Egypt

I spent the morning of my 30th birthday in a rock cut temple built in the 13th century B.C. There’s nothing to make you contemplate your existence like gazing at ancient graffiti in the even ancient-er Speos of Horemheb. In Read More

Although we have traveled quite a bit during our almost-three years in Cyprus, the vast majority of our trips have been long weekends– dip in, dip out, sometimes hurriedly. We’ve taken longer trips to Scotland/Ireland, the Christmas Roadtrip, and of Read More

The circles in the text below are cartouches, which mean they are the names of the pharaoh. Many of them were left blank at Edfu because there were many successive pharaohs during the tumultuous Ptolemaic period– they didn’t want to Read More

Our second stop of our first full day on the Nile was the Temple of Horus at Edfu. It was built during the Ptolemaic period, which means it is a young relative to many of the sites we saw in Read More

After we finished touring the tombs, we headed back down the hill toward massive these massive brick defensive walls, which are relatively young (only 4th century B.C.) Surely carving sandstone with magnificent hieroglyphs is an amazing feat, but there was Read More

It’s amazing the speed with which the lush-green farmland irrigated by the Nile gives way to nothing but sand and rocks. This modest hillside, completely overlooked by most tourists’ itineraries, is home to several 3,500 year old rock-cut tombs. These Read More

Sleeping on the boat wasn’t as bad as I expected. It helped that (1) I had unintentionally guilted the owner into a free upgrade (for which I felt slightly guilty for most of the trip) and (2) I had taken Read More

I have to admit, it was somewhat hard to enjoy our visit to Esna because I was ready to get the show on the road and see where we’d be staying for the next five days (and who we’d be Read More