EGYPT PART TWO: I want to live on the Avenue of Sphinxes

 

Avenue of Sphinxes, Luxor

Karnak Temple of Amun

Temple of Karnak

We are whisked off the plane into a world of wonderment in Luxor stopping first at the Temple of Karnak, the largest religious structure in the world, with a great hall of 54,000 square feet. They say there is enough room in it to house the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but let's not give anyone the idea. 

 

Colossi of Memnon

The Avenue of Sphinxes runs 1.7 miles and connects Karnak to Luxor Temple, slightly less grand than Karnak and by that I mean tremendously grand.

Luxor Temple

On the Nile

We boarded the ship Blue Shadow, which became our home for the next four nights. The Nile Cruises are a big business. There can be up to five ships tied together and when you dock, you walk through their lobbies to get out or they pour through yours. One day Darr compared the exodus of passengers to a clown car emptying out. 

Cruising on the Nile is about as dreamy as it sounds. You get a break from continuous khaki and see verdancy all along the banks. The days are brutally hot but as soon as the great orb goes down, it is mild and lovely and cool. We sat on the pool deck on top of the ship, watched the sunsets and stars and heard the evening calls to prayers up and down the Nile.

Tomb of Ramses IV in the Valley of the Kings

 Tomb of Ramses IV

A woman in our group who had been to Egypt before told us that the best was yet to come. We refused to believe it, but The Valley of the Kings is truly magnificent. The valley served as the necropolis to the New Pharoahs, and has 63 subterranean tombs in the limestone hills. Up to 11 tombs are open to the public every day. Because the tombs are underground, many of them have maintained their amazing colors.

Temple of Queen Hatshepsut

After the Valley of Kings we went to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, which resembles a high tech office building in Arizona.

Temple of Horus in Edfu

The next morning, docked in Edfu, we were whisked by horse-drawn carriage to The Temple of the Falcon God Horus. Protected by the Goddess Isis, Horus was able to take revenge on his oddly named Uncle Seth who had killed his father Osiris.

Temple of Kom Ombo

That afternoon we docked across the street from the Temple of Kom Ombo. You can see the the influence of the Greeks, those newcomers, in the column design.  

The Great Temple of Abu Simbel

We took a flight to Abu Simbel, yes there is an airport there, and then had lunch at a Nubian restaurant. How many people can say that? The only Nubian restaurant in the US, in Newark, is closed. The Abu Simbel Temple was moved, piece by piece in 1968 to prevent its being flooded by Lake Nasser.

Dog on the Dam

The last day was the least day. We went to the Unfinished Obelisk, which fittingly I left unviewed. Darr noted that it was the first time he wasn’t awed. Some of our group went instead into the shade to drink cokes and browse through a bookstore and spice shops. Finally, we went to see the High Dam at Aswan. What? No hieroglyphs? No paintings? No obelisks? We had certainly reached the bottom of the barrel, but by then we were ready to barrel on home.

I want to thank the Egyptian nation, the fields of archeology, anthropology, ancient history, and the philanthropists who support them, and maybe even the grave robbers who tipped off a few of the tomb locations. Thank you for preserving these breathtaking sites and and allowing millions of us to see them.

Tomb of Rameses 1 in living color

Egypt: They're Mummifying the Cats (Part One)

Mummified cats Alexandria National Museum

The Great Pyramid

Egypt is just too much. Too much history, too much beauty, too much shock, too much awe. So I will break this blog into two parts, Lower Egypt which is in the north, and Upper Egypt in the south. On top of that, the Nile River flows south to north.  I know, my head hurts too.

After a 14-day Road Scholar tour of Egypt, I was on overload. Red lights were flashing. My eyes were dazzling, and my brain was sizzling like the sun.  There was no room at the brain's inn. I could not even fit in a tiny hieroglyph. 

 

Our group 

This was our first organized group tour, and there was not a single bad apple in our gang of 14, in fact there wasn’t even a slightly bruised one. These were flawlessly nice people. 

 

Safwat teaching us something

Road Scholar puts the emphasis on scholar. Dragging back to the hotel after a day of intense sightseeing your instinct is to take a rest. But no. There was frequently a “lecture” at 6 p.m. by a noted Egyptian scholar. These brainiacs don’t know when to say when. Road Scholar regulars call the trips “travel for nerds.” 

Safwat, showing us how to smite the enemy

We were also lucky to have the best tour guide in the world, Safwat Gabr, a native Egyptian with a PhD in Egyptology, who loves showing off his country. He is smart, kind, compassionate, funny, easy going, relaxed. He loves his family, his job, he even loved our group, which he called Habu, or blessing. 

Safwat had the solution before you could state the problem. New reading glasses? “Here, try these, I will have my associate go to the pharmacy and get you new ones.” I wanted to buy a new pen, he handed me his to keep. He managed our group with the expertise of an orchestra conductor. 

Before I went to Egypt people asked if I felt safe going there. I had been a little nervous, but Road Scholar wrapped us up like mummies in a protective cocoon from the moment we arrived. We had a Road Scholar handler greet us at the airport and whisk us through the visa and customs process; we traveled with an armed guard (“tourist police”); we had police escorts when the traffic got rough. 

The first morning we went to see the only remaining of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid of Giza.  We saw the Sphinx, and that afternoon we went to the Egyptian Museum of Cairo where we saw the original (not the traveling replicas) treasures from King Tut’s tomb. And that was Day One.

The Sphinx of Giza

Over the next 12 days Road Scholar piled ancient wonder upon ancient wonder on top of us like the stones in a pyramid. I rode a camel. I climbed 236 steps down into the Bent Pyramid. I saw mosques and tombs and bazaars. I learned to like eggplant. A little. 

I did it!

 

Khan el-Khalili Bazaar Old Cairo

“This is not a shopping trip,” Safwat warned us. And yet there was a relentless barrage of vendors at every ancient site. 

World's cutest vendors

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun, 879 AD, Cairo

I like to be on the go, go, go, and I used to call Darr the Nazi tour director the way he would march me around Europe. But we are mere pikers compared to the demands of a Road Scholar itinerary. This activity level was called Keep the Pace, and boy what a pace.  We went underground to see catacombs and stood high on a minaret, we took three airline flights in Egypt, we rode on a ship, a motorboat, a sailboat, a horse-drawn carriage, a bus, and a camel. 

The Bent Pyramid

Bent Pyramid 259 feet underground

Cairo-The Nile at night

We got a 2:15 a.m. wake up call to prepare for a 6 a.m. flight from Cairo to Luxor and off we went to Part Two. Please join me there.

Chatting Up Chatham

Sunrise in Chatham

We usually go to Maine in the summer. No, we always go to Maine. The Warren roots there are deeper than the bottom feeders on the ocean floor. 

But this summer my son, who lives in Berkeley, was attending a wedding in Wellfleet on the Cape. So for convenience we rented a house in nearby Chatham, and my older son, who also lives in Berkeley joined us. Full family of four fiesta! 

Franky, age 2 and a half

 

We have been taking the boys to Maine since they were babies, and they quickly developed a taste for lobster. We told them they had to, or they could no longer be part of our family. We spent a week in Maine when they were 5 and 2 and a half and according to my journal we had lobster 6 out of 7 nights. “They love lobster. Peter likes the body meat. Franky likes the tail.” That’s the way we used to roll, or lobster roll. 

But now my sons are vegetarian. 

New England restaurants with names like The Captain's Table, or the Impudent Oyster do not cater to vegetarians. They had to ask for several adjustments to the menu throughout the week. Like a BLT without the B. Or sausage gnocchi without the sausage. We had the wait staff picking so much meat out of our orders that they may as well have been shelling lobster. 

We were dubious about Cape Cod as opposed to Maine. So we set out to answer the questions, Why isn't Cape Cod as good as Maine? Or, Why is Maine better than Cape Cod? 

Upside down house

We rented a house from Pretty Picky Properties. Yes, the real name. I was tired of searching on VRBO and Airbnb for residential properties, full of personal chotskies. Instead I found a pure rental property. Not Auntie Margaret’s ancestral home. Not “the house that’s been in our family for generations but a couple of weeks a year we rent it to losers like you.” So the house felt like a long-stay hotel freshly painted, clean, spacious, and well maintained, but without a drop of personality. 

The other problem was that the house was upside down. The kitchen, dining room and family room were on the second floor. Two of the three bedrooms were on the first floor. We often wondered where we were. Wait, I have to go upstairs to get coffee?

Ridgevale Beach

But the house's primary attraction was the location-- a 5-minute walk to the beach. You could pop up in the morning and walk to Ridgevale Beach on the Nantucket Sound for sunrise and watch seagulls slicing across the sky like javelins. The weather was perfect all week. 

Nauset Light Beach

After picking up Franky in Wellfleet, we stopped at Nauset Light Beach, part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Straight-up roaring Atlantic ocean for 40 protected miles.

Seal with a blubber bite

The Monomoy Island Excursion Seal Cruise took us to a sand bar with hundreds of seals lounging in the sun. The skipper and his matey taught us some fun seal facts—they have to eat 10 to 15 pounds a day; some of them had visible scars from the great white shark who also likes summering in Cape Cod. The seal survives a brush with a shark because it has three inches of blubber fat to bite through. Sometimes Jaws just doesn’t have the time or energy. 

Monomoy Island has 30,000-50,000 gray seals

 Did I tell you the weather was perfect? 

After the cruise we were as hungry as seals, so we went to lunch at nearby Brax Landing overlooking the harbor from which we had overlooked the shore. There we learned that you can’t carry a yeti bottle into a bar. (A Yeti walks into a bar...) My son was carrying one full of water, but the hostess told us that some rascals fill their Yeti's with booze and then blame the restaurant for their subsequent drunk driving offenses. 

Striped and seaworthy

They don't make it easy to find The Morris Island Loop part of the Monomoy National Wildlife Reserve. Its trailhead is inside a gated community with a private sign at its entrance. Locals assured us these signs were “misleading” and that the public has full access. 

Provincetown

We made a day trip to Provincetown! It’s amusing and it’s loud and there are good vibes all day long. Clothing and art shops managed by attentive and humorous gay men, alongside live cabaret shows and sex shops. In other words, it’s as great as everyone says it is. 

Fiddler Crab

We went to the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Five trails lead you through panoramic salt marshes, and sea grass, and tidal pools. Despite the Audubon name, we saw no birds of note, but we spent a long time watching fiddler crabs pop up and down out of the sand. They are damn weird looking with their disproportionately large claw. They look like pitchers with lopsided sized arms. 

Denny on "his" beach in Wellfleet

We visited our friends Denny and Sandy who had rented a spectacular house in Wellfleet, atop a bluff overlooking a very angry Atlantic Ocean, throwing its weight around with huge surf. 

Italian Wedding Cake at Bucas'

Our favorite restaurant was Bucas' Tuscan Roadhouse in Harwich.  It is dark and cozy and friendly, and we were swept into a food coma on clouds of creamy goat cheese, hot crusty bread, nutty pesto, and bruschetta. We went back for more two nights later. 

Wild Goose Tavern

Best strawberry rhubarb pie: Marion's Pie Shop. Best ice cream: Schoolhouse Ice Cream.  The portions are so large it's like getting served by the cafeteria lady who likes you best. Best brunch: Liz's Café in Provincetown, good lunches at the Blue Willow in Wellfleet, and the Wild Goose Tavern in Chatham. 

Franky told Siri to take us out for the nicest breakfast on the Cape on our way to the airport, and she/he/it decided on Will & Co. Cafe in Plymouth. Best coffee: bottomless cups of Witches Brew, a dark roast. We reviewed the week and came back to the original question about Maine vs Cape Cod. Admittedly Cape Cod has many of the same charms as Maine. But we agreed that Maine is cozier, homier, more down to earth, less crowed, and more welcoming (well, a little). 

 But the number one reason Cape Cod is not as good as Maine is because Cape Cod is not Maine. 

 But thanks Cape Cod, we had a great time!

Sunset in Chatham

Pitt Stop

Pittsburgh bridges

Pittsburgh suffers from a lack of awareness (Where? Pittsburgh?) and appreciation (Why would I want to go there? Isn't it all polluted?) But I found it to be a charming city with distinctive good looks, 436 bridges, three mighty rivers, and pierogis (also spelled pirogue, and perogie). C’mon, give it a try. 

We had two goals, we would see the Andy Warhol Museum on Tuesday, and Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house, on the way home Wednesday. But the Warhol museum is closed Tuesdays; and Fallingwater is closed Wednesdays. If you decide to take a Pittsburgh jaunt, plan accordingly. 

Grandview Park

We started at the top. We drove to Grandview Park on Mt. Washington  which, as advertised, has a grand view. 

The Steel Mill Saloon

We had lunch at The Steel Mill Saloon which initially felt unwelcoming, we were greeted by a bartender with neck tattoos, serving a solitary drinker. We asked cautiously if they served food, and she said yes. Suddenly the place came alive, a cute waitress brought us a menu that would please any millennial, and the place filled up with diners. Regional favorites included the Mill Worker burger, a Bavarian Pretzel, and Buffalo Pirouges. 

The Duquesne Incline

Riding in comfort on funicular built in 1877

For someone who is reluctant to take carnival rides,  I don't know why I was so eager to jump on the 147-year-old Duquesne Incline.  But what a view!

PNC Park home of the Pirates

Sports venues reign supreme in Pittsburgh and warrant prime property. Both PNC Park and Heinz Field, (I mean Acrisure Stadium) adorn the riverfront. There was a local man on our funicular who instructed his out-of-town visitors never to call it anything but Heinz Field. 

 Confluence point of Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers

Pamela's Diner

Wednesday morning we met Peter and Nila at Pamela’s Diner “best breakfast in the burgh since 1980.” (Is that supposed to sound old?) We had specialty hotcakes-crepe style. They may have been thin but they were huge. And stuffed with either strawberries, blueberries, or bananas, or, if you wanted to break bad, bananas and chocolate chips. 

Peter and friend at Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop

After breakfast we wandered around the neighborhood known as the Strip District, where ethnic grocery stores are taken very seriously. We loved and lingered in Reyna Foods a Mexican food market with small trash cans stuffed to the brim with dozens of kinds of dried chiles; every hot sauce in the world; and every Goya product. Just across the street, the S and D Polish Deli features goodis from Poland, including  sauerkraut and beets. You could also buy everything ever made in black and gold at Yinzers in the Burgh. 

Andy Warhol Museum, Kaws + Warhol show

Darr and I went to the Andy Warhol Museum. The miniseries The Andy Warhol Diaries sparked my interest in Andy.  His famous paintings and friends were all on display in the  largest single artist museum in North America.  The Pittsburgh Andy Warhol grew up in was sooty and dark. During World War II,  Pennsylvania produced more steel than all of the Axis forces combined. There was so much smoke in the air that it looked like midnight at noon. 

But now, no doubt with the help of Andy’s famous Brillo Pads (Shines Aluminum Fast!)  Pittsburgh is  sparkling and bright and worth a visit. 

Bon Voyage to Nila and Peter, moving to San Francisco