Middle East
6 adventures documented
EgyptThere is a part of our Middle East journey we never told at the time, the one moment of the whole trip we can explain only as the hand of God. It happened at the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, when John went suddenly faint and a priest named Father John appeared to pray over him, and it deepened into something we still cannot account for when we returned weeks later to give thanks.
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EgyptOur last full day in Egypt, in Cairo with our guide and friend Sam. The Egyptian Museum, the Rosetta Stone that unlocked the hieroglyphs, the Narmer Palette, and the treasures of Tutankhamun. Then the old Christian quarter of Coptic Cairo: the founding of the Coptic Church by St. Mark, the cave where the Holy Family sheltered, and the Hanging Church. A blessing from Father Jacob, a goodbye to Sam, and a story we have saved for its own telling.
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EgyptBack in Cairo after the cruise, we drove up to Alexandria, the Paris of antiquity, where Egyptian, Greek, and Roman worlds meet. Down in the catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, one of the Seven Wonders of the medieval world, the three cultures are carved into a single stone. Then Pompey's Pillar, and the old and new libraries of Alexandria.
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EgyptA day off the ship at Safaga, driven inland to Luxor, the ancient Thebes. The vast temple of Karnak with its avenue of rams and its Great Hypostyle Hall, the remarkable story of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, a boat across the Nile, and the painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings, where Janice walked the ledge into the burial chamber of Merneptah.
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EgyptSouth of Giza to an older Egypt: Saqqara, with the oldest stone building complex on earth. The climb down into the tomb of Teti and its Pyramid Texts, Djoser's step pyramid and its great colonnade, then Memphis, first capital of a united Egypt, and the open-air museum at Mit Rahina with its Alabaster Sphinx and the fallen colossus of Ramses the Great.
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EgyptInto Cairo and across the Nile to Giza, in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, with a night at the historic Mena House. Our guide Sam at the Giza necropolis, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, a camel ride on the sand, the Great Sphinx, and Sam's own account, as a Coptic Christian, of the long story of the Christians of Egypt.
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