Egypt - really, really old news

About 8 months late, I realized that I did not finish writing about the rest of my study trip to Egypt in January.

Cairo is a crazy big city that is impossible to get around. Most of my memories of Cairo are of being stuck in traffic in a cramped, hot bus in a suit. We had some cool meetings though in addition to the one with Orascom that I have already written about - a few government ministers, a non-profit, some energy companies, and a tech startup. But the cultural sites were what really stood out in Egypt.

The pyramids, though their size was impressive, were a bit of a disappointment. We saw them once during the day and once at a hoky light and laser show at night.

Luxor, a few hundred miles south of Cairo along the Nile, was really amazing though. We took a sunrise hot air balloon ride over the valley, and had amazing views of all of the temples, tombs, and ruins. I also found the Nile really interesting. While I guess I learned this in high school, the entire country of Egypt is desert, except for a stretch about 1-2 miles wide on either side of the Nile, which stretches all the way from its delta in the north of the country to southern Egypt. While this makes sense, it was still shocking to see firsthand how green the area around the Nile is, and how it instantly drops off to extreme desert just a few minutes walk away from the river.

During my travels through 33 countries over the past two years, I have seen a lot of really old stuff. But the sights in Egypt are staggeringly old. Many of the ruins that we saw were 4,000 to 4,500 years old! All of the ancient ruins that I saw in South America, India, China, Thailand, Japan, the Middle East, and Europe - none of them were more than 2,500 years old. And the Egyptian ruins including King Tut's tomb, Hatshepshut's tomb, the pyramids, and the many statues of pharoahs and sphinxes were as impressive as any of them. It puts the rest of the historical sights I have seen around the world in a different perspective, and also really challenges the American worldview where remembering things from 40 years ago seems like ancient history.

So while Cairo is not high on my list of places that I would go back to, I would love to spend more time exploring more of Luxor and Aswan, and explore the rest of the areas along along the Nile south of Cairo. Here are a number of Egyptian photo highlights.

Street market - Cairo

Boy carrying flatbread

Camels and pyramids

More Great Pyramids, Giza

Old building facade, Cairo

Hot air ballooning in desert over Luxor
Mosque in Egyptian desert Hot Air ballooning, fields by the Nile quickly become desert
Sphinxes, Luxor

Massive ancient columns
Hatshepset's tomb
Google satellite map showing the green by the Nile and the surrounding desert

El Gouna

The most exceptional meeting we had in the entire study trip was with Naguib Sawiris, the CEO of Orascom Telecom.

Orascom Telecom is the largest telecom operator in a number of emerging markets including Pakistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, and Bangladesh. Naguib is a famously high risk businessman, and has just bid to become the first mobile operator in North Korea.

Since Naguib was on the vacation at the beach town his family created, he flew our group of 40 people from Cairo to El Gouna (a beach town his family has created) for the day.

He was one of the most interesting speakers I have heard over the past two years. His father was one of the wealthiest Egyptians until his construction business was nationalized in the 1960s. The family was reduced to poverty. Then Naguib's father, later with the help of his three sons, built the current business up to its $30B total valuation. It seems to me like watching his father's rise and fall and rise inspired Naguib's determination to seize opportunities and to take risks against the advice of all others.

I have been meaning to write more about this for the past five months, so I just decided to post what I have now and to add a few pictures.

Dahab

Dahab was a really cool little beach town on the Red Sea. While it was a little touristy, it was mostly European and backpacker touristy. There were not a lot of Americans there at all (which is not surprising, given that Americans rarely venture out of North America and sometimes Europe).

But anyway, Dahab has a nice promenade along the Red Sea waterfront with tons of restaurants built right into the sand. The floors of the restaurants are basically blankets and pillows and you can just crawl into a spot at a low table for a drink, a shisha (the Arab hookah, quite popular among locals since many Muslims do not drink alcohol), or great seafood.

There is also fantastic snorkeling with a beautiful coral reef that you can just walk into right off the coast.

We spent a pleasant and relaxing two days hanging out along the water, snorkeling, and recuperating after a pretty intense two weeks of travel. Jason and Rob left to go home and Owen and I met up with two other friends, Alex and Huiting who were also in Dahab scuba diving. A pretty fun few days.

Restaurant, Dahab

Red Sea sunset

Sinai Peninsula - Mt. Sinai

After a day in Aqaba in southern Jordan we decided to venture across the Red Sea onto the Sinai Peninsula. Given the politics and geography of the area, which will come into play later, we took a ferry to get there. It is remarkable how physically close together so many different countries are in the Middle East. Sitting at the beach in front of our hostel in Aqaba, Jordan (Al Aqabah in the top right corner of the map below), we could easily see across the water to Egypt, up the road to the right to the buildings and hotels of the city of Eilat in Israel, and down the road to the left at the mosques at the Saudi Arabian border.

The ferry was an experience in itself. It was scheduled to leave at noon, so we arrived at the terminal to buy our tickets at 10:30. After two treks up and down two flights of stairs with our luggage (up to buy tickets, down to pay the departure tax, up to get our passports stamped, down to get on the rickety old bus to go the 100 yards to the boat), we finally made it on to the boat an hour later. Then, since our journey was a few days after the Hajj concluded, our boat was packed with a ton of people who were returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca. As a result, it was extremely crowded and more than a little aromatic. After the hour long boat ride, and a 2 hour disembarkment process we finally made it to Egypt.

Egypt was definitely cheaper than Jordan and tremendously cheaper than the Gulf. Our first move was to hire a driver to take us to lunch and then an hour up the coast to the beach town we were staying. Total cost - $20. As we were starving, our first destination was Dr. Kebab, where we had some pretty good chicken shwarma and lamb kebabs. We then continued on to Dahab, a pretty cool beach town right along the Red Sea.

The main reason for the trip to the Sinai Peninsula was Mt. Sinai. Mt. Sinai is about 2.5 hours inland from Dahab, in the south central Sinai Peninsula. Reputedly where God delivered the 10 Commandments to Moses and appeared as the Burning Bush, Mt. Sinai attracts hundreds of pilgrims a day. While it is a fairly difficult trek to the top, we decided it would be a memorable way to spend Christmas Day, so we decided to hike to the summit for Christmas sunrise.

After arriving in Dahab on Christmas Eve, our first order of business was to hire a driver to take us to Mt. Sinai. Without too much effort, we found a cab driver who would pick us up at 2am, drive us to the mountain, wait for us to summit the mountain, and then take us back to Dahab afterwards for about US$25 each.

I have a few distinct impressions of Mt. Sinai. The first is COLD! The wind-chill was in the high teens during our trek from 4:00am to 6:30am where we reached the top to coincide with sunrise.

Second, it was isolated. We drove through hours worth of isolated desert to get to Mt. Sinai that were broken basically only by security checkpoints every 15 minutes or so. I cannot even imagine what how alone and isolated fleeing Jews, pilgrims, and other historical migrants in the Sinai must have felt in the frigid hostile environment without access to a heated 4x4 vehicle.

My third impression of Mt. Sinai is that it was beautiful. The actual hike up the mountain took a little over 2 hours. We walked with two headlamps but were able to see quite well thanks to the largely full moon. We were largely alone during most of the hike, with only the occasional Bedouin offering early morning Mint Tea or a camel to ride to the top to break the stillness.

We did stop once for a tea break and talked to some really nice Bedouin guys. They were very curious about our mobile phones and spent a long time playing with Owen’s blackberry. They desperately wanted to trade something for the blackberry and we negotiated to the point where they were going to trade one of their camels for the phone but in the end, Owen decided to pass.

While the hike to the top was both pretty and memorable, the view at sunrise was spectacular. We rented a blanket near the top from a little shop for the expensive (but well worth it) price of US$10 and watched for the sunrise. By around 7:30 a few hundred other pilgrims had joined us at the summit to watch the Christmas sunrise. While we were not given any new commandments, it was still an incredible experience.