kept temples. The colours were still on most of the walls, as if it had been painted yesterday. The weather was in the mid 40's yesterday and the tour group felt it as did I! We have been quite well but just slighlty upset tummys.

We arrived into Dahab this morning after an 18 hour bus ride! This morning, we stood at one point in Egypt and looked out to Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Great spot. We will be here for a few more days before we head to Jordan on Wednesday. We will probably do some more snorkelling in the Red Sea and Chris will probably go diving. We will also climb Mt Sinai on Monday evening to catch sunset on Tuesday morning. Really looking forward to that.

We hope you are all well and sorry for the lack of emails but we have been so busy on this tour! Miss you all and looking forward to getting home in less than two months!

france last week, austria this week, egypt next week

Once again we"re under the pump when it comes to internet. Finally we"re staying somewhere with free internet and I have a kid standing about 1 metre from me just staring at me waiting. Yes you kid, if you can read this....

Anyway, just thought I"d give you a quick update on what we"ve been up to over the last week or so since I blogged from Beaune in the Burgundy wine region of France. We headed off the next day to Lausanne which is just into Switzerland. We only spent one night there before meeting up with our friends Andrew and Jenni in Interlaken which is at the foot of the Jungfrau mountains in the Swiss alps. We went hiking in the alps for a couple of days which was just incredible. The scale of the mountains is something else altogether.

We then moved onto Lucerne for a couple of nights. The full day we had there we hired bikes and rode around the lake which is gorgeous. The old town itself was quite cool too. Yesterday we headed to Innsbruck in Austria where we are right now while Andrew and Jenni went to Zurich to visit a friend. Today we"ll meet up with them again in Salzburg for a couple of nights before heading to Vienna for a few nights. From Vienna it"s a long flight to Cairo to start our Egypt trip. But that"s too far to think about right now. For now it"s a few more days of mountains and beautiful European cities.

Hope all is well with you all back at home.