World Tour

The air is warm and very humid, the shaft unbelievably steep. Even with the modern wooden stair case the decent is difficult. At the bottom we enter into a large carved out room, to the left a sarcophagus, to the right a wall covered with hieroglyphs.

I love Egypt.

Since starting work for contiki I’d dreamed of being given an Ultimate European, the longest concept tour the company offers, and second tour up this year here it is. It means that I get to cross off five things from my before 30 list in one hit, while getting paid.

The twenty two clients I took with me were mostly ready for it, I’d spent the first half of our tour preping the guys and girls for the pace we would be going at in Egypt. Six days four cities, seven excursions, including Abu Simbel the highlight of our trip.

Day 1 – Cairo

We awake to find the temperature already in the mid 30s, the sky clear and our day  jammed full of things to do. our first stop the world famous cairo museaum, home to the greatest collection of egyptian artifacts. We stroll the floors of treasure, some of it showing the passage of time, and lack of care the early tomb explorers displayed.

While were were looking at egypts ancient past right next door to the muesum is egypts history in the making, the former home to the presidents political party stands a blackened burnt out shell. The protest of 25 jan 2011 having tourched the building multipul times. across the road from the museum the square is still occupied by a few hundred protesters.

As we drove away our guide Hanny told us that the burnt shell was to be left as a reminder to the politicians not to mess (F*ck was his words) with the people.

Smashing through the crazy Egyptian drivers we were soon confronted with large pointy stone things, also known as the Giza Pyramids. These monstrous man-made monuments dwarfed everything around them. Before we could go inside however we needed to ride us some mother-fucking-camels!

Noone has writen a ‘I’m on a Camel’ song but they should. It’s like riding a horse, only the horse has a bumpy back, makes funky noises and smells like farts.

To be continued….

You can see it from quite far away, a flag at the top blowing in the breeze. Honestly I found The Cathedral of Pisa to be more impressive but that said the most wildly known engineering f*ck up is by far the draw card. Around the base of non-vertical structure, known to the world as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, nearly every tourist was doing the ‘I’m holding it up’ or ‘ I’m pushing it over’ photo op. I’m talking kids, grandparents, mother, fathers, Europeans, Asians, Australians, everyone, except me. It’s not that I’m above it, I just simple don’t have the patients.

Taking a stroll around the ground the large, and fairly unknown Cathedral and Battistero that stand next to the leaning tower, it’s quickly clear that the tower itself was never meant to be the draw-card. The Cathedral is sunning, and the Battistero mammoth. Both include intricate sculptures and a beautiful coloured marble fronts.

At the end of the day though it is hard not to spend some time staring at the tower, it truly does lean. I remember watching a program a few years ago on what was done to stop it collapsing, the engineering that went into keeping it leaning were nearly as impressive as the fact that the damn thing hadn’t fallen over in the proceeding couple of hundred year since it started to sink on one side.

Once again I was stifled in my hopes to climb (15 euros) so I only got to enjoy the sights from the ground but it was well worth it.

GK Out.