Nairobi does have a few quiet, beautiful places. In the hills that border one side of Nairobi is a fairly wealthy area. Near there is Karen Blixen’s former home. The picture to the right is part of the grounds of her home. Though the farm was broken up long ago the house and the main grounds around it remain. There are beautiful views of the surrounding hills from her house. It really is a lovely spot, and the green everywhere is a nice contrast to the last three days travelling through Tsavo and Amboseli. The house is well taken care of, though as with the grounds, nothing like the farm pictured in “Out of Africa,” I can’t imagine that it ever looked the way it was portrayed in the movie.

Amboseli is not as dramatically striking as Tsavo, but there are more animals including large herds of gnu (i.e.. food), zebra, elephants, giraffes, hyenas, warthogs, a few lions, and the occasional cheetah. The flat plain that makes up the majority of Amboseli almost seems staged, it’s so flat, and there are so many animals. The animals seem almost completely unfazed by the minibuses, except for the zebras – they usually turn around and give you their tails. The animals walk the electric fence line around the lodge compounds too. It’s amazing to be in the pool at the lodge and have a line of zebras walking along the electric fence 100ft away.

One morning we had to be ready to go on a 5:30am game drive. I am not a morning person. I joked with our driver/guide that if I had to be ready to go at 5:30am I had better see something with fur, four very large paws, and some very big teeth – and we did! The lionesses were really funny. They seemed to think posing for pictures was part of their job. It was like someone had given them their schedule for the day:

5:45am be in the clearing for all the tourist

6:15am leave for breakfast

The lodges at Amboseli are beautiful. There is one thing truly unique about the lodge compound – it has a resident baboon population, and they’re a cheeky bunch! I was staying in a newer lodge and they were still a little warry, however some friends staying at one of the older lodges had a great story to tell:

A lady at breakfast had a banana, one of the baboons wanted it so he jumped in her lap took it out of her hand and ate it. Then jumped down went to an empty table that had a cup of coffee sitting on it, got up on the table and drank the coffee. Guess he’d finished his breakfast, so he went back to the trees.

The lodge also had several “nonpaying” guests on the grounds, a group of groundhogs! They were absolutely adorable and would bake for hours on the rocks outside the lodge. Beautiful views, friendly furry locals, good food, and comfortable accommodations – who could ask for more? But, there was more – wonderful game drives into the bush around Tsavo!

We didn’t see any big cats at Tsavo,   but we saw plenty of zebras and antelope, and the area itself had many beautiful vistas through the valley. I don’t think the zebras think much of the tourists – they have a favorite position for photographs – they turn so you get a nice view of their back ends.
On one of the game drives from the lodge we traveled up into the hills to a spring. Though the sign at the entry reminded all exactly how “wild” the area was, it was a beautiful, peaceful oasis, home to several hippos and monkeys.

Traveling by minibus through Tsavo, and then across the country side to Amboseli we stopped at a check point going out of one of the game reserves. That’s where I snapped the picture of the cute little guy on the right. He posed so beautifully for me, and I was so interested in him, I didn’t even notice until I got the pictures developed he was sitting on a gnu skull!

Oh – travel note: The roads in Kenya are HORRIBLE. Between the game reserves, they’re mostly dirt and washboard rough. My advice – if you can afford it Fly! Most of the bigger reserves have landing strips and planes that fly in on a regular basis.

Everyone went on a city tour here because we had an overnight on the ship before leaving on safari. It never seems to fail, one bus has to get stuck in a pothole somewhere along the way. The town is rundown looking, but people are very friendly.

The old fort still stands in Mombasa and is very interesting. The building walls contain an array of different colors, black, grey, cream, red, yellow, blue, and green. There were also beautiful views of the coast from the walls of the fort. Buildings from all different time periods in the fort’s history made exploration fascinating, and an exhibit showing the life of the fort in one of the newer buildings in the center tied them all together. Outside there are wonderful old streets to wander with interesting craft shops and a few little monkeys that are very adept at begging handouts from the tourists. The only thing I didn’t really like in Mombasa were the huge flying ant like bugs that come out at night – I hate bugs!

In fact the place is sooo seedy that the Captain requested everyone back on board at 5pm, well before dark, even though we didn’t sail until 9pm. The shopping sucks too – way overpriced!

We boarded the busses, several of us upset by the wake up calls, and headed for The Valley of the Kings. We stopped and had a photo op at a couple of scenic spots on the way. Finally arriving at Valley of the Kings, we are again informed that if we want to take a still camera in we would have to pay roughly $10 US, and if we wanted to take a video camera it was outrageous and we should reconsider. I paid the $10. The tombs are remarkable. The carvings and paintings are fantastic. The layout of the tombs in some cases is very complicated, and it’s not unusual for the archaeologist to think they’ve reached the end and discover another passage or set of chambers. The Egyptians really took their afterlives seriously!

After the resting place of Kings, we traveled to the Valley of the Queens. Unlike the Valley of the Kings which looks like nothing but sand, dirt and hillside and the tombs are cut and dug into the hills and ground, the main attraction in the Valley of the Queens is a temple dedicated to Queen Hatshepsut. The temple can be seen from quite a distance, and seems to be in a very lonely locations, surrounded by high cliff walls on almost three sides (this is also, unfortunately where the bus load of tourist was shot a couple years ago). From the temple there is a commanding view of the Nile River Valley. The temple is in fairly good condition and is filled with beautiful hieroglyphic most of which are painted, and there are several statues/pillars that bear the image of the Queen. The Egyptians never forgot the ceiling as an option for artistic expression, and the ceiling of the temple/tomb is painted to resemble the night sky, in blue with gold stars. There were also tombs in the Valley of the Kings that were painted similarly. As for shopping ops, both Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens has its share of make shift stores, and wandering salesmen. Things are cheap, and bargain hard – nothing here is valuable.

We returned to the rendezvous point in Luxor to meet up with the other 15 busses for our 3+ hour trip back to the ship. After returning to our rendezvous point we sat and waited approximately 3 hours before Egyptian security decided they wanted to leave (in otherwords we left 3 hours LATE). At first they tried to blame 2 passengers that they said were late coming back to another bus, we eventually found out that that was false. What it boiled down to was our escort didn’t feel like leaving yet…(”Egyptian efficiency” is an oxymoron). We were approximately 3 1/2 hours late returning to the ship (one of the busses brokedown on the way back), and the ship (especially Captain Erik) was very happy and relieved to see us. They had expected us hours earlier and had no way to find out where we were because communications within Egypt are horrible…

Both Luxor and Karnack were dedicated to Amun-Ra, and once a year the statue of Amun-Ra kept at Karnack was paraded down the Avenue of the Sphinx (the broad avenue lined by stone sphinxes that connected the two temples) to Luxor temple, where the priests gathered only the most beautiful and worthy virgins to commune with Amun-Ra, and the citizens brought wine and food and gifts for the God… Needless to say the Priests helped Amun-Ra out a bit and lived like kings and partied like rock stars for the duration of the festival.

Luxor, unlike Karnack, was “reused” in later centuries and the remains of a Muslim temple can be seen at the top of the ruins in the center of the complex. It’s also a very good illustration of how much the ground level has changed over the millenia, both temples, as evidenced by the height of the more recent building at Luxor, were almost completely buried by the shifting sands. Like the Pyramids, there are several theories as to how the temples and their massive walls, columns and statues were built. The most common is that they were built a level at a time, as one level was completed it was filled in with sand and then the next layer was built. After all the layers had been completed they dug out the temple by removing all the sand. No matter how they didn’t, the sheer scale is impressive. The one thing that amazed me the most about all the temples and tombs (except for the Great Pyramids) are the heirogliphic carvings – they’re everywhere! The must have been the ancient Egyptian equivalent of “wallpaper”. Practically every inch of wall and column is solid with them. Not only were they carved, but they were painted after they were carved. Some tell stories, some are just for decoration. There must of been hundreds of people who spent every waking minute of their lives carving and painting. After Luxor we proceeded to Karnack Temple, a huge compound of numerous smaller temples, most dedicated to Amun-Ra or his wife. Several sites within in the temple show up frequently in movies, one of the most famous being an entire room that is filled with huge columns that are shaped like leaves at the top. It’s forest of stone pillars. Throughout Karnack there are thousands of interesting heirogliphics (including some dipicting some rather “over-endowed” male characters). My favorite aspect of this temple was the huge swimming pool! I’m beginning to think the priests had a better life than the Pharoh’s, if not they were a close second. Parties, orgies, free food, their own personal swimming pool, feared and adored by everybody, and none of that defending your throne stuff – not bad.

After our tour of Karnack we returned to the hotel for dinner, complete with an Egyptian Bellydancer who of course made other people in the audience join in. There’s nothing like seeing an elderly gentleman with a fairly wellrounded middle try to belly dance (if only he’d brought his speedos from the ship)… Now that’s entertainment!
Returning to my hotel room I amused myself with CNN, and chasing an unwelcome roommate – a very noisy mosquite. I never did catch her, but she managed to nail me twice!

As we got closer to Luxor and the Nile River Valley towns appeared along the banks of small rivers/canals that we started seeing. It became an intersting drive at that point. My favorite site was the water buffal grazing under the laundry. Arriving in Luxor, on the banks of the Nile we settled into our hotels.

Luxor is an odd mix of luxury hotel barges tied up next to the banks, with dumpy boats rafting to them; luxury hotels fronted by muddy semi-paved roads being used by both cars and horse drawn buggies, and next to half built hotels abandoned for a decade at a time. It seems that in Egypt you get funding to start a hotel, apartment building or office building and you start building usually running out of money 1/2 of the way through. The building stands unfinished until you manage to raise the funds to finish it which can often take anywhere from 10 years to never. This leaves a very odd mix of buildings, some done, some not.

While the hotel that I was at was very nice, what I had hoped was an anomoly in Cairo (the rude Egyptians) wasn’t. The same attitude prevailed here. It was very dissapointing. Rude, brusk manners, absolutely no courtesy or respect to anyone who wasn’t Egytpian, and a complete attitude of “Give us your money and get out.” There is one site in Egypt I haven’t seen yet, Abu Simbel, and I’m not sure I want to see it since I would have to deal with Egyptians again – they were that insulting. To top it off – there were a couple of crusty old British ladies at the dinner buffet at the hotel that cut in front of everybody in line because ‘They had been there for a week and weren’t going to wait because they were special.’

Starting early in the morning the transit took around 12 hours total, because like most Canals it’s one way traffic, so at some point in time the traffic going your direction has to pull over and let the opposing traffic by. We were probably stopped for most of the afternoon at the holding area midway through the passage. There were several very nasty, crabby old ladies on board that amazed me – they were actually angry because the brochure said a “daytime transit” and we didn’t finish the transit until late evening. I guess they expected the Canal officials to stop all ships, and reroute traffic so we could finish our transit by sundown. While one reason I love cruising is meeting people, I could definately do without people like the nasty little old biddies mentioned above.

As far as I’m concerned, Twilight was the best part of the whole transit. We were getting toward the southern part of the Canal and there were some towns along the shores. As the sun went down all the Prayer Towers lit up in neon – it was great! One site that was interesting during the day was the memorial to the War over the Sinai – It was a giant statue of a bayonet.

On our three plus hour drive to Petra we stop at Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum is notable because it was featured in the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” It’s the place where he comes out of the desert. It was a nice little place to take a break, and a few people participated in a brief jeep tour out to see the well where most of the scene was shot. By the little cafe at Wadi Rum was an interesting display of sorts showing how the bedouins live. Proceeding on we reach the town where the ruins of Petra lay hidden. But before we venture to the ruins we have lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel. A small hotel with a very pleasant staff and a very unique view of the rock formations in this area. It’s built practically against them. They look almost like they were made by someone blowing bubbles.

The hotel is also very convenient to Petra. You can walk to the entrance, it’s maybe 300 yards. Once you pass through the gates into Petra you still have about a mile to walk – going in it’s downhill… There are enterprising boys and young men with small horses that for a small fee (and a quick grab if you’re female) will let you ride down to the beginning of the siq, however they are not allowed to take you into the siq. From the entrance of the siq it is still probably a third of a mile walk – downhill, to get to the ruins. Once you enter the siq, it’s shady, quiet, and there are some remarkable sites; old alters and carvings, trees growing out of the rocks half way up the walls, and beautiful layers of color. It’s a pleasant walk.

When you come around the final curve in the siq and see the most famous of the ruins, the Treasury, it’s almost magical. Don’t stop there! Keep walking all the way around to the ampitheater, it amazes me that all of this is carved into the rocks. You can almost imagine the caravans coming through Petra with their wares and the traders bargaining, it must have been a wonderful place to live.

When it’s time to head back up, you’ll probably be hot and tired, so I would suggest hiring a horse once you get out of the siq, however – ladies be warned, the boys will definately put hands where they shouldn’t. It’s the only instance of rude behavior I encountered in Jordan. The Jordanians as a rule where wonderful, charming and gracious (the Egyptians could learn a thing or two from them). If you want to pick up a souvenier or two you have a couple of choices, the peddlers down at the ruins, or there are several stalls at the entrance by the hotel, all reasonably priced.

After leaving Petra we headed back for the ship, on the way our bus driver stopped at a lookout point that had an incredible view of the sunset. It was a perfect way to finish an enjoyable day.