Brandan and Becky attended the University of Utah in the 1990s. Our favorite instructor at the LDS Institute of Religion was Michael Wilcox. He led tours of the Holy Land and we thought it would be wonderful to sign up for one of his tours and experience his lyrical, personal teaching style as we visited sacred sites in Israel. Around 2016, we got serious about our dream and investigated joining a tour. Michael Wilcox's tours are enormously popular and we weren't able to actually reserve spots until 2019 when we registered for a spring break tour of Egypt, Jordan and Israel scheduled for 2021. Then covid happened and all tours were canceled for 2020 and 2021. We got a phone call from the tour company in January of 2022, right in the middle of another covid surge, telling us they were planning on going ahead with tours in the spring of 2022. Fingers crossed, we agreed to the 17 day tour from March 29-April 14. Some covid restrictions remained in place so we were unable to visit Jordan and spent all of our time in Egypt and Israel. The tour exceeded our expectations, and after so many years planning for this trip, we had a lot of expectations. We took thousands of photos, far too many to post on a blog. We will post a few photos from each day to capture the essence of our trip.
It took 2 days to get to Egypt and those days do not merit their own post. This is a photo of our layover at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. From the left are Emma, Sofi, Helen and Gibson. Becky is walking towards the others. We flew from Medford to Salt Lake City to Atlanta to Paris to Cairo. Sofi and Emma met us in Salt Lake City and we traveled the rest of the way together.
The airport had an old fashioned arcade.
We landed in Cairo just before midnight on March 30. Most airports look about the same, but we'd never been in an airport with Arabic signs before.
Our tour started slowly on April 1, giving us a chance to sleep in and for travelers who arranged their own flights to catch up with the tour. Brandan and Becky decided to take advantage of a free morning to explore the area of Cairo around our hotel on our own.
We saw lots of shops selling fruit. We couldn't read the signs, but the blocks around our hotel seemed to have shops on the ground floor and apartments above.
We saw lots of buildings that were the same size and shape. Traffic seemed a little chaotic. There weren't any lanes painted on the street and we watched traffic contract and expand from 3 lanes to 6 depending on the decisions of the drivers. Pedestrians, including us, crossed the road whenever it seemed safe. In the whole time we were in Egypt, we only saw 2 or 3 traffic signals which were all located in the area of Cairo near the embassies. Every person we met was friendly and said "hello" and "welcome" to us in English.
Our first tour experience was touring the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. A note about masks: we wore KN-95 masks whenever we were indoors or in crowds. We needed negative covid tests in order to tour Israel and to return home to the US. The defining exhibit of this museum is a display of 22 mummies of pharaohs and queens found in the Valley of the Kings. Besides the mummies, the museum displays artifacts from prehistoric Egypt until the 1900s. The museum was a good reminder that Egypt's history is more than the 3000 years we associate with Egyptian civilization.
We couldn't take photos of the mummies, but here are some photos of a few items from the museum. This is a statue of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who wanted to make Egypt monotheistic, worshipping only the sun. This was too big a switch for a culture that worshipped 300 main gods, plus all of the gods' friends and relations. When Akhenaten died in 1334 BC, the priests smashed up all his statues, cut the face off his sarcophagus so his soul wouldn't be able to find his body and brought back the old gods.
Egyptians were extraordinary builders and scientists and we were intrigued by this compass and square, tools still used by builders everywhere today.
This case displayed ordinary baskets. It was easy to imagine Moses being hidden away in a basket like this one.
It turns out one of Egypt's oldest gods is a cow named Hathor. We saw representations of cows and women with cow heads everywhere. It might have seemed random that the children of Israel chose to build a golden calf of all things, but they were just choosing one of the fake gods of Egypt. In Egypt, being called cow-eyed is a compliment and means you are beautiful.
This case shows examples of Bedouin clothing and jewelry. Bedouins are nomads who live across the middle east.
This richly embroidered cloth is part of a ritual that is huge to millions of people in the world, but which we had never heard of before. The holiest city to Muslims is Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In the center of Mecca is a black cube called the Kaaba. Muslims believe the Kaaba was built by Abraham and Ishmael. Even before Mohammed founded the religion of Islam, polytheistic tribes set idols on the Kaaba and worshipped there. Mohammed smashed all the idols when he proclaimed Allah was the only god. The Kaaba is covered with an ornate cloth called the kiswah. Every year Egypt makes a new kiswah which is taken on a pilgrimage to Mecca to replace the old cloth. It takes all year to produce the new cloth. This is a photo of part of a kiswah. When the kiswah is removed from the Kaaba, it is cleaned and then distributed to museums or given as gifts. It costs $4.5 million dollars to make one kiswah.
We had a free afternoon after our visit to the museum and Brandan and Becky spent our time by the hotel pool, enjoying the afternoon breezes. We didn't realize this would be our last chance to catch our breath for a few days as the tour sped up.
We enjoyed dinner at an Egyptian restaurant at the hotel. We tried about a dozen delicious dishes, warm pita bread and fresh mango and guava juice.
This is Gibson's grilled chicken and vegetables which came to the table on a grill over hot coals.
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