Egypt, And Further Thoughts and Notes For The Future......

A couple of weeks have passed since my return from Egypt and I have ''post holiday blues'', particularly as the weather is disgusting and I hoped I would have missed all the rain on Crete....

Looking back at my notes again, it was nice to see quite a few British people travelling in Egypt again. They all seemed to be ''independent'' travellers who elected to fly in through Hurghada and then after a week of 'beach' holiday were travelling inland by private vehicle or coach to the Nile Valley to see the important sites and spend a few days around the area rather than some Hurghada tourists who come inland by coach to see the Valley Of The King's and then leave again.

The general plan after Luxor and Aswan included a few days in Cairo before flying back to the UK. While these plans sound expensive Egypt really is still remarkably cheap, and Luxor has a lot of accommodation for about 5 euros a night if you are staying a while.

As an example in Luxor, West Bank you can find many properties to rent like this one Mahmoud Haseeb Nubian House at very reasonable rates 

This one in Al Bairat has some lovely traditional features like domed ceilings!

This trip was supposed to be my last and was supposed to included Alexandria where I have a 'family' connection and initially I was planning on 6 weeks until I read on Trip Advisor that it was currently impossible, because of COVID, to get a visa extension unless you were in Cairo and wanted to brave the one and only police station that was issuing them....

Of course I later found out that I didn't even need a visa extension because I was over 60.... And the Passport Office in Luxor was open so don't believe everything you read on TA, unless I wrote it

And of course the new museum in Cairo has not yet opened and I still need to visit that so another visit is already in the planning stage to do that and also visit Alexandria....

I still don't know what it is about Egypt that I love so much.....

One thing is sure this time I will do some reviews of hotels and eateries for Trip Advisor this time as looking at my past reviews I didn't do very many!!

So you can expect some updates to the blog again sometime early next year...

Inshallah..

Egypt Part The Third 2022 - A Bit More Out And About, More Messing About on The River, And A Bit More About Egyptians

 I have already remarked on the similarities between Egyptians and Greeks and yesterday another one reared its head.... The boy sent me a message on WhatsApp the other evening, (and while we are at it if you plan on visiting Egypt then get WhatsApp on your mobile because they all love using it, and even if you pay for data it is cheaper than a mobile phone call!), to say his aunt had died and could I help him with some money. Obviously not presumably he was having a whip round for flowers?

The following morning more people told me that their aunt had died etc., etc.,, so naturally I assumed it that their had been a sudden dramatic increase in the death rate of aunts throughout the West Bank at Luxor.

Mentioning this to the boy he confirmed what I already guessed, that all these dead aunts were indeed the same dead aunt. I can only assume that the requests for assistance was to help pay for the funeral, but here we get the similarity with Greeks in that everybody is related somehow to everybody else even though the relationship is not even a blood tie, everybody is part of the same family..

But getting back to a bit of out and about... Egyptian cafes are very variable, some are quite swish with proper floors, some only have rugs on the dirt floor, but whichever you end up in invariably they tend to be 'richly' furnished with wall hangings and somehow I always get the feeling that Rudolph Valentino is about to make an entrance.

This morning ridiculously early I am on the East Bank at Luxor because I have to get a full pcr test done, and for that I am going to a private clinic on Television Street, and that peeps is the official name for it because of this...

Yes it is the TV transmitter.

When I asked Abdul why Television Street he just pointed at it and didn't bother to even speak..

And my electrician at my house complains that my wiring is old, and he really needs to get out a bit more because this is normal power pole wiring in Egypt...

Abdul tells me that this whole area is quite new much in the same way that the 20th Dynasty is newer than the 18th Dynasty looking at it, but this is a good place to go shopping, there is even a supermarket that sells Egyptian Smoked Salmon, I wouldn't have thought that salmon fishing was a full time occupation in Egypt.......

But something even more interesting caught my eye recently and here we have laid out in a field well have a guess first...

And did you guess right??

 

These are tomatoes being laid out in the sun to dry! 

And so back to the river Nile and boats, and I am fascinated by one boat in particular, called the Mazag it is what is known as a ''dahabiya'' and doesn't really have its own 'power' and like many others is pulled by a tug.

I still haven't been able to find much information on this one except that somebody described it as futuristic but for some reason it reminds me of The Nautilus from the James Mason movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea!

There ae several of this type pf vessel around and you can rent them all to yourself and your private party, typically many of them take only 10 passengers with a crew of 10... At a price of course... I seem to remember that Joanna Lumley did part of her Nile journey on one of these...

Other dahabiyas moored on the Nile, they come and go at regular intervals...

I would love to be able to rent one of these for a week and bring my bestist friends for my 70th birthday!!

And while I was on the East Bank I decided to get my very dusty Gant loafers cleaned up a bit the gentleman was just in the process of finishing the second shoe when two policemen arrived and lifted bodily and took him away.

I don't know why they do this along the Corniche... But I never got the chance to pay the man so if you are there and you hear a shoe shiner complaining that a  British tourist never paid him you can tell him it was me and give him 5 LE from me..