LOOK, SOME REALLY OLD STUFF

Day three of the Ancient Egypt Assault Tour and we've been hammering through the local monuments at a phenomenal rate. On day one we knocked off the Pyramids of Giza (quite large but not as awe inspiring as I'd thought they would be), the Sphynx (smaller than you'd imagine), the Step Pyramid of King Joser and had the very good fotune to visit an authentic papyris factory just as they were offering 20 percent off thier entire range of hand painted papyris. I couldn't believe my luck.

Day two I believe was yesterday although the first two days seem to have merged into a single entity due to the rather rough night I had on the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. I'm becoming increasingly jelous of my traveling companion Steve, who seems to have the uncanny knack of falling asleep in seconds, no matter what the terrain or ambient circumstance. That said, it wasn't as bad as the tour guides had suggested. On the bus on the way to the train they spent a lot of time emphasysing the poor state the toilet facilities would eventually reach with the kind of language which had me worried that we might have to wake in the middle of the night to sand-bag against an oncoming efluent flood. Fortunately the prophets of doom were exaggerating.

After departing the train we headed up to the Aswan damn, which, if my tour guide Romany is to be believed, is probably the greatest engeneering achievement of the 20th century. I'm not sure about that, but it is an impressive bit of work. Romany spoke with passion about the history of the damn and the importance of liberating (ie nationalising) the Suez to the fund it. He spoke of Egypt's right to recalim Suez from the French and of the thousands of Egyptian workers who died in its construction. He spoke of the frustration of being invated and occupied following the nationalisation and the triumph and restored pride of reclaiming the lost land. I suspect the Israilis would take a slightly different view of that reclaimation but they were slightly underrepresented on the bus.

After that we visited the Temple of Filal.

The great thing about travel is that you get to see so many exciting new things, like a man cycling home from work with a nine-foot-tall tree on the back of his bike, or another man loading what looks like large chunks of horse-meat directly into the boot of an enormous early model two-door black Mercedes. And all of that was withing an hour of checking into my hotel on Saturday.

At the Cairo airport before I got sight of the horse-meat Mercedes I got caught up in a post Eid stampeed, as two flights worth of Meccan pilgrims returned from (and correct me if I'm wrong) symbolically stoning Satan and seemed pretty intent on doing me in as well. It got pretty intense in the clinches as the guards sturggled to maintain an orderly queue. Being Australian, and subsequently with no taste for front-line scrummaging, I prooved no impedement to the forward advancement of the returning pilgrims. My resolve and my backbone stiffened a bit after I discovered that I was actually moving away from the customs desk and with a little defensive backpack swishing I earned enough breathing space to punch up to the yellow line, where I made the almost fatal mistake of stopping as instructed, respecting not only the polite request of the sign above the desk, but also the semi-automatic weapon being casually wafted about by a youthful guard. Bad idea. Needless to say I started heading backwards again. Lesson learned I muscled up again and went shoulder to shoulder with a surprisingly spirited four-foot tall fifty-year old woman. Despite the fact she managed to get her passport thorugh the immigration window before me, mine was the first returned. So moral victory at least.

We're off on the feluka today, so I'll be out of contact for a few days.

That is all,

Dale

ps, Bubbles has been confined to the backpack following an incident involving a camel, a red hat and a surprisingly large felafel. I'll write more about that soon.