An Excursion to Egypt April 2001

Introduction and Rationale behind the Trip

My wife had always wanted to visit Egypt, having been interested in the country since she was a little girl, possibly encouraged by her father who also had an interest and had served there as a soldier. With one of life's "special" birthdays approaching, she decided that in 2001, Egypt would be a good place for her to celebrate her birthday. I should have suspected something was going on as our TV always seemed to be tuned to the History channel or Civilisation channel and her library was gradually being extended with books about Egypt, Tutankhamen, Ramses II and the like.

So, it shouldn't have been a surprise when, in May 2000, she booked us all on a Nile Cruise on the MS Nile Commodore, one of the Presidential Nile Cruise boats. I have to be honest here, I was not thrilled about it, nor were our two teenage children. It didn't seem like a holiday to us. After all, it was hot, Egypt was full of sand, sand and more sand. People were ill when they went to Egypt so we envisaged a seven day holiday spent in bed at great expense. I needed a pile of inoculations (the last time I had any I was ill) and tourists got shot and killed in Egypt didn't they?

True, I do have a passing interest in archaeology (I am an avid fan of The Time Team) but the thought of wandering around lumps of stone, not knowing what I was looking at, in intense heat being attacked by insects of all shapes and sizes just did not appeal at all ! Still it was done, I was going (under protest !) and that was that. I surfed around the net for anything that would allay my concerns and make me feel good about it, but information was sparse.

So, I decided to create this web site for those of you out there who may be in the position I was, a bit uneasy about the whole thing. It is not my intention to give you all the history of the sites that we visited - I'm not an Egyptologist. However, I hope my comments and photographs of some of the things we saw will encourage you to be a bit more content and look forward to your trip back in time to an ancient civilisation, the trip of a lifetime.

You may be wondering how it all went .... Well, you'll have to follow my journey and see what I thought of it all at the end, and no cheating by pressing on the button above !

Finally, please bear in mind that the information is graphic intensive. I've minimised the size of the photographs to reduce the download time, but it may still take a while so I hope you'll think it worth the wait!

So with that ... browse on fellow travellers !