Continental Hotspot

So a couple of days ago I arrived in Cairo for a two week holiday. I’ll be posting something detailed eventually but I’ve got some interesting pictures to share already!

On my first day I immediately bee-lined for the Cairo museum right across the street from my hotel. This vast building is currently by far the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts anywhere in the world. I can’t possibly impress the scale of this museum on you other than to say I literally got lost on the upper floors after walking for a few hours already.

One fun picture I took in the sarcophagus hall near the atrium is this one:

The baboons on this sarcophagus reminded me of a cool history video on Youtube. Basically the world’s international trade first started between Egypt and a civilization called Punt. The latter of which has since been lost. However recent studies on baboon skeletons and mummies may now tell us where Egypt’s oldest trading partner was:

Once you leave the hustle and bustle of the atrium behind you are treated to hall after hall of seemingly endless displays of every object the ancient Egyptians ever produced. The picture below shows just one tiny corner of one of the dozens of halls on the second floor. There’s simply too much to look at. You could spend a month here ducking security in a Night at the Museum style bit and spend your entire day doing nothing else but inspect objects one by one and you still wouldn’t have seen it all. There is some evidence of the looting in 2011 here and there but the highlights of the museum are still there (no photo’s were permitted unfortunately)

Of course I just had to see an actual mummy:

Not only were the dead meticulously mummified, they were then burried in elaborate but hard to access tombs (to prevent grave robbing). The most magnificent of which are of course the pyramids. Below you’ll see two pictures of me entering one on my tour. Entering a pyramid is much like bouldering sideways through a tunnel barely high and wide enough to fit through for several hundred meters in a sauna. I wondered in advance why that part of the tour was optional. Oh boy do I get it now!

More modern highlights

Cairo also has many stunningly beautiful mosque’s such as the one pictured below built by Muhammad Ali located inside the citadel of Salah Aldin:

Especially the interior is on par with the best that Istanbul has to offer and you can enjoy it better since there are fewer people.

Update:

I continued my tour of Egypt after I posted this. I visited a number of other sites in Cairo such as the Coptic Quarter and several bazaars. After that I took an internal flight to Luxor (having been strongly cautioned against the day train I had planned to take).

While the story in Luxor is similar to the one in Cairo with astounding temples and tombs which made me feel like I was living the game Tomb Raider, I honestly didn’t have a great time in Luxor.

I got harrassed there constantly. People touching me, following me, heckling after me, threatening me and at one point cornering me with a horse carriage. The calls of “Taks, taks, taks!” (taxi) literally started as soon as I stepped foot outside of the hotel. The tone of the people was very aggressive and got worse the more I ignored them (you quickly figure not to engage them which is even worse). I tried to go on foot to the Temple of Luxor which was about two hundred meters away and could be seen from the hotel. I made it half way before fleeing into a bookshop. I have never felt as threatened before in my life.

The height of the awful experience was being physically assaulted by a bum with one arm who wouldn’t let me go with his other.

All in all the trip was worth it but I’m not going back to the unsafe tourist trap that is Luxor.