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Well I’m freshly back from my most recent trip abroad. We visited the land of the Nile and pyramids. The wife has always dreamed about visiting Egypt and so when she called me about a cheap trip she had found, what could I say? So off we go. It was a 9 and a half hour trip from JFK to Cairo (going over). The trip started pretty well, all went as planned. Egypt is an interesting place. We went with a guided tour group which is the ONLY way to visit. I would highly adivse against travelling there on your own unless you are a very seasoned traveller abroad.
As you may or may not know, Egypt is basically a 3rd world country, or underprivaliged nation (for you PC people). The general city itself is quite old and very dirty. There are about 17 million people living in Cairo. Having said that, 95% of their income is from tourism, so the real tourist hotels and such treat you fairly well. The hotels themselves were clean, and the staff generally nice. We stayed at a hotel for a day then flew to Abu Simbel to visit a temple then back to Aswan to hop on a cruise ship to head up the Nile. The Nile is a very dirty river and had a certian smell to it. The scenery was very nice though. Lush green areas surrounding the Nile on both sides.
So we visited just about every temple there was, hit the pyramids, the sphinx, the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, and several markets. Now the markets are quite an experience. For those who have been to Mexico, you know what the local markets are like. Well multiply that by 5 (worse that is) and you have the Egyptian markets. Everything is bartering, and they will tell you anything to get a buck out of you. Started wearing on my nerves very quickly. This is the part that having a guide with you helps at. He was good at answering our questions and making sure we were not being taken too much.
Basically the sites were absolutly awsome, I was glad I went to see them. But I really could have done without the hasseling of the markets. By the way the hasseling went further than just the market place but I’ll save that for another day. Click below for an album of photos we took while there.

Egypt Experience

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2003 at 10:17 am and is filed under General Thoughts, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.