Nick and Jess

So my last post was about my time in Turkey, and since then I have spent even more time in Turkey finishing the final project for the town of Bitez and then traveled a bit more around Turkey before meeting Jess in Cairo. The final project went great — our group of 10 students and Korkut — our professor — completed work coming up with a framework for the municipality on how they can integrate tourism and agriculture to save what is left of the agricultural land and promote tourism in the area. We presented our work to the mayor, some town council members, and other interested members of the community. The presentation went quite well even though it went for over an hour and a half. Here is a link to the presentation.
INSERT PRESENTATION HERE

Since then, quite a bit of traveling has happened in Egypt. Jess and and I met in Cairo after not seeing each other for over a month. It was really good to see each other and has been fun to go into traveling mode together again

We started out in Cairo getting used to a massive city filled with tons of people, tons of cars, lots of pollution, and a heat wave that we are not really used to.

One of the first things we did was to head out to the Giza pyramids — very huge and as cool as we thought they would be. We walked around seeing everything without much shade, so we were pretty hot and dehydrated. Was fun to see something 4000 years old and something so iconic and well known throughout the world. Lots of touts offering kitsch and camel rides, but we waded through all of them. They are actually in GIza — a suburb of Cairo and not out in the middle of the desert as the pictures make them look.

To “escape” the heat, we took the 2 hour train ride up to Alexandria which is on the Mediterranean. The train ride was nice — got tickets in first class which meant spacious seats and air conditioning. Thought the coffee and snacks would be included but we guessed wrong — extra money In Alexandria we got a nice place on the 5th floor of an old building which overlooked the Mediterranean.

Alexandria is by no means a relaxing city — it’s the 2nd biggest city in Egypt with over 4 million people. Everyone from cairo heads up there to escape the heat of summer just like we did, but it was still quite hot at mostly above 100 degrees.

While in Alexandria, we enjoyed the ancient history of the city. Most of what has happened there such as one of the ancient wonders of the world the lighthouse and the ancient library which used to be the largest library in the world have been completely destroyed, but there are still a few remnants of what used to be. Of the things still there, we saw Pompeii’s pillar which is a massive 30 meter granite pillar erected to support a statue of Diocletian in 291 AD.

. We also visited the catacombs which is down by water level where caves were carved out to bury people.

One of the most modern and cool (literally really air conditioned ) was the new library which was built recently and is huge! The original Alexandria library was built in the 3rd century BC and was the largest library of it’s time with 700,000 works written on papyrus scrolls. Everything was destroyed, but on display in the new library is an old manuscript that they found on a mummy’s face. We enjoyed learning about more of the history of Alexandria in some of the museums which were in the library. A lot has happened and has been destroyed.

After Alexandria, we took an 8 hour night bus ride to SIWA OASIS which is located in the desert near the Liberian border. The oasis, which is one of 5 in Egypt, was formed by a low spot in the desert where natural springs flow out of the ground. Surrounded completely by uninhabitable desert, this area was full of date palms and olive trees.

During the day, it got really hot (118 degrees) as we were in the middle of the desert, so we spent the afternoons sitting in the shade in the palm gardens with a fan. Couldn’t really do much else without feeling the fire of the sun. We did manage to visit several of the springs int he area for some swimming fun. The first one we visited we traveled to in the back of a motor taxi with two other travelers. It was a hour ride in the back of the motor-taxi, but it was covered so it wasn’t too bad. We traveled through the huge salt lake there and ended up at the spring where we swam.

The water was kind of gross, but it was a spring which was constantly circulating. It was really refreshing to get in the water after being out in the heat. On the way back to town, we got to see the twilight of the sun over the water we were traveling next to, and it was beautiful.

The next day we went to a different spring — this time on a Donkey taxi. There are more donkeys in Siwa than cars or other motorized vehicles, and the 17 year old kid was quite an entrepreneur with his tour brochures in the back of his cart. He took us very slowly but in style out to Cleopatra spring and the temple of the oracle where it is thought Alexander the great traveled to to consult the oracle on some issues. He is thought to have been buried somewhere near there as well.

My favorite thing we did in Siwa was take a trip out into the great sand sea. We got a 4×4 vehicle to take us out into the sand dunes where we drove up and over. Was quite fun! There was a very isolated spring out there where we did some swimming — quite peaceful to have it ourselves for a while but then a huge group arrived which detracted a bit from the peacefulness.

We watched the sunset from the top of a dune which was amazing

Our driver then dropped us off and set up a tent for us. We slept out in the middle of the dunes which was great — wouldn’t have wanted to be there during the middle of the day though.

In the morning we sand boarded down the dunes before the driver picked us up. Not as easy as snowboarding but was fun to try!

While Siwa was fun, it was still really hot! So, we decided to head a long ways away to Dahab which is a hippie resort town on the red sea. After 4 buses and almost 24 hours, we arrived.

Dahab is known for it’s world class diving, and the resorts that cator to divers and other adventure sports oriented wind surfers were a nice break from the Egyptian food we had been eating. We spent a lot of time relaxing in the wind and in the Bedouin style lounges by the seaside.

We did snorkeling a couple of the days we were there and got some average shots with our new underwater camera. The light was not too great, but it was fun diving down to see all of the marine life and the reef which was really close to the shore.

Dahab is 2 hours from Moses mountain which is where they think moses climbed for the 10 commandments. We hiked up starting around 1am and reached the top 94 minutes before sunrise. Very cold when the sun isn’t up yet but it was refreshing.

After a few days in Dahab, we decided to come back to Cairo instead of exploring Jordan and Israel. We’ve been seeing some of the things we missed the first few days we were here such as Islamic Cairo and the market area.

We are now packing up our stuff to start the next leg of our journey into Greece. Although Egypt has lots of stuff we still haven’t seen, the heat is getting to us. Greece will be a bit cooler even though it is still quite hot there.

I wrote most of this post a few days ago. We’re now in Greece enjoying the sights in Athens. Saw the Parthenon and Acropolis and have been chilling out here. We’re headed to Milos this afternoon on a ferry and will be on the island for a couple days.

Then on with this crazy trip – headed to Denmark for our finale. Jess lived there and has visited there several times and I have never seen it. Should be a good opportunity for her to show me her favorite country! We found some very cheap plane tickets which made it fit into our trip budget.

Well, updating this blog is a lot of work when you don’t do it very often. We have a ton more pictures of our travels so far. When we get back we will work on an online photo album to share with everyone… hopefully. I always have big plans of doing those sorts of things so we’ll see what happens.