A few photos from my 8-hour stroll through Petra today...





When people think of Petra, they tend to imagine the "Treasury", above. It is indeed iconic, and it is a fascinating experience to approach it from the narrow gorge. However, Petra is an enormous archaeological site, covering an entire ancient city. There were plenty of other tombs and temples to explore...




It was also a great day for hiking. The setting for Petra is spectacular, tucked into valleys and cliffs amongst the mountains. Walking amongst them gave plenty of opportunity to find jutting lookout points.



After walking all day, though, it was nice to take a bit of a rest. Besides, I couldn't come back from the middle east without riding a camel at least once...

The sands and stones of Jordan...

Heading off in our 4WDs to explore Wadi Rum, in the south of Jordan.




Wadi Rum is one of those landscapes that just makes you feel incredibly small. The distances, scales, and associated emotions are a tough photo assignment for an amateur.




We explored a few different areas, including this gorge cut into the towering sandstone cliffs. In a way, good prep for Petra...

The banging on Carol's door actually woke me even before Matt got to mine. Seconds later, the knock invading over my threshold confirmed I wasn't dreaming. 2:30 am... right on time.

Less than an hour later, we were shuffling off the bus into the darkness. "Right. Everybody got their torches then?" By torch Matt means flashlight. Those Brits; it's like they've got a word for everything.

Thus began our trek up Mount Sinai. Back when Moses did it, over 3000 years ago, I doubt the path was as nicely groomed. On the other hand, I doubt he had to deal with groups of Bedouin approaching him, asking, "Camel? Want ride camel?"

Near the top of the hill, they were peddling wares that I much more keenly jumped at. A warm tea and a blanket rental sounded just right after 2 hours climbing the night-shrouded and wind-swept approach.

Finally, I nestled into a little nook between two boulders on the side of the cliff face. Having wrapped myself in the blanket and set up my tripod, I awaited my reward...

On Monday, part of our group made a side excursion out to Alexandria. Most of Alexandria's famed ancient monuments are long destroyed. The city, though, still turned out to be well worth a visit.

The ancient library of Alexandria is one of the buildings that can no longer be found here. However, a new library now stands in the city that may perhaps one day be just as famous.


The facade of the library, inscribed with letters and symbols from a multitude of human languages, looks like a sail sticking up above the Mediterranean. Perhaps it can help pull Egypt in a new and exciting direction...



The library is such a contrast to the rest of our experience in Egypt. Modern, quiet, calm, organized...


The view outside, looking past the planetarium. Off in the distance (between the palms) is Fort Qaitbey, built on the site of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the ancient 7 wonders of the world. Again, little remains of this landmark today.

Chris steps into the world of Islam...





The domed mosque of Saladin at the Citadel in Cairo, inside and out




Taking a moment to think at the beautifully austere and serenely deserted mosque of Ibn Tulun




The marvellous courtyard at the Al-Azhar mosque, considered one of the world's oldest universities.

At the southern gate of old Islamic Cairo, I climbed the minaret to get a good view of the city. While up top, the afternoon call to prayer rang out. It comes from all the mosques pretty much all at once...




Though the quality of the video and audio isn't great, the above clip should give an idea of the chorus that, to my western ears, struck me as quite an otherworldly cacophony.

Egyptian people are poor. I'm not sure if the country as a whole qualifies as 3rd world, but there were certainly some parts of it that did not seem far off by my accounts.

When we visited the Nubian village near Aswan, Derrick and I both experienced the urgent need of a bathroom. One of the villagers led us through a labyrinthan route of doors and courtyards to a shack on the crest of a hill. I can only assume this was a communal toilet, as it wasn't attached to any particular home. Inside, the squat toilet appeared to be hooked up to some form of plumbing, though there was no running water. When I picked up the large water jug from the corner to flush, a few bugs scuttled out from under it...

While I was walking around Old Cairo on Sunday morning, visiting the Coptic churches, I happened to turn down an alley that I don't think is marked in many of the guidebooks. The people sat in their doorways, most not bothering to look up at this lone passerby. Others, who did, did so with a complascent, disinterested, almost weary glance. One of the bends in the road was being used as a trash disposal area, and the local cats, dogs, and donkeys stepped through the decomposing waste in search of a nutritious morsel or two...

Later that same day, I set off in search of the mosque of Qaitbey, in Cairo's Northern Cemetary. Though once a functioning cemetary, this area has since been re-inhabited by some of the city's poorest. Tiny stone shacks give this slum, the 'City of the Dead' as it is apparently sometimes called now, a surreal air. I didn't linger too long, and never found that mosque...

Shopkeepers in Egypt are always alert, and assertive sometimes to the point of pestering. It is difficult to browse or frankly even glance at any merchandise without being accosted and practically dragged into the store. Some of us in the tour group have remarked that we would probably actually be more likely to buy something if we were free to look around the way we're used to from back home. However, on the whole, assertiveness must be the more successful technique. In a country where so many are living on the edge, financially, I don't think natural selection would allow unsuccessful sales techniques to remain so pervasive...

The Aswan High Dam has been an incredibly powerful force in the shaping of Egypt. A force so all-encompassing is invariably composed of both destructive and creative aspects.

First of all, the dam destroyed the annual Nile flood (thus making the ancient Egyptian gods of the flood, Khnum and Hapi, conclusively obsolete... and thus chee-to eating couch potatoes). The Nile used to burst its banks, bringing moisture and dark rich silt onto the shores where Egypt's crops are grown. Irrigation and pumps (note the pipes coming out of the river in the photo below) water the fields today, but only a fraction of the fertilizing silt from deeper Africa now makes if past Aswan.




With the Nile flood, though, came its intrinsic unpredictability. Such instability almost certainly caused hardship for the Nile bank farmers. Although the ancient Egyptians had ingenious ways of measuring each year's flood after the fact (as the Nilometer on the right shows, by means of the graduated steps along the inside of the pit) in order to estimate farmers' yields for tax purposes, they were at a loss when it came to alleviating the suffering brought about the variability itself. No more flood = no more instability, from that point of view anyway.


The dam also destroyed the majority of Nubia. The Nubians are an African people who lived on the banks of the Nile in a region straddling modern Egypt and Sudan. The filling of the reservoir south of the dam essentially submerged the major population centres of their homeland. The photo on the left shows a poster we saw at a schoolhouse in a Nubian village that had been relocated by the Egyptian government to an island in the Aswan area. It shows the original extent of the Nile (bluish-white line), the new banks (yellowish-white lines), and the original major settlements (red squares).

Finally, the dam destroyed most of the Ancient Nubian and Ancient Egyptian archeological monuments in the area. Some of the most significant, though, like Abu Simbel (which I mentioned in a previous post) and the Philae temple dedicated to Isis (see photo below) were salvaged by an international effort headed up by UNESCO. The temples were literally chopped into blocks, moved to higher ground, and reassembled.



Of course, none of this would have come to pass if there weren't those who believed the benefits of the dam outweighed the damage done. The creative power of the structure is evident in the jobs and skills it brought to the people of Egypt, the electric plants which now power large swathes of the Middle East, and the new farmland created along the now expanded shores of the river.

One final example of the dam's creative power, though, was its ability to help spark the Suez crisis. Egypt decided that the only way it could fund the dam was to nationalize the Suez canal, at that time in the hands of British and French corporations. Now... anything written about the protracted conflicts between Egypt and Israel runs serious risks of over-simplification... but one version involves the British and French urging the Isrealis to invade and then stepping in themselves as peacekeepers to create a buffer zone (very conveniently) along the canal.

The dam itself is impressive, though not particularly interesting visually (nothing like the Hoover dam, for example). Again, no pictures were allowed, this time on the grounds that it is a militarily sensitive site. Understandably, as a flood ensuing from the destruction of the dam would essentially wipe out all of Egypt. Presumably for this reason, the dam is incredibly massive (containing enough construction material to build 17 Great Pyramids) and its sides slope down so gradually that its intrinsic stability makes it look like it could almost naturally be part of the surrounding rock.

Some photos from a couple activities from around Aswan:


Our tour leader, Matt, disembarking from our felucca (an Egyptian sailboat designed for cruising up and down the Nile)




Chris in Denile ("I won't get sick. I'm sure it's fine. Matt said we'd be ok. Hmmm, I don't see him in the water. Well, he wouldn't lie to us, would he? I'm sure we'll be fine...")




Chris climbing a Saharan sand dune. Ok, so there's water in the background... but the Sahara actually starts pretty close to the banks of the Nile in this part of Egypt

"Would you quit flipping channels like that?"

Khnum ignored him/her, his eyes slightly glazing over as his thumb rhythmically prodded the remote. His jaw slowly ground a cheeto into pulp.

"You're not even stopping at each channel long enough to see what's on."

He only blinked slowly as the images continued to flicker by. Most people assume that insolence and stubbornness are just natural traits of someone with the head of a ram, but the reality is more indirect. He developed these characteristics as a defence to all the teasing he had suffered back in school.

"Oh god, you're as stubborn as ever. Just like the time you rejected my power-sharing agreement without even reading it."

This time it was Hapi who had pushed a button. Khnum's head snapped over and he focused a burning glare on him/her. "Don't you bring that up again!" he bellowed.

"I'm just saying, if we had quit bickering over who controls the Nile flood and worked together, we may have been able to see this God fellow coming and done something about it."

"They call him Allah here, now, you ignorant gnat. And how many times do I need to tell you it wouldn't have made a difference anyway?" Khnum sighed before continuing.

"It wasn't the element of surprise that gave him the edge, you know, it was his whole approach to things. God of everything! I wish I had thought of that." The remote now lay on the couch between them, as Khnum needed both hands to accentuate his points. "You see how easy that makes it for him to thrive, that adaptability thing he's got going? We never stood a chance."

"Well, climatology and hydrodynamics had managed to make gains on him."

"Bah, not even gods. Pathetic, if you ask me."

"Pass me a chee-to, would you?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, sure."

They sat in silence for a few moments, their distracted attentions being drawn occassionally to the window. From their third floor flat in Aswan, they could see the banks of the river that had once made them great. It looked dramatically the same as yesterday, and the day before that... Hapi again broke the silence.

"I bet this Allah never even shed a tear when the floods stopped." His/Her eyes still moistened at the thought. "Ooh, what I wouldn't have given for a chance to hurl a thunderbolt at that Nasser fellow. Miss-yur Pray-zee-dent or whoever he was."

"It's pronounced president, knucklehead. Kind of like a modern pharaoh."

"Who ever heard of a pharaoh building his pyramid blocking the Nile? For gods' sake, they never even buried him in it!"

More silence. "See, this is why you shouldn't bring this stuff up. It's such a downer," noted Khnum.

Hapi had picked up the remote in the meantine, and was flipping almost as mindlessly as Khnum before. Being the more fickle of the two, though, his/her eyes soon lit up. "Ooh... Dancing with the Stars! I love this show..."

And we shall name this post "Chris trying to make cool poses in front of Egyptian Temples"

This is a statue of Horus at his temple in Edfu. Horus was the falcon god, who defeated Seth, the hippopotamus god of evil, even after Seth pulled out one of his eyes. Coincidentally, the Egyptian hyroglyph for "Horus" is the same as the one for "badass."


Wait a second, could it be another humungonormous statue dedicated the Ramses II? Note the size of the ear on the crumbled head. It's an exact copy of the neighbouring seating figure, again to give you an idea of scale. There are in fact 4 of these seated in a row here at the temple of Abu Simbel... they couldn't actually all fit into this shot. This temple was built by Ramses II and dedicated to... Ramses II. After a bit of time in power, he decided that he might as well be worshipped as a god. He figured he'd build his temple way to the south of Egypt, though (it's almost at the border with Sudan), in case the high priests of the other gods got a little upset and tried to take matters into their own hands...

Being in such a remote location, the temple at Abu Simbel requires tour bus convoys to and from Aswan. So it's a 3 hour drive one way, 2-3 hours at the site, and 3 hours back. And all the tourist show up at just about the same time. This makes for some packed temples. However, most people ram into the first temple for an hour, then ram into the second temple for an hour, then go sit in the cafe and relax from all the being rammed into temples.

What that means, is that for the last half hour of the tourist crush, the first (main) temple is essentially deserted. I managed to revisit it, this time taking my time to slowly walk up the centre to the inner sanctuary. The collosal statues that also line the interior peered down on me as I hovered along. Within the sanctuary itself, Ramses II sat amongst 3 other carved gods. The four of them and I shared the space only with a tiny sparrow who sat on Ramses' crown, cocking its head as I approached. It gave a little hop to the right, another quick one to the left, let out a loud chirp, and twittered off overhead.

The last few days were spent cruising on the Nile, from Luxor to Aswan. Now, I'm not usually one for laying around and doing nothing... but there's something to be said for sipping a cocktail on the sundeck and finishing a good book (thanks Sarah!), especially when the pace of your trip so far has been quite busy. On the other hand, we didn't have so much down time so as to make it boring, and we had activities to fill the time.

Aside from a few temple landings, one of the main highlights of the cruise was "Egyptian Night", a party thrown onboard where we were all encouraged to find some local getup and dress like an Egyptian! I'm glad I had my cellphone with me in my bag, in order to add the final authentic touch.

Now the girls had their own costumes, and decided it would be a wonderful idea to get some incriminating photos of the guy travelling alone in the group; for Monika's benefit, of course. So Ryan, now you know what you're up against as far as bachelor parties go, I've already been known to be spotted with my own personal harem...

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At the end of the week, though, it was time to say goodbye to the cruise ship, and to sunsets on the Nile...