Security

I have mentioned security and that I would explain it in a later post. Our guides explained that the Dept. of Tourism wants to ensure anyone visiting Egypt has a safe, pleasant experience so they have hired lots of police to "protect" tourists, especially Americans. They understand that with events on the news and the viciousness of Islamic terrorists, people are afraid to visit the Middle East. To try to offset that, they have an armed guard travel with every group of 12 or more Americans. Since we had an "important" representative of the American government in our little group of 7 (James is a consul for the State Dept.), we were especially well-looked after. Russ took this first picture a bit surreptitiously. The James Bondish handsome guy in the foreground is our grandson, Nick. The guys behind each of his shoulders are armed security guards ever on the lookout.

They even did "extra duty" at times, giving us a hand on and off boats or in any precarious stepping situation. They also intervened a couple of times with the aggressive, desperate vendors- telling them to leave us alone when we let it be known that we were not interested in buying anything. This second photo was our falluka ride (smallish sailboat) on our last day on the Nile. Our tour guide is here next to James, Susanne, and our grandsons. Behind them are 3 armed guards putting along in a small inflatable boat staying close with us as we sailed along peacefully.

Egyptians want Americans to know they welcome them with hospitality and look forward to being able to show them their treasures. I'm just passing along the message that they will do their best to keep tourists safe. You'd be safer there than on the streets of Detroit!

Monuments in Egypt

I could fill pages and pages with pictures of the things we have seen here in the Middle East. I kept reminding myself the things I was seeing were thousands of years old- anywhere from 2 to 4,000 years old. Although most showed wear, they were amazing in so many ways. Here is James giving you the perspective of how huge the stones were in the pyramids. There were thousands and thousands of these massive stones we could hardly move with really powerful modern equipment. The thought of piling them with only manpower and simple tools (and tons and tons of sand piled up) is just mind-boggling. 

Then there are the gigantic statues. This is Ramses IV, laying down because his legs are broken off. We were in an outdoor museum. Most of the smaller artifacts we saw were in the Cairo Museum which our guide in Cairo managed to squeeze in for us between our flight from Aswan and our flight out to Amman. It was a welcome alternative to spending most of the day in the Cairo airport!

I am standing among these columns to give you the perspective of size again. There were columns in and in front of all the temples everywhere we went. They were built by piling huge discs then carving and painting marvelous art on them.

There were even places where the colors had not faded so you could see how incredible they were.

To illustrate the number of things, I'm including the street of sphinxes. It's a path about a mile long from one temple to another lined on both sides with sphinx statues, hundreds of them!

Cruising the Nile

We flew from Cairo to Luxor (called Thebes by the Romans) on Monday, Oct. 13. There we were taken to our cruise boat. The first picture is the reception room where we first arrived and later where group events took place. The next 2 photos are of the top deck.

This last picture is in the dining room, at water level as you can see through the window. The meals were all amazing, mostly buffet style. We never lacked for food! We even had a luxurious basket of fruit in our room they eventually had to take away because we were never hungry enough to eat any of it!

Tourism in Egypt

Since over 95% of Egypt is desert and despite the advanced country it was compared to the rest of the world in 4000 B.C.E., today the primary source of improvement and influx to their economy is tourism. Cotton is also fairly important but most of their other agriculture is for home consumption. It was a bit eerie to see the lack of tourists everywhere we went. The hotels were sparsely occupied and the sites we visited were quiet. We had one tour guide that took us everywhere in Cairo whose name was Muhammed. The tour guides are called Egyptologists because they have at least a 4 year college degree in history and tourism so they can explain the sites and answer all the questions tourists pose about Egypt and its history.

Our tour guide as we cruised down the Nile River was Ahmed. He is the sweet-faced man second from the left in this picture taken on "Egyptian Night" on the cruise ship. He is fairly young, in his early 30's, unmarried and living with his parents due to the economy. He doesn't feel he can afford to be married and is helping his parents financially.

Ahmed was going to be a guide for one other small group for a couple of days after we left then would be idle until late November. When we expressed sympathy for the lack of work, he said he was grateful things were getting better because he sometimes had been idle for up to 6 months at a time.

The best illustration of the condition of their tourism industry is concerning the boats on the Nile. There are somewhere between 300 and 400 Nile cruise boats in Egypt. Due to the fear caused by the "Arab Spring", tourism dropped off until there were only 5 or 6 running a few years ago. It has increased to only around 25 now. A license for a cruise boat was a few thousand dollars in the early 1990's but with the concern for pollution they stopped allowing more licenses. Now the only way to get a license is from someone who has one and isn't using it and the cost is about 1 million dollars, hardly a cheap investment. The boat we were on was sponsored by Movenpick, a large Swiss company. It was wonderful. However, the sad thing was that there was a crew of 60 to serve only 21 passengers on a boat that can hold 140. There was our little group of 7 Americans, a couple of Germans, 2 young Chinese now living in South Africa, and the remaining were from the British Isles.

The most stressful aspect of this lull in business is in the vendors at each and every stop. They are so desperate to sell things that you feel like you're being swarmed with eager salesmen telling you how "cheap" their prices are. We wanted so badly to help by buying things but we had no Egyptian money (we always rely on James for foreign currency then settle up with him later) and we really did not want to bring back a suitcase full of souvenirs that would simply be put in our storage space while we serve a mission. We are anxious to spread the word that if anyone wants an exotic, reasonably priced vacation, Egypt is a good choice. It's hot in the summer but otherwise very pleasant and it's safe. I'll tell more about the security in a separate blog.

Cairo

I know it's going to be a chore to get caught up to the day I'm living now but I'll keep posting when I can to have a bit of a record of our trip. We had to leave on the drive to Amman, Jordan early in the day despite the fact that our flight out would not be until late in the day because the border would be closing at noon. If you could just drive right along from Jerusalem to Amman it might take less than an hour because it is only about 40-some miles. However, since there is a national border between two countries who manage to co-exist but are a bit mistrustful, there is checkpoint after checkpoint so it takes more like 3 hours, more at busy times. We had to pay $50 each for Russ and me exit tax to leave Israel. Then we had to go through checks on the insurance on the car and our passports. A great advantage we had to speed things up (if you can call 3 hours speedy), was traveling with James who has a diplomatic license on his car and diplomatic status. That will come to benefit and amaze us in other ways as we traveled through Egypt. Since the day was Russ's birthday, we went out for lunch- to a P.F. Chang, believe it or not. There are parts of Jerusalem, most of Tel Aviv, and much of Amman which are quite western/modern. Then we spent a couple of hours at the home of friends of James and Susanne who are with the embassy in Amman. They were kind enough to drive us to the airport so we didn't have to pay to park the car for a week. Our flight to Cairo was fairly uneventful, again going through the "VIP" lines was very nice.
Egypt has some 88 million people, nearly all living within a very short distance from the Nile because the rest of the country is over 95% desert. One fourth of the population lives in Cairo, a crowded, busy, and very dirty city- at least to me. The smog in the air made it difficult to breathe. However, the travel agent who planned the trip for James and Susanne had booked us into a 5-star hotel, the Conrad, where we were treated like royalty. We had 2 double rooms which Russ and I, then James and Susanne had, and a triple room for the 3 kids. The room was lovely with a nice view from the 8th floor although we didn't spend a lot of time there. Much as I dislike cold air conditioning, it was certainly better than the smog outside!
After a good night's sleep, we were up early (it was that way every day trying to get everything in!) and out to our little bus to see the pyramids. Everywhere we traveled in Egypt we had a driver, a tour guide, and security. The drivers were amazing at wending their way through the traffic. One guide joked that the white lines on the road were merely decoration. It sure seemed that way! There were very few traffic lights, no visible traffic cops, no speed limits, and apparently no rules of the road. Drivers would just make a lane wherever they had room and horns were used frequently but because it was so congested in the city nobody could get up enough speed to have an accident. We drove across the "longest bridge in the world" as we headed out of Cairo, surrounded by a tangle of roads on bridges going all directions. There was mile after mile of what our guide called "illegal buildings". Apparently people built huge concrete apartment buildings and moved in quickly. "Squatting" seems to be an expected means of acquiring property here in the Middle East. The buildings were only partially occupied because the people were saving rooms for family members to move there or grow up to marry and start families of their own. The masonry was always difficult to differentiate from the ancient ruins we saw. Sometimes the ancient ruins, made of stone and some with remnants of paint still showing, were even more attractive than the newer buildings!
There are 108 pyramids in Egypt. The Great Pyramids of Giza took 30 years to build by 100,000 workers, most of whom were only seasonal because they were farmers.

 I was a little surprised at the size of the Sphinx. It wasn't all that huge. Somehow I had always envisioned it to be comparable in size to the pyramids. As you can see, it's considerably smaller, although still impressive in its design and structure.

This is the view with our backs to the pyramids and Sphinx. Cairo is quite close by, although due to the traffic it took at least an hour to get from our hotel to the site.

We arrived in Tel Aviv at a bustling international airport and got through customs fairly easily, showing our passports and explaining that we were headed for Jerusalem to visit our son's family and that he works at the American consulate here. It's always a delight to be reunited with family wherever we have that opportunity. Despite a lack of sleep, the excitement of being here kept me alert for the remainder of our first day, which wasn't long. However, trying to sleep through night here, which my body was accustomed to being daytime in AZ, was a bit difficult. I wore earplugs to make it as quiet as possible, had the window open to the cool night air so it wouldn't be too hot, and was grateful to my grandson for sacrificing his bed and room during our stay. Still, I basically cat-napped through the first few nights. The 1+ hour drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem took us through barren, rocky countryside with settlements of masonry dwellings here and there. The signs are all in Hebrew, Arabic, and nearly always include English. (I feel truly blessed to have been born in a country which has as its primary language the language chosen for international communication- English. I have tried to learn a little of other languages but could never adequately converse in any of them. I admire those who can!)
Susanne trudged through the old city of Jerusalem with us while James worked and the kids opted to stay home. Our arrival was during the holiday called Sukkot or Feast of Tabernacles commemorating the travels through the wilderness as the children of Israel left Egypt headed for the promised land. On balconies, in tiny front yards, and wherever there was space, many Jewish families and restaurants had erected small booths of some sort of cloth for having meals together, socializing, and perhaps even sleeping as their ancestors did centuries ago.  The old city had very rough stone pavement with very narrow streets lined with shops and churches here and there. There is very little open space, as in any long-established city. There was an obvious military presence everywhere with well-armed police or whatever they might be called at intersections and in public squares. Clothing ranged from Western wear (primarily) to Orthodox robed men with furry hats to the occasional Muslim in certain areas and combinations in between. It was somewhat comforting to see familiar names interspersed with so much that was strange to me: Goodyear, Ford, Toyota, Pepsi-cola, even "McArabian" which advertised the Middle Eastern variety of fast food apparently available at McDonald sponsored restaurants.

The traditional spot for Jesus's tomb is in a large, complex building called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We were grateful to have our trusty guide (Susanne) with us as we wound our way through its halls and rooms and little nooks. We also visited a small, normally quiet park established by a British charitable trust which has in it this "Garden Tomb" showing what the scriptures described as the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Because of this tomb and the nearby skull-shaped cliff (Golgotha perhaps?), there are some who say this could be the actual site of Christ's burial. Although normally a very quiet place for prayer and meditation, we arrived when there was a large Korean (I think) church group lustily singing hymns. You could see joy in their faces as they stood and swayed, some holding hands, some raising hands, singing praises to God and His Son. 

The sun is getting lower in the sky but shining in our eyes here as we stand with the city of Jerusalem behind our backs. Russ isn't looking too happy but I guess it's because this was taken only hours after arriving in Israel. 

 This is what is considered to be the "Garden Tomb" of Joseph of Arimathea where Jesus was laid after removing him from the cross. The little steps are for the safety and convenience of tourists like us who want to step into the tomb. The channel the back part sits in is where the large round stone would have been rolled back and forth to close the tomb.

Despite the jet lag, it is wonderful being here with James, Susanne, Jarom, Nicholas, and Louisa. We spent a large part of the day visiting the BYU Jerusalem Center, which is really beautiful. It is truly a miracle that in such a crowded old city where real estate is prohibitively expensive and difficult to get, the large parcel upon which the Jerusalem Center was built was purchased several decades ago. The center is 8 floors high but does not tower over anything because it is built into and on a hillside.

As we entered the courtyard of the Center, a lovely white dove happened to be standing on the fountain. Louisa thought I should take a picture. I told her I would only if she would be in the picture, too. I'm sure if you were to Google the BYU Jerusalem Center, you could find lovely full-front photos of it. We didn't get any because we entered from the top and never stood in the very front of it.