je ne regrette rien

Location: Cairo

Alighted the dreadful train and made our way to the bus that would take us to….da da dum..the GREAT PYRAMIDS of CAIRO!

The latest looks for Winter/Autumn ‘08 eyewear, from left to right: Fossil Aviators, Chanel oversized black classics, Ray-Ban Wayfarers (knock-offs) as shot on location. Hah! I’m so shameless..it’s terrrrrible.. TERRRRIBLE! I don’t think I’m going to put any serious shots so here’s coz it’s boring..so here’s another poseurish one for the fun of it…

THE VAG-TASTIC TRIO CONQUER THE PYRAMIDS!

We sadly, only took pictures of the back of the pyramids.. if you look at the front there’s an opening into the pyramid. For US$30 you can go into the pyramids.. but according to Khalid it was a bit of a waste of money since you would be crawling on all fours in a dark dusty tunnel..and the only thing you could see /(smell) would be the bum of whoever who’s crawling in front of you.And there was a disclaimer that people suffering from heart diseases, asthma or claustrophobia could not enter. But a member of our tour group went for it anyway and had to leave half way through because he was feeling very claustrophobic.. the opening was as wide as two grown men and as low as 3feet. The opening apparently got very steep as it stretched deeper into the pyramids..

After the requisite photo-taking, we went up a little hill for a short camel ride..

One thing you don’t realise until you’ve actually ridden one is how tall camels are.. from where we sat it would be a good 7ft fall to the ground. And of course, while it was considerably more comfortable/less jerky than riding a horse, my bum started to ache after 5 minutes and I couldn’t do anything but grin and bear it til my camel came to a nice halt.. *mind flash!Quad biking around the Pyramids would be too awesomeee!!*

After that we made our way to the Sphinx…it was much smaller than i thought and unlike what you always see in postcards, the pyramids and the sphinx aren’t surrounded by vast deserts but the city of Cairo is pretty close by..

My sister was trying to look as if she were kissing the Sphinx but ended up looking like she wanted to the suck non-life out of it *shudders*…I know, it turned out quite nasty. Look away kids, look away..

Now this is quite a nice candid picture of mon frere et ma soeur taken by me… the lighting and pose were just right.

Later we were taken to a nearby aromatic oils shop that sold really expensive vials of 100% pure oils…They had many types of fragrances, some even concocted to smell like popular perfumes like Chanel Chance, Dior Poison, Kenzo Flower etc but the most interesting one would be one called Secret Of the Desert, which was supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Women were supposed to dab only 3 droplets of it on their breasts and their vajayjay to get the loins of their men to burn (ugh i sound like a Mills & Boon novel).

Then we went to our final destination, a papyrus shop. We were shown how the ancient Egyptians made papyrus out of the papyrus plant and encouraged to buy some authentic papyrus souvenirs like posters or bookmarks. Brother bought a nice bookmark with the eye of Osiris on it

The papyrus making demo: the papyrus fibres are being hammered out to stretch it and to be made into sheets; a graphic depiction of The Final Judgment where the heart of the deceased is weighed and if it is lighter than the feather, he will enter the Underworld as guarded by the god Osiris (green skinned) and if it was heavier than the feather, the little dog squatting in the middle of the scales would devour the heart.

After that we made way to our luxe hotel, Hotel Zoser which was a welcome change to our cramped train quarters. Was in a state of comatose as soon as my head touched the pillow..

Locations: Aswan en route to Cairo.

Well this unfortunately enough, we HAD to wake up at the godforsaken hour of 3AM to travel 2 hours and a bit to the amazingness that is the Abu Simbel Temple. Now, I consider this temple to be one of the highlights of the tour because it’s a miracle how the ancient Egyptians built it in the first place AND how in the 1960s, UNESCO and a team of European and Egyptian engineers painstakingly disassembled and moved the temple 200m away from its original location, BLOCK BY BLOCK to prevent its destruction by the rising waters of the nearby Nasser River after the Aswan High Dam was built. Can you imagine. Moving such a colossal temple..block by block!! And the end result was like it never was touched!
Truly a miracle of ancient and modern engineering/architecture. I think every aspiring civil engineer or architect should visit Egypt, really.

AWESOMEEEES! Phototaking was not allowed inside but I’m going to cheat and put up pictures I found online..

This is the entrance of the temple.. it’s mainly a long corridor that is lined by gigantic statues of the Pharoah Ramses II (Ramses the Great) in the Osiris position (arms crossed in front of the body) about 30 ft high. The paintings of vultures on the ceiling symbolise protection and the original colour can still be seen on them. This main corridor leads to several smaller corridors and little vestibules (narrow little rooms).. I can’t quite remember how many they were but the rooms had low-ceilings, dimmed and adorned with hieroglyph paintings all along its walls depicting offerings made to the king and gods. I remember it being surprisingly cool..One of these rooms on the west wing leads to the innermost sanctum, the holy of holies….

The “Holy of Holies”… while they might look like slightly-larger than life but otherwise normal sculptures, there’s something very, very remarkable about them. Our tour guide explained that the ancient Egyptians planned the layout of the temple in such a way that twice a year, on February 20 and October 2o, the sun would penetrate the temple and illuminate 3 of the 4 seated figures. These figures represent l-r: Ptah, the god of darkness, Ra-Haoreakti, Pharoah Ramses (depicted as a god, not a human) and Amun-Ra, the sun god. No prizes for guessing which figure never gets illuminated…

After these awe-inspiring lessons in history and physics, we started on our 2hour journey back to our cruise boat and packed up our luggage to leave the boat for good..the Nile Carnival, is what it incidentally is called..
The man between me and my brother who looks severely stressed and/or constipated is Khalid…our super tourguide! He’s super, really!
From then we took a bus to view the “unfinished obelisk”…an obelisk is a tall, narrow and pointy monument. The obelisk we saw was hewn out of a granite quarry and would weigh 1,150 tonnes and stand at 41m if it were finished. The reason it was abandoned was that they found a huge crack running through it and refused to offer anything less than perfect to the Pharoah.

That’s the tip of the obelisk pointing towards you.. and you can see the crack that is running through the middle. No machines were involved in the process of hewing these enormous, phallic-shaped (heh) monuments. Starting with huge slabs of rock, the ancient Egyptians would create holes in the sides of the desired obelisk and insert lighted leaves into these holes. The heat will make the rock crack and yield a smaller rock with a long rectangular in the middle. An army of workers would then work on chipping and smoothing the sides of this smaller rock to be shaped into the obelisk. When the sides were all chipped away the loosened obelisk would be tied to a fleet of horses and pulled out of its position and carted to where its supposed to stand. There, a system of pulleys would be in place to slowly pull the obelisk into a standing position.

After that, we made our way to the view the Aswan High Dam..which I didn’t find particularly interesting because I’ve developed an aberration towards dams ever since I was forced to memorise all the names and locations of dams in Malaysia for Form 3 Geography. But here’s a picture anyway for posterity’s sake…
Next up…we drove to a small pier and took a motor boat to the Agilika Islands where the Philae temple stood. At the pier I encountered a young Egyptian boy of 3 or 4 who could speak beautiful, fluent French…oh the shame!!Anyway…the temple was v. popular among the French tourists because there’s an inscription by Napoleon Bonaparte on one of the entrance walls. I know because poor me was squashed by a big, sweaty group of them while they enthusiastically squealed ‘viva la france’!

After that short tour, we went back to the pier via motor boat and drove to another pier to ride on a felucca..which was the earliest mode of transportation along the Nile. They don’t have motors and the directions are controlled by the wind and rudders.
View from a felucca.

FINALLY…(this was a super long day), we headed back on land and to the Aswan Railway Station to board an overnight sleeper train to Cairo..The place was as you can see, pretty dismal. The tracks practically doubled as a garbage site. However, it wasn’t too packed..so I can quite imagine how the train stations in India would be like…

The experience onboard the sleeper train was something I won’t forget for a long time yet…The cabins were about the size of 2 aeroplane toilets. We had been out the whole day and there wasn’t a shower onboard. The toilets were communal and it didn’t quite have running water to flush..so basically to flush, you press a button on the floor and the flap in the toilet just opens to empty your nasties into an unknown, dark abyss below. My sister said she peered into this
“abyss” and she almost puked instantly..ew ew ew. Basically we didn’t bathe the whole day and we only had a little tap with really cold running water in our cabin. I had to towel clean myself for the first time ever…-_-
the morning after…HAHA! Look at us! SO ker-lian! KESIAN KESIAN!The tray that was supposed to fold out in front of my sister couldn’t fold out properly and kept drooping so we had to eat our food (which was not great..but beggars can’t be choosers and we needed the energy for the day) on our laps sitting on our bed. The sink is next to me and the ladder leads up to the second bunk bed.

My LUNKHEAD of a sister refused to sleep on the higher bunk bed because she was ‘afraid of falling down’ even though it’s an irrefutable FACT that she sleeps like a log. Since I tend to move a lot when i sleep, we BOTH had to sleep on the tiny lower bed we are sitting on. Unsurprisingly, lunkhead-sister slept like a log while I woke up at least 40 times throughout the night to the sound of the whirring train; the sight of the eerie, whizzing orange street lights that slanted through the window blinds and the feeling of being shaken around while inside an increasingly claustrophobic tin-box and of course the desire to smother my blissfully sleeping sister to death. Although my dad initially insisted that we fly Aswan-Cairo, the tour couldn’t accomodate that because of some safety issue, I’m quite glad we took the train and even prouded I survived it

Locations: Edfu, Aswan: Temples galore!

Well woke up to the sight of a flowing river right outside the window next to our beds. Had a scrumptious breakfast…they have the BEST eggs, tomatoes and cucumbers in egypt for some reason. And they make the best omelettes with red and green peppers and onions..yummy yummy yummy stuff!! Then we were docked at Edfu and we walked to the Edfu Temple of Horus which happens to be one of the biggest and best preserved temples in Egypt.

The temple was built by Ptolemy III and finished 200 years later by the last of the Ptolmeys, Ptolemy XIII (who was the father of the infamous Queen Cleopatra) and built in the honour of the falcon god Horus. If you must know, Egypt has been conquered by a few of the main empires of the past, namely by the Greeks during the time of Alexander the Great (there were 13 emperors…Ptolemy 1-13), followed by the Romans (Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony was defeated by Emperor Augustus in the Battle of Actium), then there was the rise of Christianity which was lastly replaced by the reign of the Islamic Byzantine Empire.

The insides of the temple was quite astounding..as you can see from the middle picture, there were multiple high pillars that ran the width and length of the temple. All the walls from floor to ceiling were covered with intricate hieroglypics as my sister has conveniently (and eerily) pointed out. Oh and the boat-like thing next to it is called the “holy of holies” where the idol of the god was placed and worshipped. This was located in the innermost and middle section of the temple. It’s a represented as a boat because the ancient Egyptians noticed that the colour of the sea and the sky were the same, blue, and concluded they were a continuation of another. Thus, you would need a boat to sail on the sea and onwards to the heavens. This boat is a replica..the original one is in the Louvre Museum, Paris

The first picture (uppermost left), is the first of a series of hieroglyphs that tells the legend of how the evil god of chaos, Seth kills his brother Osiris, lord of the Underworld and then chops him to little pieces and scatters them into the river Nile. Osiris’ wife, Isis is devastated and begs the god of embalming, Anubis to reassemble her husband and bring him back to life for just one night. On this night, Horus is conceived. He would later avenge his father’s death by killing his uncle, Seth. Along the walls where my sister and I are posing are hieroglyphics that show the multiple ways that Seth (shown as a cute little hippotamus!) was killed.. (by the way I’m typing all this from what I can remember so details should be double checked, mmkay? but i think i’ve got the general idea right ) But isn’t ancient Egypt mythology so interesting?? I’m loving it…

We then made our way back on the boat and sailed to our final destination, Aswan! By the time we got to our destination it was night..but apparently the Kom-ombo temple is best viewed when its lighted up…it’s really quite a sight and I agree, don’t you?

For some reason I like these pictures, although they’re not picture-pretty. Especially the one on the right..I think I shall put it on facebook.. i shall call it “A graphic representation of the isolation, insignificance and awkwardness I feel in the face of a bleak future as to be dictated by traditional institutions of family & society”. Hah..NOT! I really hate artsy, overtly-pretentious people who talk like that and use the word “metaphysical” way too much to come across as ‘deep & serious’. And, maybe if I was feeling self-loving enough, I’d spend hours coming up with a black and white/sepia versions of these pictures. Maybe, but maybe not..In the second picture, I like the spontaneity and casualness of the foreground juxtaposed against such a serious and imposing background. 

The Kom-Ombo temple was used as a hospital back in the ancient times. It was unusual because it was divided symmetrically-perfect to honour not one but 2 gods; Sobek the crocodile god and Haroeris on each side of the temple. And as Khaled, our super tour guide explaned, there’s an hieroglyphic inscription of how the ancient Egyptians performed circumcision operations during those times on one on the walls outside the temple. To magnify the areas they were operating on, they used the lens from a dead camel’s eye. Apparently camels see everything 20times bigger than humans do.. that’s why you can see little children running around minding and bossing camels around! inereesstinng!

And just because you’ve been extra good, here’s what a 2000+++ year old mummified crocodile looks like…you can still see the teeth on it in the picture on the right (!!) and the claws on their feet if you look really close up. NAaaassty creatures, crocodiles, real naaasssty!