Welcome to the diary I kept while travelling for ten days in Egypt.
Egypt. If there’s one place I’d always wanted to go to as a child, it was Egypt. I harboured the dream of being an archaeologist for a few years, and I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt as a child.
It still surprises me that I’ve only been there for ten days and haven’t yet had the opportunity to return. I was 25, it was at the end of my first long trip of a year overseas, and I was running out of money – in fact, at the end I was travelling on a credit card. I’d been to Italy and Greece with a girl who was a friend of a friend; not someone I had a lot in common with, but an OK travelling companion; and at the last minute we both decided to get on a plane to Cairo, with no bookings or travel plans whatsoever.
It was only ten days, but it felt like a month of experiences. The ancient sights of Egypt were everything I’d hoped they would be, but I was also pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed talking with the friendly locals; once I got past the usual shallow touristy interactions, of course. In fact, my brother went to Egypt several years later and, on my recommendation, went to Ali’s African Restaurant in Luxor. He mentioned me, and Ali said he remembered me. When my brother told me this I thought, ‘yeah, sure…’ but then he said Ali had said “your brother, he was more … open” as he waved his hand over the top of his head and smiled. What did that mean? Well, my brother didn’t get the bald gene in our family.
How to navigate this diary
The Egypt link at the top of the page in the main menu takes you to the main Egypt page where you can access all the days of this diary. Alternatively, start reading here (or anywhere, for that matter) and use the Previous and Next links at the bottom of each page to navigate through the days. You can always keep track by looking at the date.
When you’re reading a page, you’ll see blocks of photo thumbnails (wait a little while for all of these to load onto the page). You can roll over a thumbnail to read the photo’s caption.
To see full-size versions of these photos (highly recommended, as the thumbnails are cropped), click on a thumbnail. Once the image is blown up, you can navigate left and right through the full size images, or click the X in the top right hand corner to exit them and go back to the text.
Leave a comment at the bottom of any page if you feel like it.
Fe sahetek!