Marrakesh

Got into Marrakesh last night and managed to navigate our way to our unmarked hotel deep in the maze of the medina, dragging our luggage through the crowded streets. We will poke around here for the next four days before we have to fly home

m'hmad and the desert at erg chigaga

We are really glad that we took the long drive oiut to m'hmaid to see the desert again. A nu,ber of people urged us to go to merzouga and see the dunes of erg chebbi instead, enough to make us worried, but the desert here is magnificent. We spent a couple of hours hiking around in dunes up to 150m high and were the only people out there that we could see. See pic; its awesome. Glad we're here in winter and not summer though, whren it gets up to about 55C or 130F

ourzazate

We took a very early plane out of fez this morning to Ourzazate in the mid atlas. Oddly enough, this town has turned into something of a film making destinatin and a lot of desert-y or middle eastern movies have gotten made here, like "kingdom of heaven", "alexander" etc. stopped in at the studios to seee replicas of what we saw in egypt, and then on to a nearby casbah (sort of fortified village - see pic) where a lot of berber people still live. Ended up with another sword and ranee with another neckless - I am sensing a trend here... we're planning on heading further south tomorrow to spend some more time in the desert after our great experience in siwa

Fes et al

We spent a day visiting nearby volubilis, a partially restored ruined roman city about an hour from fes, as well as meknes, like fes, an ex capital of morocco. Morocco has had a number of different ruling dynasties, and many of them saw the need to establish new capitals. The nesting storks at Volubilis and the lovely country setting made it the more interesting of the two places.

Spent the next day wandering around the medina on our own. Saw the potteries, belching black smoke, where tile mosaics, pottery and ceramics get made, and got comprehensively lost in the medina. Somehow I ended up the owner of a Berber sword and Ranee the owner of a couple of necklesses - I'm not entirely sure how that happened but there were some fast talking medina inhabitants involved

Landed in Morocco

Got into Casablanca about two hours late after an unsheduled stop to "take on more fuel"(???) and headed staight on to Rabat as soon as we landed. Overnighted in a R
riad (converted courtyard home in the medina, the old walled part of town) and saw the few sights (some roman and merenid ruins now mostly colonized by nesing storks, and a surprisingly beautiful tomb of the current King's grandfather) before quickly heading to Fes. he first pic is of a small fountain by the tomb. The riad we are in here, Riad Fes, is really spectacular (pic). Explored and got lost in the medina here this morning (discovered that the tanneries (pic) use pigeon shit to soften leather - not all that compelling a sales fact). We had lunch with a guy we met on the tain yesterday and his family at a delicious bbq place we would never have found otherwise where you select your meat from the butchers freshly killed carcasses and have the guys grill it up to order.

Last day in Cairo

Slept in today, hit the internet for 2.5 hours (yes there is something wrong with us - we go to Egypt to surf the web!) but also visited the Egyptian museum and the Khalili market. I think it may be the only time in recorded history that tourists at Khalili weren't beseiged by vendors as everyone was glued to the screen wathecing the soccer. Pic is a bit blurry but its a bread seller balancing his load of bread on his head as he pedals his bike down one of the lanes in khalili

Highlight was watching (on TV) Egypt win the Africa cup of Nations football tournament tonight. Egypt are the host country, so with the win the crowd both at the stadium and at the restaurant we were at went wild! Lots of happy people in Cairo tonight. Cars honking; people with painted faces smiling and shouting everywhere, more flags than you can poke a stick at; the streets are packed

Siwa oasis

Just got back from Siwa Oasis. Its a trek to get to but well worth it. Its about an 8 hour drive from Cairo, through El Alamein and Masa Matroud to get there. The Oasis is one the edge of the Eastern Sahara, near the Libyan border. We stayed at the amazing eco-lodge, Adrere Amellal, which has justifiably been writting up glowingly. Its a sprawling set of buildings built in the traditional manner of construction out of mud, solidified sea salt and palm trees (see top pic). The cavelike rooms have small windows to keep them cool in the hot summers and are furnished in a mixture of traditional furniture and high thread count super comfy sheets. There were only 3-5 of us there and dinner each night was in a different place in one of the many public spaces, sitting rooms, dining rooms, patios and hidden nooks around the place.

Siwa itself is an interesting little town. The people there are mostly Berber rather than Arabic, and it has a separate culture and language from much of the rest of Egypt. It has seen a lot of history despite its remoteness, from Alexander the Great coming to consult the Oracle of Siwa to confirm that he was of divine birth and hence able to be a Pharoah of Egypt, to Cleapatra and World War II. The town itself seems quite conservative. Whereas we've seen many women with headscarves in Egypt, and some with veils or even Burkas, in Siwa we saw some women who covered their entire heads with a black (presumably translucent from close enough) cloth, without even an eye slit, so that from a distance they looked like black dressmakers dummies wearing hoods, capes and robes.

The desert itself was the main highlight (see lower pic). We ventured out there a couple of times in an old Landcruiser with the desert guide Abdullah, visiting other oases and lakes, a hot spring, weird rock formations and miles of perfect dunes. It is breathtaking, and the photo really doesn't convey it. The unlikliness of coming over a dune top after driving for miles over nothing but sand and seeing a clump of palms surrounding a large lake is pretty incredible.

The second day the wind was picking up and the millions of tendrils of windblown sand a few inches of the ground made an amazing sight, impossible to caputure on film. So much sand was blowing over the tops of some of the dunes that I couldn't get my camera to autofocus and had to switch to manual - the blur between land and air was too blurred. We went fossil fossicking and found all sorts of sea shells fossilized and incongruous in the middle of the sandy desert.

Tried my hand at sandboarding and pretty much sucked at it - made one or two turns before invariably falling over the front of the board and sumersaulting into the (hard packed!) sand. Unlike snowboarding, the sand has a lot more friction, and so you need a steeper angle to get any movement, which makes learning a bit harder, and more painful. I ended up with fine gritty sand more or less everywhere.

Dina

Writing this at 4am. Just came from a bellydancing show featuring Dina. Dina is apparently the most famous bellydancer in the Middle East (and hence the world). She is one of these people who doesn't need a surname for people to know who you're talking about. She also had a Paris/Pamela type incident - apparently a few years ago she was having an affair with a prominent married Egyptian businessman who was under investigation for tax fraud or something. He was also secretly taping their trysts. When h was raided the videos of them together starting appearing for sale at the local markets and at traffic lights. At least she didn't answer the phone... She apparently quit dancing, took the veil, did a haj and has since started dancing again and is more popular than ever!

As you may be able to tell from the pic, Dina also has a statsitical similarity to Pamela Anderson that is quite pronounced (low light and she was moving fast, so its a bit blurry)

Abu Simbel

News has been dominated by the ferry that went down last night between Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Not looking good. It hasn't been a good year for accidents in Egypt - a bus rolled in January killing a bunch of Aussie policemen on vacation, and last week another bus crash killed a bunch of tourists from Hong Kong. Now this.

Notwithstanding, we did the quick in and out flight to Abu Simbel today on Egypt Air. See pic. Its pretty astounding - those stautes are about 30 yards tall. The four of them would sit overlooking the Nile, mostly to intimidate people coming up the Nile into Egypt's south that there was a seriously powerful king up ahead. Worked pretty well I imagine - its no mean feat. More recently, the whole temple structure (its cut into the mountain and extends back 50 yards into a number of rooms with carved reliefs, more statues and columns, mostly proclaiming Ramses II's greatness - he was not a modest man) was taken apart, moved to higher ground 200m above the original location and reassembled to beat the Lake Nasser flood waters from ther new dam. They did a great job - even recreated the original rock facades and landscape so that you can't tell at all.

Rest of the day was pretty relaxed; we head back to Cairo tomorrow

Aswan

Amazing. Egypt built their "high damn" at Aswan in the late sixties and it created the largest man made lake in the world. It would have flooded a lot of temples and other ancient sites but with UNSECO's help and about 40 countries, they MOVED about 20 of these sites to higher ground. Block by block. Took them apart and put them back together again. The temple of Philae is one of them and it isn't far from Aswan - they even rebuilt and relandscaped the new island its on so that it looks like the original. Thats ambition. Today we're taking things pretty easy, wandering throught the souk (market) which is a lot lower key than in other places we've been to, finally getting to use the internet after being on the boat for a few days, and maybe taking a sail on a "felucca" later this afternoon

Pic is of spices for sale in the souk

Cruising

Four nights is a very leisurely cruise up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan. The boat probably makes about 5 miles an hour. Stops thrice, at Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo, each Greek or Roman age Egyptian temples (amazing how long the culture survived and was embraced by successive conquerers). Means lots of time for reading, napping and watching the banks of the Nile slide by.

Pic is of Esna - we were the only people visiting it which was a very pleasant change. This is one of the smallest and least important of the Egyptian temples to give you a sense of scale of the others. In good shape and retains its roof because it was buried under the sand for a long time - you can see the level of the current ground in the photo

More temples at Luxor

I thought Luxor temple was impressive - Karnak is something else again. The complex is huge. So are the crowds. Particularly liked the obelisks and the rows of sphinxs. Pix here of the Great Hypostyle hall (huge columns far as the eye can see) and of one of the ram headed Sphinxes

Nile cruise

Our cruise got off to a bit of a bad start because os some confusion about when we were supposed to show up and start the cruise. The website and Abercrombie and Kent's call center said noon, but our travel agent said 9am, and had organized a car to take us there at 8:30am. We suspected that he'd set up a tour of various alabaster factories, papyrus museums and other commission generating tourist traps that was going to waste our morning, so we set up our own trip for the morning, taking us to some of the West Bank sites that were not on the itinerary (Habu Temple, the Rammaseum and the Tombs of the Nobles).However, the guy was being totally straight with us, so when we showed up at 11am, we found out that the trip to the West Bank (Valley and the Kings and Valley of the Queens and Hatshepsut's temple) had left a couple of hours before... Our own fault for not trusting people. So we ended up scrambling and getting a private guide and car to take us to those sights.

Since my knowledge of Ancient Egypt mostly comes from Las Vegas casinos and movies starring the Rock, I didn't realize that there are not actually any pyramids at Luxor. The tombs are interesting but the temples are really impressive.

The first picture is of some guys by the outer wall or pylon of Habu temple - note the carved relief in the background of Ramses III smiting his enemies. Lot of smiting went on apparently. Scond pic is of colossi of Ramses II, of Ozymandius fame, from the aptly named Ramesseum, his funerary temple. Th4se guys didn't build pyramids, but they really went big on the temples.