Egypt part 1

 

This was 11+ year for my youngest. She is at a good school and can stay there till A-levels. But she decided, with some encouragement from me, to appear for a grammar school. (Grammar school entrance exams are very competitive, even more so in London. The speed and accuracy required in these exams are of an extremely high standard. But more about the 11+ in a different blog post.) 

Planning for the trip 

We booked our tickets about 10 months ago. It gave us something to look forward to for the time we were studying. During the year, we also were able to convince my daughter's best friend and her family to also visit Egypt during the same time. While both families did not fly in and out of Egypt together or on the same dates, we were together for 8 out of the 10 days we were in Egypt. 

The wife and I hold a different approach to travel planning. She likes to research and plan out things, while I like to visit the highlights, and then walk the streets. As it happens, we end up following the wife's plans in every trip. 

A number of my friends have been to Egypt, so we had a good list of recommendations. 

We decided to:  

1) Not go on a cruise to save time in going from A to B

2) Visit Abu Simbel by flying to Aswan 

3) Pyramids and GEM

4) Go to the White desert* 

* decided by the wife 

Itinerary

Day	Night	Activity
Wed	Cairo	Reach Cairo
Thu	White desert	Desert safari
Fri	Cairo	Back to Cairo
Sat	Cairo	Pryamids of Giza (32 mins by Car), Khan Market (45 Mins)
Sun	Cairo	Gems Meusuem (13 Mins) + Cairo Tower + Feluca ride with dinner
Mon	Luxor	East Luxor - Luxor Temple , Karnak temple
Tue	Luxor	West Luxor - Valley of Kings and Balloon Ride in evening . Hatshetput, colosimemon
Wed	Hurgada	Morning Hot Air Ballon in Luxor + Head to Hurghada
Thu	Hurgada	Chill
Friday	Hurgada	Deep Chill
Sat	Cairo	Fly to Cairo / 5.30 pm Flight to London

Flying to Egypt 

We landed on a Wednesday at 9pm, flying Egypt Air. The airline had some frightening reviews online. I was not overly worried - I am from India, it is a 5 hour direct flight - how bad could it be. 

I was pleasantly surprised - the flight was on time, the check-in was smooth, the crew were friendly and took care of us. The only dampener - no vegetarian options. EgyptAir will only carry vegetarian food if you ask for it, else its 'chicken or beef' with a huge smile. 

      Athens at night

The immigration lines were short, and the officer was quick - they did stamp a 'register within 7 days' stamp on our passport, but we did not notice it then. 

We reached the hotel (Novotel Al Borg) in an Uber. (Uber works well in Cairo to a large extent)

Overnight to the White Desert

Most of the desert tours pick up tourists from central hotels in downtown Cairo or from Giza necropolis. We were picked up from our hotel (as our hotel was close to Tahrir Square in central Cairo) in a 10 seater van. This van picked up people from a few other places then left Cairo. 

We headed to the Bahariya Oasis, which is about 400km from Cairo in the desert. The desert starts almost immediately after leaving Cairo. Egypt is essentially all desert except for the Nile. So, if you head away from the Nile in any direction, you reach the desert.  

I was not in a good mood when the journey began. It could be because of the early morning wake up, the not very comfortable seats in the van, the prospect of 4+ hours in it, etc, and I might have moaned a bit to the wife. 

But things picked up. 

The road was fantastic. 2 lanes each way separated by an extra wide central verge. Smooth surface, flat and straight. The van was soon doing 130-140 kmph. 

The kids were behaving much better than me. They were sleepy, but were not complaining and were busy reading and listening to music. 

 

At Bahariya, we had lunch and shifted into a 4x4 drive with Ala. Ala was going to be our guide, driver, cook and valet for the next 20 hours. 

(Ala and me)

We went for another 200km - similar roads continued into the desert towards the oasis at Farfara. Our destination was the White Desert National park, which gets its name from the white chalk rock formations, formed due to the erosion of by wind and sand. 

It reminded me of a sea bed - sand and On the way, we did off-road driving (120+kmph), some sand boarding (approx 15kmph), visited the black desert and a crystal mountain. We also found many fossilised marine creatures encrusted within the  limestone at a few places.  

Just before sunset, we arrived at our tent. Ala got busy - he made a small wind break next to the car, and then began preparing food for us. We huddled next to a small fire and watched the sun set. 

Soon after sunset, the stars came out. I had been looking forward to this. Long ago, the night time view was like this every night. The sky would be littered with stars. The view was well worth the effort. We spent the night in the tents.

In the morning, we work up to watch the sunrise and had breakfast at the same time. We wrapped up and left the tent at 7.30am. On the way back, we stopped at a hot water spring. After that, we bade farewell to Ala, and sat in the van to head back to Cairo.

The Pyramids 

There are many pyramids around Cairo. The largest one is the Great Pyramid at Giza, which has three pyramids and the Sphinx.  You can buy an entry ticket and walk around the entire area. However, you will be approached by many people offering to show you around - by a car, or a tanga (horse-cart), or horses. 

We took a Tanga-wallah masquerading as a guide for $70. We were happy to have bargained it down from $180. However, the joke was on us. The tanga-wallah knew less about the pyramids than we did. 

For the money, we got photos like the ones below. 

We were a group of 4 adults, out of which the men were not very enthusiastic about a claustrophobic walk inside a 5500 year old tomb.  So, we decided not to go inside the pyramid. 

GEM 

The next day, we went to the Grand Egyptian Museum. It is a modern museum with impressive architecture and has an impressive collection of Egyptian artefacts. 

I will not recommend the guide tour offered by the GEM - it is usually very large (our tour had 50 people), so it is hard to talk to the guide or even see what the guide is talking about. By the time you reach the artefact that the guide has been talking about, the guide has moved on to the next thing. 

Another tip, the tour tickets include entry tickets, so do not buy the entry ticket if you have bought the tour tickets. We bought tour tickets, and then entry tickets as the language is not very clear on the GEM website. They were sympathetic but they have no way of refunding a ticket, so we ended up with double entry tickets for 8 people :( 

If you have already bought entry tickets, you can get your tickets upgraded for the tour at the museum (but not online). 

You can uber to GEM and uber back. In case your uber driver asks for payment by cash (we were asked for $20 for a ride which cost $3), just cancel and rebook and you will eventually find a driver who won't. See a similar conversation with another uber driver. 

Khan-el- Khalili Market 

Close to central Cairo is this market which reminded me of Delhi's Sarojini Nagar and Karol Bagh market. We went there at 9pm and it was not very busy then. There are shops for clothes, souvenirs, stone, glass, jewellery, cutlery  - and there is a lot of bargaining. 

The Egyptian salesmen

I was mildly irritated by the repeated sales pitches but this irritation changed to admiration gradually. Every person who approached me did so with a smile. They wanted to talk to me and get me to walk into their store. If I refused, they would persist as long as I was smiling. If I lost my smile, they would immediately withdraw. 

They would usually start to talk by identifying me as an Indian, saying Namaste, and then start talking about Bollywood. They would make jokes about how they dislike the actors in Bollywood as their wives like them, and how they are happy that the Bollywood stars are far away from them. 

They would always smile while negotiating on price. 

We adopted a 80% discount to the starting price. It was an extreme step, but once more, the joke was on us. Soon, we were suprised to note that the shopkeepers were happy to part with their wares at this discount. 

Egypt is not the richest of places. Their currency has been hammered in the last few years and months and is now at about 50EGP to 1 USD (down from 20EGP to the USD from a few months ago). So, I would imagine how a lot of things are more expensive now. Tourism has also been hit - earlier by Covid, and then by the war in Palestine. So, it must not be easy to earn your living in Egypt for many who depend on tourism. So, beneath the smiles, there was the serious business of earning a living. But the mask did not slip. 

For this, I admired them.

In the second part to this blog, I will cover the remaining part of the trip - Abu Simbel, Luxor and Hurghada. 

Hurtle.

Hurtle on Google 

Would there be any other way to describe the growth and resulting damage to the environment. 

Here are some things which I wonder if I should be doing more - 

1. Flying less, using a train more, especially for personal travel.

2. Driving less, using the metro more

3. Walking 

4. Eating less meat, wasting less food. (Apparently, 18% of CO2 comes from cows belching. That's a lot of CO2. It is a good thing that Indian's don't eat cows. Another billion of hungry mouths to fee would mean a lot more cows)

5. Eating local (not low cal, but maybe that as well) 

6. Going out less, eating in more

7. Using greener computers and ACs

8. Planting a tree (you can do that here for India and here for the Brazilian rain forests) 

9. Reduce the heating on your water heaters and room heaters by just a notch (don't tell your wife or mum - they will immediately think the water is too cold). During summer, insist on sleeping at 25 degrees with a cotton bedsheet and not at 21 degrees with a quilt. 

10. Shift work times to a slightly earlier time (in India) to get into the office when the traffic is less and the office is cooler. (Why don't more organisations do this is beyond me?)

11. Change your car and your TV less often. 

12. Buy smaller or more fuel efficient cars. Use CFLs.

 

All of these things will save you money. That's something to think about! 

A logical extension of point 1 is that one should not travel abroad for holidays. 

The fantastic arc of instablity (Pakistan, Afghanistan etc) and India's terrain ensure that foreign travel means hopping onto to flight (unless you want to check out the origins of Balti cooking in Dacca). Does that mean all travel should be avoided? I think that travelling inside India is also something we need to do more. Also, when travelling abroad, try to use trains more after maybe the initial flight.

So that's that. 

The Tale of Three Cities

The good thing about blogging irregularly is one has plenty to write about. At the same time, since one blogs after long intervals, one might miss upon some of the things once had decided to write about, because of a fickle memory.
Let us call this the rate of buildup b and the rate of decay be called d. The decay would also be proportional to the memory buildup. I can sniff a differential equation now onwards and I will keep my mouth shut on this topic now.
Anyway, there were quite a few things to write about. I visited Gurgaon, Mumbai, Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, London, Chicago and New York in that order...
Gurgaon is a testbook case in how to grow very fast in the worst possible manner. From being a sleepy little town about ten years ago, it is the outsourcing and ITES hub of North India. To be fair, such growth would stretch the infrastructural muscles of any city, but it has overwhelmed Gurgaon. There are roads, but the roads exist only for cars and more cars. There is between little and no public transport, depending upon where in Gurgaon you are. As a results, cars and more cars is all you get. There is an eight lane expressway between Delhi and Gurgaon, but it has kilometre long pileups...
Mumbai is now my favourite large Indian, probably because I really enjoyed the time I spent there (which had nothing to do with the city). Anyway, my two bits about Mumbai is that the people seem nicer and are more down to earth and polite. I also get this feeling, which I absolutely love, that I am part of a Hindi movie when in Bombay. No, the movie is not about me or about anyone I know. I am more like that person in a movie, who is crossing the road in a movie where two people have just fallen in love, or the guy who gets out of the lift, while the hero gets in on his way to his office, and things like that. It is this perpetual peripheral movie feeling which I can not kick off and absolutely love. I used to think that I have not watched too many movies, but now I am of the opinion that I watched enough.
Mumbai, or rather one of its new residents, did give me a parting shot, which I will not forget for a long time.
New York... ah New York. I loved it. I was there for about 50 hours, and I loved it. I got to watch the US open, went to the WTC memorial website, lost the camera with which I took pictures, walked on the Brooklyn Bridge, heard, spoke and ate American and so on and so forth. There were times when I felt the same peripheral movie feeling, only this time the movie was in English, but I pushed it away. There was so much to do and see. New York is a world city - there is everyone from everywhere there. No matter where you are from, you would find your neighbours from back home in New York. Such things make a city a great place to be, not only because you find your own roots there, but you get to see everyone else's also I guess. I think this is what makes Mumbai and London a cool place to be too.

[Housekeeping - My site got a PR upgrade to 2. Let us see how this helps this.]

The next post will be about Job hunting. However, I found something quite interesting on the internet -
"Mozilla built us a wonderful tool. Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE's ass." A bunch of people who do not like IE and also remember how they used to not like seeing buttons like - "This website is best viewed on IE5.0" have now figured out a way to get back at them. More details are available here and the reasons to shift are given here. For now, both the websites are available on IE, and now that I write it out, I realise it is a smart thing to do and now something I can point out and you can smirk at.
And if you have an ad-sense account, you can make some money out of it too.

St. Ives.

I do not think that I like any other part of England more than Cornwall, and even within Cornwall, the two villages of St. Ives and Carbis bay are my favourites by far. I can not really put my finger on what it is about these two places - they abound in the charm offered by small English towns and villages - picture perfect houses, winding lanes, lush greenery and maybe not very common even with the rural landscape, a blue-green body of transparent water which stretches as far as the eye can see.

I had a lot of fun here on my first trip, it was tantalisingly close to being perfect. The cool thing was that this time when I went back there, every thing about the trip changed - the people I came with, the things we did, the places we went to, and even the weather. Even so, I think I did not mind too much. I still thought about the first time around, but I had much-o fun nonetheless.

What is there to do in Cornwall? If travelling from London, the killer way to save money is to travel in groups of four and then buy tickets at Paddington. This way, you can get a super saver ticket, which is basically a 50% discount, enabling you to travel 6 hours each way by train for £35. Probably the best way to spend time in Cornwall is to divide time between spending time at the beach and travelling to other beaches and spending time there. I am not joking, but the way to do it is to spend like a day or something on one of the many beaches in and around St. Ives - Carbis bay being one of the best for just lying around. The second day can be used to travel to the many other beaches in the areas - Sennen's cove, Land's end, Porthocurno and also to see Minack Theatre. A special note about Minack's theatre - it is an open air theatre, with the Atlantic as the background in most of the sets - mindblowing. Such beach-hopping can end at Penzance, from where the train can get you back to London.

Another not to be missed spot is the Porthminister Cafe - memories of a curried lamb and some excellent starters still warm the heart and comfort the soul. It is one of the better places to dine at, in St. Ives. It has views of the ocean and is a nice place to be for sunset. Do book in advance.


My next post will be about job hunting in London.

I have been travelling past few weeks - a weekend trip to a place called St. Ives and then a longer weekend trip to Prague. Here is a picture from Prague. Prague, in some ways, is like a older, cooler version of Paris. The picture here, for instance, has the Presidential palace in the backdrop (I am not sure of the correct name, but it is a palace and the Czech preseident stays in it). The foreground is the Vltava river, which meanders through the city and has to be crossed a few times no matter where one is headed. The ride from the airport into the city is a ride of architectural variations - in period, structure,design,colour. The Airport is a slick building, complete with granite floors and expensive stores. It fades into long facades of Soviet looking flats (you will know when you see them) and then the old city suddenly bursts into view. The old city has spires and churches and grottos and various other constructions which are quite medieval in appearance. I have read quite a few stories about kingdoms and castles and revolts and the true heir laying low before staking a claim by ringing the church bell and if any one was making a movie on any such story, Prague would be a very custom built locale to shoot such a movie. The other thing which struck me in Prague was the way the Czech were promoting their country - "Hope you have a good time in the Czech Republic" came second only to "Give me a Pilsner!" as the most commonly spoken English phrase. (By the way, I had two Pilsner breakfasts but thats another story) Back in India, it is easy to find instances where one laughs at tourists when they are taken for a ride. If they were stupid enough to come to India, then they should also bear the consequences. In Prague, it did not matter if I was shopping, taking a hair cut (1/4th of UK prices, but language issues can lead to unpredictable results), drinking beer, meeting friends of my Czech friend, it was a concern which bordered on an obsession - I won't be surprised if this country which is the size of Haryana earns about the same from tourism as India does.


The next post will be about St. Ives, which in my opinion, is one of the most underrated beaches in Europe (which is again is a good thing)