I’m back from 8 days in Egypt – trying hard to visit only those places that few ever do. Indeed we didn’t see more than a handful of tourists except at a few sites. It was a hard trip, in part because we did it all ourselves (not one thing was arranged by another or in advance) and in part because it’s Egypt. I’d like, in the coming days, to comment on various features of Egypt that will never make it into any future publication or lecture. I ‘ll save the technical details of the sites visited for the revised edition of the Egypt CD (whenever that might be), but observations of the culture and interesting photos will go here. Lord willing. I feel like I have a million and two things to do. This could perhaps be a way to relax. A few quick numbers to end this initial Egypt post. We traveled upwards of 1900 miles, visited about 20 sites, and I took over 1500 photos. The days were short (10 hours of light), but we were usually on the move about 16 hours a day. We missed about one site a day from the intended itinerary, because the days were short and the travel long. The photo here shows Andrei and me in front of the Temple of Horus at Edfu. True, this is a site that many tourists visit, but I hadn’t seen it yet because I’d not been on a Nile cruise which is how most get to Edfu. This is the best preserved temple in all of Egypt – pharaonic in style but Ptolemaic in date.
