The Land of the Nile!

We decided to save most of our time in Cairo for the end. Arriving in the middle of the night, we bought tickets first thing in the morning for a 12-hour sleeper train down to Aswan. To pass the day, we hit the Egyptian Museum thinking that surely guidebooks’ suggestion of two days there were exaggerated by at least 1.8 days…

As it turns out, the books were right. I thought the highlight was the Nemes Palette from 3100 BC, when Nemes joined upper and lower Egypt for the first time, UNTIL we made it to the second level. Two rooms house something like 15 mummies in varied conditions – generally Pharaohs and a few queens. The most interesting were probably *** with manicured black hair and *** who was clearly mangled from battle. Many died quite young, some from mysterious wasting diseases. *** was an exception, and you could tell you were looking a an old man, complete with some fluffy white (yellowing) tufts of hair. After the mummies, we rushed to see as much of Tut’s treasures as we could fit in. They say he was relatively unimportant, ruling for only nine years, but the treasures they’ve found in his unraided tomb (thanks to a lucky position hidden by the rumble of another tomb that hadn’t fared so well) have shot him into the spotlight permanently. Even with all of the buildup, the collection did not disappoint. Display after display – jewelry and other adornments, sarcophagi, golden chariots and beds, and a gold and jewel-encrusted death mask – presented some of the most beautiful craftsmanship I’ve ever seen. I am definitely glad we saw the collection before visiting the tomb in Luxor almost a week later.

After the Egyptian Museum, we got a bite to eat and took a little stroll around downtown. Suddenly we realized we should be at the train station already. We jumped into the first cab we saw, only to find that we couldn't communicate with the driver. Fortunately, we were headed in the right direction, and naming all the kinds of Egyptian trains we could find while flipping through the guidebook managed to convey our desired destination. Looking back, I'm not exactly sure why we couldn't find "train station" in the book...