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.