Egypt and Jordan experience

Here are some snaps from our two weeks in Egypt and Jordan. It was amazingly interesting, educational, eye-opening, fun and only occasionally frustrating (notably: mistakenly giving 20 USD to a toilet attendant instead of the obligatory 1 Egyptian pound; spending 14 hours on a ferry - four of which we spent looking at our destination waiting for the tug boat to come and save us; learning that the trip notes are useless, i.e. when they say you don't need a sleeping bag for a winter's night in the desert, you really really do).

Sunset in Wadi Rum - Lawrence of Arabia Territory and home to tribes of bedouins

Our camp for the night in Wadi Rum

Another style of accommodation - our overnight train from Cairo to Luxor. The ladder is to my top bunk and under the little shelf you can see is the basin. This was an old old train, and it's uphill to Luxor. Consequently I kept hitting the wall, literally, everytime the train lurched uphill. I can say we had every form of transport on this trip - plane, train, bus, boat, camel, donkey, horse and cart...

Back in the Jordanian desert - me and my camel

Chris's camel was always hungry

Some scenes from our boat as we cruised up the Nile

More life by the banks of the Nile

From the top of Mt Sinai - it surprised me that this was one of my highlights of the trip. We were lucky to get to Sinai due to flooding the week before. The roads were really washed away in parts and it made for some hairy driving. Very windy conditions at the top, one guy did take a tumble when the wind picked him up. We came down by torchlight.

After much discussion with previous Egypt travellers I decided to take the 4-hour, dawn bus trip to Abu Simbel, temple of Ramses II. Was very worthwhile. Hard to believe it was covered by sand for centuries, and that they moved it and reconstructed it to save it from the rising dam waters.

An Egyptian friend in Edfu temple

Me and some very well preserved sandstone rams at Karnak Temple, Karnak. They don't look 3000 years old do they?

The sandstone temple of Queen Hatshepsut - imagine in it's time it was brightly painted, with grass all around path leading up to it...

Feluccas lined up on the Nile

Chris in Karnak temple - our guide here was amazing, and gave us so many intricate insights into this place. Nothing was as simple as it seemed as there was symbolism and a story in everything.

Hot air balloons early morning above the Valley of the Kings