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Day 79: For all of our planning, some of the best days on this trip have been marked by experiences in which our loosely-formed expectations have been unexpectedly exceeded.
The minute that we walked through the doorway into the reading room of Alexandria’s Bibliotheca Alexandria, we knew that we’d stumbled onto another such spot.
There was no […]

Day 79: A night spent in transit with Air Arabia from Alexandria to Sharjah, and then connecting from Sharjah to Tehran the following day. Once we boarded the plane, Air Arabia did everything right, but even so very little sleep ensued.

Day 75: This was it. The big day. The day we were off to see the Pyramids.
We accepted the offer from our hotel to organise a visit to the pyramids near Cairo in chronological order of their construction. This turned out to be extremely useful way of developing an understanding of how the pyramid […]

Day 75: Standing up close to the Red Pyramid, outside Cairo, you get a sense of the scale of the creation. In a word, hugeness.
Nevertheless, while massive, we still felt that it was more plausible that the pyramids were built by human hands than they were by aliens. You are probably very reassured to […]

Days 74-77: What a grand old place this is. With an creaking elevator operated by an attendant, rooms that have not been updated since Winston Churchill’s time and an in-room telephone that connects only with reception, it was everything that we had hoped for in a central place to stay in Cairo.
When we asked […]

Day 73: It was here, at the Temples of Karnak, that our guide introduced three concepts that have come to define our archeological experiences in Egypt.
The first was “religion”. This referred to the religious context of most of the scenes depicted in Egypt’s archeological wonders, its funerary monuments and its temples.
The second was […]

Days 71-72: It’s sometimes unfairly said that cruise ships are for the newly wed and the nearly dead. As Kate and I still fall into the former category, we were perfectly qualified for two days and nights of luxury travelling from Aswan to Luxor.
After arriving in Aswan we took a look at the various ships […]

Day 71: In Edfu, halfway between Aswan and Luxor, we visited the Temple of Horus just as the sun was setting for the day. It was a mighty sight, architecturally imposing and impressively intact. Entering the temple we walked through the magnificent courtyard, into successive rooms with walls engraved from top to bottom with hieroglyphs […]