I Like King Tut…

…and I cannot lie.  (Note: this opening was rated highest among all candidates for today’s post.  Read into that what you will.)

I’m lying here in the lower bunk on a sleeper train to Aswan.  We have a tidy, cozy, private cabin in a car with the rest of our tour buddies.  The bed is reasonably comfortable and the gentle rocking and swaying is soothing and should be conducive to sleep.  Unfortunately, the sudden stops and lurching are not.  We’ll see how the night plays out, but right now we’re sitting at about 50-50 sway vs. lurch.  We were served dinner as soon as we boarded (right).
Today was the first day of our Gap adventure and we really packed a lot in with a trip to the pyramids in Giza and the afternoon at the Egyptian Museum.  The museum is amazing.  It would take a week to really explore it in depth, but we crammed our visit into three hours.  Thankfully our guide Michael is very knowledgeable and took us to the most important exhibits, explaining each one in detail as we saw them.

The remnants of King Tut’s tomb were fascinating.  The museum holds everything except the mummy itself (that’s at the tomb in Luxor).  King Tut’s famous mask is the highlight of the exhibit.  It was very, very cool to see such a recognizable artifact in real life.  We also strolled through the room containing the mummies of some of Egypt’s most famous kings.  It was well worth the 100 Egyptian Pounds to see the spectacularly well-preserved remains of all of the kings, especially Ramses II, right down to his shock of wavy white hair.

The pyramids and the Sphinx were also very impressive.  Lying on the edge of the dusty Cairo suburb of Giza, the pyramids stand as majestic and proud now as they have for thousands of years.  I was blown away by their sheer size in real life, with the natural, “How’d they do that??” rolling through my engineer brain.  We took the opportunity to enter the smallest of the three pyramids—a claustrophobic trip downward through a long tunnel to the tomb chamber below the ground level.  The chamber itself is uninspiring, but the trip down was well worth the price of admission.  I’m just glad we took the trip in the middle of winter and not on a hot, sweltering summer day.
The train has switched back from lurching to swaying, so I’m going to take a stab at sleep.  Until next time…