But the highlights have been going to the Pyramids of Giza. Just amazing that they are so ancient, once covered in sand, discovered and now we have the opportunity to enter into these mighty pyramids.
The funny part about the pyramids, which we were warned about, was when an English girl got on a camel, and didn't quite negotiate the price before getting on. If you do not, they will not let you get off the camel until you give them more money. So shortly after she got on, the man started fighting with her boyfriend about not paying for the girl. It was funny to watch and we were just glad it wasn't us!!
As for the Egyptian Museum, we only got a taste. There about about 300,000 artifacts in the museum, it would take a month to see everything but hands down my two favorite things.. everything that was in King Tut's tomb. Almost everything from the tomb was there from the three layers of solid gold that covered the mummy to every sarcophagus (sp??) (coffins). It was awesome to see the original solid gold mask of King Tut. The other favorite thing was to see the mummies. We say about ten of them. 3,000 years old and you can still see the teeth, skin and some of them still had their hair. Some of the mummies we saw were Ramses the Great, Tuthmosis I - IV, Hatsheput, Merenptah...etc.
From there (Cairo), we took the over night train to Aswan where we only had a day, but on the morning of the 29th we set sail for an overnight felucca ride on the Nile. Beth and I both agree this was the highlight of the trip. We stopped for several hours, had lunch, went for a swim in the Nile, then by 6pm, we set sail again, on a fairly windy day to another location where we set up camp. The guys on the boat made dinner, we sat around by candle light and a full moon reflecting off the waters of the Nile, had dinner, talked about anything from the history of Egyptian religion to where Moses may have split the Red Sea. It was amazing.
We slept in the open air on the boat, and I woke up in the morning to us paddling across the river for our next venture .... we got off the boat about 7am, and headed toward Luxor.
We visited the Luxor temple in the evening, with all the lights on the statues. It is so massive I can't even describe how big the temple was. Today we visited the Valley of the Kinds, in which we went into three of the tombs of the Kinds from Ramses the 9th, Rameses and Merenptah (which is one of the mummies we saw at the museum). These kings tombs were just unbelievable what they did to prepare for the after life, and again 3000 years later here we are, going into their tombs to see where they were buried. Very interesting. We saw where King Tut's tomb was, but did not go in.
I will stop there, but things are going well, we leave Luxor tomorrow for Harrgadda (sp) where there are beaches on the Red Sea. We still have yet to see or know what we will do there.
