Tell Amarna

Dear Friends,

OK, today's the day we visit tel el Amarna (also Tell Amarna, and other spellings) which is where Aknaton (also "Akhenaten") moved the capital of Egypt. You may remember that Aknaton was an amazing pharaoh for several reasons. He introduced monotheism with the worhip of the one god who was represented by the sun--Aten, the Sun God/Amon Raa; he was married to the beautiful Nefertiti; and he was the first to change the traditional "perfect" images of people in sculpture, paintings, and carvings to a more realistic representation. He is seen as a rather odd looking person with a pot belly and an oddly shaped body. He was assassinated by the priests, and the capitol was moved back to Luxor an the old religions (and priests) regained power.

This was a huge site--heck, it was the capitol of Egypt. We climbed the sides of a small mountain to see the royal tombs, we saw the ruins of the palace and the temple we saw two boundary stellas which were huge carvings that marked the boundaries (only two remain (it may be three, I don't remember specifically). There had been close to 20 at one time). 

This was an all day trip for us that returned us to El Minya for an overnight. It was really great.

Here are some photos and a video:

1. from the foot of a boundary stella looking at the van and the road we took to get here (not a lot of vegetation!)

2. detail of one of the boundary stellas (remember this was carved here over 3,300

 years ago!

3. path up to

 the tombs. If you look closely you'll notice all the flights of stairs in the distance.

4. video of Lea and Stu moving along a path by tombs. Notice how high up we are. The van at the end that you see is our van that moved from where we started to be where we would come down off the mountain.

And, we saw a lot of other neat sandy, high, sites and tombs. They didn't allow us to take pictures in the tombs.

That's it for today.

Love,

Frank

Reaching Minya

Dear Friends,

We finally reached Minya (by the way, for most of the town/city/area names, there are several spellings. That's because when the names were translated into the Roman alphabet there were various ways to represent the translation. So, for example, you'll see Minya and Minia. Plus, there are the Arabic names which are different than the western names. 

Anyway, on our drive, we had a wonderful time seeing the middle of Egypt. We went through towns and villages. Because the tourist police were leading us (as fast as they could drive, by the way) we didn't get to have photo stops or even go slow enough that it was easy to take photos. When we got into towns and there was a slow down in traffic, the police put on their sirens, pull around the traffic jam and we'd speed along. Again, it made us feel conspicuous and like the tourists we were.

We got into Minya in the middle of the afternoon. The town is a city and quite large. It has one of the largest universities in Egypt, therefore, a lot of students. 

AND, because of that, a lot of protests. We were asked not to leave the very pretty hotel grounds unless we had our guide with us. 

This was early in January and the New Year's Day had just passed a little while ago. I'll put a couple photos of the decorations we saw. Also, we found out that even the non-

Christian Egyptians celebrate Christmas. They have Santa Claus figures (there was an 8-10 ft tall Santa at our Cairo hotel), decorated trees and the whole secular thing. Basam and Manal told us that it is a time of celebration and gift giving (not of celebrating the birth of Jesus). For the Christmas part of the celebrations, they use cotton balls and cotton batting to create "snow." You'll see some of that in one of the photos.

 

The hotel was right along the Nile. The rooms were in separate grouping of two or more rooms. This was the best hotel in the city and the rooms were basic (really basic) and the heat wasn't great. It was getting into the low 40s at night. I slept in long-johns.

I'll post below some photos of the Nile, the next day's sunrise, some fishermen and some of the non-human life along the river.

Frank

Dear Friends,

It's hard to believe that in a couple days we'll have been home from Egypt for almost 2 months. WOW. We've had so much to do and life has been so full that in some ways it seems like it's been a year or so since we were in Egypt. In other ways it seems like I'm still there. Egypt becomes a part of you it seems.

More for myself than for anyone else, I'm going to continue this blog so that I have a place to have some of my photos and a description of what they are about.

It looks like my last post was while we were still in Cairo.

We left Cairo on Wednesday, January 7 and headed south towards Luxor.  This total drive would be Cairo to Minya (155 miles), Minya to Asyut (75 miles), Asyut to Luxor (200 miles), then after our Nile Cruise and our Lake Nassar Cruise, we'd drive from Aswan to Luxor (about 81 miles). That means that we'll have driven about 510 miles along the Nile.  Neat!

Anyway, on our way south, we passed Saquarra, and were driving with just sand desert on both sides of the van (we had in the van Lea, Stuart, Ahmet our great guide, Mahmoot our wonderful driver, myself, and a tourist police officer. We were led by a jeep with a driver and a person beside him and 2-3 people in the back of the covered jeep who each had a machine gun. We felt safe and a bit conspicuous.

As we drove along, I noticed a large outcropping in the distance. It looked a lot like Devils

 Rock out west. I pointed it out (there's a photo below of when we got a bit closer). Ahmet didn't

 seem like it was anything special. Then we turned off onto a smaller road and started driving toward this neat outcropping. As we got closer we could tell it wasn't a natural formation, it was a pyramid!

 

We were seeing Meidum Pyramid from a

 distance.

 

You'll see a couple photos of the pyramid, the guard shack 

and the "lesser tombs" in the human-made mound nearby. 

I'll see if I can put a video on this

 to also give an idea of the size of this neat place.

We were here for a while and then headed south towards Minya.

I'll end this post here and add the photos.

Love,

Frank

Dear Friends of my heart,
Well, here we are doing another update. But first I wanted to say how grateful I am that you are in my life and that you support this work. Yesterday when I got online, I went to the OneHeart section of my mailbox to see what was going on with everyone and to know what to send energy to. It was so uplifting to connect in with all of you that way. It really helped me understand how powerful OneHeart is and what a service it is to those that are physically away from the Phoenix family groups. I felt uplifted all day, just like I had been with you. Thank you for that and for supporting OneHeart; it really is a service that keeps on giving ;-> I guess what I mean is that it's a sevice in and of itself and each time someone makes a post, it is a service also. Anyway, thanks for that.
Well, I think I'm at the day Stuart and I went to the pyramids and sphinx on the Giza plateau. I'll put some photos of from our trip there. It was quite different in how it was set up and how it was more tourist friendly. One thing I really noticed that those of you who have been there would relate to. There is an area called the Panoramic View or something like that. It is an area "behind" the pyramids that gives you a really nice view of all three of the pyramids and is at such an angle that you don't see the entire city of Cairo in front of the pyramids. Well, when we were there 10 years ago, when we stood looking at the pyramids, behind us was desert as far as you could see. It was really need. Now, when you stand looking at the pyramids, about half a mile behind you is the city of Cairo! It's grown that much and almost surrounds the pyramids now. It was quite a shock.

The pictures, if any (I may run out of space on the internet card) I have posted would have been pretty self-explanatory except for one. At and around the pyramids there are "available" camel rides, carriage rides, horse rides, etc. Well one of the photes would have been of an area below the pyramids, just at the base of the plateau where the "horse wranglers" were done for the day and gathering to go home. You would have know which one that was. Sorry for that, I edited it after I realized that I may run out of space before I can post what I want to.


Well, it's about 11pm now (4pm Lexington time) and we meet Ahmed at 7am for Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut's temple. We'll be back onboard in time for lunch and our 12:30pm sailing time.

Good night and sleep with the angels. I'll try to get these posted tomorrow. I think Stu has some in the "back log also."

Love,
Frank

Since I've been home, I've added some photos from around Cairo that I thought were fun:

A photo from the Citadel where I was able to get a picture of the Crescent Moon symbol with the crescent moon in it--

Bread the bakers have set out for the delivery people to pick up for the restaurants:

Starting to catch up

Dear Friends,
[It's still hard to find connections. The ship has a card and for about $10 you can get "25 mb or 24 hours, whichever is less". What that seems to mean is that your uploads and downloads are measured. It's looks like Stu's two posts used up half the card. Lea's looking at the Stu's and my posts to date took up another 2.5 mb. Soooo, we'll see what I can do. I've made my jpegs smaller images so that may help. Also Stuart and I are composing posts off-line when we can, and then we will post them as we can get on line. So, we'll both be doing several posts at a time.

The connection is sooooooo slow here. I copied the post, wrote this section in brackets and loaded one photo, failed loading one photo and am trying the photo again, and I've been at it for almost 40 minutes! I'm going to cut back on the photos since I only have two posted so far and it took 5mb to do that and fail twice. I'm sorry about that, we'll try to find a better way to get images uploaded.]

Dear Gang,
Well, I'm back again. I'm sitting in my cabin composing this in word=processing and then I'll get on line and upload it to the blog site with some photos. Any photos I include I'll try to include in the body of the blog so that it follows a bit easier.

I think what I'll try to do is follow our trip chronologically. I talked about our first day here when we went to Heliopolis and the citadel. That was a night that I skipped dinner and went to bed at 7:30pm. Though I was awake a lot, I slept the night through and got up in the morning about 8pm for another great breakfast.

Our schedule today was to go to Memphis (noooo, not that Memphis, there is no Graceland here! ;-> ), then to Saqqara then to Giza for a pyramids/sphinx visit.

Ahmet and Mahmoot showed up at their appointed time and we loaded up for a trip south to Memphis. We'd pass Saqqara as we went to Memphis, and catch Saqqara on the way home.

We arrived at Memphis and were the only ones there. We saw the giant, fallen statue of Ramses, a sphinx and a large statue of . . . er, someone. Also, saw more of the great looking black and gray crows they have here in Egypt.

Here's a photo of the sphinx,


an odd photo of the statue of Ramses
.


Next we headed back towards Cairo for our stop at Saqqara (you'll note that I've learned how to spell this since my last post!).

For those that have been at Saqqare, there have been a lot of changes since we were there in 1998. In addition to the step pyramid, several of the tombs are now open. Sadly, they didn't allow any photography or video in the tombs (not even without flash). These tombs had some really nice carvings that still had color on them. It was really touching to see this scenes that were carved over 4000 years ago. When I looked really closely at them, I could see the chisel marks. It was amazing.

Below are these photos:
0280 a fellow resting with his camel


The TITI Pyramid tomb sign (TT bragged to Pouf about this saying that she'd once shifted into an Egyptian noble (and then into a dead Egyptian noble. Pouf came back saying "that's nothing. I once shifted into a dragon and Peter Paul and Mary sang a song about me and the little boy who was my friend!). The entry to this tomb was a ramp about 25 yards long at a steep angle with treads on the ramp. The height of the ramp was about 3 feet, so I had to back down stooped low. At the bottom it was the same height for about 6 feet. I did that and stood up in a room crowded with tourists and little air and made my escape back up the tunnel. I think I heard TT and Pouf laughing.


0292 a photo of the step pyramid. You can get an idea of its size by the people in the photo.


At the end of our visit to Saqqara, we headed back to Cairo. It took about an hour or so to get back. Lea decided she was too tired to go to Giza for the pyramids and the sphinx. She had seen them before and we could see them from our rooms, so she was ok with that. Since this was our last day touring in Cairo, Stu and I decided to do the tour with Ahmet.

Since this post seems to be getting so long, I'll close and get ready to do a post for our tour of the Giza plateau.

Love, love, and more love,
Frank

Finally got on line

Dear Friends,

I hope you are each doing great.

I've not had a chance to read Stu's blog yet, so please forgive the information that I'm sure will be repeated.

We had a good flight in; the plane was packed; but we had ok seats and made it in safely. We were picked up at the airport by someone holding your names on a board. He took us to baggage and through customs. It's so much easier when they let "helpers" on the "other side" of customs to help before we get to passport control and all of that. Once we were through customs (not a problem there!) we were met by Basam. What a treat it was seeing him after 10 years. He seemed as happy to see us as we were to see him. 

He rode to the hotel with us (it took almost an hour to get there) and we chatted. The thing I remember most of our conversations--some personal chatting and some business--was when Lea asked him about his two children. His entire face softened, and he got such a happy look on his face that it was really sweet and touching. It really let me know how much family meant to him.

We got checked in to the hotel and agreed that we'd meet our guide the next morning at 11am. We wouldn't see Basam again until Tuesday when we scheduled a planning meeting with him.

The hotel was really nice--The Mena House. This had been first built as a royal hunting lodge in the 1800s and has been in constant use (one way or the other) since then. I'm sure you could find out more about it if you googled "Mena House".

The problem Lea and Stu had there (and again in Luxor) was that since it is winter here, the air conditioning is not turned on and apparently can't be turned on. That created some frustration for them. Since I'm not one who likes to sleep on the cold side, I was fine.

I'll post a little video clip that shows the view from the balcony of my room at the Mena house. Then I will end this post.

Love,

Frank

Our days in Cairo

Dear Friends,

[I've tried to edit this post so the photos are around their description.]

Let's see how far I can get before we have to head down to breakfast (not very exciting here at

 the Pavilion of the Winter Palace here in Luxor--here's a photo of it's gardens that are quite

 pretty).

 After that we check out of the hotel, meet with Basam to check out a couple more Nile cruise

 boats (we checked out 3 yesterday with our great guide Ahmet who is with us for the whole trip). Then we check onto our boat, have lunch, then meet Ahmet for a tour of Luxor temple (we did Karnac temple yesterday with him).

But now back to the beginning:

On the first day we took it easy and rested and walked the grounds of the hotel a bit.

The next day was an easy day with a visit to Heliopolis, the center of sun worship and then the citidel. This is a photo of an obilist that is the only thing [other than a pharoh statue] now remaining now at Heliopolis, the ancient cult center for sun worship.

We next went to the citidel which is the highest point in Cairo and home of a fortress and some great mosques. The rest of the photos are from there. Notice the one with the pyramids off in the hazy distance. This gives an idea of how amazing the pyramids must have looked thousands of years ago when seen from a distance with no pollution and no modern buildings!

The day started with a great, really great breakfast at the Mena house. I felt adventurous and have their stewed fava beans which looked like a pot of thick soup beans. You take a bowl, but a little tahini in it, then the beans, then some cumin, ground red pepper, salt and olive oil and smash it all up. It then looks like chunky refried beans, but it tastes great! With pita bread (they don't call it that here) it is wondeful. They also had some of the best falafels that I've ever tasted. Wow! it was really good.

All that along with fresh fruit, some nice pastries, juices, etc. made for a really nice start for the day.

We met Ahmet at the lobby at 11am and then met our driver who we'd have until we made it to Luxor. They were both wonderful. 

Thank you for the energy you've been sending. We've been really going and going and going and are starting to get tired. I don't know what availability of the internet will be once we are on board the ship. So this may be the last post for a while.

Love and more love,

Frank

 the next will be some views from the citidel which is the highest point in Cairo and also home of a fortress and some great mosques.

PS--TT and Puff both say "Hi!" and say they're having a lot of fun.