Egypt

My Adventures In Egypt, May 2024

Egypt… Just its name conjures up mystery and intrigue!

Our Viking Nile River Cruise, May 2024, was a spectacular way to get up close to not only the mystique of Egypt, but also the Nile River. This page includes the link to the blogs I’ve posted in this experience. And check back… I have many posts to add! There are more to come! ~Cher B

Giza

Giza and the Great Pyramids

Camels

Camels & Camel Rides

Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel

Valley of Kings

Luxor & the Valley of the Kings & Queens

Tut

King Tut’s Tomb

Hatshepsut

The Temple of Hatshepsut

Karnak

Karnak

Come back for the following blog posts…coming soon!

Saqqara

The Egyptian Museum (old)

The GEM: Grand Egyptian Museum (new)

The Nile

Aswan & Lake Nasser

Philae

Dendara

Edfu

Kom Ombu

Cairo

Coptic (Jewish and Christian) Cairo

The Citadel

Thanks for checking back… More to come!

Armchair Travel

Sharing this experience would not be complete without sharing the book that was instrumental in my full appreciation of Abu Simbel. In this book, Lynne Olson, writes about the intervention of French Archaeologist, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, in the preservation and relocation of this ancient treasure. Impossible to summarize, I quote the book jacket and encourage everyone to read it to full appreciate what went into saving Abu Simbel:

Empress of the Nile:

The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction

“In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.

“Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”

“Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.”