Seeing The Big Places

After lunch we all went out of the boat to get on a bus to go see two very big temples. The first temple was called the Temple of Karnak and it really was big. There were statues of lions with sheep heads on them in front of the front wall of the temple. Apparently in Egypt when something has a lion body and some other head, it's called a sphinx. So these were called ram's-headed sphinx statues. If it has a person's head, it's just called a sphinx. I wonder what they'd call it if it had a moose's head....

Once we went through the front gate, there was a big empty space with some very large statues and columns. One of the statues looked like it had feathers coming out of its head, but that might have been because it had a palm tree just behind it. Maryanne has been telling the other people we are traveling with that they should wait to see the temples in Luxor because the other temples really were not as amazing. Well, I guess that she was right. Everywhere we looked there were groups of people listening to guides in a million different languages, taking pictures and getting sore necks trying to see the tops of all of the very tall things in Karnak.

After the huge empty space, we went into something the guide called a hypostyle hall. At first, I thought he said hippostyle hall and I was pretty excited that we were going to see some hippos, but there aren't any hippopotamuses in Egypt anymore. If the last space was very empty, this hall was very full. There were hundreds of huge columns in the space, and people with cameras everywhere. The room was almost like a giant forest filled with enormous trees and tiny little people. Just the sort of place that a moose would really like. The guide man said that there are 134 columns in the room and that at one time it was very dark, having a roof of very large stone blocks on top of the columns. There was a lot of time to build such big things because they say that the kings were building in this place for over two thousand years. I wonder how they could remember what it was that they were building.

We walked all over the place at Karnak. There are so many broken buildings there. I wonder how people know what they all are. The guide man said that people learned to read the pictures that are carved on the columns and walls. I guess that the old Egyptians used the pictures to carve their names on the buildings. One of the things that they built in Karnak was a very pretty swimming pool, but I never saw anyone swimming there.

After a while we found our bus again and we went to another temple in the same town. This temple was called Luxor Temple and one of the things that I liked about it was that there were places where I could sit and rest. I sat on one king's lap. They said that he was a strange king called Akhenaton but that he made this statue before he changed his name to that. This temple had been covered in sand and mud for a long time and the people forgot that it was there so they built a mosque and a church on top of it. When they dug the temple up, the church and the mosque were left way up in the air. Now people in the mosque are over the old temple. Very strange.

There were a lot of statues of the old Egyptian kings in this temple. One of the kind of cool things was the fact that they would put statues of their children with them. I got a picture of myself next to one of the girls. She was very pretty.
After all of our traveling around, this was the last day on the boat. We were going back to have dinner and sleep and then in the morning we were going to fly to a place called Sharm el Sheikh. Maryanne says that this is a holiday place on the Red Sea and that I would see fish there. I wonder if the sea is really red like the sky was the last night in Luxor.

A Morning In Luxor

This morning I woke up early, looked out of the window, and saw the most amazing thing. Huge balloons were floating up from the green fields across the river into the sky. Maryanne said that people ride in baskets under these balloons to see the river and Luxor from up in the air. I think that is really cool.

After breakfast we got on a bus and went over a bridge across the Nile. We were going to a place called the Valley of The Kings. At first, it didn't look like much, mostly a lot of white rock and sand. But then we went into some tunnels that had been cut into the hillsides. Inside were some beautiful paintings of people eating things, talking together and doing all sorts of things. There are rules that don't let people take pictures of the tunnels so Maryanne couldn't take any. The tunnels are called tombs and the guide said that Egyptian kings a long time ago decorated the tunnels and left statues inside so that they would have company when they were dead.
There were lots and lots of people there waiting to go into all the tunnels. We only saw three of them because we had to see a lot of other things that day. To get all the people in and out of the valley they used little trains.They were pretty nice because all that walking made everyone pretty tired even though they all kept saying how good it was that it wasn't very hot. But we still had another valley to visit and another temple or two. There were many buses waiting for all the people at the Valley of the Kings and it wasn't so easy to find ours but we did eventually and we left to see a temple for a queen called Hatshepsut. She made herself the king of Egypt for a long time and even wore a fake beard. She made a special place for herself next to the cliffs.

This was a really big temple and we climbed three sets of stairs to see all of it. One of the amazing things in these places was how many people there were from everywhere in the world. People everywhere. There were all sorts of drawings and carvings on the walls here. Some of them showed the lady king doing things, but more showed the people who worked for her. They say that the king who came after her didn't like her much and he took all her pictures away. One of the guards helped me out by carrying me around for a while because I was getting tired of looking at so many columns and walls and things. We went back to the bus again and went to another place, the Valley of the Queens, where there were more tunnels but the pictures weren't nearly as nice as in the Valley of the Kings. By this time we were getting pretty hungry and tired, so we were very happy to see the last place for the morning.

The guide called these two statues The Colossi of Memnon. They were very, very big statues of men who were pretty broken. The guide said that once long ago the statues used to make a sound in the morning when the sun warmed up the stone, but sometime ago they fixed the statues and they don't make the noise anymore. We looked around at the statues and the area around them where people are trying to understand what had been built around the statues. But we were glad to go to have lunch.

Sailing North

The second day of sailing was more quiet than the first one had been. We didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to catch an airplane like the day before, we just got to wake up and eat breakfast and then watch the boat sail down the river to a place called Edfu. The people on the boat gave us a lot to eat and it was really nice food too, so everyone had a good breakfast. When we went back to the room, the cleaners had made a pretty flower out of a towel from the bathroom and left it on the bed. Then we went up to the top deck where the sun was finally getting to be stronger than the cold winds. I tried out the deck chairs around the swimming pool. They were pretty comfortable but there was nothing to watch since the people seemed to think that it was too cold for swimming. A moose would think that the temperature was perfect, but Maryanne told me not to get wet.

Since I wasn’t allowed to go swimming, we explored the boat a bit. I checked out the safety rings that they hang up around the boat in case someone is silly and falls into the water. I think that they are a little big for a small moose. I decided that it would be a good idea not to fall into the river. We looked all over the boat to see what there was. They had a couple of places where you could sit inside to watch the river and there was a shop where you could buy things from Egypt. I tried on a hat and thought that it was pretty cool, but Maryanne pointed out that we were always seeing people wanting to sell us things from Egypt so there was no reason to buy something right now.
We sailed past places where the valley was so narrow that we could see the desert just beyond the green palm trees and fields. There were parts of the river where it looked like the water had dried a bit to leave grass for cows and sheep to eat along the banks. At one spot, some children were playing on a sandbar in the middle of the river while their fathers fished in boats nearby. We weren’t the only big boats on the river. Others were sailing along by us and sometimes we could see the people sitting around on their top decks like we were. There were quite a few kids playing in the sun. It looked like they were having a good time.

In Edfu we left the boat and we went to the street where a lot of horses and carriages were waiting. We took one of the carriages and we rode to another temple where we saw a huge place. The walls were so tall it was amazing. The guide man told us that most of this temple had been buried under lots of sand for thousands of years and that the sand had protected it from being taken apart. The temple was for an Egyptian god called Horus who was in the shape of a falcon. There were carvings of men in Horus masks all over the walls of the temple and in one place we saw one where a little sparrow was sitting in the belly button of the Horus man. I guess that this is a bird temple for sure.

Later we went back to the boat and sailed some more. We went by many green fields of tall grass that people said were sugar cane. They said that people cut it down, smash it to get the juice out and then boil the juice to get sugar. I thought that was pretty interesting since sugar is white and powdery. In other places we saw the villages against the rocky cliffs of the desert. Some of the houses were the same colour as the desert and others were painted bright colours like blue and yellow. Many of them are made of mud brick because it keeps the house cool and is cheap. In some places they call these kinds of bricks adobe. It’s ok to make mud bricks here because it almost never rains to make the bricks melt.

Just about the time that the sun was setting we came to a place called Esna where we had to wait for the ship to have its turn to go through something called a lock. They said that in the old days there had been a narrow place in the river there where the the river dropped down and that it had been hard for boats to pass so the people made a special small lake with a passage so that a ship could go into a box, have water either put in or taken out to move up or down. There was a long time to wait for the ship to go through the locks, so I went to bed because the next day we would be in Luxor and I had to get up early.

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.