Egypt

Ancient Egypt and its monuments to the dead and the afterlife are why a dysfunctional country on a dysfunctonal continent in a dysfunctional region is so well known and, until at least recently so widely visited. Modern Cairo has a massive necropolis at its centre that is a drawcard for the morbidly curious and it is home for millions - dead and alive together. Egypt's icons, the pyramids, are giant tombs and a mummy, a corpse, could not be mistaken as a symbol of any other country.

Cairo

The largest city in the Arab world and Africa with a population of 6.76 million and spread over 453 square kilometres, 15000 people per sq km. What doesn't look falling down looks half finished. Dusty, grimy, frantic and noisy. But that's part of the attraction.

Giza. Saqqara

There's big ones and little ones, a red one, a black one, a bent one and a stepped one. But it's the pryramids at Giza that are truly jaw-dropping.

Luxor-Karnak

The Thebes of ancient Egypt - the capital of the Middle and New Kingdoms. The temples and palaces of Luxor and Karnak built on the east bank and the necropolises of the Valley Of The Kings and (mis-named) Valley Of The Queens on the west side as was ancient Egyptian custom - the living on the east where the sun rose, the dead on the west where it set.

The Nile

Egypt is the largest of the Middle Eastern countries and the 3rd largest in Africa. In reality though it's really a very narrow ribbon of green through vast empty deserts terminating in the triangle of the Nile delta where most of the population lives.

Aswan & Abu Simbel

Egypt was prepared to sacrifice Abu Simbel to the Aswan Dam. Luckily the rest of the world was not.

Sinai

Sinai, a focus for religion and for conflict, as inseparable as ever, from before Moses to the 6 Day War and still a bit risky - our driver telling us he'd run any unofficial road blocks. Didn't see any though!

Egypt, Jordan, Syria

The Ruins & friends, Prophets of Anarchy tour.

Tour notes

• Luxor - Karnak and Abu Simbel should not be missed. An astonishing look back in time into ancient Egypt. The Great Pyramid's status as a Wonder Of The Ancient World is fully justified. It and the Pyramid of Khafre are truly awe inspiring.
• The Egyptian pyramids are not the only pyramids along the Nile. You didn't know that did you? There's a group of nearly 200 pyramids in Sudan, 200kms north of Khatoum built about 800 years after the end of the Egyptian pyramid era. Smaller narrower and steeper than their Egyptian equivalents but who's ever heard of them? The forgotten pyramids of Meroe; how come stuff like this gets a mention hardly anywhere? '
• Egyptians have mastered the "Exit Through The Gift Shop" model of retail. Leaving the Egyptian Museum, Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel and the Temple of Hatshepsut are exercises in avoiding attempts to get hold of your money. The style varies from the reasonably civilised at the Egyptian Museum to the desperate, don't-take-no-for-an-answer antics at the Valley of the Kings.
• The personalised cartouche. A cartouche is an hieroglyphic representation of a royal name carved inside an oval shape. Any Egyptian jeweller can find the necessary hieroglyphs to inscribe your name as a cartouche onto the trinkets he wants to flog you. Ancient Egyptians named Bruce or Rita! Who knew?
• Metal detectors are everywhere - hotels, museums, the Pyramids. Not many worked, but if one beeped an alert the security guards tended to ignore it. Perhaps we looked totally non-threatening.
• Public crappers. To be avoided if at all possible, the users' aiming skills are astonishingly poor. Keep your sphyncter puckered for the duration. Those hole-in-the-floor bogs are disgusting. Us old blokes with less than optimal bladder pressure need to stand close to hit a target. Bugger the standing close - we'd aim from about 3 feet away and end up pissing on the floor; which usually improved the standard of hygene of the place.
• Small brown bumps and bruises on the foreheads of most older Egyptian men. A result of more than 40 years of connecting with mosque floors 5 times a day would be my guess.
• A shopkeeper in the Street Of The Tentmakers (Sharia Khayamiya) in old Islamic Cairo, on hearing my accent, rushed into his shop to retrieve a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald to show me where some of his craftwork got a mention in an article on a Melbourne craft exhibition.
• Hulks of planes along the runway on landing in Cairo. Not crashed planes, they looked as if they been cannibalised for parts and then left to gather dust.
• Calls to prayer over tinny loudspeakers from a mosque near our Giza hotel - the Go-kart Races we came to call it; sounding for all the world like a pack of racing 2-stroke engines.
• The Sinai falls within the great arid climatic belt crossing northern Africa and southwestern Asia. The climate in winter has a relatively high amount of precipitation and occasional torrential rains. The pilot on our flight from Cairo must've had a heads-up from the meteorologists - the flight crew was indulging in a few cigarettes in the cockpit, possibly to calm their nerves because we hit one hell of a storm upon descent into Sharm El Sheik that bounced the plane all over the sky and resulted in an initial aborted landing, Sean's fingernails were embedded into his arm-rests and the terminal, roads and hotel were all flooded.
• Should you leave a country on a high note or on a low note? At Nuweiba you have the low note option imposed upon you. Publicised as a tourism highlight of resorts and fabulous scuba diving on coral reefs, our experience was one of a shit-hole, literally and figuratively. Gloomy, grimy, unwelcoming and inefficient.