DO get a Visa ahead of time if you’re traveling over land across the border.
DON’T listen to anyone who tells you differently.
“You don’t have a Visa?” the Egyptian passport control officer asked me. “What’re you doing here? Go back to Israel!”
The border between Eilat, Israel and Taba, Egypt
DO spend a few days in Sinai.
Don’t go at the beginning of your trip when all you want is to get to Cairo.
We (my travel companions, Adam and Spenser, and I) had to hang in Sinai for two days to wait for the Egyptian embassy back in Israel to open up (coming over the border from Israel you need a Visa to get to Cairo and Egypt Proper, but not to go to Sinai), and while my travel companions had a blast, I was antsy and restless and bored, ready to head out.
Sinai beach
DO stay at African Toukl.
DON’T wait until you’re hungry to order any food.
The tourism industry in Sinai has been wrecked by terrorist attacks over the past five years and as such there is very little in this area in particular – the coastline between Taba and Nuweiba, a city about an hour away, is lined with empty resorts and hotels abandoned half-way towards completion. Additionally, the Bedouins who live in the area have been forced in and out of land by tourism developers and over the last few years have built up these little hut villages (Lonely Planet calls them “tourist villages”), which is where nearly all of the visitors to this part of Sinai stay. When I say huts on a beach and that’s it, that’s exactly what I mean: they are little clusters of straw huts lining the coast, often run by Bedouins who live nearby. Ours was called African Toukl and run not by a Bedouin but by a Sudanese man named Juma who made amazing food – there are literally no stores or restaurants or anything for miles in any direction, so Juma provides you with everything you need, from toilet paper to bottled water to soda to the most amazing meals you’ll ever spend four hours waiting for. We’re not exactly sure why it takes so long to make a plate of spaghetti or some roast chicken, but whatever the case, be sure when you go to order your dinner around 3pm so you can be ready to eat by 8 or 9.
Our hut
Juma's shakshuka is the best I've ever eaten, but if you get it make sure you have a bathroom handy.
DO take a shared taxi through Sinai to Cairo.
DON’T wait until you get to Cairo to agree on a drop off point.
Unless you want to end up in the middle of a busy intersection at 9pm. The shared cab was very conveinent, much more so than the bus from Taba to Cairo would have been, I’m told – we left earlier, only had to share the space with five loud Arab-Israelis, had a few disgusting bathroom breaks, and paid only a couple dollars more than we would have for the bus. Just remember that it’s called a shared cab, but it’s not really a cab, and they will drop you off wherever they feel like, no matter how much you miss-communicate with them.
DO bring an iPod and/or a long book with you.
DON’T expect to get anywhere particularly quickly, or within the time frame they tell you you will.
The (five to seven hour) drive through Sinai to Cairo (and Cairo to Sinai) is pretty much endless amount of nothing speckled with ramshackle bits of nothing. It’s pretty amazing to see, just these little bits of houses, Bedouin tent villages, the occasional police checkpoint, the odd gas station. It’s amazing to think how expansive these deserts are, you see just a horizon full of emptiness and sand, like looking at the ocean and seeing nothing but water forever.
Driving through the endless desert
Ramshackle bits of nothing
Abandoned half-finished hotel
DO spend a few days in Cairo.
DON’T go without preparing yourself first.
26 million people is a fuck of a lot, and you really feel it as soon as you get there. I think it’s a very polarizing city – I loved it, especially coming off of the emptiness of Sinai; the life, the vibrancy, the energy, were all amazing. But others can leave Cairo feeling overstimulated and overwhelmed, lost in the furious pace of the city. Or hit by a car, which brings me to…
DO take great care when crossing the streets of Cairo.
DON’T show any fear.
No one ever gets to play the “such-and-such state has the worst drivers!” game ever again. Even Israel – no one ever gets to claim Israel has the worst drivers, because Cairo has won it all. Egypt on the whole is a crazy place to drive, but Cairo is like a giant, collective game of Chicken. There are no traffic lights. There are no crosswalks. There are no lanes on the road. There are no rules to the road. And you all think I’m exaggerating here, but I’m dead on.
It's blurry because they were going faster than the speed of light
Somehow, it all works – people seem used to it enough so that they all kind of work together to make this road system work. They duck and weave around the cars surrounding them, skim along beside the sidewalk so as not to hit any pedestrians standing fearfully by the side of the road hoping to cross the street in their lifetimes, ride those brake pedals just waiting to jam on them, and somehow it more or less works. Despite the fact that Egypt has one of the highest rates of vehicle-related deaths in the world.
Crossing the street is an even dicier affair. If you want a death-defying thrill, come to Cairo. Mom and Dad, you may not want to read this part…
I summed it up at one point by saying that it’s like a huge game of Frogger – those of us too young to remember that game (which I think I actually am, but it was featured in an episode of Seinfeld, so there you go. Sorry for the TV reference, Barbara), it’s basically crossing a busy street through a series of starts and stops and backwards and forwards and weaving through empty spaces. Which is a bit like this experience in Cairo, but I later realized that it’s less like Frogger and more like another game of Chicken – it’s you vs. the cars to see who will blink first. There should be a video game made out of this.
The trick is to just go, and once you go you can’t stop or go back or even really take a second to breathe – you have to get your ass across and basically just dare the cars to hit you, because if you keep going they will stop – but as soon as you stop, even if you’re in the middle of the street, they’ll whizz right past you. There are no real crosswalks – actually I think there are one or two, but there are no traffic lights at them and no one really pays attention to them when driving. I think they’re just painted on the street for decoration. So everyone pretty much crosses everywhere all the time and you have to trust that the cars will stop for you. We found it’s best to go in big groups – look for other people trying to cross the street and go as soon as they do; you feel much less vulnerable that way.
So, moral of the story, rules of the (pedestrian) road:
1) Check out the sidewalk around you, find other people crossing and use them as human shields.
2) Commit to going. Once you start, you can’t stop.
3) Drivers can smell fear. They prey on hesitation. Show none!
4) GO! GO NOW!
DO stay at African Hostel in Cairo.
DON’T fall out of the elevator.
Seriously the best hostel I’ve ever stayed at – if you can really call it a hostel. You think of a hostel as usually a shitty, dorm-like residence that you stay at more for the low cost and the experience of it than the atmosphere, but African Hostel was freaking beautiful, in every way – the building fit right in with most in Cairo, this old European style dusted over with decades of dirt, as if they are as much relics as the pyramids. The rooms are ginormous, very grand and spacious, and ours opened up to overlook a busy street below (as I guess all the streets in Cairo are), and the staff is the friendliest I’ve met anywhere I’ve traveled, hands down.
Overall, people in Egypt were quite lovely to us – never a bad word said (aside from one grumpy tour guide one day, and even that was mild), lots of people excitedly shouting “Obama!” to us when we said we were American, lots of people offering to direct us around when we couldn’t figure out our way - but you get this sense that it’s all done with an underlying motivation of greed. Maybe greed isn’t the right word for it; as one fellow traveler we met put it, they don’t have very much money, and they know we have more than them, and they want to help us part with it. But it gives you the sense that it’s never really genuine kindness or helpfulness when someone gives you a friendly smile or directs you somewhere, but rather done with the hope that they’ll get a little something from you in return.
The staff at African Hostel, however, was strikingly different in that respect from the rest of our interactions through the country, which I think helped formed my overall impression of Egyptians as very nice, friendly people. The front desk guy was warm and helpful and excited to talk to us (which very well may have been an act, and yet didn’t come off as such), and they helped us pretty plan the rest of our trip – booked all our transportation, hotels, felucca, guides, tours for us for insanely cheap and got a driver for us to guide us around Cairo and Giza for super cheap as well. All in all, I’d say our trip would have been very different had we not spent the first couple of nights at African Hostel in Cairo.
African Hostel outside courtyard
The awesome/scary elevator that has no shaft
View from our window
DO bring your own toilet paper everywhere.
DON’T argue with me on this.
Even the nicest hostel in the world is pretty short on TP. In Sinai we had to buy some from Juma. Not a single public bathroom had any. The only two places that had readily available toilet paper in the bathrooms were the hotel we stayed at in Aswan and the hotel we stayed at in Luxor. I’m not a really high-maintenance person, but the bathrooms overall were pretty dicey, so just trust me on this, at the very least: bring toilet paper everywhere you go!
DO ride a camel to see the pyramids.
DON’T ride a runaway horse.
I gasped out loud when the pyramids first came into view. I’ve heard some people say that they’re disappointing, a bit like seeing the Mona Lisa – smaller than expected, overrun with crowds, too touristy, yada yada yada. But I found it absolutely incredible to see them rise over the treetops at the edge of the highway, just sitting there like they have for 3,000 years – amazing.
We were driven into Giza and taken to a tour office who offered us a choice of going up to the pyramids by camel or by horse. My travel companions thought they had chosen wisely with their horses – “camels are too slow,” they said. “Horses are way cooler,” I’m pretty sure they were thinking.
I chose a camel.
Mostly because I’d never ridden one before, and how cool is that, to ride a camel up to the pyramids? Way cool, I know you’re all thinking it. As soon as I got on, though, I started wishing that I was on a horse like the guys. The camel was kind of lumbering and sluggish and I felt wobbly and I haven’t ridden a horse in I don’t know how long and suddenly the grass was far greener on the other side. I watched as Spenser’s horse pranced along the street (a sign of things to come, I later realized…) and Adam casually strode along atop his, took some pictures of the two of them trying to look like badasses, and got a bit jealous as I held tightly to my camel’s saddle.
In between shooting jealous glances towards Spenser trotting up a sand dune and trying not to fall off of my camel, I gaped at the pyramids.
We stopped on a high dune to take some pictures
I really like jumping pictures
Unfortunately I forgot to change one of the settings on my camera, so several of my pictures are way too bright :/
So about here is when Spenser offered to switch his horse for my camel, and things started to go south.
Well, fun for a few minutes I guess, as Adam and I had a (controlled) gallop across the desert.
“Do you know how to ride?” our guide asked me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I used to ride a lot when I was a kid.”
In retrospect, I fear he may have mistook that for I’ve been riding since I was a kid. Which is a very different thing.
Especially when you end up riding a BATSHIT CRAZY HORSE.
It started out a quick trot. The guide told me to slow down. I pulled on the reins. The horse sped up. I leaned back. He sped up more. I spoke to him and continued pulling back on the reins. He started cantering (in between a trot and a gallop.”
“Help,” I said goofily, laughing a bit. “Uh, help. Help?”
The horse took off at a gallop.
“Help. Help. Help? HELP! HELP!”
Yeah, I screamed. Now, I don’t normally panic in that way – my freakouts are usually of the quiet shaking sort, maybe a few tears. On roller coasters I usually just close my eyes and put my head down and wait for it to be over (and then immediately want to go again).
But I screamed my head off all the way across the pyramids. I pulled and pulled and screamed and watched as my horse headed towards a dip in the dunes, and had plenty of time to watch it approach and think about how I was about to go flying down a cliff.
A man jumped out in front of the horse to try and stop it, but to no avail. My crazypants horse just flew right by him.
I hear the gallop of other horses around me, and we picked up even more speed.
“HELP!!” I screamed. “HELP!!! AHH!!”
Finally we slowed down – another guide on his horse came up on one side of me, our guide on his horse on the other side, and they grabbed the reins and somehow forced mine to a halt.
“Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou,” I breathed out in a mildly hysterical rush. No tears, fortunately, but for some reason I burst into hysterical laughter in between my gratitude.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” the other guide said soothingly, smiling brightly like everything really was okay. “You’re fine, everything’s okay.”
“I thought you said you knew how to ride,” my guide said, and I tried to choke out that I know how to ride SANE horses, and that he neglected to mention that this horse was out of it’s fucking mind.
“He’s very strong, this horse,” the other guide said. “Very crazy.”
“Yes, you have to pull very, very hard on him,” my guide added. ”And do this – ” he demonstrated pulling the reins from side to side – “to make him slow down.”
I didn’t say, “well, that’s a fuck of a lot of help now, isn’t it?”
Also, let me point out that another tour guide knows how crazy this horse is, and yet they continue to let unsuspecting tourists ride it.
We bid goodbye and one last thanks to my savior and my guide led me back to the others, holding firmly to my horse’s reins.
“I’m fine,” I told the guys shakily, yet still smiling like a crazy person for some reason.
We were then led closer to the pyramids and given some time to get off, go up and take pictures.
“Man, I gotta pee,” Adam muttered.
“So pee!” our guide told him.
“What, here? On the pyramid?”
“Of course! Why not? You’re outside!”
So he did.
After taking some more pictures
and getting barked at by a police officer who demanded money for touching the pyramid (which is bogus, we were warned about beforehand by our guide – more on that later…)
and touching the pyramid anyway
we got back on our rides and I took my camel back from Spenser.
“Do you want us to hold onto the horse for you?” our guide asked Spenser. “Or do you want to try controlling him yourself?”
“…Um…you can hold onto him,” Spenser replied slowly.
We hit up the Sphinx next, our last stop on the Great Pyramid Tour.
Sphinx!
I really don’t understand why some people are disappointed by it or complain that it’s too small. I thought it was amazing.
DO visit Saqqara because it’s my favorite pyramid
DON’T try to touch this one because they’ll yell at you.
Literally the oldest pyramid in the world, built in about 2650 BC – four thousand years old.
DO climb inside a pyramid when you can.
DON’T try to do it in the dark.
The power went out as we climbed down the pyramid of Dashur, which was seriously cool on the one hand, but a bit difficult on the other.
Spenser and Adam using camera flashes for light
Nothing much to see inside, as most all the pyramids have been cleaned out and their contents either lost to tomb raiders or sent off to museums, but still very cool to climb inside one.
DO keep a lot of small change on you to give out for tips.
DON’T feel obligated to tip everyone who asks.
Like I said, the Egyptians are very eager to help you part with your money, and as such will demand tips from you – “bakshish! bakshish!” – at just about every turn. Sometimes it’s justified, like a particularly good tour guide or a driver who’s been with you all day. Most of the time, however – cops who demand it to touch pyramids, tour operators who insist on carrying your luggage for you to a car, random shmos on the street who give you directions – it gets fairly ridiculous, and I refused to hand out tips for every little BS thing. People can get pushy about it, holding a hand out in front of your face even when simply handing you toilet paper for the bathroom, and they may get a little annoyed with you if you don’t hand over some pounds, but hold your ground, because there’s nothing they can really do if you don’t.
My general rule of thumb became: if they don’t ask for it, they probably deserve it, and I’ll readily dole out a few pounds. If they ask for bakshish, I’ll shrug apologetically and explain that I have no small change on me.
DO take an overnight train
It’s way cheaper than a flight across the country and the seats are pretty comfy to sleep overnight in.
DON’T forget to pack an eye mask and earplugs
DO check out Aswan
DON’T spend more than a couple days
Just personal opinion here – it was a really lovely place, felt very calm after the craziness that is Cairo, and the Philae temple was one of my favorite spots. But it’s rather overrun with tourists and seemed even in the city’s center that people don’t actually live there and instead like it’s a stopping off point for travelers.
But like I said, Philae Temple is pretty great
And the souq here is fun
But overall I’d use it as a stopover for other places and not spend too long here.
More from the temple
DO take a trip on a felucca
DON’T sail with anyone but Captain Jack
That’s a bit of a stretch. I’m sure all the other felucca captains are great – or most of them, at least. But Captain Jack was awesome beyond awesome.
This is a felucca
They’re basically this big sailboats that hold up to about a dozen passengers, and you just sit on the big, comfy deck and lounge against pillows and sail up the Nile.
There’s no real inside, except the captain’s cabin and a storage space for your stuff, so you sleep up here too, and it’s just awesome. It was my favorite part of the trip, by far. All you really have to do is
lounge
drink tea
eat
eat
eat some more (oh my god, that rice was amazing)
(the captain cooks for you on board)
lounge some more
watch goat herders on the shore
chat with your fellow passengers
(I loved meeting the other people on our boat – a couple from Austria, one of whom is a physicist, a couple from England who are in the midst of driving from London to South Africa, a man on business from Taiwan, a guy from Australia who loved his flower-print shirts, and a young woman from Holland traveling on her own)
watch Captain Jack do his thing
watch other boats on the river
and lounge some more
(if this picture was slightly better you’d be able to see the billions of stars that were in the sky)
So to repeat: DO, definitely, definitely DO take a ride on a felucca.
DO be cautious about where you tell people you’re from and coming from.
DON’T be overly so about it.
The first time I ever went abroad was my month-long summer study abroad thing in Luxembourg in ’04, at the beginning of the war in Iraq in Afghanistan and height of anti-American sentiment throughout the world, and we were expressly warned not to tell anyone that we were from the US, and me being an idiot and an inexperienced foreign country traveler, followed their instructions and told people I was from Canada – while in Amsterdam, of all places. We had the same debate throughout our trip in Egypt – do we tell people we’re American? Do we tell people we’re living in Israel? Who do we tell what to? If someone asks where we’re traveling next, what do we say?
And here’s the thing – you just never know who’s around you. I realize it’s incredibly paranoid, and I feel like this sense of distrust has been beaten into me over the last few years of being inundated with Muslim terrorist this, Islamic extremist that. And overall I can’t imagine having any problems with most of the people we met in Egypt. But you never know who’s around you, and when you’re in a spot where you’re the only tourists around, it’s hard not to feel a little anxious and like you shouldn’t reveal too much of yourself. Add to that the Israel thing, which is dicey in this area – Egypt and Israel have a peace treaty (as far as is my understanding), so you can travel freely between the countries (though it’s much harder for Israelis to get a Visa for Egypt than it is for others), but seeing as most every country in the area kind of hates Israel, it’s hard to decide what the reaction of people is going to be if you say you’re living there.
I realize this comes off a bit confusing and muddled – I’m just typing as I think here and my feelings on the whole situation are a bit hard to articulate. Mostly it comes down to: this was my first foray into a Muslim country, and much as I like to keep an open mind, it’s hard in this post-9/11 era not to let that edge of paranoia sink in. Maybe it’s the NYC If you see something, say something hyper-vigilance that is hard to shake off even as you try to be accepting and open to other cultures. It’s not like women in headscarves are such an unusual sight, but I think it’s suddenly being the foreign one, the one of these things that’s not like the others, that drives in how far you are from home, and that can be alarming.
But it’s one of those things that you have to push through. One Israeli woman we met in Sinai put it very well – there are always concerns in Israel about the safety of Sinai, so it can feel a bit scary for many people going there, but much of that is your own fears, your own sensibilities, and you have to break through your own fears and your own mindset and you’ll be fine.
But how do you balance that with actual, legitimate dangers that are particularly prevalent throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa? With the fact that Americans are often targeted for terrorism, kidnapping, etc? With the intense animosity that still exists between Israel and the countries surrounding?
For me it came down to the specific people, and Captain Jack is a great example. I think he heard Spenser and I speaking softly and carefully to our fellow passengers about how we live in Tel Aviv and picked up on our nervousness and caution about it – over dinner he regaled us with stories of other trips he’s taken and other passengers he’s sailed with, telling us first about a group of four drunken Aussies who bought three cases (24 bottles per case) of beer for their trip of three days, then about a group of German passengers, before moving into a story about an Israeli man who was traveling a few years ago and how he was very nervous about revealing where he was from, especially when Captain Jack invited the man for a meal at his home. When the man finally tentatively explained that he was Israeli, Captain Jack explained that it really didn’t matter, and the man ended up having such a lovely time that he recently took his honeymoon on Captain Jack’s ship.
And from there the felucca captain moved into a conversation about how a country’s people are different from its government, and while our politics or religion might differ, we’re still people and we can still talk to each other and be friends. It helped me remember that once you really talk to people, the gaps between you become so small. Maybe it’s simplistic, maybe it’s too optimistic, but I still firmly believe that people don’t want to hurt each other, and when you’re able to talk to and interact with each other on a natural, normal basis (as opposed to labeling each other only by our religions or our skin colors or our nationalities and just firing guns at each other), you gain such a greater understanding of each other and it’s easier to let go of those initial fears of different and unknown and I don’t understand.
So, what it comes down to is this: DO be open to people and allow yourself to talk about who you are and where you come from, DO be open to others in return and recognize that not everyone around you is out to get you, but DON’T forget who you are and where you are and that you’re the foreign one here, so DO exercise a fair amount of caution with who you speak to and how gregarious you are with yourself. Ultimately it comes down to your own comfort levels, but as I’ve said before, you always have to adjust your comfort zone when you go to a new place, and if you’re looking over your shoulder at every turn and suspecting every person you come across you’re going to be stressed out and miserable for your whole trip.
DO try to be on time for meeting points or you will have angry Italians glare at you.
DON’T bother trying to explain that it wasn’t your fault you were late as they’ll probably just continue glaring.
DO drink lots of water
DON’T be fooled by the dry heat
It’s lovely compared to the oppressive humidity of NYC’s summer months, but it can be just as harsh in the middle of the day.
DO sit next to a window when taking vans long distances
DON’T sit too close to your travel companion in a cramped, hot van or she will bite your head off.
DO visit Edfu as it’s one of the most complete, untouched temples that looks most like it did in its heyday.
DON’T visit Comombo if you’re running short on time or getting templed-out. It’s nice enough, but not a top attraction in my book.
Edfu exterior
The temples are all amazing, but after a while they do tend to bleed together a bit and it can be a little exhausting to go to yet another one with the same style of hieroglyphics adorning the walls, so if I had to pick one to sacrifice it’d be Comombo, as all the others have a few more distinctive features to individualize them.
Inside Edfu
DO stay at the Nile Queen hotel (or maybe the Queen Nile hotel) in Luxor.
DON’T scoff when someone offers you a hotel with a pool.
When booking the rest of our trip at African Hostel back in Cairo, the guy helping us was showing us a brochure for the places we’d be staying at in Aswan and Luxor.
“3 Stars hotel in Aswan,” he told us. “3 Stars hotel in Luxor – it has a rooftop pool.”
“Cool,” we replied, nonplussed and mostly just ready to get going and hit the road.
“The hotel in Aswan doesn’t have a pool,” he continued regretfully. “I’m sorry – but there is one at the hotel in Luxor!”
“Meh,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t care that much about a pool.
“You will, you will,” he told me. “It’s very hot. You will want a pool.”
When will I learn not to doubt people who know better than me? THANK GOD FOR THE POOL. Seems like a minor thing, no? But the day we got to Luxor it was boiling hot and we’d just emerged from a van that we’d been trapped inside for a three-hour drive and upon being told that we wouldn’t be able to get onto any tours that afternoon, we decided okay, we’ll check out the pool for a bit.
And spent the rest of the afternoon and evening up there.
DON’T try to take pictures.
or
DO try to take pictures at the Valley of the Kings.
DON’T be as obvious about it as me.
The Valley of the Kings is where tombs of many of the most famous Pharaohs reside – there are a ton to see, but 90 Egyptian pounds (about $20) only gets you access to three of them, so chose wisely.
We actually didn’t get to choose – our tour guide chose for us and directed us to arguably the best ones outside of King Tut’s, which costs extra. Some tombs, I’ve read, are definitely better than others – different states of wear and decay, different designs, some have things (the sarcophagus, usually) left in them, some are completely empty save the hieroglyphics on the walls.
Photography is absolutely forbidden in all of them, a rule which I had not realized would be quite so vehemently upheld until my camera was suddenly snatched away by a very angry looking guard.
“I’ll watch your back,” Spenser had said, before he got distracted by something on the wall and turned away. Lesson learned: DON’T trust Spenser to help you take illegal photos at ancient pharaonic sites.
I only got a few blurry pictures before my camera was confiscated
DO make sure to tell your tour guide where exactly you want to go.
DON’T let him pressure you into going to an alabaster factory.
DO flaunt in the face of warning signs.
DON’T get caught. (see: above, the Valley of the Kings camera incident)
DO tell people that your are married, when asked or you’ll be getting quite a few marriage proposals.
DON’T worry too much about the marriage proposals. Like the whole tipping issue, it’s easy enough to walk away from people.
DO take your time exploring Karnak Temple.
DON’T forget about Luxor Temple.
Karnak
Luxor Temple
DON’T forget to take into account the screwy Passover bus schedule in Israel.
DO keep a few pounds on you for the trip back through Sinai to the border. It’s a long trip to go without any money or any food and there’s definitely no ATMs conveniently located along the way.
DON’T talk to the crazy man in the seat across the isle from you on the bus or he will not shut up for the duration of the trip.
DO expect lines at the border coming back at the end of Passover. Ugh.
DON’T be surprised if it takes you several hours to get through. UGH!
DO try to explain what “I’m volunteering in Tel Aviv for five months” means to the border officials, no matter how much it seems like they aren’t getting it.
DON’T try to lie and say that you’re jsut traveling for a couple of months, because if you’re me, they won’t believe you. And it’ll be a gigantic pain in the ass and you’ll spend the rest of your evening wondering if brown hair would help erase whatever potential terrorist qualities you must possess which keep getting you hassled by Israeli security.
So, we’ve come to the end of our journey through Egypt. Perhaps when I’m feeling a bit less lazy about it I’ll go into a bit more detail on Karnak and Luxor Temple, but this thing has taken me long enough and it’s time to get it finished and posted. So, in conclusion,
April 15, 2010 at 4:15 pm |
AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME post, Rach. Best one ever. I was laughing so hard at you on the horse that my colleagues were like, “What are you reading?” and I was like, “It’s called Brown Desert, Red Hair.” They acted as if they had heard of it, nodding sagely. KEEP ‘EM COMING!!
April 15, 2010 at 8:33 pm |
oh Rachel, I laughed so much it hurt, what a great guide you are for those who aren’t travelling with you…..loved it.
April 16, 2010 at 8:45 pm |
I would love to say the first thing I thought of when I read about you on the crazy horse was the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when they’re leaving the temple and Marcus Brody jumps on the horse and screams, “Follow me!” and the horse goes crazy, but it wasn’t. It was JLo in The Wedding Planner.