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