Coptic Cairo and Egyptian Museum

Trip Start Mar 07, 2006

Trip End Jun 07, 2006

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Flag of Egypt Cairo, Egypt
Friday, March 24, 2006

We spent the next few days exploring various things in Cairo. Coptic Cairo, one of the few Christian parts of Cairo dating from the times when according to the Bible, Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus hid in a cave here, now under a Church, when they had to flee the Holy Land and Herod. It was a peaceful place to wander around but the Churches were so full of incence we didn't hang around long for fear of suffocation!!

We also visited the Nilometer, the original flood marker to establish whether the year was going to be good or bad depending on how how the River rose during the yearly flooding. Above 16 cubits and taxes went up as the harvest would be more profitable, below this and they remained the same or went down. You could debate for hours both the humanitarian and economic reasons behind the building of the High Dam in Aswan that now prevents this yearly flooding but when you see the Nile in Cairo it's hard to think anything other than, what an absolute environmental nightmare it was to have ever built that Dam, but as I said, there's more to it than one simple factor and I'm not going to bore you with my opinions on the matter now.

Also negotiated the process of sending a package back to Australia today which once we'd found the right place turned out to be relatively pain free. Hopefully it makes it, In Sha'allah (God willing)!!

Spent the requisite day at the Egyptian Museum which was impressive not only for the sheer numbers of artefacts it contains but the fact that each and every piece holds so much history and meaning.

Hyroglyphics, Egyptian Museum Courtyard

It's a difficult place to visit though as it's constantly packed with tourists and the exhibits themselves are crammed together and not always very well labelled but an experience not to be missed nonetheless.

It was our first real look at hieroglyphics and the other Ancient artefacts that make a trip to Egypt. Unfortunately camera's are no longer allowed inside the Museum, so no piccies from inside sorry.

The Tutankahmen treasures are as stunning as expected and the sheer size of the horde really makes you wonder what it must have been like for Howard Carter stumbling on it back in the 1920's. The Death Mask and the Sarcophogus are both solid gold and very intricatly engraved and look as though they were produced just yesterday. The quality and intricacy of the jewellery was what stood out the most to me, absolutely beautiful and amazingly delicate work.

We're both finding the hassle of Cairo is getting too much now, you can only take so much without getting pissed off so after visiting Giza tomorrow we've made the decision to get out of Cairo even though there was still a couple more days worth of things that we would have liked to visit. So we head South to Upper Egypt and Luxor on Saturday, not that we expect the hassle in Luxor to be any less, quite the contrary by all reports but at least the air will be more pleasant to breathe.