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Helen and I spent two weeks in Egypt in 1996. I'm writing this almost a decade later but remember it pretty clearly. Fantastic place!

We arrived in Cairo, then spent a week floating down the Nile on a houseboat called the Doma. This was a wonderful way to travel, with days spent in the breeze watching the world go by, playing games and eating nibblies. The crew were a scream - super polite but once the cards came out their one goal in life appeared to be to grind the tourists into the dirt, just like the guides in India.


The wonderful Doma.	Oh how we scoffed at the passing passenger liners with their first class cabins and air conditioning!

The banks of the Nile were lush and beautiful, but about 100 metres beyond them the desert started and didn't stop. The Nile was a green swathe through some pretty harsh country. There was no sign of crocodiles or pollution, and at each stop we jumped over the side for a swim.


The lush Nile...	...and the desert just beyond it.

The monuments were a real highlight. Those guys could sure carve stone. The dry, constant weather is monument-friendly, and we were often surprised to hear that the pristine statue we were looking at had stood exposed to the elements for thousands of years. It was incredible to see the achievements in architecture, mathematics and art, and to realise that much of this stuff was made around 4,000 years ago.

Our trip took us to the temple at Abu Simbel which has to be seen to be believed. It was threatened by rising dam waters in the 1960s so was moved stone by stone a few metres up the hill(!) Work was still underway when we visited.


The absolutely mind boggling entrance to Abu Simbel, about 3,400 years old.	A column that had stood exposed to the open sky for millenia.	Detail of some hieroglyphs.

I was intrigued by the fact that most of the statues had their noses chipped off. The first guide I asked said that this was because the nose is the first thing to break when you drop them, which was not the secret-of-the-ages type of answer that I was hoping for. Luckily another guide satisfied my thirst for tourist folklore: the ancients believed that the spirit left the body via the nose, and the statues were generally of kings, so marauding armies would chip their noses off to keep enemy kings from reaching the afterlife. Much better!


"Not much to see today." "Nope, things have been pretty dull since they defaced us in 762."	Trying to look a little sheik. This was the start of my love affair with camels (not literally of course).

Another highlight was a trip to the Valley of the Kings by "sturdy donkey". We initially thought this was just a tourist gimmick, but those little buggers certainly were sturdy! They took us up and down steep and treacherous mountain trails for hours without stumbling, and seemed more or less oblivious to the giant bipeds bouncing along on their backs. I know that any attempt to steer them was futile.


Helen on her sturdy donkey.	I grew quite fond of mine.	The curse of the pharaoh. Perhaps I shouldn't have licked that sarcophagus...

We visited Egypt during a time of fundament activity, and were escorted by military vehicles whenever we travelled by road. We weren't confronted but it was quite unsettling to hear what happened to the Swiss tour group in Luxor a year after we were there. Putting that out of mind, the assortment of vehicles on the road was quite entertaining: one morning we saw of a truckload of camels, all with their heads poking up out of holes in the canvas roof.


Racing Arabian horses around the pyramids...	...now that* was fun!*

Our last night in Cairo was one of typical chaos as I went in search of a musical instrument to add to my collection. The ensuing series of misunderstandings with taxi drivers, music shop owners and the general populace took me all over the city for several hours. Meanwhile Helen, waiting at our meeting point in the markets, got increasingly harrassed and worried as the night wore on. But the hassle was all worth it as I returned triumphant with a lovely ud (lute) that I played a few times then sold for an excellent profit.