.In December of 1990, there was a global fear of a regional war in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and was ignoring demands for withdrawal. There were fears the war would escalate well beyond the borders of Kuwait.
And that made it a perfect time to travel to Egypt. Tourism in the region had dropped to diddly squat the day Saddam rolled his tanks into Kuwait.
My mate, Doug, and I took started our end-of-year holidays from our job in Aleppo, Syria and flew into Cairo on Christmas Day. But Cairo was noisy, dusty and chaotic so we skipped the obligatory visit to the pyramids and caught a flight the next day to the ancient city of Thebes, modern-day Luxor. And it was blissful. Perfect coolish December weather and we had some of antiquity’s greatest sites all for ourselves. We had no problem booking a hotel on the east bank of the Nile where we could have evening cocktails while watching felucca’s sail off into the sunset. There was a bit of desperation among the locals who thrive on the tourist trade so we were surrounded with tourist guides and souvenir sellers wherever we went. But the Egyptians were fun and good natured. They’d never get a sale off us but we’d all depart after some laughs and smiles.
On our first full day in Luxor we took a ferry across the Nile to the west bank … where the ancient Egyptians buried their dead. Doug and I found some bikes and spent the day pedalling around the tourist-free Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. Having the bikes gave us freedom to drive around some of the back roads around the tombs and visit some villages and an alabaster factory.
On another day we checked out the east bank on the Nile where the ancients honoured the living. Luxor Temple. Karnak Temple. All marvellously restored with exaggerated grandeur. Prior to visiting Luxor, I only knew ancient Egypt from old slides I used to see in my grandfather’s study. He led tours to the Holy Land and Egypt but his fascination for the region never quite rubbed off on me as a child. All those pics of mummies and obelisks made it all seem a bit boring to me. But what a different experience to actually be there and to touch a column of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple or ferry cross the Nile like the ancients did with their dead. Doug and I immersed our brains with Egyptology and found it fascinating. We learned a lot in those few days and kept bouncing questions off each other. “Now who was the father of Mentuhotep II?”. “In which dynasty did Amenhotep IV rule?” It was all too much to learn the who’s who of ancient Egypt while walking amidst them. We never quite figured out the family tree but it was enthralling to know we were walking on the same ground as pharaohs did 5,000 years earlier.
After immersing ourselves in the ancient lives of Egypt we flew to Sharm El-Sheik to submerse ourselves in the Red Sea. Sharm is nestled at the southern tip of the Sinai and at the time was a sleepy resort town which attracted a few diehard divers. The Red Sea is widely regarded as one of the world’s best diving sites. But even then, even during a war, we could tell Sharm was on its way to become a major tourist site and future site of peace conferences, world economic forum and this COP27 later this year. The hotels were probably more full of construction workers than tourists. We spent a few days travelling out on dive boats to sites where you only had to go under about six metres to witness an underwater world better than any man-made aquarium. The shallow dives meant longer dives as the air in your tanks last longer. And what better way to escape a world at war than to plunge deep into the sea and surround yourself by a calm and stillness where the only sound is that of your breathing.
(All photos scanned from Kodachrome slides and restored in Adobe Lightroom)
