I could have done more diving, I'd quite happily come back to Egypt one day and just spend 30 days diving here, but I wanted to spend some time with Tarrant in this little slice of oceanic paradise. There's some good reef accessible from the beach too, plus a vast swathe of seagrass where the [...]
The city of Marsa Alam is a bit of a shithole, the seafront property is mostly unfinished, apparently due to some bizarre Egyptian law whereby if you have land you have to build on it or the government will take it off you. Anything over 70% completed is subject to tax resulting in a a [...]
The Horus temple at Edfu is very much worth the effort I think but oh my fucking gosh, what an effort it was! Trains in Egypt are ultimately a great way to get around but they're also generally late and if you don't speak Arabic it's impossible to know which train is stood at the [...]
There is a tourist activity in Luxor that doesn't involve dragging your unwilling carcass through dusty archaeological sites, lamenting the fact you didn't bring enough water whilst you try to stop your devices from heating up and the sun claims the top layer of your skin as its very own. Hot air ballooning, guys! It's [...]
CONTENT WARNING: DEAD DUDE! We saw the mummy of Tutankhamen and I've included a photo of him in this blog. Ancient Egyptians only lived on the East Bank of the river Nile. They worshipped the sun disc which rose in the east and set in the west, and why would you live where your god [...]
We're not staying on the East Bank of Luxor and thank fuck we're not. It's nothing particularly special and we'd read that the West Bank was a much nicer place to be. Our introduction to Luxor though, that pretty much validated our decision to flee west. A taxi driver at the train station collared us [...]
Ramses II liked building fuck off great big things to remind everyone of his general badassery and the temples at Abu Simbel are a fine example of this. They reckon he built this particular imposing temple in that location to warn those coming up the Nile from the south of his absolute power and to [...]
"Don't take the night train!" people will tell you, "You won't get to see Egypt if it's dark!" No, but I will save on a night's accommodation and the night train becomes a day train when the sun comes up. In our case the night train became half the fucking next day train too. Instead [...]
So I actually quite like Cairo. There. I said it. Is it noisy, busy, chaotic and a bit smelly in parts? Abso-fucking-lutely! But is everyone lovely and friendly and actually really helpful? I mean, mostly, yes. Some people want you to have a tea at their café or buy their stuff, but random blokes with [...]
We had a little wander into Cairo today to put some Coptic stuff in our eyeholes. After we'd filled up on fuul at our current favourite place to get the delicious beany goodness we braved the public transport system, because I'm that masochist that actually really likes taking public transport in foreign countries. I'm especially [...]
Travel & Shit 