Walk Like an Egyptian
(Liam Hillard Sternberg) Performed by The Bangles
All the old paintings on the tombs
They do the sand dance don't you know?
If they move too quick (oh whey oh)
They're falling down like a domino
All the bazaar men by the Nile
They got the money on a bet
Gold crocodiles (oh whey oh)
They snap their teeth on your cigarette
Foreign types with the hookah pipes say
(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)
Walk like an Egyptian
The blonde waitresses take their trays
They spin around and they cross the floor
They've got the moves (oh whey oh)
You drop your drink, then they bring you more
All the school kids so sick of books
They like the punk and the metal band
When the buzzer rings (oh whey oh)
They're walking like an Egyptian
All the kids in the marketplace say
(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)
Walk like an Egyptian
Slide your feet up the street, bend your back
Shift your arm then you pull it back
Life is hard you know (oh whey oh)
So strike a pose on a Cadillac
If you wanna find all the cops
They're hanging out in the donut shop
They sing and dance (oh whey oh)
They spin the clubs, cruise down the block
All the Japanese with their yen
The party boys call the Kremlin
And the Chinese know (oh whey oh)
They walk the line like Egyptian
All the cops in the donut shop say
(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)
Walk like an Egyptian
Walk like an Egyptian
To begin: I don't even remember the last time I did a "Tunesday" post, and while I can't even be bothered to look up when it might have been, my sense is that the last one that would have really mattered to me would have been from three years ago when Dave and I went on our last big adventure. But then COVID shut down the world and Dave's parents were sick (and then gone) and we bought the Lakehouse and Kennedy had her backyard wedding and we helped Mallory get into the housing market and it seemed we would never go away again...but we did! After Christmas last year, Dave and I decided that in 2023 we would travel again and we landed on a definite bucket list destination: Egypt, in all its ancient and modern majesty. We booked a tour that seemed to hit all the highlights: Cairo and the Giza Plateau, a cruise up the Nile River to the Valley of the Kings, and at the end, three days at an all-inclusive resort on the Red Sea. And I have to say: it was a wonderful trip that filled me, heart and soul. (And also reawakened my greed for these kinds of experiences: What's next? When can we go? Anywhere, anywhen with this guy.)
Here's a story I need to get out of the way: When we got to Cairo (after something like twelve hours of travel), we learned that Air Canada had failed to put our luggage on the flight; it was still on the ground in Toronto. And while our tour coordinator and a representative from the Cairo airport assured us that this happens all the time and that they would find a way to get our bags to us, Dave was super frustrated and insisted on calling Air Canada as soon as we were seated on the shuttle bus to the hotel (which was super embarassing for me, increasingly more frustrating for Dave - as the rep spoke imperfect English and he felt the need to keep raising his voice and repeating everything - and it must have made a bad impression to everyone else on the bus, who had all just been forced to wait an extra hour with us as we watched for the bags that never came and filled out our paper work). With only our carry-on luggage, we needed to go shopping for clothes a few times (not a nice experience; we paid too much for poor quality knock-off "designer", but there really weren't any alternatives) and it took us several days to find sunscreen and hair product (this picture at the pyramids above shows us in our not-quite-right clothes; note I couldn't even get a hat for the sun). But, the bags did eventually come (the last evening of our river cruise), and if nothing else, we tried to act like good sports about it and the situation served as a good icebreaker with the rest of the tour group. All part of the adventure. But insult to injury: Air Canada delayed our bags on the way home, too; they never made the connection with us in Athens. (I mean realllly, lol.) But, before we even knew our bags were lost, this was the amazing view as we came in to land in Cairo:
So, day one: We got to the hotel in the early afternoon (the Ramses Hilton; it was fine - they may call it a five star, but it was just okay; the elevators that did work were terrifying), and our tour guide, Isis, told us we could find clothes at the Ramses Mall across the street if we wanted to join those in the group who were planning to go out to dinner together. Naturally, we went over, and it was floor after floor of the same knockoff designer purse and shoe stores, lots of pyjama stores for some reason, a "Cottonli" (really affordable socks and underwear made of soft Egyptian cotton), a dollar store (where I found an eyeliner, mascara, and deodorant) and, finally, one store that sold familiarish tops and bottoms, where we bought a few things (hoping our bags would catch up with us before we left Cairo), and it wasn't until we got home that we saw how they had overcharged us (I think that first shopping trip was $350 for 6 items? We went back a couple days later and bought a few more things - including a top that literally disintegrated in my hands as I pulled it over my head - but that time they hailed us as good customers that had earned a discount and we paid the equivalent of $150 dollars: I'd say never pay on a mobile credit card machine where you can't read the payment screen - we needed clothes and had no other choice but to shop in this one store, but I suppose we could have went to an ATM to get cash and control the cost. Live and learn.)
At any rate, we were able to join the group for dinner at the Sky Rim restaurant - on a mountain overlooking the city as the sun set - and the "typical Egyptian meal" (hummus and baba ganoush, roast chicken and fish) was tasty and familiar. Sitting and really talking with the other folks on the tour for the first time (somehow, our end of the table were all Canadians) made for a friendly and satisfying evening. A crazy start to the day ended perfectly.
(Not to belabour the complaint, but I'm wearing a dress here from the Ramses Mall that was fine, but the bottom was so sheer that I had to wear my yoga pants from the plane under it.)
The next day was the first proper day of the tour. We started at the Great Pyramids (!!) and had the opportunity to enter the Pyramid of Khafre:
The tunnel feels just as small as that looks: I was bent over at the waist, with knees slightly crouched, the entire way down (thank goodness there is a wooden walkway with rungs along it for traction), and as claustrophobic as that may seem, I hadn't realised until the first time it happened that people exiting would be coming back up the same ramp. As we kept going down and down, with electric lights every here and there barely showing the way, I began to wonder just how long the tunnel was - and I also became very aware of just how vulnerable we were: if anyone started freaking out and scrambling past the long line of us for the exit, it would surely start a stampede and people would be hurt (but I was reassured by the fact that I had never heard of that happening). As it turns out, it took about twenty minutes to get to the "burial chamber" (compared to the hour+ it takes at the Khufu Pyramid [which is the one tourists usually get to enter, but which was closed to us; thank Ra]) and that was just enough time to feel like we had "earned" it. Standing upright in the open chamber (which isn't decorated beyond graffiti from the nineteenth century and a sarcophagus of dubious provenance), I was in awe of the millions of tons of quarried rock above and around me; in awe of the human effort behind its flawless construction and the thousands of years that it has stood and the fact that my own breath was now adding itself to that ancient story. The tour guide, Isis, had explained that entering the pyramid (for an extra charge) wouldn't be visually stunning - and that it certainly wouldn't be for anyone even slightly claustrophobic - but when people ask me what my favourite part of the trip was, this was it: more than anywhere else we went in Egypt, this was where I felt most in communion with that country's long and storied history.
I also want to note: It was at the pyramids that I first encountered what an aggressive tipping ("baksheesh") culture Egypt is. In the burial chamber there was an official-looking man who waved people to move behind the ropes and pose on the sarcophagus, with his hand out at the end for a fee. When we were back topside and taking selfies in front of the pyramids, another man (who looked like an official) told us not to stand in a certain place (and being polite and law-abiding, we moved to where he suggested), and before we knew it, he had Dave's phone in his hand and he was telling us how to pose and moving us to another vantage, and then another man was opening Egyptian headdresses and putting them on our heads and then they were telling us how much we owed for them. I can't explain how fast that all happened, and how it soured me. And this would happen everywhere we went - one of the friends we made in the group, Raul, even had a policeman hustle him this way (and as Raul explained: when a machine-gun-toting man in uniform separates you from your group and then puts out his hand, you put money in it) - and it took me nearly the whole trip to come to terms with the fact that this is just the culture: I was not being singled out for harassment and we should have had a stack of American dollar bills to give to anyone who felt like doing us a favour. Still, aesthetically, I do prefer our selfies:
After our experience in front of (and inside!) the pyramids, we were brought on the bus to a panoramic point up and behind the plateau. This is where some in our group decided to ride camels out to the "perfect" picture site, but since Dave and I have had a (better) camel experience in Jordan, we took the free time to enjoy the view on our own, and ended up walking back down to the pyramids anyway (and I am delighted to share the pro tip that there was no one at the back: we had the landscape entirely to ourselves to explore and take our selfies).
And then we finished the day with a trip to the Egyptian Museum. And as amazing as it was to see the mummies and the artefacts and the golden treasures of King Tut's tomb, my absolutely favourite experience was seeing the room devoted to my favourite ancient weirdo, the Pharaoh Akhenaten:
The next day we flew to Aswan and took a trip to the Aswan High Dam (I have to say: I understand how important and technically challenging the construction of this dam was for controlling the annual flood of the Nile, but having seen the Hoover Dam, this didn't feel like it earned the name "high dam"). We saw an unfinished obelisk in a nearby quarry (my word, but it was hot out: in the forties and we still had no hats), we took a wind-powered felucca boat on a spin around the Nile as its crew sang for us (hands out at the end), and we boarded our river cruise boat, the Alyssa. We went clothes shopping again in Aswan - and we were just so lucky that when we went to cross the street out front of the dock and an aggressive hustler tried to get us to follow him to a "spice market", we slipped into a door that turned out to be the entrance to a multistory department store (women's clothes on the main floor, kids' on the second, men's on the third), and not only were we able to find suitable clothes at a reasonable price, but they directed us to a nearby pharmacy, where we were finally able to get sunscreen, razors, toothpaste, and hair gel. Everything about the river cruise was wonderful: our room was lovely, the staff was friendly, and with big buffets at every meal, it was easy to find something good to eat with very little effort. There was a pool on the top deck of the boat, but while Dave was able to buy himself a swimsuit at the department store, the only options they had for women covered from the ankle to the wrist; maybe for others, not for me.
That first day in Aswan we also had a tour of the Island of Philae - a temple complex that had needed to be moved to an island with higher elevation after the damming of the Nile raised the water level - and we had a fascinating tour guide for this excursion whose story tied in nicely with what we experienced during our tour of Abu Simbel the next morning (another, huge, temple complex that had had to be moved to higher ground when the Nile was dammed). I'm just going to share what I wrote about ancient "graffiti" on facebook because this is the kind of historical insight that fires my brain:
A word on graffiti: Yes, there are idiots who sharpie on the temple walls, and it seems that every 19th century archeologist carved his name in between hieroglyphs, but I was most fascinated by the graffiti at the Philae temple we visited yesterday. Here are pictures of the entrance (with the goddess Isis having been defaced by the early Christians because they didn't like her virgin birth story; the empty plinth on the left is where the obelisk in Trafalgar Square is from). And I'm sharing a picture of a statement (top right) left behind by Napoleon's army. And the last is a picture of graffiti from antiquity to which our guide had a personal connection: almost finished his Masters in Ancient Egyptian languages in London back in the 80s, his advisor told him that a couple of Canadian archeologists had apparently discovered the last ever use of demotic Egyptian in antiquity, and told him that his Masters thesis would be improved if he could find it and translate it. The Canadians were long gone by the time he got there, and it took him nine months and a bunch of good luck to find the tiny carving amongst all the hieroglyphics and cartouches. And when he translated it, he discovered that it had been written by a Greek (from the time of Alexander the Great) and it translates as: I am Peter junior, son of the son of Peter. I was FASCINATED by that - this is recording the death of a written language, and it's "Kilroy was here" - and I felt really lucky to have had this guide on this day; I don't know if anyone else tells that particular story. Naturally, you hate to see the modern graffiti, and it's sad to see how the Church tried to erase the parts they didn't like, but in the end, it's all a part of the human history of these sites. 
Also note: Taking the "optional" tour of Abu Simbel meant meeting in the lobby at 2:30 am for a four hour bus ride (the temple is way down south, 20km from the Sudan border, and we were held up for an extra hour at a military checkpoint). I'm not good at sleeping in moving vehicles - and no one who could see how the bus driver played chicken with oncoming traffic was able to relax anyway - but this was an incredible experience and I am happy to have taken advantage of it. People who didn't go on this tour had the option of visiting a Nubian village (seeing the crocodiles they keep in their houses, experiencing their hospitality, and taking a dip in the Nile), and while I wish there had been time to do absolutely everything, I have no regrets. After returning to Aswan, we joined the rest of the group in travelling onward to Kom Ombo, where we saw the "twin temples" of Haroeris and Sobek.
The next morning we docked and met in the lobby at 5:30, and although our itinerary said that we'd be taking horse-drawn carriages to the Temple of Edfu, everyone was relieved to discover that we were to go by bus. When you see the horses - not only their ribs but their hipbones were painfully visible - it's hard to understand why tourists would be lined up to use them (but to be fair: if our tour company was still using the horses, it would have been hard to refuse to get into the carriage. If more tour companies stop using them, maybe the industry will be put out of business; but, of course, that comes with its own downside for the carriage operators. It's hard to know what to wish for, but participating in what looks like animal abuse isn't for me.) Back on board the riverboat and we spent the day sailing up to Luxor - we had a sun shelter on deck and I read in the shade while Dave swam in the pool - and it was fascinating to watch hawkers row out to our much bigger ships to try and sell goods as we waited our turn to go through a lock. They'd try every language (as they do on dry land) until someone answered them, and then they'd put a Tshirt or a tablecloth or some such in a plastic bag and throw it up on deck. If someone decided to buy it, they'd put money in the bag and throw it back down, or just throw the goods back (or, as someone in our group apparently did, refuse to touch the bag of goods as it lay on the deck beside her.)
When we got to Luxor, our lost bags were brought on board! And although Isis told us to leave them in the lobby and someone would bring them to our room eventually, we took them immediately to our room and changed into our own clothes before we left again. Off to see the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, back to the ship for dinner (and to finally pose with my copy of Death on the Nile while we still had daylight on the Nile) and then back to Karnak for a sound and light show. Now, not only was it still hot out when we got to the temple complex at 9 pm (it had been so hot all day), and not only had I been disappointed that the sound and light show we had prepaid for had been moved from Cairo and the Pyramids to Karnak by the tour company, but the show itself...was kind of boring. More sound - droning, dramatic storytelling - than light. We spent half the time walking through with a sea of lit-up-phone-recording people as various obelisks and panels of writing were illuminated one by one and half the time sitting beside the Sacred Lake - but the water itself wasn't used for reflections and there wasn't, like, a laser show or fireworks or anything (and maybe it's like: good for them for respecting the space and not going for big Hollywood/Disneyworld effects, but it was a little long and dull?)
The next morning we went back into Luxor, but this time to the West Bank and the Valley of the Kings. (Note: There was an optional excursion to have a sunrise hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings, and while I know that I wouldn't like the heights and the instability, those who went - leaving the hotel at 3 am - said it was a "commercial balloon" that holds up to 35 people; "as stable as an elevator"; looking over the side is "like looking out an airplane window". I don't know. It still scares me; no regrets.) It's amazing to travel through this area - a barren desert with looming sandstone cliffs, dotted here and there with tomb entrances - and I could just imagine the people who for millennia had walked over the graves of their long-dead pharaohs without any clue of what was beneath their feet. Or imagine the early Egyptologists, randomly poking around for a tomb entrance, sometimes getting lucky; none so lucky as the fabled Howard Carter. As tourists, we were given a ticket that entitled us entrance to any three tombs, and Isis directed us to what she said were the three biggest and most brightly decorated (if I remember it right, it was Ramses III, Ramses IV, and Setnakht, and they were phenomenal). Entrance to King Tut's tomb is an extra $20 US, and even though Dave had read on the internet beforehand that it's not worth the price, I wasn't going to come that far and not see everything possible. Yes, what you can see of Tutankhamun's tomb amounts to just two small rooms - one with his mummy in a climate-controlled glass case and one with a stone sarcophagus; all of the treasures are in the Egyptian Museum - but I was amazed to have experienced this (even taking out Death Comes As the End for a picture). Just look at these happy faces:
We then went on to the Temple of Hatshepsut, and I have to say: It is huge and imposing and amazing, but after so many huge and imposing and amazing sites, it all became a bit too much; I was suffering a temple hangover, and by this point, I think I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the scale of it all. We stayed that night at the Steigenberger Resort Achti (pretty "swish" as our new Scottish friends proclaimed), and while it was the last evening we were to have with many of our new friends, we were certainly looking forward to the next phase of the tour: three nights at the Amarina Abu Soma Resort outside of Hurghada on the Red Sea. Although there had been a fatal shark attack in Hurghada just the week before, as well as a deadly boat fire, there was a shark net (patrolled constantly by a life guard) at the resort and we did end up going in the water. As an all inclusive, the food and the drink, the sun and the sand, the buffets and a la carte restaurants, were exactly what we needed to recover from a week of early starts, late nights talking with new friends, and cramming our senses with overwhelming experiences. Several others from the main tour group joined us at the resort - we especially enjoyed the time with our Scottish friends - and three days was just enough time to recover. Dave never did get the waters to part for him, however:
A downside: When we split with the main group at Luxor, they flew back to Cairo, enjoyed a last day and night in the city and then flew out the next morning. Our last day was spent (over nine hours !!) on a too small bus, driving back to Cairo. And when we got there, Dave and I were whisked off on the Old City tour that I had prepaid for (we didn't know we would be the only ones; the rest of our group was taken to the Old Cairo Bazaar, which the itinerary had us visiting on day one). And while our guide was friendly and knowledgeable and gave us an amazing condensed history of the city and the country as he showed us the Saladin Citadel, the Alabaster Mosque, and the Church of Abu Serga (built over the cave where the Holy Family lived while escaping Herod's slaughter of the innocents; this felt like it closed the circle of visiting Bethlehem on our last trip), it was hot and we were tired and stiff from the long bus ride. At the end, he said he was supposed to take us next to the bazaar (it had been part of what we were expecting), but we told him we would be happy to go on to the airport hotel instead.
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We checked into Le Meridien, also quite "swish", had a refreshing rest in the lobby bar, and met up with our Scottish friends for one last dinner. Woke up the next morning and started the journey home. Sidenote: I wish I had really looked at the itinerary, and seeing that we were changing planes in Athens, I wish I had looked into making it a long enough layover to see the Acropolis. Not only would I like to see the Acropolis, but the connection was so tight that an Air Canada agent met us at the staircase down to the bus that would take us to the terminal, she rode us to the terminal and passed us off to another agent who said, "Can you run?" And then we ran for like ten minutes through the terminal - including up two flights of stairs - with our carry-ons. He brought us through a private security area, unlocked a back door to the gate area, and got us there just as our flight was boarding. We kind of knew at that point that our bags wouldn't be making the connection with us, but going home, there wasn't much at stake and we knew it would be just another data point to take to Air Canada.
And if anything here sounds like complaining, it's truly not. This was a trip of a lifetime, in a lifetime of amazing trips, and I feel grateful and enlarged and just so lucky to have been able to see and touch and breathe the air of this amazing country. Fun facts: the pyramids and the Sphinx are maybe not as big in real life as I had expected; the pyramids aren't built on a sandy desert but on top of a wobbly limestone surface (which is like, duh, that's why they haven't sunken down, but it never crossed my mind before I felt it under my feet); and while at first I bristled at the baksheesh culture, I grew to understand it as a way of getting by. There are so many things that are a part of me now that I didn't get from books or shows and I could cry to think of how I have been so soul-nourished with this knowledge. I had no idea that pharaonic mummies had these weirdly carved gold finger and toe covers before I saw them in the Egyptian Museum. How had I never seen these before?
This is long enough for today: I will need to come make another post about the people that we met; what an incredible group, from all over, that made us smile every day. I simply feel blessed.
