1 week down and camping has been easy because it’s been at campgrounds with showers and lights. The truck converts into a kitchen so our meals have been spaghetti bolognese, chicken stir fry, fajitas, curry, stew, omelets, banana crepes, and French toast. We’re fortunate that one of the passengers used to be a head chef. The guide is a firefighter and experienced independent traveler. The driver is a trained mechanic and has traveled extensively through Africa. Neither one however has gone through Sudan or Ethiopia so they’re new to everyone. Everyone is friendly and full of laughs, but it is only the first week. Passing time on the truck has been more challenging than expected. It’s hard to read because of the bumping and wind so we’ve resorted to word games, napping, and of course watching the world go by. There’s already a soccer ball and cricket paddle on board so we picked up some balls to play dodge ball. The majority of people are single and either just finished university or taking a break in between terms. There are those similar to us in age just taking a break from work and a couple more aged travelers so we’re somewhere in the middle.
We’ve driven through the western desert in Egypt, which is the eastern end of the Sahara. The black desert wasn’t much to look at. It looked like rocks covered with ash. The white desert was neato, but really bright under the desert sun. It looks like it’s made from chalk (CaCO3). We passed through some oases which were just villages covered in dirt. We climbed to the citadel of Mut which is just a pile of mud now. On average we’ve been on the road 5hrs a day. Now we’re in Luxor and will be taking it easy from here for a few days. We’ve even upgraded from tents to rooms.

Seriously, when you’re on a truck with 25 other people you’re bound to need a potty break every 2 hours or so. And when you’re driving through the barren landscape of the Sahara desert the potty is the side of the road. This is how it goes: Someone pushes the buzzer to signal driver to stop. Then people pile out the back. The girls hike over whatever cover there is, usually some mound of dirt if any, and do their business while the boys walk 30 feet from the truck and empty their bladders with their backs to the truck. You very quickly learn that a bum is a bum, some are just whiter than others.

This morning our big, yellow, 16 ton semi truck converted to transport 24 tourists and 2 guides showed up. It’s surprisingly spacy and has all kinds of hideaway compartments, an area to lay down for naps, and a “beach” on top to tan. They’re going to break us in slowly with a 6hr drive today. We still have to form our cooking teams and learn the rest of everyone’s names. We’re the only Americans on board with most others from the UK, Ireland, Germany, and 1 Aussie that we know of. Good thing english is the language of choice here… but I’m afraid we’re both unconsciously converting to the queen’s english. Oy!

Tonight we’re be camping in the Sahara desert and doing everything for the first time. No more internet tho for a few days so we’ll try to keep up the blogs as much as possible.

Wish us luck, we’ll need it.

Yesterday was the end of our vacation. Today we started our safari truck trek through northern Africa. It was obvious already that our lives are no longer our own. Here’s the basic trek:
We leave Cairo tomorrow morning for the Western Desert and then head South, crossing into Sudan around Nov 14th. I expect we’ll have email twice more before then. After that, I can only hope that we get a little bandwidth in Khartoum and Addis Ababa before we roll into Kenya.

We’re following the trip until it reaches Nairobi around Dec 24th and then we’ll hang out on our own for 6 weeks in Kenya and Tanzania before rejoining a different truck to finish the trip to Capetown.

Speaking of the truck, here’s our new home:
We’ll try to keep in touch, but I think we’ll probably not get many photos up for quite some time. But who knows… The way we post, you probably won’t even notice

In the meantime, you can check out the itinerary and more about the truck at:
http://www.oasisoverland.co.uk/truck_expeditions/africa/nile/index.html

Sure, malaria pills might be enough for some people but when you’ve had over 150 bites more than once you need something with a little more oomph! That’s where the hand held bug zapper comes in. It was a thing of beauty to see it hidden in the pile of crap displayed in a store window on a busy street in Cairo. It looks like a toy tennis racquet but has a metal mesh and runs on two AA batteries. The store was kind enough to show us how well it worked…I was overjoyed when I saw the sparks fly. Genius!

There’s not much more you can ask for than to spend a birthday at the pyramids in Giza. We walked around the pyramids taking photos, paying baksheesh to climb on the smaller of the 3 (we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to climb a pyramid), and braved the stuffy interior to crawl into the big and 2nd big ones. The interiors were very simple, and short. Not only were the walkways 3 feet high so you had to crouch almost the entire time, but the endings were bare rectangular rooms with a single empty quartzite looking sarcophagus. The only real interesting part was in the big pyramid where there was a tall, narrow passageway that reached 30’ over your head.

I did find one opening above the path that wasn’t blocked off. I climbed into the shaft which went up a level and found a dark dusty space behind a ladder to the generator. With nowhere to go I jumped back down to a group of stunned tourists wondering why people were falling from the ceiling. But that was about it for excitement. Before we left Giza we stopped to see the Solar Barque and of course took more photos of the Sphinx, which is much smaller in person.

The Pyramids are the only remaining ancient wonders of the world and were amazing but it was much different than I expected. For example it isn’t out in the middle of the desert but rather in a suburb of Cairo. I bet you could get a great shot of the pyramids and sphinx from the Pizza Hut across the street.

We thought the Cairo museum was supposed to be one of the great museums of the world. You’re in the land of civilization, Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent, everything here is thousands of years BC. The place was packed, not just with tour groups but with wall to wall artifacts, as if they had too many objects and not enough room. It was completely cluttered. None of it was organized and only a small percentage had any descriptions. Some areas looked like store rooms and there wasn’t enough floor space to walk. There were signs posting no touching or photos on all the walls but the ugly tourists were using the statuary as footrests, coasters, and armrests. They would knock on the statues to make sure it was real granite or wood. Even the guides were laying their hands on the lids of the sarcophagi with his troops following the example. It was disgusting. None of the museum guards or crew seemed to care as people blatantly used the exhibits as furniture. The whole situation was so vexing.

There was so much to see and we did our best to enjoy it. Our favorite was the treasures of Tutankhamen. They had all five of his gold gilded tombs, the 3 golden sarcophagi, and all the funerary objects such as beds, canopic jars (where they put the mummy’s innards), statues, furniture, and jewelry. It was unbelievable the quality and quantity of gold and previous stones he had wrapped up with him. His famous gold burial mask was incredible. The mummy exhibit was neat but once you’ve seen one, the rest all start to look the same. We had seen a few people take pictures inside so we got a little brave with taking some discreet video. Right as the museum was closing for Ramadan Steve got caught using the camera at the papyrus exhibit by one of the guards. We managed to give the guard the slip, quickly swapped bags, separated, then regrouped outside.

This song went on too long. But it’s finally over and it ended with a bang. We’re in Cairo now for the final night of Ramadan and the streets are just a zoo at night. Everyone is out shopping, eating and crowding the streets. It is literally like New Years Eve in Times Square. The shops are covered in balloons and festive paper in preparation for the three or four days of partying that take place at the end of Ramadan.
How did we celebrate? The same way we started Ramadan: with a Big Mac and a coke…and a chocolate sundae.

We learned a good travel lesson here. The Middle East isn’t so bad during Ramadan. Everyone still does their best to get things done, even if it means they need to stop in the middle of the day for a nap. We never had a real problem. But these few days of partying are causing all kinds of trouble. Shops and museums are closed most of the time and even our hotel is barely staffed while everyone either parties or sleeps. I hope they don’t close the door on the pyramids for us tomorrow!

After the mobs at Luxor’s west bank we expected Karnak to be another valley of buses. We hoped our lesson the day before would hold true so we went to the entrance around lunchtime and were well pleased. Bus after bus drove past us on their way out to fill their hungry bellies. Karnak was empty. This was the city Thebes, the epicenter of the Egyptian dynasties during the reign of pharaohs dating back to 3000 BC. The scale of the temples, monuments, and statues were grandiose. It seemed every available wall, column, ceiling, and obelisk were covered in hieroglyphs. There likenesses of the deities Amun-Ra (the god of gods), Orisis, Anubis, Horus, and Hathor as well pharaohs such as Rameses, Thutmos, and Hatshepsut surrounded us. Amazingly, some still retained their original painted color high above tourists’ reach. Somehow we found ourselves in a temple off the tourist path and it was the most intact and best preserved that we had seen, eerily so. The carvings were crisp and alive as if it escaped the thousands of years of wear that other monuments had suffered. We felt as if we were transported to ancient Egypt, far away from any other living thing where only the shadows stirred. There was an overwhelming feeling like the hieroglyphs were going to walk out of the walls. I practically jumped when I came around a row of columns and nearly ran into a statue of Hatshepsut. That temple was undisputedly the highlight of our Egyptian experience thus far. As we walked back to the mapped attractions we saw the waves of tourists crashing amongst the main thoroughfare and it brought us back to reality.

– Mary

After a torturous 18 hour bus ride from Dahab to Luxor, we were ready to stretch our legs. Luxor is the place to do it. Across the Nile from our hotel sprawl out temples and tombs and colossi. Needing the exercise, we ferried across the river and rented clunker bicycles.We’ve driven cars and ridden bicycles in some pretty crazy places, but I think that Egypt is possibly the scariest road scene I’ve experienced. And here we are riding down crummy roads in farmland dodging horse drawn carts, kids begging for money, giant tour buses, and goats. This is what we call fun. Well, fun until Mary pointed out a cool bird to me and lost her balance instead of watching the road… But it was a pretty bird.
After cruising through the Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Hebu, we headed out for the Valley of the Kings to see the tombs of the pharoahs. Ancient history is nice, but diving a couple hundred yards into a little hole in the side of a hill is way more fun.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but the tombs are generally square tunnels cut downwards into the side of the mountain leading to a room with the sarcophagus. Most have carvings or paintings covering the walls of the tunnel. Some go way into the mountain, some don’t. A couple had “well rooms” that suddenly drop 20 feet down apparently as a trap to tomb raiders. There is nothing left in any of the tombs beyond the huge granite sarcophagi left in a couple. Everything of interest has been stolen for museum collections. Even though we heard it was quite boring, we went to see King Tut’s tomb. It’s small and boring.
There are all kinds of rules about no touching, no pictures, no video and so on. But there is a very well established practice in Egypt called “baksheesh”, which means some combination of the words “tip”, “gimme money” and “bribe”. With a little baksheesh, you can do just about anything you want in Egypt. Sometimes it makes sense to do it, and sometimes it is just a pain to have a guy following you around asking for it. It is just a little sad that the guardian of a priceless ancient artifact will let you abuse it for less than a dollar and nobody cares. In protest, we took most of our photos the old fashioned way: we snuck them.
Almost as interesting as the tombs was how predictable the tour groups are. We showed up at about 12:15 and the valley was overflowing with tour groups. By 12:30, they were ALL gone. We had the whole place to ourselves and other people like us until 2:00 when the big groups all showed up again.