Travelling to Egypt
Four AM is a shitty time to be woken up, especially if you have had a lousy night’s sleep worrying about getting up in time! But we had a plane to catch at Gatport Airwick to take us to Hurghada in Egypt for our winter break holiday. This is the third year we have gone away in January, after New Zealand in 2016 and Sri Lanka in 2017. Why Egypt I hear you ask? There is lots of sunshine and it’s very cheap I reply! Besides that, I will be able to visit some of the most ancient classical remains on Earth and get to drink as much Egyptian beer as I want (which isn’t much).
I scraped the ice off the car windscreen and we drove down the M3, M25 and M23 to the airport and left the car at Purple Parking, which is a couple of miles from the airport. After leaving our keys with some complete strangers, we got on a shuttle bus to the South Terminal.
After checking in our bags we had breakfast at the ‘Spoons in Gatwick South; a very tasty sausage, egg and bacon sandwich, a winning combination and our last taste of English food for two weeks.
We boarded the plane at 9 AM, then fly, fly, fly, fly and we were in Egypt half an hour earlier because we had a tailwind! Hurghada Airport is new, and mostly empty since most tourists are too scared to go to Egypt, sissies. But we are Stout Hearted Londoners who have lived with the threat of terrorism for a long time, who aren’t easily put off.
The Grand Resort
Hurghada is a strip of hotels along the Red Sea coast, mostly constructed in the last twenty years. It isn’t a beautiful place, but it does have very good weather and a blue sea most of the time, unlike Skegness. Skekky does have better sand and better chip shops than Hurghada, otherwise it’s at a disadvantage. The hotels are huge concrete buildings in middle eastern style, and ours -the Grand Resort- is painted a lovely terracotta pink colour. The interior main lounge is all columns and Islamic arches with stone floors, and quite enormous. There are hundreds of easy chairs and tables to accommodate guests for their main occupation of the day, sitting around staring at mobile phones and drinking the “free” drinks.
We went on an all-inclusive holiday, which means that all the food and drink is available on demand at no extra cost, result! It’s all fine and dandy as long as you are happy with Egyptian beer, wine and spirits, which tastes like stuff that was rejected by the Tesco Value range. But honestly, it tastes OK For washing down a seafood paella (without any noticeable seafood) and some of the brown bread rolls do look like dog turds.
Food is served in a huge buffet restaurant called the Mahara. There are stations where you can help yourself to salads, bread, hot meat and vegetable dishes. There is plenty of food available, but it is more like school dinners and restaurant quality food. I was told the fish is Sea Bass, but it definitely wasn’t. The “Indian Curry” was sliced beef in a curry-flavoured gravy, like something your mum might make from left-overs. There was plenty of fruit for dessert; oranges, mandarins, melon and weird hard pear-like things that turned out to be guavas. If you had space in your tummy, there were lots of brightly coloured cakes, which some of the larger visitors liked to pile onto dinner plates to ensure they got their money’s worth.
As I sit here typing, I have a “Tequila Sunrise” with a straw in it. It’s a fruity drink with some sort of spirit and ice in it, and it didn’t cost me £7, so I quite like it. In fact, I might have another when the waiter comes round again, just because I can.
After three nights in Hurghada, we got up at 4.30 to have breakfast and get on a coach to Luxor. We drove across the barren Eastern Desert to Qena, and then south through irrigated sugar cane fields to Luxor. They grow a lot of sugar in Egypt, about three million tons a year. They also eat a lot, consumption is twenty-two kilos per person every year, Egyptians love their sweet tea and syrupy cakes.
The Nile Cruise
Luxor is a city of half a million people, and it has almost no rain at all and 4,000 hours of sunshine a year. In ancient times the city was called Thebes and was the capital of Upper Egypt. Upper Egypt is in the south of the country, and Lower Egypt is in the north, around the Nile Delta. Since the revolution after the Arab Spring of 2011, there has been a massive downturn in the tourist trade, and many people In Luxor are unemployed.
Our cruiser was the MS Grand Rose, a 2005 vintage ship with cabins for two hundred guests. Our cabin (407) was spacious and comfortable and on the fourth deck, so has great views of the river and over the banks. All the Nile cruisers are about the same size as the reception areas are halfway down the ship. When they stop at ports on the river, they sometimes sit side-by-side, up to five ships in a row. The furthest ships from shore are accessed by walking through the receptions of the others. They all float at the same level in the water (otherwise traversing the ships would be very awkward).
The Grand Rose had about a hundred and fifty passengers, and none of them looked like Hercule Poirot. They were mostly German, with a few Egyptian families and a dozen English people.
One of our compatriots from England is a loud lady in her sixties with a deep tan and blond hair, so I call her Donald Trump. Donald likes being the centre of attention and would always tell us all in great detail about the latest souvenir she had bought. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about her six bookmarks for a Euro, I doubt she can read long books anyway. Her husband didn’t say anything, the poor bugger couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He could enjoy a fag on deck, and let the verbal diarrhoea wash over him.
Our Egyptian guide on the ship from Red Sea Holidays was Ussama, a charming educated man from Cairo with a slightly strange English accent. I had to quietly correct him when he told us about Mark Antony and the Romanians. He guided us around all the ancient sites and patiently explained the statues and hieroglyphics.
On our first afternoon and evening in Luxor, we saw the magnificent Karnak and Luxor temples. which are both monumentally awesome in their scale and beauty. The Hypostyle Hall in Karnak covers an area of 50,000 sq ft (5,000 m2) with 134 massive columns arranged in 16 rows. 122 of these columns are 10 meters tall, and the other 12 are 21 meters tall with a diameter of over three meters. The vast temple complex was constructed and added to over about fifteen hundred years from the Eighteenth Dynasty until the Ptolemaic Period.
Some of the ceilings that had remained in the shade still had their original paint on them, I don’t think Dulux will last for 3,500 years!
The Luxor temple, which is right in the city centre is floodlit at night, which added to its magical beauty. The site was packed with tourists, so we had to shuffle around the site.
As an added “bonus” our coach took us to a papyrus factory where we were given a quick demo on how papyrus paper is made, and the opportunity to buy a piece printed with Egyptian scenes. Not my kind of thing really, and that’s being very polite. Our own “Donald Trump” did buy a print, which I’m sure will go very well with her flying ducks on the wall and paintings of sunsets over Vesuvius.
In the evening we had dinner with two other couples from England, John and Sue and Edith and Melvin. They are all a bit older than us, but quite sociable and good fun. Melvin especially likes a cocktail and tells good stories. After dinner, there was an Egyptian show in the lounge. The belly dancer wasn’t very entertaining, but her band were really good, especially the bongo (don’t know the real name) player. The whirling Dervish show was great fun, and he didn’t even look dizzy when he finished.
However, I was really, REALLY pissed off when my new £2,500 dental implant fell out after dinner, leaving me once again with a gap in my front teeth.
The MS Rose has sixty-two cabins and two suites, and has a crew of ninety, so the guests are very well looked after. Our pink “fully inclusive” bracelets give us just about as much food and drink as we want. All the meals are buffets with a wide selection of salads, vegetables, meat dishes and cake, loadsa cakes. I can have wine, beer and cocktails whenever I want to, so showing resistance is quite tough. It would be easy to eat and drink far too much. Our waiter is a quietly efficient guy called Madami, who knows when to get me another glass of white wine.
The Nile varies in width and has sandbanks and islands, so the pilot has to be skilled and know what he is doing. The green area alongside the river is only a mile or two wide, beyond that, there is a brown desert. Date palms line the banks, interspersed with fields of crops or meadows grazed by cattle, buffaloes, donkeys and goats. Occasionally a small skiff is seen crossing the river. One man rows the short (about eight feet long) boat with simple oars on a single those peg. There is plenty of birdlife; swallows, swifts, herons, egrets, hawks, crows. At Aswan there are many feluccas, a graceful sailing boat with lateen rigs whose origins date back to Roman times.
The guests are British, German, Russian and Egyptian, mostly middle and old aged, but there are some families with young children. The conversation in our group did tend to go towards aches and pains and the declines of old age. At that point, I make an excuse and go somewhere else. I may be heading that way myself, but don’t want to talk about it.
On our second day in Luxor, we visited the Valley of the Kings where many pharaohs were buried. As we arrived a flock of balloons was rising up into the cool morning sky.
The Valley looks like a rough quarry, crumbling limestone hills covered with scree and without a single blade of grass. We got here very early, too avoid the crowds, it is one of the top tourist sites. in Egypt. There are a dozen or so entrances into the hillsides which lead into the tombs.
The walls of the passages are covered in colourful paintings and cartouches of hieroglyphics, still vibrant after three thousand years. I was very surprised that I could touch these ancient treasures without being shouted at, I think they need better protection. The sarcophagi in the tombs are massive coffins of granite from Aswan, but all treasures were stolen thousands of years ago. The notable exception, of course, is King Tutankhamun, whose tomb, complete with grave goods, was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
I sneaked a photo in one of the tombs to show the hieroglyphics cut into the plaster walls of the burial chamber.
On the other side of the hill from Valley of the Kings is Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, which has been beautifully restored by the Polish Academy of Sciences. It has a collonaded front that looks beautiful from a distance, and it is still be reconstructed. Hatshepsut was a Queen who portrayed herself as a man so she could rule legitimately. She sent an expedition of ships to the Land of Punt, which is modern Somalia. The temple was the site of a massacre of fifty-seven tourists in 1997, so there is tight security with many policemen with Kalashnikovs.
There are so many temples in Luxor (which is derived from the Arab word for the palaces) that you get a bit blasé about them. The Medinet Habu temple of Rameses III is not overrun with tourists like Karnak and Luxor, but is equally impressive, with towering pylons (monumental gateways) and hypostyles of huge columns. Because it was so quiet it is now officially My Favourite Temple in Egypt.
Our last stop on the east bank of the Nile tour was the Colossi of Memnon, two enormous granite seated figures of Amenhotep III that have attracted tourists since Roman times. They are quite eroded and cracked but are still awesome. The wind used to make the hum, but a Roman restorer filled in some cracks and they stopped singing.
The MS Grand Rose laid on a candlelit dinner for us in the dining room. The dining room is on the lowest deck, so our two feet are two feet below the water line. The first course was a small salad with a tiny piece of salmon. The next course was described as “pate with mushroom sauce” and turned out to be an oval of puff pastry with cream of mushroom soup over the top. The main course was a steak in a very peppery sauce with vegetables, which was really good. Finally, we moved to the bar on the fourth deck to choose from a big selection of cakes. That’s the time I really have to hold back and just have a few tiny syrupy ones or else I would end up like “Donald Trump’s” spud shaped husband.
We cruised through the night to Aswan in the far south of Egypt, where it borders Nubia. The Nubians are black people who have been neighbours and sometimes rivals of Egypt for thousands of years. In the 1960’s the Aswan High Dam was built to control the waters of the Nile and created Lake Nasser, the worlds largest reservoir.The lake displaced eight hundred thousand Nubians who had to be rehoused in Aswan and other cities. Britain and France had fallen out with President Nasser during the Suez crisis, so the dam was financed by the Soviets.
The dam is mostly made of rock and sand, which is described in the cross-section diagram as “muck”. Maybe the designer was from Yorkshire. It is surrounded by soldiers and missile batteries. If the dam was breached it could wash away a large part of Egypt!
Aswan is a holiday destination for people from Cairo and Luxor, as well as attracting dozens of cruisers. It has a desert climate and is very sunny and warm. There are several big islands on the river, supporting modern hotels and ancient ruins. The Nile is cross-crossed by feluccas, small sturdy sailing boats with lateen sails that take tourists on trips. We took a short excursion on a motorboat and were joined by two boys paddling an old surfboard who sang songs to us. Usamma gave them a small tip and they paddled off as happy boys.
Our temple of the day was Philae, which was dedicated to the mother goddess Isis and her husband Osiris. It was inundated by Lake Nasser but was rescued by UNESCO, which dismantled the entire temple site and moved it to another island and rebuilt it. The work was amazing, you can’t see that it was rebuilt.
I’m now in the hotel bar, sipping a G&T watching the sunset over Elephantine Island listening to “Everything I do, I do it for you”, it’s really very pleasant. Those felucca’s are really very photogenic.
On Friday most people got up in the middle of the night to go on a coach to Abu Simbel. A three-hour coach trip to another temple didn’t appeal, so I stayed in bed. My nemesis “Donald Trump” overheard us saying we were going to the Botanic Gardens on Kitcheners Island and tagged along with us. She brought along Jim who hasn’t been known to speak since she does the talking for the two of them. We haggled with a motorboat driver and got a trip over to the island, which was very popular with local tourists. There are a great variety of tropical trees with plenty of benches to sit in the shade, I was the only man in shorts on the island, they probably thought I was weird. Donald hardly paused talking to draw breathe, and it was all drivel. My wonderful wife is far more sociable than me and soaked it all up while I read the signs on every tree.
Our last temple was at Kim Ombo, which was built and extended in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. We went at 7.30 am, and it was really cold and remained cold until the middle of the afternoon! I had to wrap up well to read my Shardlake novel “Revelation” on the sun deck.
In the evening we had an Egyptian fancy dress party in the lounge. I bought a gallibaya and head dress from the shop on the boat, and think I haggled him down enough. He was probably rubbing his hands with glee when I left. I managed to get him down to £10 for the complete outfit, which I will probably never wear again! The Egyptians dinner was really good, and included falafels and roast lamb, very tasty.
It turned out that the English were the only people to dress up, the Germans, Russians and Egyptians chose not to. Consequently, we got picked on to do the party games and dancing in front of everyone else. You can always rely on an Englishman to put on a dress and make an arse of himself. I made myself an even bigger arse by trying to play snooker with a spud suspended by a string from my waist.
The last day on the boat was a slightly dull voyage from Esna back to Luxor, through the lock. We did get to go on the “bridge” I’ve had enough of cruising now, the novelty has worn off and I’m looking forward to more variety of food and things to do.
I got to sit next to the pilot of the boat, who steers it using a kind of joystick. He has to know all the islands, rocks and sandbanks in the Niles, it’s a very responsible job.
The staff have been very nice, especially Madami and Ragi the waiters and Ussama the guide. Ussama’s wife is about to have another baby and he is very excited about it.
The coach picked us up from the Grand Rose at 7.30 am at Luxor, another early start. The first hour and a half to Qena are alongside irrigation canals on embankments overlooking sugar cane fields. There were narrow gauge railways collecting cane to be taken to be crushed to be made into sugar. Our transfer guide on the coach told us that Egyptians eat twenty-two kilos of sugar each every year, and thirty percent of Egyptians have diabetes. The homes have reinforced concrete frames infilled with brick walls. Most have reinforcing bars poking out of the top so extra stories can be added to the homes in the future when their families get larger.Most of the men are traditionally dressed in grey or brown gellabyas with white turbans, the few women outside are dressed head to foot in black. Donkey carts loaded up with cane walk down the road, competing with lorries, tuk-tuks and motorbikes for space.
All the way to Qena there were road humps and police checkpoints slowing down the traffic. Elevated look-out posts by the roadside were occupied by bored young policemen with Kalashnikovs. At all the temple sites there were armed guards, and also at the riverside where the boats were moored. Many of the older guards were tubby and looked they couldn’t run a hundred metres and wouldn’t be much good in a fire-fight.
After Qena the road enters the Eastern Desert, a landscape of rocky hills and wadis filled with sand, washed down by the occasional rainstorm. Occasionally there is a Bedouin encampment of simple shacks with rusty pickup trucks. We stop for coffee and a toilet stop, local women brought donkeys, children and baby goats for us to photograph, they didn’t attract much attention from the tourists who were busting for a wee.
Our coach dropped us at the Grand Resort and we checked into our room. It’s huge, about five metres by six metres, with a sofa, to chairs a balcony and really crappy old Philips TV. It’s a CRT telly of the type that hasn’t been available in the UK for at least ten years. There’s a selection of German and Egyptian channels which aren’t any us to me. The only news is CNN, with stern shouty presenters telling us the latest about Trump and his latest antics. There is one film channel, so Julie was very happy to watch the second Hunger Games film.
For our last few days in the Grand Resort we fell into a routine. We ate breakfast in the sunshine outside of the Maxim, getting in before eight before the hoards. After breakfast we went over to the beach to read our books on a sunbed on the gritty beach. Returning to the Resort, we had burger and chips in a little cafe by the pool, it makes a change to the regular buffet food. The sun went down at about four thirty, so we retreated inside after that.
In the evening we drank lousy cocktails in the lounge, watch a bit of TV and read our books some more.
The flight back to Gatwick was pleasingly uneventful, and I entertained myself by finding features on my phone I didn’t know about before. Do you like my selfie?
timharnesstravels 