An Athenian Diary

 

32

 

On the Road with Kids, Part 3

 

The Athenian Diary Goes to Egypt

 

 

 

The Athenian Diary takes a trip outside Athens, indeed outside Greece, for eleven days and ten nights on the Nile, December 26 to January 5! Egypt -- who could resist? A few hundred miles by air across the shimmering winter Mediterranean, too rough in antiquity to sail (though regular traffic continued from Cyprus and Rhodos to Alexandria in Egypt, across a stretch of sea beyond the Aegean), but crossed with ease by Egypt Air.

 

    Prologue in Athens

 

Planning for eight. Where to go, what to see? My Egyptian dreams included places perhaps not on the usual route -- Alexandria, the capital founded by Alexander the Great, which became the chief city of Egypt till after the Arabs founded Cairo; the Fayoum, the depression west of the Nile famous to all Hellenistic historians as the site of Apollonios' great dorea, gift, from king Ptolemaios II, an enormous agricultural enterprise run for many years by Zenon; the monasteries in the Wadi Natroun, home to some of the earliest Christian monastic settlements and an important force in the destructive struggles over dogma in the fourth and fifth centuries; the great Eastern Desert, which the Romans tried to tame for its resources but where recent archaeological discoveries show that they were little more than visitors in a vast landscape controlled in fact by locals; and the great sites of Upper Egypt between Luxor and Aswan, which include both high Egyptian monuments and the remains of the Ptolemaic and Roman hegemons. Okay for me -- but how to make this fun for everyone? For not just us, but also Edie's sister Ellen and her husband John with their kids Will and Emma would be coming too. The answer came in the form of a boat -- a Nile cruise, in fact. So it came about that we arranged to include in our standard trip a cruise on the Nile for four days, which would encompass the great sites of Upper Egypt. We lost, unfortunately, Alexandria and the Eastern Desert (glimpsed only through the window of the airplane) -- things to do, I think, another time. Luckily the planning was simply dumped in my hands (no one else wanted to think about it), and so with Saad (on whom more below) I worked out the schedule that will play itself out below.

 

Huge slabs of cash. Preparations call for time and energy, as always. First and last, money. Friends who have traveled in Egypt warned us that Egypt is one country, no matter how experienced an independent traveler you are, where you do not go "on your own." There are things to arrange everywhere -- passes, permits, arrangements, fees. I heard tales of "independent travelers" held up for days at mysterious checkpoints. So, following the advice of a colleague from the University of Hawaii who travels professionally to Egypt all the time, we contacted Saad Muhamed. Saad is an archaeologist who arranges personally-designed tours on the side, for a small fee. Through him we set up the schedule that follows. The only problem -- Egypt is like Greece twenty years ago: all transactions in cash, preferably dollars. So on Tuesday, December 23 (two days before Christmas), I arranged for the American School to provide us with massive slabs of American money. Naturally enough, banks being banks, they charged us twice for changing the money and added a fee on top, just for the insult. But now we have the cash we'll need to carry in utter nervous horror from here to Cairo, till we can discharge it into the happy hands of the local businessmen who will be our hosts in Egypt.

 

All things converge on Egypt. For Christmas Edie gave me a copy of Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari -- Theroux's account of his trip from Cairo to Cape Town. Like us, he hung around Cairo, and like us, he took the cruise between Aswan and Luxor (though in the opposite direction). A few days ago I decided to read some Greek science fiction. There's not much, but a clerk at Eleutherodakis steered me toward The Sickness and the Flower of the Lotus (H Arrwvstia kai to loulouvdi tou lwvtou) -- whose first chapter is set in Cairo. Just before we left I fell into conversation with two of the students here -- and discovered that one was studying Arabic and the other's father had lived in Egypt for two years. And finally, Nikos, the IT assistant at the School, turns out to have lived in Cairo for two years as a teenager with his parents. All the omens point toward Egypt!

 

Mad rush to the airport.

 

Amazingly, the rush to the airport was -- no rush. We took the airport bus, which departs from the Hilton Hotel, only a five minute walk from our house. The bus hurried us to the airport in less than an hour (perhaps in part because the holiday meant much less Athenian traffic than usual). We cleared passport control without a hitch, and after some of the usual waiting in lines, found ourselves on an airplane, headed for Cairo, at 8 pm the day after Christmas.

 

Our Days in Egypt -- A Diary of Travel

 

 

You need a good map to follow our adventures. For our use I bought a 1:1,000,000 scale map produced by Cartographia, with toponyms in transliterated Arabic. So I provide below also the Arabic names for the places visited, for ease of reference (and so one will know that Luxor and al-Uqşur are in fact the same place).

 

Likewise, a good guide is essential. For the archaeology, nothing beats the Blue Guide Egypt, which was impossible to find in Athens and, it turned out, just as hard to find in Cairo. We left Egypt without a copy, despite diligent efforts to find it. We also forgot to get a city guide for Cairo -- big mistake. Let's Go Cairo is one of the better; we got a copy after  our return, to see what we should have done, where we should have eaten, and for next time.

 

Our trip was arranged by Saad Muhammed, an archaeologist who works with foreigners to create specially designed tours. Everyone we talked with insisted that you need a guide for Egypt -- you can't just go there and expect to travel around on our own as you might in Greece or Turkey, and our experience bears out the wisdom of this advice (especially for first-time travelers). The agency that organized our trip was Legend of the Nile Travel (LONT Group) -- I'd recommend them to anyone. For more details about contacts in Egypt, see below.

 

Index of the Diary

 

The Diary on Egypt is massive. So, I have divided it up by day, to make it easier to read (and load!). Click on the days below to follow our adventures day-by-day; the links on the sites lead to resources on the internet with more information about them. I apologize for the inconsistencies of spelling of some place-names:

 

December 26 and 27, 2003: From Athens to Cairo/al-Qahira. From Cairo/al-Qahira to Luxor/al-Uqşur -- on the good ship Ra I. Temple of Karnak and Temple of Luxor in the town of Luxor; the Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. The Valley of the Kings. Sailing to Esna.

 

December 28, 2003: On the Ra I, and December 29, 2003: On the Ra I. Sailing to Edfu/Idfu. Edfu Temple. Sailing to Kom Ombo. The Kom Ombo Temple.

 

December 30, 2003: On the Ra I. Sailing to Aswan. Elephantine Island by felucca. Aswan -- the High Dam. The Unfinished Obelisk. The Temple of Philae.

 

December 31, 2003 and January 1, 2004: Back to Cairo.  The pyramids and sphinx!

 

January 2, 2004: By car to the Wadi el-Natrun. El Anba Beshoi and el-Sourian Monasteries, and January 3: By car across the desert to the Fayum. The Oasis.

 

January 4: Cairo, and January 5: Back to Athens, goodbye to the cradle of civilization.

 

To see more, have a look at the new (and huge) website Eternal Egypt.

 

The People and Organizations That Helped Us

 

In the first instance, we owe our trip to Saad Muhamad. Saad's an archaeologist by training who, alas, after years of trying to make it in the academic world -- a very tough proposition in Egypt -- is going back to run the family farm. But he arranged a custom private tour for us for a very modest fee.

 

The tour agency Saad used for was Legend of the Nile Travel (LONT Group). The staff was great, helpful, funny, and understanding.

 

In Cairo we stayed in the Safir Hotel Cairo in Dokki (202-748-2424). Very nice facilities, really quite good food in the dining room, and inexpensive by US standards. Slightly away from downtown (it's on the west side of the Nile) means you can't quite walk easily to the Museum and other sights. Our boat, the Ra I, belongs to Eastmar Port at Luxor and Aswan (012-21-40-556); no web site, unfortunately.

 

Our guides included:

All these people and organizations would be delighted to help anybody arrange a tour in Egypt. Don't be shy!

 

We hope you've enjoyed a virtual tour through Egypt with us. Please let us know what you think!

 

 

 

March 6, 2004

 

To return to the Table of Contents of the Athenian Diary, click here.