Da Moose Goes Cruising

The farm here in Egypt is pretty interesting. Maryanne (she’s the lady who lives here and like me, she used to live in Canada) has horses, dogs, donkeys, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, a mule, a water buffalo, some parrots, and now me, Da Moose. I think that she really likes animals. One of the horses is a little girl named Shams. Her mom got sick when she was born and the people have been feeding her milk from a bottle. She seems to think that she is a dog and plays with the dogs all day. Her mom is ok now, but Shams really likes the dogs.

You might think that life on a farm in Egypt is very boring, but lots of things happen here and there are lots of things to do. All kinds of people visit Maryanne. Some of them come to ride the horses, and some of them just come to visit. Just a week or so ago, some old friends came to visit Maryanne from the United States and she took me on a holiday with them to visit other parts of Egypt. It was so much fun. We went by airplane to Aswan where we got on a boat. We travelled by boat from Aswan, in the south of Egypt to Luxor, another city in the south of Egypt. We stopped every so often to see some of the interesting things along the way. The boat was really nice. It had a restaurant for meals and a bedroom with a window that we could look out at the river from. The river is called the Nile and it is really big.

In Aswan we went to a place where a very long time ago the Egyptians used to cut huge pieces of stone for tall towers. It seems like a strange thing to do, if you ask me because they had to cut the stone with very simple tools and it was a lot of work, but they say that they liked doing it. When I think about all the big, big pieces of stone that I saw in the buildings on our visits, it must be true. When we started the trip, it was still very wintery and cold (not for Canada, but for Egypt) and everyone was wearing sweaters. At the stone cutting place the sun was shining pretty strongly and one of the guards had fallen asleep in the shade of a stone. I decided to see if taking a nap on a rock was nice. The sun was ok, but the rock wasn’t very soft.

From the rock cutting place we went to the Aswan High Dam. This is a very high wall that the Egyptians built a long time ago to keep water from covering up the valley every year. Now all the water stays behind the dam and they just let enough out to take care of the farmers and the people who need water. Two of Maryanne’s friends had to hold my hands when we were sitting on the wall because it was so windy we were afraid I might fall.

I also looked at a picture that showed how the dam was put together and how they let the water out. There was so much water behind the dam that it looked like an ocean with islands in it. They say that there are very big fish there and even crocodiles but I didn’t see any.


From the Aswan Dam we went to a place where there are boats that we got to ride to an island called Philae. Philae was pretty interesting. It had something they called a temple that was built a couple of thousand years ago. That’s so long that it almost doesn’t make sense to me. There are very large walls there, but the man who was telling us all about the places said that they weren’t nearly as big as some other temple places’ walls. They were covered with pictures of very tall people wearing funny hats that everyone called crowns, and sometimes the people had animal masks on.

Visiting the temple was very warm work, climbing around the big, big stones and looking at all the pictures of the tall people. We went to find some water to drink and there was a dancing camel that the water man introduced me to. The camel danced a little for me and everyone laughed and enjoyed it. I was happy to make a new friend.

After Philae we got back in the bus and we all went back to the boat to sail down the river a while to a place called Kom Ombo where there was another temple for Maryanne and her friends to see. But they saw the temple there at night and it was past my bedtime so I didn’t see it. But the river was very pretty with the sail boats and the other small boats travelling up and down.