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I went to Eqypt to celebrate New Years 2000 at the Great Pyramids with Rambo.
I also gave a lecture at the American University of Cairo, but after that it was mainly
sightseeing. There is an incredible amount to see. The grandeur of the pyramids and
temples cannot be captured in words or photos, so I won't really try to convey the
situation, I'll just show the photos.
There is a lot to see in Cairo (besides the smog). Here are some photos of us near the
citadel. Behind Rambo are the hills where they got most of the stone for the Giza pyramids
The citadel overlooks some mosques:
There is no shortage of hanging meat or trash(check out the rooftops):
We went to the Giza pyramids for the New Years show, but it was too dark to see much
of the pyramids, so we went back a few days later to check out the pyramids and the Sphinx.
We drew a crowd of young boys to our sphinx flipping. I am pretty sure they
had never seen such a thing.
We went to the Sinai Penninsula for a couple days to SCUBA dive and snorkle.
The bus ride was long, with lots of stops for rest breaks and passport checks:
We decided that traveling by car would be better. We drove out through the oases. We
stopped off at the white dessert to watch the sunrise. It is a pretty amazing place. I am
not sure what the white outcroppings are made of, but it is very flakey:
We had a good workout in the dessert, consisting of jogging, frisbee, and dune jumping:
We ended up staying a bit longer than we wanted to because our car got stuck in the sand.
We were over 20 km from the nearest town, so we decided to build a road. We jacked the
car up and put rocks under the front wheels. We then built a rock road for about 20 ft. in
front of the car. The idea was to get the car moving (with Rambo pushing), and then execute
a gentle turn through the soft sand and get back onto the harder sand that could suport the car.
After about 2 hours of building, I was pretty confindent we would get up just enough speed to
get the car stuck about 50 ft further out into the dessert. Surprise - we made it.
After the oases, we arrived at Luxor. Luxor was the capital of Egypt during the middle and
new kingdoms. The region is loaded whith temples and tombs (valley of the kings):
Rambo was going through a terrorist phase. He was just trying to get revenge on the
local food which was not treating him so well.
One of the coolest places is the Temple of Hapshepsut, where 58 tourist where gunned
down in 1997. Our workout that day was to climb the 50 steps on our hands:
Another cool temple is upriver at Aswan. The high dam flooded a lot of temples, so
they had to reloacte many of them to higher ground. Philea is one of the more famous ones.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people begging from you at all the tourist locations.
Young kids try to get in your picture - they want you to pay them to get out of the way:
We went on a long camel ride from Giza to Saqqara. Well, we did not make it all the way
to Saqqara before our camel pirates took the beasts back and left us to walk the last few km.:
Unfortunately, you can no longer climb the pyramids. But, if you were to say, run in the back
way thriugh the dessert and then climb up the backside of the pyramid before the police could
stop you, then it might look something like this from the top:
You would probably have to talk to the police for a while after you climbed down, but at least
you could go back to your hotel to take a nice shower. That is, if you don't mind leaning over
the toilet to do so:
