It's been awhile! Sorry for the extreme delay in posting anything -- it took me a while to formulate a blog post for Egypt because there was just so much I wanted to talk about, and when I finally got my blog post to where I wanted it to be, I tried to publish it and instead it deleted almost everything. I did some soul searching and decided that rather than trying to replicate the blog post, I would post what saved originally (which really doesn't cover a lot, we don't even make it to Cairo in this post) and then just put up a lot of pictures and let them tell the story. So, without further ado...
Friday morning on October 6th, bright and early at 5 AM, I departed from home with Jenna, Natalie, and Elijah, my traveling partners. We caught a 6:30 AM bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat (the closest town to the Taba land border crossing with Egypt), slept most of the way down, and arrived around 12 PM. We had to take the most roundabout route to get to the Taba border crossing because the only bus that goes from the Eilat bus station to the border also winds its way back and forth across the city ten times before managing to get to the border, but we made it there in the end, officially ready to start our trip.
Immediately after crossing the border on the Israeli side, we encountered our first taste of Egyptian bureaucracy. Quick backtrack: the Egyptian embassy in Egypt had previously told us that we didn't need to get any sort of visa or do anything prior to arriving at the Taba border crossing. This, as it turns out, was definitely a lie, though I'm still not actually sure, since we managed to make it through -- it was just much more difficult. We walked into the border crossing station and purchased a visa for Egypt for $25, walked up to the immigration desk, and then were told we needed to have a guarantee. What's a guarantee, you ask? Good question. We sat on some benches in no man's land for a bit and waited for someone that they Egyptian border police had called to help us. When he arrived, he was dressed not in a police or immigration uniform, but in normal clothes. We paid him another $25 and he helped us fill out a form, which then miraculously got us through Egyptian immigration with no problems. We even got to skip to the front of the line. Ah, bureaucracy.
And then, we were in Egypt! Having finally made it through the border, we encountered a mob of taxi drivers. With no other option for getting from Taba to Sharm el Sheikh, where we were staying the night, we forked up enough cash to know we were definitely getting ripped off and hopped in a taxi driven by Mabrook. The drive took about three and a half hours, where we encountered a total of 7 checkpoints. We made it through all of them fairly easily, as Mabrook did all the talking (and bribing). And then, just like that, we had made it to Sharm el Sheikh and our hostel.
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| Driving through the Sinai |
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| I was INSIDE THIS PYRAMID |
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| Natalie on a camel through the desert |
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| Our first view of the pyramids at Giza |
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| Elijah embracing his inner cowboy |
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| I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I was touching stone that was over 3,000 years old |
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| Our day trip to Alexandria -- Roman ruins combined with Egyptian sphinxes |
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| Jenna, our resident journalist/archeologist |
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| The Citadel in Alexandria |
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| The bazaar in Cairo |
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| Down to Luxor -- the Temple of Karnak |
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| The carvings are all painted! |
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| Elijah is so done with me |
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| Seriously why did no one tell me the Egyptians painted their carvings? |
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| The West Bank of Luxor -- this is Medina Habu, the best preserved temple in the area |
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| The Temple of Hapshetsut, the first female pharaoh |
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| Nighttime at the Temple of Luxor |
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| Daytime at the Temple of Luxor |
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| Driving back through the Sinai to home |
Hope you liked the pictures! We also went to some museums (where pictures were prohibited) and the Valley of the Kings (where pictures were VERY prohibited). We saw mummies, tombs, bazaars, mosques, the Nile, and lots of wild cats. We ate everything put in front of us and loved (almost) all of it. I loved our experience in Egypt -- it was such an amazing adventure!
Katrina
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