Temples and Tombs Overload on the Nile - the longer version, part 2

Hi there,

So our restful slumber under the stars on the felucca boat is rudely interrupted by a sunrise wake up call. Altho, to be fair, watching the sun rise over the Nile wasn't such a bad way to clear out the sleep from our eyes!



We were off on another mad police convoy, heading north up the highway to Luxor, with a couple of short and sweet stops along the way to ingest some more ancient Egyptian history. Kom Ombo temple was first stop, built around 2nd Century BC, and completed by Cleopatra's daddy, Ptolemy the 12th. It's an unusual double temple as it is dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and the falcon god Horus . The ancient Egyptians worshipped all sorts of animals as well as gods in human form, and this is but one example of this, in particular worshipping the croc god so that the locals wouldn't get attacked by the real things in the river!! Despite being badly damaged, the temple is a beautiful sight as you approach from either direction on the river, particularly as sunset nears and the colours change. We were visiting at the wrong end of the day for that, and besides, we only had 30 minutes tops here!! It was enough tho, to sit in the jacuzzi (empty) where Cleo took her milk baths from time to time - a great little tacky photo op!



Next was the Temple of Horus (again) at Edfu. This is another 2nd Century BC effort, and the best preserved temple of Ancient Egypt, so being because over time it got completely covered by sand dunes, and then, not knowing that a 2000 year old temple was beneath them, the locals built a village on top of it!! It was only rediscovered in the mid 19th Century. My highlight of tyhis place was a really cool passage way at the rear of the temple with enormous elaborate hieroglyphic carvings, depicting a huge battle scene between good-God Horus and evil-God Seth, with Seth being portrayed as a baby hippopotamus (i kid you not). These guys would use any surface available to them to tell stories of conquests, rises and falls of gods and kings, so you could look up at the cieling and it'd be covered with scrawls the length and breadth of it. I'd hate to think of how long it took and back-breaking it would have been. It was exhausting enough spending our 45minutes cruising around them!



Right, so another 2 hour drive north and we hit Luxor. For the history buffs out there, this used to be known as the fabled city of Thebes, and has been in this history books since around 1500BC. All i remember of it now was getting whisked (by horse-drawn carriage mind!, a popular and traditional form of transport in this town) to another temple, Karnak temple this time, where we had an Egyptologist guide us thru it for the next 3 hours. This is by far the largest complex i had seen in this stretch - the site is gigantic, measuring roughly 1.5Km long by 800metres wide (as i quickly consult my facts and figures book!!). To be fair, this was a pretty impressive temple, maybe more so than the others, with loads to see, but by this stage i was one of the walking dead, practically sleeping standing up, and so at the first opportunity, i grabbed a ride back to the hotel to grab 40winks before dinner, as we had another early start the next day.



I'll give the tour organisers full points for imagination. While we had to rise at 4.45am, our next form of transport was by donkey! No jokes, the 7Km between the Nile and The valley of the Kings, we spent trotting thru loval village streets and farm field on board donkeys.



Quite funny really, especially as the girls in the group were advised to wear a sports bra, or two bras if they didn't have one, and the guys were
told not to wear boxers to avoid damage and soreness due to the incessant bouncing - there is no dignified way to ride these brutes!!

The Valley of the Kings is where the great and ancient Pharoahs of Egypt were buried in tombs with all their treasures, in a canyon beside a pyramid shaped mountain peak, this being a symbolic icon for the passage to the next world for these revered characters. Once again, time forgot these tombs as they were buried beneath the sands of time (sounds like the beginning of a dodgy soap opera!), and it's only been in recent history that they have been rediscovered and excavated, 62 in all so far, altho there may possibly be more. In fact it is here where the most recent and most famous Tutankhamen tomb was discovered in 1922, with all his treasures in tact. All the other tombs, much, much larger than Tut's, had all suffered at the hands of ancient grave robbers and theives, and were empty of treasures when discovered.





This is another one of those famous names you get taught about in school and see TV programs about, and here i was standing at the entrance to his tomb, having seen a swag of the treasure in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Nuts! Again tho, minimal time was allowed to take in the whole site, and after an admittedly very beautiful walk in the desert valley, we were back on the donkeys into town, and then spent the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening shopping in the markets, before boarding a night train at 11pm back to Cairo.









Back in Cairo after minimal sleep on the train, we were given free reign to check this city out again proper.......i slept!!!!







I was just biding my time until our final supper (so to speak), then said our goodbyes, and i was on another night journey, this time back to Dahab, for some decent R & R.

I needed it, i deserved it.

Talk soon,

Tony

peace love and happy faces

Temples and Tombs Overload on the Nile - the longer version, part 1.

Hi again,

Okay, so it's 3am, and i'm snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug... until that damn hotel wake-up call jars me from my peaceful slumber. There's no such thing as a 10-minute snooze on this tour, it's just up-an-at-em. We've got a 3 hour 300Km bus ride ahead of us to Abu Simbel, in a police convoy no less. About 7 or 8 years ago there were some shootings at a popular tourist site in Luxor by some radical Islamic terrorists, killing a number of foreigners, Ever since then, in certain parts of Egypt, the only way to travel between certain tourist destinations is to get all of the group tours and individual travellers together in one big convoy, and speed down the desert highway. For those of you with your heart in your throat at the mentioning of this, don't worry. Ever since this system has been in place, there has been zero trouble.

Abu Simbel is about 40Km north of the Sudanese border, and there's not much there in the village, but just a mile or so outside of town are two of the most amazing temples with a pretty incredible story behind them. Back in 1274-1244BC, Pharoah Ramses the 2nd, built two enormous temples for himself, and his beloved wife Queen Nefertari, to honour the Gods Hathor and Amun, carving them out of the mountain on the west bank of the Nile. Over the centuries, the Nile and the desert sands shifted, and the temples were lost to human memory, until they were discovered again in the early 1800's AD. In the mid 1960's, the Egyptian Government decided they needed to dam the river to create more farming land to cope with the expanding population. Unfortunately, the newly created lake would flood over and destroy a good number of ancient monuments forever. So, they thought they'd move them!!





Not an easy task to uproot and relocate 3000 year old temples of monumental size, but with the help and funding of international governments (a cool US$40million) and UNESCO, they spent the next 20 years undertaking a huge engineering marvel and miracle of sorts, carefully deconstructing, block by block, storing, preparing, and reconstructing the temples, on higher ground, also specially prepared, with the exact same dimensions, facing the same direction to the exact millimetre. Abu Simbel's Temple of Ramses and Nefertari was one such temple. Honestly, to visit this site now, it has been recreated so faithfully, you would never know that the original site was 210metres away, under 65 metres of water in Lake Nasser dam. They're pretty speccy, to say the least, and well worth that damn 3am wake-up call and 600Km return journey.

Upon returning to Aswan, we almost immediately hit the banks of the Nile to jump on a felucca sailboat to cruise around the islands for the afternoon, and sip a coupla cold ones. This was a welcome respite from the hectic schedule we'd been keeping, to just lazily sail around, mingling with all the other felucca's, just gliding across the still, calm waters, with nary a breeze on the air, and the sun shining down a pleasant 20-something degree temperature. Come dusk, we disembarked on one of the islands where we would spend the evening with a local Nubian tribe in their village.

The land of Nubia occupied a large swathe of Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt. They're generally a nomadic group of people, and while not ever having their own country homeland so-to-speak, the frequent border disputes affected them greatly over the centuries. The final border agreement after World War 2 between Egypt and Sudan finally relegated them to the stauts of a people without a land to call their own. Then, there was the first dam built on the Nile in the 1920's, with the directive from the Government that they had to leave their villages and relocate to Sudan or to slected towns in Egypt, as they were going to be flooded forever. Then, the 2nd dam was built in the 1960's, bigger and greater then the first, and again they were forced to leave and relocate thier homes, truly displacing them from their homeland. Aswan was one of the options given to them, and many of them set up home on the islands in the middle of the Nile.

They are very distinct from Egyptians, looking very much more African than anything, with much darker skin, and generally taller and skinnier. It is a credit to them that they have managed to maintain their own cultural traditions, which we got to see a little of when we stayed for dinner. We did a short tour of the village, and visited the school that Imaginative Traveller sponsored, then sat down to dinner with them as they showed off their crafts and clothing and culinary delights. It was a very enjoyable evening, one of my favourite parts of the trip.

We then said our goodbyes and hopped back on the felucca, spending the night moored on the banks of the island on the Nile, sleeping under the stars in Southern Egypt....Nice!!

more in a bit.

Tony



peace love and happy faces

Temples and Tombs Overload on the Nile - the short version.

g'day,

how do i sum up the past week? it's been breakneck hell-for-leather speed.....on-speed (not literally, but you get what i mean). Just to give you some idea, i'll give a brief rundown by timescale how nuts this week has been.

Monday 17th, CAIRO - ASWAN Guided visit to the Pyramids & Sphinx at Giza, which I have already written about. 10pm Overnight train to Aswan.

Tuesday 18th, ASWAN 10am Arrive Aswan , visit Unfinished Oblelisk - an ancient monument, then free afternoon. 7pm Visit Philae Temple for an evening sound and light show. 10pm bed.

Wednesday 19th, ASWAN - FELUCCA CRUISE A so-called 'free morning'. Instead, it was a 3am wake up, and a 3 hour, 300 km drive south to Abu Simbel. 2 hours checking out some ancient temples, 3 hour return drive to Aswan. 11am, jump on a felucca boat for lunch and a Nile cruise til sunset, sailing around the islands of Aswan. 6pm Visit Nubian village for cultural show and dinner. 9pm bed, Overnighting on board the felucca.

Thursday 20th, ASWAN - LUXOR 7am wake up. Drive from Aswan to Luxor visiting the riverside temple at Kom Ombo, 30minutes viewing time, and then the Temple of Horus at Edfu, 45minutes viewing time, en route. Arrive in Luxor, have a take-away lunch, then in the afternoon horse drawn carriages to Karnak temple ,3 hours viewing time, then dinner. 8pm bed.

Friday 21st, LUXOR 4.45am wake up. Donkey ride for 7Km to the Valley of the Kings for some more Pharoah tombs (including Tutankhamen's). Free afternoon, dinner, souvenir shopping in the markets, then 11pm overnight train back to Cairo.

Saturday 22nd, CAIRO. Arrive 8am. Tour finishes tonight, so this is essentially a free day. Late afternoon we ride camels by the Pyramids and watch the sunset. At Midnight i get a 9hour overnight bus to Dahab.

While this was a completely nutso itinerary, a lot of cool stuff happened.....i'll elaborate on those in the next email - give you guys a breather as well!!

Cheers, Tony

peace love and happy faces

Dahab dreamin' and the Mountain of Moses

Hi again,

Up until about 10-15 years ago Dahab was a tiny, quiet little fishing village in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, on the edge of the Red Sea. Scuba Diving was the big industry a little further down south at Sharm-el-Sheikh, and if anyone wanted to dive at the siters off Dahab, it would involve a 2 hour drive north.

Then a few business-heads opened up a few little dive shops and hotels at Dahab, and as these things do, it slowly mushroomed to what it is now - a slightly larger fishing village with a fair few dive operators and hotels, hostels and bungalows. It's still a long way from being a pure tourist hell-hole like Sharm, or Hurghada, and is likely to remain the quieter, more chilled out cousin - as long as the authorities stay wise and prevent an airport from being built there (Sharm and Hurghada have both had airports built recently to handle increased tourism).



Anyway, this was our first stop in Egypt after the border fiasco. Pity it was so short. This is the problem with organised tours - some places you absolutely love, but are in and out quick as a flash. On arrival, we stopped in at this awesome seaside bar/restaurant named Al Capone's, the usual surfie-hippy get up that a lot of sleepy coastal town eateries have - low-lying tabels, with lots of cushions to sit down at, with plenty of rugs, and knick-knacks and ornaments decking out the place, highlighted tastefully by strategically placed oil lamps, and a small bonfire in the middle of the room. Here i had the most amazing grilled calamari in the world, on a plate about 16 inches in diameter, full with sides of brown rice, fries, and salad, and along with a fresh-as-fresh-gets mango juice, it set me back about 10 Aussie dollars! Not typically Egyptian I know, but hey it still said Welcome to Egypt to me!!

Next morning we drove out to a spot called The Blue Hole for a spot of snorkelling. This place is as famous as any other spot in the world to the diving fraternity - i'd heard of it when i dived in Thailand, and so i was pretty excited to get in there and check it out, even if it was only for a snorkel. Basically, almost as soon as you step off the rocky beach and into the water, barely five feet in, and the coral and marine life are right there, in about 3 feet of water. Paddle out about another 50 feet of crystal clear water, and looking down you spy a huge drop off - an enormous underwater cliff juts straight down some 60-70 metres, with coral all colours of the rainbow and shapes and sizes and textures clinging to the edge. And the fish that live in the coral, ducking in and out, playing hide and seek, and schools just gliding by, make it such a magical experience.

I spent about an hour or so checking all this out before i started to get a little chilly, and rejoined the rest of my pals chilling out in a beachside cafe, supping on fruit shakes. I had planned to just take a breather and then go back in, but the sun was just so nice. After the past three weeks of fairly cold wintry weather, this was almost the first dose of decent warm sun we'd seen in a while, and i just wanted to soak it up. We then cruised back into Dahab for a spot of afternoon souvenir shopping, and then were outta there. As i say, short but sweet.

Just a short drive down the road, and we were in St Catherine, the jumping off point for Mount Sinai. Anybody who has the slightest notion of religion (of any faith) will know that Mount Sinai is where Moses recieved the Ten Commandments from God. Once again on this trip, i was spinning out about visiting a place that held such a huge importance for soooo many people, and was sooo famous for spiritual, historical and archaeological reasons. We were climbing to the spot where this happened - with a slight catch! We were to wake up at 3am for an early morning walk so that we could watch the sun rise over the desert mountains on the Peninsula. Needless to say, it was baltic cold, and all the clothing we owned was donned for the climb, some 2200-odd metres above sea level. There are two ways to climb this mountain, either via a camel trail to a point 3/4 the way up (and yes, you could hire a camel to ride up if you so chose!) and then walk the final bit, or follow the 3750 Steps Of Repentence, a path built by a pilgrim, as the name suggests, as a form of repentence to God. I wanted to climb the steps - if there's an easy and a hard way to do something challenging, i like to think i'd take the harder option for the reward of acheivement upon completion is so much greater. My tour leader had other ideas, wanting to keep us all on the same path, and insisted on the camel trail.





It was a pretty easy 2 1/2 hour climb in the end, and i got to the top about 20minutes before sunrise. As sunrises go, it was okay, but all sunrises get my stamp of approval (the few that i get to see that is!!), and, playing with the settings on my camera, i got some pretty neat piccies. Walking back down (via the Steps!), we stopped off at St Catherine's monastery, which had been around since the 3rd Century AD., just to boggle my mind some more!! And then, guess what! - back on the bus!.....for a 7 hour drive to Cairo.

Talk soon,

Tony

peace love and happy faces

bodgy border crossing number 2!

Hi all,

After the exertions of Petra and Wadi Rum (the name of the place where the Bedouin camp and jeep safari was - can't believe i forgot to mention that!), Aqaba was the next stop on the itinerary. Aqaba is a port town nestled on the tip of the Red Sea, right on the Jordanian border, a crossroads of four nations, and is the major trade access point to the sea for those Arab countries who have less than friendly relations with Israel. Hence, it is incredibly important, and therefore massively busy, and more than a tad chaotic. From the harbour, you can pretty much see the lands of Israel, Saudi Arabia, (as a non-Muslim, this is about as close as i'll ever get to entering that country), and Egypt. It was this port that we were to pass thru to cross over to Egypt by ferry - a journey of 1 hour on the fast ferry. As i said, it's normally pretty mad, but apparently the weekend just past there was a National holiday in Saudi Arabia, and so was doubly busy with folks travelling to and from home/work.

Initially we were told we'd be on a ferry at 12Noon, and should be at the port at 10.30 in order to be ready and have immigration formalities sorted out. When it got to around 11.30, we were told the ferry had been delayed and the new departure time would be 3pm...Groan. All we could do was sit around, along with the thousands of other locals (i count on my hands and toes the number of Westerners at the port), and their tons of baggage. Seriously people had all sorts of gear with them, sofa's and lounge suites, fridges, microwaves, suitcases that you could fit 2 small people in - i don't know what these guys are thinking!!

So anyway, we sat, and 3pm came and went. At about 3.30pm we got the call that the ferry was waiting. Now the other mad thing about this journey was that the terminal and the actual ferry was about 300metres apart, but you HAD to board a bus to take you there - you were not allowed to walk to the ferry. This is supposed to regulate the numbers of people boarding the ferry and preventing mad crushes. I guess its also a way to hide unemployment!! All that it did tho was transfer the mad crushes to the buses. Just think about it, at least a couple of thousand people trying to clamber onto a small fleet of 52 seater coaches. I can never figure out the mentality of some races of people - and i've seen this in a number of places around the world - that makes them all want to be the first person on board.....the ferry is big enough to fit everyone on, and it probably makes the boarding process slower, and it ain't gonna make the journey any quicker!

It was around 4.30pm that we finally got moving. All this for a 60minute ride across the Gulf of Aqaba to Nuweiba port in Egypt!! But you know, this is a Tony Tale, so there's always more! We had to complete the bus ordeal in reverse at Nuweiba, but our guide greased the hand (bribed) of the ferry captain to ensure we'd be among the first people to be let off, just to make it a little easier. Immigration formalities were completed on board the ferry, so all that was left to do was go thru customs. The customs hall was a decrepit, rusting, dusty old aluminium hangar with boxes and random crap strewn all over the place, and the most antiquated metal detector/scanner i had ever seen (it had a serious lean to it, and i doubted if it even worked!). We were held up here for an eternity, and upon enquiring about the delay, we found out "the guy who works the luggage scanner is not here, maybe he is having a cup of tea or something" !!!! Y'know, there's only 2000 folk outside waiting to go thru - surely he could get off his arse, or someone else could operate the machine!! But no, we had to wait until he turned up. When he did, we couldn't go thru initially because he'd only just switched it on and was waiting for it to warm up!!!!

On passing thru Customs, we were told there was one last step - waiting for the passenger list to be checked and double checked to make sure all was in order with Immigration. Because they are really serious about this! (please note the sarcasm laid on thicker than mollasses!). This process only took 90 minutes or so, and at around 7pm we were finally thru. Phew!! At the beginning of the day, before even the first delay was announced, our guide gave us a best-case and worst-case scenario about the time we'd be thru. She had been thru this dozens of times before with other groups, and her best case was 2pm, worst case was 5pm. 7pm didn't even enter her thoughts!!

A one hour drive later, passing thru at least 3 police checks along the way, we had arrived in Dahab, one of the towns on the Red Sea coast that has a major Scuba Diving industry bank-rolling it. Of the most famous 3 or 4 dive sites, it is the most chilled out and relaxed, and up to this point, relatively unspoilt by package tourism and bad hotel development. My inital first impression (arriving way after dark) was that it was a lot like Thailand's islands in vibe. It definitely didn't feel like Egypt anyway.



More in a bit.

Tony

peace love and happy faces

Bodgy border crossings and bagpipe playing Palestinians in Amman

G'day,

On our final night in Damascus a few folks from the group headed to this little local cafe we'd been told about. One method of passing information from generation to generation is in the form of the oral tradition of storytelling, and while slowly dying out, there are some who still practice this art. For as long as anybody can remember, there is one old bloke who comes along to this one cafe every day from 5pm to 6pm and reads tales and folklore from a book in the old language of Aramaeic, and translates into Arabic for the audience. The five of us sat down in this cafe, ordered some tea and a sheesha pipe, and watched this guy perform. We were told by the waiter, that today it was one of the tales from the 1001 Arabian Nights. We didn't understand a word, but with his costume and sword as a prop he was as entertaining as anyone i've seen, and the audience interaction and repartee and laughter throughout was fantastic.



Damn we're moving at a frenetic pace. 6 days in Syria and then boom! - another new country, another stamp in the passport, and hey Presto. we're in Jordan!

Because a few of our group had some troubles getting visas before the trip started, our drive to Amman was split into two groups - one going straight thru with a change at the border, and the guide went with the 5 who needed visas on a seperate express mini-bus to get that issue all sorted out. That left the remaining 6 of us with no guide and some instructions to look out at the Syrian border for a tall, stocky, dark skinned man with tight curly hair (like that doesn't describe half the male Arab population!!) who was to be our driver from there to Amman. After completing passport/immigration formailities. We saw no sign of anyone that could have been our driver, and after an expensive international roaming mobile call to out hotel to try and suss out if they knew anything about it (they didn't), rather than be stuck at a Middle Eastern border post with no one to get us to our next stop, we decided to jump back on the public bus still sitting there.

At Amman a random guy ushered to his mini-bus and said he'd help us out. Somewhat confused, we refused, but then after overcoming the communication barrier, it turned out he was from the hotel. Obviously the driver had figured out what had happened and sent this guy. It turned out our driver had gone to the border to pick us up, but somehow we had simply missed each other (altho it beats me how he could miss 6 Westerners with chunky rucksacks wandering slightly befuddled around a border post!)

Speaking of guides, and drivers etc, I haven't made mention of our Syrian guide, Bashar. This guy has been simply incredible. In comparison to our Turkey guide (who was woeful) this guy was a revelation. An organisational supremo, he has turned out trip around. While the Turkey section was fun, there were times when it was frustrating beyond belief dealing with dodgy hotels with no heating or hot water in the midst of winter (and our guides inability to either ensure in advance this wouldn't happen, or resolve it in a satisfactory manner when it did). There were no such issues here, and moving thru a country like Syria, which is very much a police-state with potential dramas and dangers looming around every corner, he handled everything with aplomb. Having just said that tho, he was to be our guide for the Syria leg only - we've got a new guide to see us thru Jordan , and all the way thru Egypt to Cairo - an Aussie chick from Brisbane named Jodi, who also just happens to be a total babe!! But let's not get too distracted here!!

So anyway, we arrived in Amman a little weary, but in good shape. Now compare to the cities we have been thru recently, Amman doesn't really rate. It's pretty much just a big capital with a sprawling, but very densly packed metropolis of 1.6 million people (out of 5 million in the entire country), all, it seems, living virtually on top of one another in near identical light brown square-box-like housing, interspersed with a few 700-year old mosques on every 10th block. It, like Damascus, has its fair share of Palestinian refugees, and we noticed several very poor looking refugee camps on the outskirts of town on our way in. Aside from a few key sights there is not much in the way of historically or archaeologically important monuments, and we covered the main part of town in 1/2 a day of walking around.







I was beginning to suffer a little bit of information overload on ancient history anyways. After a while, all the facts and figures and dates and periods of a myriad of empires rising and falling tend to blend into each other, and i found myself getting confused pretty quickly, and not making sense of everything I was 'learning'. Not to mention the fact that more than few places we've visited are name-checked in the Bible and the Islamic Koran, which just magnifies their significance by some degree. There are a few serious history and archaeology buffs in our group, and they're soaking it all up like a sponge, checking out every single museum and ancient site they can.

That afternooon, we visited another Roman ruins site about an hour out of town, named Jerash. Very similar to Palmyra, the desert setting replaced with sprawling suburbia, and not as large. But while strolling around the site, we could hear Scottish bagpipes being played (of all things!!). Following our ears we wandered into the Amphitheatre and saw three Arab blokes dressed in the khaki uniform of the Scots Desert Patrol (a regiment posted there from early last century as i was reliably informed), playing pipes and drums!! They spoke no English and so we couldn't find out what their story was - how did they learn to play, where/how/why did they get the uniforms, and what they were doing there. The last question was answered by the open jewel box with small change in it - busking. But as strange and amazing and awesome as the moment was, we left none the wiser.



Talk soon.

Tonypeace love and happy faces

Dead Sea Scrolls, Pampering, and Petra - part 2

Hi again,

what can i say about Petra? Well, I can safely say that it has rapidly overtaken Palmyra as my fave stop on this trip - by a long, long way.

It is another ancient city left to lay in ruins after successive empires have taken it over and left to decay and disintegrate over centuries of time. This time it was an empire by the name of the Nabateans Arabs, a nomadic tribe who settled in the area, and that ruled from around 600BC to around 100AD (if my stats are right), when the Romans came and took over. In amongst the Wadi Musa valley stand enormous rust-coloured sandstone rocky outcrops and escarpments, rock faces and cliffs that have been moulded by a combination of centuries of erosion and fierce weather.

The site is semi-arid, the friable sandstone which allowed the Nabataeans to carve their temples and tombs into the rock crumbling easily to sand. The colour of the rock ranges from pale yellow or white through rich reds to the darker brown of more resistant rocks. The contorted strata of different-coloured rock form whorls and waves of colour in the rock face, which the Nabataeans exploited in their architecture. The first major sight here, and the most instantly recognisable, is the Treasury, a 40 metre high facade carved into a cliff face, intricately and exquisitely carved, with an entrance to a large square room designed for hiding treasure.

The whole site of the city of Petra is enormous, and on the climb up out of one valley then descending into another, you pass the impressive amphitheatre, Royals Tombs, and the tomb of the Roman Soldiers amongst a myriad of other small memorials and facades. The final climb leads up to the Monastery, another enormous building, 45-50 metres tall, from around 100AD, carved into a cliff face, this time with Roman influence in the design, as this was towards the end of their reign.

Aside from the sheer magnificence and majesty of these buildings, simple walking thru these hills and valleys on a gorgeous, warm winters day, with perfect blue sky, and the sun beaming and reflecting and beautifully showing off the colours of the sandstone was simply awesome. part of my enjoyment of sites like this, and Palmyra and Ephesus, is just wandering thru, hiking up and down the hills, and enjoying the moment and wonderment of thousands of years of history.

If i thought that was good, the next 24 hours really put me in my element. Directly after our full day at Petra, we drove off into the desert to spend the night soaking the cultural experience of camping with a Bedouin tribe. Bedouins are (or were, in centuries past), a nomadic group of people, tribes spreading out all over Egypt right thru to Syria, surviving off trading of animals and handicrafts, pitching down and pulling up their tents whenever they felt the need to move on. In recent times they have settled down more, and are pretty much minorities in their own homelands these days. If my mother berated me from time to time with 'hey, do you think you live in a bedouin tent' whenever i left the front door open at home, well now i can say that i did for 24 hours! When we arrived, it was already dark, and almost immediately we were served up with a feast of traditional Bedouin food - various meats and stews with rice, cous cous, and a number of salads (more for the Western palate), which was followed by some musicians and an impromptu dance session in the main tent. The good ol' sheesha pipe was also soon brought out for a bit of a communal smoking session, with various fruit flavoured tobacco. I've become quite partial to this middle eastern delight, having sampled cappacino, raspberry, apple and orange flavoured tobacco's. Mmmmm, yum.

After a night sleeping under a tent woven from camel hair with the campfire ermbers still burning (too cold to sleep out under the stars, altho one of our group chanced it in the sub-zero temperatures), we rose early for a brief little camel safari jaunt for an hour or 2. And then, if enough historical and cultural highlights hadn't already been packed in, the thrill-seeker highlight of a jeep safari thru the desert sand dunes was next!! Woo-hoo! Riding in the back of a jeep, we sped off thru the plains before hitting some heavy duty sand dunes, tackling them head-on. A bit of a foot race up one particular dune was on, after which the dozen of us that went out were totally knackered. Amazing views tho.

Unfortunately, it was then time to go - onto Aqaba, the border town, before then leaving Jordan for Egypt. More on that next email.

I had the most amazing past 24-48 hours of the trip, so much excitement and adventure packed in...let me just say that i was glad to be alive!!

I think that's a good note to finish on.

talk soon,

tony

peace love and happy faces

Dead Sea Scrolls, Pampering, and Petra - part 1

Hi there,

Here's a useless bit of trivia for you. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth at 391 metres below sea level, and it's salt water content sits at around 34%, making it incredibly bouyant. So much so that you can literally float on top of the water with pretty much zero effort. This narrow body of water also happens to seperate Jordan from Israel (or Occupied Palestine, depending on your viewpoint), and in particular that little trouble spot you hear about on the news fairly often, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We could see it from where we were, but it was as close as we were going to get.

We stopped here on our way south from Amman for a few hours the other morning. From time to time, the tour company Imaginative Traveller likes to pamper its customers, and the spot where we stopped happened to be a 5 star hotel resort with its own private access beach to the Dead Sea, which they booked out for us for the morning. This place was amazing - it had 3 pools, 2 with waterslides, and the other a lap swimming pool, in addition to the sea. And part of the deal was an all-you-can-eat buffet of the most amazing food. And....being the off-season, we had the entire place to ourselves!! Of course, we took full advantage!

The other interesting fact about the dead sea is that its surface is muddy rather than sandy, and in this mud is reputedly a high content of some mineral which is excellent for your skin. So, the thing to do after you're done floating, you grab a fistful of mud and smear it all over your body and let the sun bake it dry, then washing it off afterwards. Mud fights not withstanding, we all participated in the smear campaign, and did those silly poses you see painted buskers doing in shopping arcades. Lots and lots of fun, let me tell you.







Fun over, we had a 4 hour drive to Wadi Musa, the jumping off point for Petra. Snoozing contentedly in the mini-bus as we climbed back above sea level and them up into a mountain range, we were woken by Jodi to show us Wadi Araba ('wadi' means 'valley' in Arabic), a desert valley that stretched for miles upon miles into the far distance. This was, in my words 'wadi awesome!' (at which Jodi was in stitches at my impromptu one-liner) - the colours and shadings of the sand and rock that made up the surface ranged from white to yellow, to red, then blue, and all shades inbetween (from mineral deposits of potassium, sulphur, iron and magnesium, as i was reliably informed by a science geek on our tour). Back in the bus, and back to our snoozing we arrived at Wadi Musa, and were told our hotel had a Turkish Bath facility for those that wanted to continue their pampering. At A$20 for a 90 minute session, i thought 'why the hell not'. My skin has never felt so good!

More in a little bit.

Tony




peace love and happy faces

Damascus - and hanging with a presidential loser

G'day,

When yer on a tour group, sometimes you simply don't get enough time to spend in some places - Damascus is one of them....a day and a 1/2 just doesn't cut it for a city so full of places to see and things to do.

It's basically divided into two areas - the Old Damascus, (the really interesting and therefore touristy bit) which is encompassed by the old city walls, and is made up of the souq-market areas, the Christian Quarter and the Jewish Quarter - and New Damascus, which is the modern city which has expanded on all four sides of the old city and up into the hills (most of which is slums holding the bulk of the population of Palestinian refugees and illegal immigrants).





Damascus claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and evidence shows some kind of urban metropolis on the site from 5000BC. Therefore it is historically and archaeologically incredibly rich, and it's another important stop on the caravan trail from East to West and is chock full of history, having been ruled by a number of different empires, including the Romans, before falling under Islamic rule around 700AD.

The start of our short stay began with something that most tourists don't get to do, and that is visit the countries main Islam Foundation Centre - a mosque, school and international education centre. Here we were taken to a windowed rooom above the main prayer hall, and listened to a translated sermon (for want of a better word) and watched the congregation go thru the ritual of prayer to Allah. Afterwards, we met the imam (main guy) of Damascus' largest mosque, along with a dozen Afro-American' guys who were on an exchange programme studying Islam and Arabic, and had a sort of question and answer discussion about Islam. Issues of sexual equality and terrorism among other topics brought about some rather animated repartee, but all in all it was a good learning and info session for me in particular, not knowing much about the concepts and ideas of the religion.

A visit to Damascus is not complete without a wander thru the souqs and Amuyyud mosque (not the largest but the most important and beautifully decorated), dating from around the 7th Century.





The souqs never cease to amaze me - the sheer manic-ness, and hustle and bustle, the colour and the noise, the exoticness of the wares on sale, and the 3 hours i wandered around trying free samples of various food products and snapping photos barely saw me thru a 1/4 of the market.



At the mosque (one of the few that your allowed inside to photograph and wander thru as a non-Muslim), noticed a largish group of people closely huddled together wandering around, and curious, slowly approached. There was a lot of photographers and guys with notebooks out as well, and then I noticed John Kerry - the guy who lost to George Dubya in the US election, being escorted around. I had to get a piece of this action! And I did! Mingling with the journo crew i got into a position to snap a piccie of him pretty close up. Score! Happy with that i moved off, kind of hovering around the edges trying to catch conversation just to find out what he was doing there. I couldn't.

Nevermind. Shortly afterwards i bumped into another guy from my tour group and told him who i saw, and showed him my piccie. He knew about it already, and had gone one better - a photo of the two of them together! Not more than 30minutes later, as i continued on my touristy way checking out one of the small palaces by the souqs, i ran into the John Kerry expedition again. This time, emboldened by my mates efforts, i approached him as he was leaving a souvenir shop and doing the politician-kisses-baby photo ops, and asked for a photograph to which he obliged! (how could he say no, with all those journo's around - he'd look like a pompous ass if he did!).



Anyway, that'll do for now.

cheers, Tonypeace love and happy faces

Hama - Crac Des Chevallier - Palmyra

G'day,

It's bound to happen. You travel thru a series of countries and places, and pick spots that are your 'favourite', then a few days later, a new destination crops up and that's yer new 'fave'. Palmyra is one such place, superseding Cappadocia, which superseded Ephesus and Gallipoli before it as my fave spots in the region.

Before we hit Palmyra tho, we spent a night in Hama, a quaint riverside town with gorgeous centuries-old (isn't everything here!) water-wheels



supplying the irrigation aqueducts. It's also the main jumping off point for Crac Des Chevallier, an 800 year old castle that we visited. It is pretty much still in mint condition, and as a strategic defence post for the various ruling empires over the ages, you can get a pretty good idea of how life was for the 4000 residents that lived within it's walls in its heyday.



On to Palmyra. Syria is the self-proclaimed 'cradle of civilisation', and given that its 2 biggest cities Aleppo and Damascus both claim the title of 'longest continuously inhabited city in the world' with evidence dating back some 3000 years BC, it is a claim with some validity. Palmyra, situated by a classic desert oasis of palm trees and water springs, these days is a tiny, dusty little town, smack bang in the middle of these two cities, deep in the Syrian desert, and a major stop/rest-point/trading station on the ancient caravan trail between the Asians and Persians, and the Roman empire.





Driving out from Hama, spotting traffic signs pointing the way to Baghdad on the highway (good photo op!!),



we passed several bedouin camps, and goat and camel herders, which really made us feel that we were right in there in desert life. Before you reach the modern town of Palmyra, you pass by ancient Roman ruins of the old city.

These ruins date from the 3rd and 4th century, and span several square kilometres. This city is replete with giant entrance arches leading into the main market street, wide enough for camel caravans loaded with goods and supplies, service lanes for shops and stores, an amphitheatre for Gladiator-style battles for public entertainment, private and public underground and above ground burial tombs, the outstanding Temple of Bel - to worship the God of Gods - and a citadel at the top of a hill, now used as a spectacular viewing point (fantastic desert sunsets!) .




It's amazing. I spent hours just snapping photos and wandering around these ruins, the weather perfect altho cold (who would have thought I would be wandering thru the Syrian desert with 4 layers of clothing on, including a heavy wool-lined parka!

We have been extraordinarily lucky with the weather on our trip. We are up to about Day 20 now, and while it may be a bit cloudy on occasions and rarely warm, it has only been raining while we've been on the bus, but almost as soon as we stop to visit another site, it stops, and the sun would come out. We only got caught out with a slight drizzle once in Turkey (at Troy), but that's it. It makes the trip just that little bit better not having to deal with rotten weather!

I have to say that the Syrian people are amazing. Most speak no more than about 5 phrases of English, and i have learnt about 5 phrases in Arabic, but the warmth and friendliness of these people transcend language barriers. Just walking down the street we are forever being stopped by locals asking us where we're from, and the first response is "Welcome to Syria".



Market shopping is a helluva lot easier to deal with than Turkey as well. There's very little of the pushiness and pressuring tactics here, and bargaining is done with a lot more genuine joviality, rather than the forced smiles and pretend laughter we dealt with, and makes the process of buying something a lot more pleasurable. And the free cups of tea are just as good as Turkey too!

On that note I'll finish this journal entry now. Talk soon.

Tony


peace love and happy faces