The Land of the Mummies

The travelbug had been biting me for a loooong time. So I decided to satisfy my itching feet with a trip to Egypt on my way back from India, since I have always been intrigued by Egypt. Its been well over a month now but am still re-living the one week that I spent there.

I felt as comfortable in my skin there like I do in Mumbai. Very friendly people, very hospitable.The locals there seem very non- ambitious and satisfied, going about their lives on donkeys and camels.Most people work all day and then hang out with friends till almost 1-2 in the morn and are up and ready to work at 6.00 the next day but life seems to go at a slow pace, no one seems to be in a hurry to get anywhere

Started off my trip at Cairo and Giza..with the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, the step pyramids of Saqqara and the Memphis open-air museum.

When I stood in front of the 450 ft tall Great Pyramid of Khufu….I had to pinch myself to make sure I was actually here and the image that I only saw in pictures, on TV and in my myriad dreams of going to Egypt, was actually towering in front of me paying obeisance to the sun-God RA. If the Pyramids wont awe you, I don’t know what else would….just imagining the basic technicalities that must have gone into making this larger than life structure, imagining people actually arranging about 2 million stones weighing at least 2 tonnes each in mathematical precision to create a home for their dead king because of their beliefs in the afterlife can be logic shattering.

After the ode to manual labor in Giza, I went to Aswan to see the High Dam, a modern day engineering miracle built in the 1960s. The Lake Nasser that this dam created was a threat to many of the ancient temples. So this lead to the other modern day feat of actually relocating entire temples to higher altitudes …the most famous of them being the Temple of RamesesII and Nefertari at Abu Simbel.

Then it was a 3-day cruise down the Nile from Aswan to Edfu to Kom Ombo to Luxor. After a couple of them, the temples start seeming similar though each one has a different history and is dedicated to different Gods and Goddesses. But I found the Temples of Karnak the most impressive of all. It is a complex which has multiple complexes within it built by different kings over a 13 hundred years period. It houses obelisks, hypostyles, rows of sphinxes and cryosphinxes etc.Many of these temples alongside with age-old hieroglyphics, also had 18^th century graffiti on their walls…most of them left by Napoleon’s troops, which was fascinating in its own right. And of course the famous Valley of the Kings where the Tutankhamun treasures were found was very interesting with archeaologists all around still digging to unearth other hidden treasures.

However the piece de resistance of the trip for me was the Cairo Museum, with almost an entire floor dedicated to Tutankhamun’s treasures and a room with the royal mummies. It was quite ironical to see the mummy of Rameses II, where you could still see his silver hair and his frail body and then compare it to the colossal statues of his at Abu Simbel.

And I should not forget to mention the wonderful food I had everywhere…have never had falafels that good or baba ghanoushes with aysh that still can make my mouth water.

Shukran - for your patience for letting me be your personal Egyptian tour guide :)

But the travel bug is not yet still…….I hear the Incan ruins of Macchu Picchu whispering to me.....