The Voyage of the Mighty Tenho: Egypt - Giza, Western Desert and Luxor

Egypt makes your head spin, as every day you see both the ancient and modern life side by side. One day, we’re leaning over our hotel balcony to watch a protest in Tahrir Square over the people who died in the 2012 Port Said stadium riot, as the mighty Nile, the lifeblood of early human civilization, flows past just beyond. The next day, we’re wandering around 4,000 year old pyramids, with the incessant accompaniment of countless touts trying to make poverty wages by selling camel rides to the few tourists who haven’t been scared away by the revolution, and, in Maggie’s case, patiently humoring the Muslim women who apparently love photographing themselves with little blond-haired girls.

Then we went into the vortex of the Western Desert with a Bedouin driver and back 20 million years to a time when prehistoric shellfish, sharks and whale-like creatures swam overhead, leaving their fossils for us to find. Then, whisk back into the present with the police escort that briefly followed us to keep us safe (a honor preserved apparently for travelers from America, Israel and Denmark?). We stopped occasionally in the oases along the way to clean off in the water being pumped from the massive aquifer under the desert to irrigate new fields. Everywhere from Cairo through the desert to Luxor, we saw gas stations either closed, or with long lines of trucks and minibuses lined up waiting overnight for the next fuel delivery. Makes the ubiquitous donkey seem awfully dependable.

For me, my favorite scene of the old and new Egypt will always be the man on a donkey cart, pulling a load of hand-cut Egyptian clover for fodder, talking on his cell phone. For the kids, they’ve learned about ancient alphabets, from the hieroglyphs on the temples to Arabic numbers around the campfire in the desert sand from our Bedouin driver, but also about the hard side of modern Egypt, seeing for their first time bands of kids living on the streets of Cairo.

Hands down, our favorite family experience was the mind-bending experience of being in the desert, where the quiet and wide open emptiness gives you time to think, while the wind creates the best ever sand dunes for rolling down.

We’re now in Dahab on the Red Sea, hoping to do some snorkeling and perhaps a side trip to see the site of the burning bush and Mount Sinai…but not sure given the recent flooding.