Introducing Cairo

Everyone always says that Cairo is a surprise. It is surprising from the time you suddenly leave the vast Egyptian desert and find yourself immediately within the confines of a bustling city of 20 million (officially... unofficially there are three times that number). Turning every corner is surprising; you never know what you'll find in this city built on the ruins of several other cities. The poverty, the history, the stench, the escaped grandeur, the largess of it: It is Cairo. El Quaira.

Walking down Ramsis street I felt vaguely reminded of walking down the streets of Panama. It was time to man-up. To put on my best game face and blend into the hardened, dry streets. The problem was that I stuck out like a sore thumb for the same reasons I couldn't blend in anywhere in the Middle East: I am White. I am Blonde. I am a Woman. A triple-threat. Haha. Really, a triple target. So I wrapped my comforting head scarf around my head as tightly as possible, sucked in my fears and kept going. I was headed to the Egyptian Museum: supposedly a Crown Jewel to the city of Cairo.


The night before I'd had a makeshift tour of the city with my tour guide and tour group as we walked the bustling streets to go to dinner (Lamb Kafta... Yum!) The guide, Ghandi, pointed in a general direction and said: "The Egyptian Museum is there."

Images from the previous night:

 The Nile by night... A daze of neon.

So "There" I went.

And it was much farther than I thought his nonchalant shrug and point could have meant. But I had time to kill that morning, so on I went. Past the slum-like dingy buildings that at one time were grand examples of art deco architecture. But 100 years of grime have darkened them. Past the stares and smiles and smirks of locals who would call out: "Whereareyoooofrrom? YouareWelcome!" (ie: How's it going?) And finally I arrived at the museum, dirty from the city, exhausted from my tour and determined to just keep going. I toured the gardens before the entrance, checked my camera (nervously!!!), paid my 50 Egyptian pounds and went inside, expecting to enter the likes of an ancient Egyptian temple, with darkened passages lit by torches, treasures heaped up in mounds like in the movies.

I was sorely disappointed. I mean, clearly I had some expectations that were blown out of proportion, but... it's freaking Egypt! Where was the theatricality? EGYPT! B.F.E!

So on my list of worldwide museums, this one ranks at the bottom.

It's small.

It's only got Egyptian stuff, and honestly, I've seen better Eyptian stuff elsewhere... Paris, St. Petersburg... Provo, Utah (truly) for sobbing out loud.

And the kicker? The piece-de-reisistance of the museum is good old King Tut.

Well, I was in Cairo.

Tut was in San Francisco.

So in a moment of sneaky "take that-isms" I snapped this photo of the museum on my phone's camera, which is a no-no, but it turned out pretty cool despite my spy-like quick-take action:

So I wandered a bit. I looked at old stuff. And I enjoyed it. And I followed a tour around for a while, listening to very cool bits of ancient history.

And then I left.

And I was driven by a compulsion (and possibly by the sight of the Ritz-Carlton next door to the museum) to go to a spa and soak my desert abused, caloused, dry feet in a whirlpool. I'm not the kind of girl that goes to spas on a regular basis. When I travel, it is to see the sights and sounds and the local flavor of the place I'm in (for the most part). But ten days in the Middle Eastern desert completely did me in. I wanted some comfort.

So I pounded my poor, abused feet over to the Ritz. Except when I got there, it was closed for remodeling. I was told by a very kind guard to keep walking ("That way" he pointed nonchalantly) to the Ramsis Palace Hotel. And being that I was already miles and miles away from my own little cheap hotel and on the main strip for the luxury hotels, I thought: Awww heck, I'll do it.

And I did.

And it was FABULOUS. Heavenly. Wonderful. I felt human again. And it only cost $8. At a hotel that runs around $400/night. Crazy, right?

And when I met up with my group for dinner that night, all of the boys laughed at me when I told them I'd gone for a pedi, and all of the girls laughed too, in that girly "Ohhhhhh.... I wish I'd gone too" way.

Faraway Fantasy Friday: At Sea

Today I'm thinking about a ferry ride I took across the James river two days ago. It crosses from Surrey to Jamestown, Virginia. I stood out on the deck and watched the waters churn below. Seagulls rode along with us, perched like the carved mermaids masts of old wooden ships. The sun was nearly ready to set and the winds pushed heavily across my face.

Today I'd like to be on a ship. Sailing the ocean. Going anywhere; Exploring the world; Enjoying doing nothing but heading into the wind.



Where do you want to be today?

Down Home on the Farm

I am in Virginia. 

Earlier today I drove the ten backwoods miles down to the river, hugging the turns and loving the clean, country breeze through the open windows. 

My cousin Anna is currying out her horse. I just finished a long and thrilling four-wheeler ride through my gram's backwoods and along the outskirts of the soybean-planted fields. 

My cousin Lisa's three year old son Nicky ditched his clothing shortly after arriving at "Gramma Nene's" and is streaking across the huge five-acre backyard, followed around by his Grandpa, "poppy." Nicky has a country accent that goes on for miles. He calls his dad "dahudee."

I ate dinner tonight surrounded by family. Aunt, Uncle, Cousins, children, friends. 

I. Love. It. Here.

Faraway Fantasy Friday: Grandma's Farm

My sweet, dear, little old Grandmother is a farmer. She's lives on a magical farm in Virginia that is always the same and is always changing. I leave tonight to go and visit her. Today, my daydreams will be of lush, green landscapes and humid, sticky heat. The crickets play their loud songs in the woods and the birds chime in. I sit on my favorite back porch sip tall glasses of ice water. Take trips to town with my white-haired Gran and visits with cousins and Aunts and Uncles.

My daydreams will be of Home.

Where do you want to be today? 

The Worst Hotel I Have Ever Stayed In (So Far)

It's not the scummy little hotel in the middle of nowhere between Texas and Utah I stopped in while moving. The place with Duct tape on the toilet seat and a dirty bathtub. (And dirty who-wants-to-think-about-what-else!)

It's not the horrid little hole that a group of ten friends crammed into in Tahoe after sleeping one night on some rocks by a lake (the GUYS wanted a hotel after that night, not the girls! LOL.)

It's not the crazy night I spent in the back of my old Jeep Cherokee in a Wal-Mart parking lot in New Mexico, followed by a wash-up session the next morning at a local Denny's. (Although that technically doesn't qualify as a hotel...)

And it's not the cruddy hotel in Jordan with the leaking plumbing and mosquito infestation.

Instead, it was the hotel my little Intrepid tour group stayed in at the base of Mt. Sinai. Let me preface this by saying that the owners of the place were lovely. And they provided us with a couple of delectable meals. But the facility...

At least it was clean.

There were screens on the windows. But that didn't seem to stop the mozzies coming in and eating my two roommates and I alive. Even with the 99% Deet bug repellant and sleeping with sheets over our heads. It was like trying to sleep in a pool of nibbly pihranas.

It seems that the last several guests to sleep in the bed before me were of the large variety, at least several hundred pounds large. There was a well in the middle of my bed that would have accommodated a baby whale.

There were no pillows. Some kind of ordering snafu on the owner's part seems to have caused the hotel to end up with a stock of very stiff body pillows where there should have been neck pillows. Between the whale-well and the huge cotton lump, there was no place to sleep on my bed!

There was a bathroom in our room... it had a toilet and a sink and a showerhead hanging on the wall. Apparently the entire bathroom turned into a shower. But, the accordian-style door, on trying to close it, came completely off the wall rendering both the shower and bathroom unuseable by the occupants of our room.

Score.

So we tried to use the separate bathroom facility two doors down. A nice, double bathroom with two of the shower/toilet rooms and a couple of sinks. Except the lightbulbs were burned out. And the mosquitoes swarmed the bathroom (no screens). So I emerged from the shower, deet-less, Mt. Sinai dirtless, clean, wet and my mosquito bites were covered in mosquito bites.

Lovely.

I was so very excited in the morning to load up in our tour mini-bus for our drive to Cairo, which would give me several hours to sleep.



Where's the worst place you've ever stayed?

Ghiradelli Chocolate Festival

Every year the Ghiradelli Chocolate Co. in San Francisco holds a Chocolate Festival. Companies come from far and wide to showcase their chocolaty wares. People flock to it en masse, buy a ticket for $20 with 15 "samples" on it, and then proceed to wander around tasting different chocolateness.

I'd never been.

Until this past Saturday.

I went with my sister, her husband and my cute, cute, cute Nephew.

Well.

Going anywhere with a baby changes things immensely. We took the train into the city, which means we were always on the lookout for the elevator (to move the stroller up and down from Street Level to Train Level), which also meant that somehow we seemed to have skipped all of the ticket purchasing-ness that normally occurs when one isn't forced to ride the elevator with a child in a stroller. Both for BART and MUNI. It was a bit of an oversight on the part of the designers, don't you think? The elevators completely bypass all ticket collection stations. Insane.

After adventure that is riding BART with the afforementioned child came the adventure that is riding a bus with a child and a stroller!

Seriously. I don't know how mothers of small children ever make it anywhere. You are all amazing.

And we got on the wrong bus.

By the time we finally got to the festival it was around 3pm and began to fight the crowds and weave in and out of the booths and lines and I remembered why I'd never been before.


I said to my sister:

"I hate crowds. I hate lines...
I think I'm just going to go to the Ghiradelli ice cream shoppe and buy an ice cream."

She looked at me and just laughed. "Uh, why did you come here?"

So I stated the obvious:

"I like Chocolate."

Here's a cute picture of my cute nephew in the park by the festival. Just because. 

Faraway Fantasy Friday: P22 Wallaby Way

Australia, OH, Australia!

You taunt me.

Out there, chillin', in the middle of nowhere. The elusive #6 to my list of continents visited.

I WILL get to you one day. And I will see Syndey. And Uluru. And Ayers Rock. Perhaps even Tazzy. And I will spend my days soaking up sun on the endless white sandy beaches on the Great Barrier Reef islands. I'll lounge in a lap pool on a deck overlooking clear blue waters that gimpy clownfish swim in.

Because that's how I roll.

Where do you want to be today?

The Not-Really-Mt. Sinai

The actual location of Mt. Sinai in the Egyptian desert seems to be a place of some confusion. Among the tourist circuit is a well known spot set up to visit, complete with a monastery and a "burning bush". Amongst the locals, that tourist spot is known as St. Katherine's.

Well.

"Mt. Sinai" (the touristy one) is not REALLY Mt. Sinai.

As I found out recently. (Which explained some lingering questions I had when I was standing at the top of it...)

Here's what Wikipedia said about the institution of Mt. Sinai: (because we all know Wikipedia is the end-all-be-all of information sources)

According to Bedouin tradition, this is the mountain where God gave laws to the Israelites. However, the earliest Christian traditions place this event at the nearby Mount Serbal, and a monastery was founded at its base in the 4th century; it was only in the 6th century that the monastery moved to the foot of Mount Catherine, following the guidance of Josephus's earlier claim that Sinai was the highest mountain in the area.

 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Sinai)

SO. What do you think about that?

I think I had a fun afternoon of hiking to a contrived spot of invented religious importance. That last statement may or may not be somewhat controversial, I realize.

But.

I went. Because that's where our tour group was. And because, well, I like hiking and didn't know anything about it not reeeeeeeally being Mt. Sinai at the time.

My group left our little hotel about three hours prior to Sunset. We drove back to the parking lot at the base of St. Katherine's monastery and hiked past it to a Camel parking lot. This was my first chance on the tour to ride a Camel and I was stoked! I planned from day 1 to ride a Camel here. No one else seemed too keen on the idea in earlier days, but by the time we got to the mountain, there were about six of us who went for the Camel ride. Five hiked up the "Easy" path - the same path the Camels went up.

Three people on our tour were hard-core hikers. You know the type. The ones who see a challenge in everything. They go to Military-style boot camps just for giggles. They thrive on adrenaline.

While the junkies started up the most difficult path,  the 3750 Steps of Repentance, (Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? I know.) I found myself promptly on the back of a very stubborn Camel. Exciting! And high-flying. Those suckers are tall.
And though it may not have been exactly desirable, I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't spat-at by one of the "Ships of the Desert."

My Camel was slooooooooooooooooooow. Really, I should have asked my Camel leader for a fast camel, but it didn't occur to me while we were "boarding." My guide's name was Musef (Moses). My guess is that he was pushing 17. And boy-o-boy was he chomping at the bit to get married.

"Bedouins are looking for wives! You will marry me, I will give you 20 camels."
My riding companions had a laugh and told him he'd have to do better as I'd already had a much better offer from a Sheik. Musef frowned, but kept flirting.

He said to my friend Ken, the fifty-something Aussie man married to Pat:
"For five Camels, I will get you a new wife, a strong wife, not like this one (motions to Pat), she is old and tired"

Well.

The Camels only take you about 2/3 of the way up the mountain. So we met up with our tour-arranged mountain guide (who was a freaking rock-star of a mountain goat man) and the rest of the normal hikers from the tour and picked our way up the last third of the mountain. When we reached the top, we found our Adrenaline junkies calmly waiting for us (and they had been for about 45 minutes), wrapped in camel-hair blankets and sipping on hot chocolate (There are local Bedouins that live on the top of the mountain for a week at a time to sell food and trinkets to the tourists!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Sheesh.

I was a bit shocked to see a very old church on the top of the mountain. Apparently it is a Greek Orthodox church, built in 1934, on top of an older, ruined church. It supposedly houses the site from which the Tablets for the Ten Commandments were carved by God. The Church is closed permanently to the public.

Molto Interessante! And suspect.

I expected more. Not more buildings. More holiness. More spirituality. More of a feeling. Ya know? It was just sort of... "Meh..."

Don't get me wrong - there is always an astonishing feeling when standing at the top of a mountain and taking in the grandeur of all that lies below. But for the love of Pete, we were standing at the top of Mt. Sinai. The place where Moses talked to God! The place should feel reverent.

Perhaps I expected too much?

In any case, I watched a gorgeous sunset over the Sinai Desert, after I'd wrapped myself in one of those thick, camel-hair blankets (they're warm and lovely and utterly stinky) and had changed into a heavier jacket, gloves and a hat. It was COLD at the top of the mountain.

We hiked down in the dark. If ever you trek up Mt. Sinai for sunset be sure to bring a headlamp! It is much, much too dark and rocky and treacherous a path to try to walk in the dark. I am completely in love with my headlamp after our bonding experience on the hike down Mt. Sinai. Or Not-Mt-Sinai.

Whatever.

Headlamps = Good.

Hiking = Good.

Camels = Good.

"Mt Sinai" = fun hike. Holy place mentioned in the bible? Doubtful.

 

Faraway Fantasy Friday: Yasawas

I've decided to dedicate Fridays entirely to travel dreaming and planning.

So on Fridays you'll find my odds and ends of planning trips; trips I'll take; Trips I'll never take (not likely!); trips I'd like to take for a specific purpose; trips I'm planning for the near future. Places I dream about!

To kick it off, here's where I'm dreaming about today:


The Yasawa Islands, Fiji

Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I read about them on Nomadic Matt's site:
http://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-guides/fiji-travel-tips/yasawa-islands/

Here's the deal: It's a budget backpacking way to see 12 paradisical islands that aren't very well known. You can take a "boat tour" - where you purchase a pass on a "Bula Boat" and island hop at will.

I was SOOOOO excited about that!

You see, I want to go to Fiji. I want to go to Tahiti. I want to bask in the azure water and lounge in the white sand and sit under palm trees on deserted beaches (well, I want to do that all the time. In fact, my dream job is beach lounger. Is there such a thing? In my world, yes.) And I want to stay in one of those amazing beach huts on stilts over the water with windows in the floor to look at the ocean and a hot tub on the back deck. You know the type, right?

Well, I want to do that trip, but I want to do that trip with a significant other. And since I'm currently lacking in one of those, The Yasawa island chain gives me a fantastic excuse to see a different side of Fiji!! Aren't you soooooo excited now too?

I thought so.






Where do you dream about being today?

St. Katherine's Monastery

Bedouin Wedding in the Egyptian desert. Check.

Additional day doing a blissful nothing in a grass hut on the Red Sea. Check.

Next stop: St. Katherine's Monastery & Mt. Sinai.

Admittedly, I know very little about Catholicism. I have been to Notre Dame in Paris (even sang in it with a Choir!), Il Duomo in Milano, Vatican City even. But being LDS, I don't really identify with much of the business that goes on in Catholic places.

But.

I appreciate them. I appreciate the beauty of the Cathedrals, the churches and sanctuaries and the artwork and the history that has been preserved. (Yes, no matter whose spin on history it actually was!) I appreciate the good that comes from monasteries and other places that are created with the intent to help humanity.

So while I wandered around St. Katherine's, a monastery set up in the year 600 AD at the base of Mt. Sinai, I had no clue what the symbols and artwork stood for, what the deal with the holy relic system was or why everyone was touching a large shrub and pushing prayers into the rock walls surrounding it, (turns out it's supposed to be THE Burning Bush... I'm skeptical. I will not lie.) I enjoyed the antiquity around me. The culture. The history present in the ancient, cracked and crumbling walls. And I observed the crowds pushing through the place. The people wandered through with various levels of intensity on their faces. Some were devout Catholics, it was plain to see. They reverenced the place in it's entirety, soaking it in. Others were interested in the Crusades, or the region, or nothing at all. Whatever reasons brought us all together there (my reason for being there was that my tour stopped there, quite simply), I reverenced the opportunity to observe.

"The Burning Bush" and Me. Being skeptical.

After an hour or so, we drove to our small, budget hotel to unpack, rest and enjoy a hearty meal of tomato chicken, rice, flatbread, hummus and the ever-present and delicious sliced tomatoes before heading back to the Monastery and begin an evening hike to the top of Mt. Sinai.