Visiting Giza Pyramids

One of the problems of being a young moose is the fact that you can't just go anywhere you want on your own. But Maryanne is pretty nice about taking me places. The other day we went to see the big pyramids here in Giza...really, really big pyramids. These things are the biggest piles of rocks I've ever seen. They are pretty interesting too. So many people come here to see them.

There are signs everywhere to say not to climb on the pyramids, but lots of the visitors climb on them a little bit. The rocks are so huge that kids need a grown up to help them get up and down on them. But to find these big rocks is so cool, who can resist climbing on them? Even grown ups climb up on them and some of them act pretty silly up there too. You can go inside the pyramids, at least some of them, but the tunnels inside are small and crowded. They aren't too bad for kids and a small moose, but most of the grown ups come out groaning about backs and legs and stuffy air.

Almost everywhere you look at the pyramids there are people selling interesting things like little statues of people with animal heads on them. Maryanne said that they were statues of the old Egyptian gods and goddesses. I don't know much about that but they were kind of fun to look at and the guys selling them really seemed to want me to have one or two of them. I didn't think that it was very nice that Maryanne didn't want to buy them for me. I could have come home with a car full of people with animal heads, post cards, and other stuff. Not fair if you ask me.
Other guys had lots of pretty pyramids in different colours and then there were the guys who offered camel and horse rides. There is so much going on at the pyramids that it's almost like a carnival. That's what Maryanne kept saying too. "This place is such a circus!"

The pyramids are really, really, really old. I think that they are about 7 or 8 thousand years old. I can't figure out how old that really is but they are older than most of the things that we saw when we went on our Nile cruise. Apparently, it was like the grandfather or great grandfather of the pharoah who made the biggest pyramid who invented pyramids in the first place and built one in Dahshur called the Red Pyramid. So these aren't the first pyramids but they are the biggest.

Visiting pyramids is fun. There are so many people running around, kids coming up to you saying "Hello. What is your name?" even though they don't seem to know what to answer if you ask what their name is. There are horses with people riding them, horses pulling carriages, camels with people riding, camels alone...maybe Maryanne is right and it really is some kind of circus.

Visiting Fishes in Sharm

Well, Sharm el Sheikh was pretty cool. We went to a big hotel next to the ocean and sat around in the sun for a morning. The hotel had a huge swimming pool but I forgot my bathing suit and no one was sure if a moose was allowed in the pool. The people were saying that this is a real vacation place. As far as I can see that means that no one here goes for long walks in temples or tombs or anything. A lot of people were just lying around in the sun and sleeping.

Some people were in the water playing and then someone who works for the hotel came and started some music so that the guests who wanted something to do could play some games and do some exercises. It was pretty interesting to watch but looked like you could get pretty tired. They jumped up and down in the water a lot. I guess that my people weren't bored because they drank coffee and ate ice cream instead. A lot of the guests in the hotel were from France but also a lot of them were from someplace that Maryanne called the Gulf. I haven't seen the Gulf before but I heard of France.

While everyone was watching the people bouncing in the swimming pool, I was looking around to see what else interesting was going on. All of a sudden I saw this guy on a big white horse come walking by the pool. Well, I thought, maybe the horse is going swimming. If horses can go swimming, then maybe a moose can too. But it turned out that the horse didn't go swimming. The man was nice though. He works for the hotel and it turned out that Maryanne knew him. They have horses there that people can ride so he let me sit on the horse for a picture. Maryanne said she didn't see why she would pay to ride a horse when she can do it for free at home. Oh well.

One of the things that people do in Sharm el Sheikh is to look at fish. We went to the shop for people who want to look at fish or go to the mountains to see what sort of fun things we could do. Some people wanted to go to see a place in the mountains called St. Catherines. It's a monastery where monks live. They had to explain that monks are nothing like monkeys..if they were it would be much more fun. But it didn't matter because the monastery was closed and we couldn't go anyway. Everyone thought it would be too cold to go swimming to see the fish, even though I thought that I looked pretty good in the mask to see fish with. So instead, the next day we went on a boat with a window in the bottom. Everyone said not to worry because no one was going to open the window while we were in the boat.

The next morning we went down to the beach and there was a boat tied to a dock. We got into the boat and there it was...the window in the bottom of the boat. Wow! It was very cool. While we waited for everyone to come to take a ride on the boat, we looked at fish that were swimming by the beach. Fish are really amazing. They slide around the water very gently and then flash! They are gone. The fish in Sharm are beautiful colours. Some of them are blues and greens and yellows, every different shape and size and pattern. Stripes, squares, big spots, fish with long fins, fish that are big and small...everything.

After a while the boat started moving and we very slowly went around the water in the bay looking through the window at the fish and at things that looked a lot like plants growing in the water. The plant things are called corals and they come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and colours. The fish seem to like to live near them and some of the small ones even seem to hide in the corals. It was really fun to look at the fish and the corals. I hoped that maybe we would see a shark or a whale but the fish weren't all that big. There were some fish that looked like Nemo in the movie though.

One of the people on the boat with us wanted to go swimming with the fish and the boat stopped by some corals so that he could swim. The rest of us just sat around on the boat and bobbed up and down for a while. The sun was warm and the breeze was nice so I decided that sitting on boats is a good thing to do. This boat wasn't nearly as big as the Nile boat, but I think boats are a good idea. It was much better on the boat than it was on shore because unless someone has planted something green in Sharm el Sheikh, it's all rocks and sand.

Later that day we sat on the balcony at the room of the hotel and watched all the boats coming back from visiting fish out at sea. A lot of people in Sharm go out in these boats all day long and they jump in the water to visit fish. It sounds kind of strange to me. They could just look through the bottom of the window boat.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

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.