Hurghada, Alexandria and Memphis were my last three days schedule, I just put them together here. There was about 4 hours drive from Luxor to Hurghada, all the way north east to the Red Sea, there was almost nothing but desert, by the sunset we were at the hotel. The next day was totally free, we joined a tour on a not very new yacht for the Island of Paradise, on the way back, the yacht stopped for snorkeling.
Luxor or Thebes, the “world’s greatest open air museum”, was the ancient capital of Egypt. If there is a counterpart of a city in China, I would say Xi’an. Our local guide told me, any dig into the ground, you will find some antiques, private archaeological evacuation is totally forbidden!
Personally I would say Luxor is the most pretty city in Egypt, but it is also the hottest city, not only in the sense of tourists attraction, but in temperature as well, the last rain was 6 years ago.
Horus, the protector, was one of the oldest and most significant deities in the Ancient Egyptian religion.
I will go to Egypt again two days later, my second time to Egypt within a month! I will take more photos, and hopefully get up some more touch about this amazing country.
By the way, my site has reached its limit in space, as I was very reluctant to reduce my photo’s quality during the processing, the result… those photos have taken up too much space in the server, it seems I have to make a mass re-process in the coming weeks.
Come back with more and better photos.
Temple of Philae in the year of 1800.
The temple was built for Isis, the goddess of Love and Beauty, originally on a small island called Philae. With the completion of Aswan Low Dam in 1902, most part of the temple was submerged, from 1960 a UNESCO project was carried out in order to relocate the complex, more 40,000 pieces were reestablished in another island Agilkia, situated on higher ground some 500 meters away.
View Egypt in a larger map
We arrived in Cairo in an early flight (05:40 AM) on 29th of April. While everyone in Beijing said we have a late spring this year, no problem in Egypt, it was already in hot summer, hot but not humid. I cannot sleep during the flight, my head was still dizzy, we met our local Egyptian guide Yasser at the airport. This was my first time to have a local but not Chinese guide, who supposed to speak Chinese, after some chat with him (a little test), I found that his Chinese was just next to me… by 2 miles…
Yasser told me, he graduated from Cairo University, majored in Chinese, and his teachers were not Chinese but Egyptians as well, wow! He has been doing as a Chinese-speaking guide for some years, and I can see that he is very proud of his job, why not!
I was trying to make Philadelphia a separate part, but our short stay there makes it impossible.
We checked out from our hotel at New Jersey at 9 am, before lunch time, we found ourselves at the square where erected the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia is holy city in the sense of revolution, just like Yan’an in China, I saw many school kids were organized in group tour.
Our next destination is the eastern coast, there are still three more cities waiting for us: New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. The tour so far was very exciting except there were too much flying, and every flying takes averagely about 3-5 hours, I don’t know how, maybe our flight ticket is too cheap that there was no food on board.
This time I was wise, I went to a local supermarket and bought some cookies and a piece of nice sausage with me, but by the time of waiting at the L.A. airport, I had almost finished everything, even before the flight!
We didn’t visit much of Los Angeles, there was just a 10-minutes bus stop in the center of the city.
Our highlight of the day was in Universal Studios Hollywood, the theme park. For a long time, I didn’t visit such a place, though in Beijing, there are some places for this kind of adventure, anyway I just didn’t visit anyone of them.
Our schedule changed a little bit when we were on the way to Los Angeles, that is we were supposed to go to visit L.A. in the first day, then drive to San Diego on the second day, but as the second day was weekend, and the traffic was hard to predict, so we just made these 2 days plan flipped over.
