Yallah! An Adventure in Egypt

 

When your friend who studies the Middle East and whose husband runs a tour company invites you to join her on a trip to Egypt, you don’t think twice. So the day after Christmas, another friend and I flew out of Charlotte and, three flights later, joined our colleague and her family in Cairo. What followed was eight days of amazing adventure.

Of course what drew us to Egypt is the same thing that draws most people: more than 4,500 years of history, preserved in some of the most famous monuments in the world. And considering you could spend months touring Egypt and still not see everything there is to see, our friends made sure we took in a lot.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid of Khafre,
and the Pyramid of Menkaure, 26th Century B.C.E.

The Sphinx, built for Khafre in the 4th Dynasty
but completely covered in sand by the 18th, when
Thutmose IV rediscovered it.

The Step Pyramid, built by the great architect Imhotep,
with the cobra-lined wall of Djoser's mortuary complex

The ceiling of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali
(1848) inside the Citadel of Salah al-Din.

Philae Temple, begun in the 4th Century B.C.E.
and moved in its entirety when its original location
was flooded by the Aswan High Dam in 1970.

The Great Temple at Abu Simbel, built by Rameses II
in the 13th Century B.C.E., also moved in its entirety
when the High Dam created Lake Nasser.
(All four statues are of Rameses.) 

The hypostyle hall at Karnak, built in the
20th Century B.C.E.

Luxor Temple, circa 1400 B.C.E.

The Temple of Hatshepsut, the woman pharaoh
of the 15th Century B.C.E.

The sarcophagus of Rameses VI in the Valley
of the Kings, from the 12th Century B.C.E.

The goddess Hathor welcoming Nefertari
in Nefertari's tomb, Valley of the Queens,
13th Century B.C.E.

But the thing is, we’ve all seen pictures of these places before. They’re better in real life (so very much bigger than you expect them to be!), but I found what really made the trip for me was the experiences we had in and around these famous monuments. This is where I have to give a shout-out to Mejdi Tours, the company founded by my colleague’s husband, which makes sure we don’t forget, in visiting the sites of the past, that life is still being lived in these places here and now.

Khan el-Khalili bazaar in Cairo

The Nubian Village outside of Aswan, where a
local family hosted us for dinner.

A belly dancer at the New Year's Eve
gala in the Tolip Hotel in Aswan.

A tanoura dancer at the gala.

A Luxor family hosted us for lunch and 
showed us how they make feteer meshaltet
(probably the best bread in the world).

A dawn hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings.

The Neighborhood of the Garbage Collectors
in Cairo, a mostly Christian community that
has created one of the most efficient recycling
industries in the world. Most tourists never see
this neighborhood, but we were led through it
by a guide who had grown up there.

We went on a camel right at the Pyramids,
where this camel got very friendly with me.
The camel driver was about eight years old.

Stray dogs are ubiquitous in Egypt. This one
has set up shop in Saqqara, the necropolis of 
ancient Memphis, and is doing very well
for himself.

Cats, beloved by the Prophet Muhammad
and sacred to the ancient Egyptians, are also
everywhere. This one lives at Philae and is taken
care of by the people who run the café on the island. 

From the 5 a.m. call to prayer to the (apparently justified) belief that stoplights are an unnecessary obstacle to traffic flow, every moment reminded me that the way I’m used to living is by no means the only way to do it. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to see life in another culture, and I look forward to the next opportunity to be humbled by the wonderful variations of humanity. So as they kept telling me in Egypt, “Yallah”—let’s go!