Cairo, Egypt

First of all, for everyone who’s worried, I am not, I repeat, not hurt nor dead. Not really something to joke about, actually - some of you may have heard (and I’ve even received emails about it) that there was a terrorist attack at a resort town just outside of Sharm El Sheik. Anybody keeping track of my itinerary would have noted that I was in Sharm El Sheik just the day before the attack. So that was in some ways a close call. In other ways it wasn’t: I spent no time at all in the resort in question, and was in Sharm El Sheik only half an hour. My exposure was pretty minimal. Scary nonetheless.

But the terrorism spectre is taken extremely seriously here in Egypt. Tourism is Egypt’s 3rd most important industry (after the Suez Canal and Oil), and it employs 60% of Egypt’s workforce. As such, when terrorism hits a tourist area in Egypt and the tourists stop coming as a result, it causes huge losses to the country and it’s people. As such, the government goes out of its way in a major way to protect tourists.

For example, I took a tour to Luxor about a week ago. Luxor is the site of the ancient Egyptian capital city of Thebes, containing a huge amount of temples, palaces, not to mention the Valley of the Kings nearby in which many of the Egyptian Pharaos’ tombs are found (including King Tut’s tomb). The place is simply amazing. But I digress, I was talking about terrorism and security: when the bus went from Safaga (where my boat was docked) to Luxor - crossing a desert to reach the river Nile - we went as part of a caravan of tourist buses. This caravan was escorted by a bunch of army trucks and police, the roads were blocked off while this caravan went through... In addition, there were armed checkpoints on the highway every 25 km or so, where every car had to stop and be questioned, searched or what have you. Busses in the caravan flew through these checkpoints, however. Our caravan had about 70 busses in it - imagine 70 large, air conditioned busses, all in a line, driving 130 km/h down a highway. Sometimes the caravans can reach 250 busses even!

But it’s not just caravans - every tourist site had numerous bag searches, metal detectors and (what initially put me off the most) lots of armed guards. I have never seen so many guns in my life until I came to Egypt. Oh, and another thing - our bus had it’s own bodyguard - a guy in a dark suite carrying an automatic rifle casually “hidden” from sight.

Major security, if you ask me. I didn’t feel safer - if anything, 70 busses in one spot make for a rather meaty target if a suicide bomber can figure out how to get past all the armed guards - but I definitely felt like there was an effort being made to keep us safe. How do you defend against a maniac with a bomb strapped to his body? I’m not sure how...

Having delved a bit into negativity, I should talk a bit about the things I’m loving here on this trip.

Lovin’ it #1 - deserts are cool. Really cool. I went on a trip to St. Catherine’s monastary (a very old Christian monstary built around the legendary “burning bush” where god revealed himself to Moses, and also close to Mount Sinai where Moses got the 10 commandments). During the 3 hour busride there and back, I took about 120 pictures of desert scenery. That included sand dunes, camels, Beduin tribe people and huts, and the occasional tree, but honestly most of the pictures were just really cool rock formations. It’s so dry and desolate in the desert, but at the same time extremely beautiful. I wouldn’t want to live in the desert, though. I like my tap water.

Lovin’ it #2 - camels are cool. I don’t know of any other animal that comes across as content as a camel. If you leave them alone, they just hang out, look around and gaze calmly in a given direction as if they’re just sighing “hmmmm.... “. A bit like cows, though I can’t seem to shake the feeling that cows are suching “duhhhh....” instead of “hmmmmm....”. But that’s not all, when camels walk, they don’t walk, they “lope”. Slowly. With their feet touching the ground as if they’re wearing really comfortable slippers. I just love it.

Lovin’ it #3 - ancient Egypt is cool. This stuff is old!!! Really old! I mean, us Europeans were living in caves, banging bones together to make tools while the Pharoas were ruling an advanced civilisation with writing, pyramids, temples, gold, jewelery and probably a fashion show or two. Now that’s advanced! But what gets me is when you’re looking at a piece of pyparus parchment from the 10th century BC (say) and you can see the penmanship of the writing. 3000 years ago, some guy was sitting at a desk with a pen in hand, writing this thing, probably pausing for a moment or two to chew on the end of his quill before going on to draw a bird, then a washboard, then a feather and then a guy walking - which means “apeman” in hieroglyphics, and which is pretty much where us caucasians were in the evolutionary chain at the time. It just boggles the mind.

Lovin’ it #4 - dolphins rule! So far this entry has dwelled on Egypt, but I’m not forgetting that I’ve spent most of my time in the past month on a boat, and I have seen a total of 18 dolphins playing on the bow of said boat. Nothing compares to seeing dolphins having a bit of fun in the wild. On time, when the waves were really high, I saw dolphins playing around and actually jumping from one big swell to another! It was truly a sight to behold. Sorry no pictures, because whenever something like that happened, I didn’t want to run down to my cabin to get my camera, in case the dolphins had left once I got back.

Okay, enough for today. Hope everyone is well! I’ll be back in Montreal in just over a week, so I’m looking foward to seeing you all again soon!

PS. The photos are:
1- Temple of Luxor
2- St. Catherine's Monastry
3- A content looking camel
4- One of my many desert photos
5- Star Flyer: "My" beautiful boat