The Mystery and Majesty of Egypt 2.0

Cairo International is Africa’s second busiest airport (after Johannesburg). There are nonstop flights from all of Europe’s major hubs. For instance, Lufthansa flies three non-stops per day from Frankfurt. So you can arrive in about the same time as it takes to get to Rome, Vienna or any other non-hub European city (about 15 hours from SFO). We’ve hired a top-of-the-line hospitality company to greet you individually at the airport and transport you to our hotel in comfortable new vans.

We will transfer you to the Hilton Heliopolis, a new 5-star property, conveniently located in proximity to downtown and the airport. Earlier this year we stayed in Giza, near the pyramids. We enjoyed the view of the pyramids, but because Cairo is a city of 23 million people, every time we left the hotel it took an hour and a half to get anywhere. We feel that we’ve made the right choice in staying nearer to the center of things this time.

The Citadel was built by Saladin in the 1100’s to defend Cairo from the attacking crusaders. The fortress still stands on the highest hill of Cairo. On the summit, in the interior of the fortress, Mohamed Ali Pasha constructed one of the world’s most beautiful mosques. Built in 1840, it is still a mosque but also serves as a museum. This allows us to go inside. Here’s a little note on this part of the Muslim world. Although Egypt is 85% Muslim and 15% Christian, the country is ruled by secular laws and president Sisi made a point last year of attending Christmas mass and wishing a Merry Christmas to Egypt’s Christians.

It’s only an hour flight from Cairo to Luxor so we will arrive mid-morning. Then, while our porters move our bags to the hotel, we’ll take our first excursion. We’ll visit the great temple of Luxor, built in about 1400BC. This is the temple where the Pharaohs were crowned. Here we will first meet Ramses II and Tutankhamen. After a guided visit and lunch, we will move into our hotel, the Jollie Ville, a wonderful resort on its own island in the Nile.

Castles and Concerts will probably never visit a more inhospitable place than the Valley of the Kings. For a thousand years the Pharaohs were buried here. The funeral procession to bury a Pharaoh would have taken several days to get there from Thebes. The nineteenth century archeologists would have taken two days to get there from Luxor with a mule. Today we can ride twenty minutes on good roads, in air-conditioned comfort, to the parking lot at the entrance to the valley. Then we can get aboard these cute little trolleys to enter the valley. Once in the valley, we can stroll on sidewalks to the entrances to several tombs. Many others remain inaccessible because they were dug halfway up the sides of the valley walls. In the valley are sixty-two tombs that have been discovered during the last two hundred years. They are numbered in the order of their discovery with no reference to the dates the Pharaoh ruled. So Number 62 is Tutankhamen, found by Howard Carter in 1922. And these tombs are among the most astounding discoveries ever made.

Today we’ll move south (upriver toward the center of Africa) to Aswan. The mountains start here. And In the old days it is here that the first cataract (waterfall) made continued passage by boat impossible. From here the great camel caravans fanned out all over Africa. The Nile is the longest river in the world and we are not even halfway to the Nile’s origin at Lake Victoria. It is here at Aswan, in 1902, that the British built the largest masonry dam in the world. It provided flood relief and irrigation to large new portions of Egypt.

It worked well. Then between 1960 and 1970 Egypt decided to construct the largest embankment dam in the world, the Aswan High Dam. Because Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, the British convinced America not to help the Egyptians. Egypt turned to the Russians for help. The Russians successfully constructed the dam. This was a major setback for US diplomacy and the repercussions from that bonehead decision continue to reverberate through our world today.

For our visit in January of this year we made Abu Simbel an optional add-on. But the magnificence of this site and and its surroundings made it second only to the pyramids in its impact. So we’ve made it an integral part of this version of our trip. And we enjoyed the Nubian people and the hotel on the lake so much that we added a second night here.

The great temple complex at Abu Simbel was built by Ramses II in about 1250 BC. It was one of the wonders of the ancient world. It became famous again in our modern world when in 1968 UNESCO led the drive to save these temples from drowning in the new lake created by the High Aswan Dam.

The next day (March 1) we will fly back to Cairo. Most, but not all flights back to Europe or North America depart between 11PM and 2AM. We will be back in the Hilton Heliopolis by late afternoon of March 1. This hotel is just 15 minutes from the international airport. Everyone on the trip will have a room in the Hilton that night (included in the price of the trip). Dinner is on your own for this night. The hotel has six different restaurants, so you should probably plan to dine in the hotel. Our schedule will allow you to depart on an evening flight on March 1 or one of the early AM flights on March 2. Or you can spend the whole night in the hotel and depart at your leisure later in the day or evening on March 2.

There is so much to see and experience in Egypt. You must see the Valley of the Kings, the grand temples of Luxor and Karnack, Hatshepsut’s temple and the other great monuments of upper (South) Egypt. Thus, our 10-day tour has left us only two days of touring in Cairo. We’ll spend a day at the pyramids and another day exploring Muslim Cairo. This leaves several important sites unvisited. If you want to arrive a few days early we can remedy this situation; here are some other things you should see:

The Museums:

Just three years ago they opened a new super-modern museum to properly display the mummies of all the Pharaohs. You probably know that Tutankhamen’s tomb is the only one to survive intact from ancient times. The fact that almost all of the Pharaoh’s mummies have survived is a curious tale. Come and meet the Pharaohs in person and learn how it happened.

This October is planned the opening of a huge new Cairo museum. They’ve been at it for ten years now. If they do get it open we will surely visit it. However, of all the museums, I still prefer the Victorian Era museum with rows & rows of glass and wood display cases. This is where Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney first climbed out of the mummy cases with bandages dragging to scare the bejesus out of me as a kid. And it still has that perfect vibe. Maybe we’ll see if we can get a night-time tour.