[2019]
[2019]
OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS
9175 Egypt Cruise -- 1990
For our holiday in 1990, we went to Egypt. Many people are horrified by the poverty there but, having been to Ethiopia, I was able to understand the situation and put it into context the poverty. Our holiday was to be a cruise down the Nile, followed by a week based in Luxor. Accordingly, we flew to Luxor and boarded our cruise ship there. It was quite luxurious. Our cabin had ensuite facilities; and the lounges and dining room were excellent.
Best of all, sheltered from the sun, I was able to sit at a table on the upper deck and watch the world, or at least the banks of the Nile, go by. I was fascinated by the farming and the village life that we passed, and found this a superb way of taking a holiday. To hand I had binoculars to watch what was happening on the banks, with still and movie cameras to film what I found there. Most important of all, I had my writing -- as usual I was doing a final revision of one of my books. All of this, and service with a coffee or cold drink whenever I wanted, was the best way to travel.
On the other hand, Pat was bored and spent most of the time in our cabin.
Of course this was, in reality, just a luxurious means of transporting us between the various temples that we visited.
These were superb, but ultimately proved rather forgettable as individual entities. The Egyptian dynasties lasted for several thousand years -- but over that time they barely changed at all; and, being cynical about it, the temples soon came to look to us just like each other.
Even so, by repeated exposure to the millennia-long culture, we gradually learned -- largely by this repetition -- the various facts about the Egyptian deities and the cycle of life.
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