Snapshots of Egypt: A Photographic Sojourn

It’s a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the cliché continues to have resonance because of the fact that a snapshot can convey things in an instant that would be difficult to impossible to convey with words. Consider trying to describe a bicycle to someone who had never seen one. I’ll give you 10,000 words and still beat you with a snapshot.

So come with me on a photographic excursion to Egypt, a land of incomparable visual richness. When I traveled to Egypt in the ‘90s photographs required film, film was expensive and I was on a tight budget. You couldn’t know if a photo was good or if it even came out at all until you got it developed, probably after you got home. Still I took many pictures. Let my children go without milk for a while! They’ll have the Sphinx. Egypt is not a place to scrimp on photographs.

I recently had the pleasure of accompanying Phil Otterson, the president of Abercrombie & Kent USA, on the President’s Tour of Egypt. Here is a small selection of the thousands of photos I took. Call me the incessant snapper.

I arrived at the Mena House Hotel on the Giza side of greater Cairo on Friday night around midnight. Little did I know that the Great Pyramid of Khufu (a.k.a. Cheops) loomed in its supernatural majesty just outside my window.

I’d had a long trip and was tired and lagged, but that view was better than coffee for getting me out in the morning and starting my day.

The Mena House could sell itself strictly on location with only cots and a coffee machine, but in fact the room was spectacularly opulent, fit for a pharaoh.

After breakfast we attended the main event – the tour of the Great Pyramids themselves. While we were at the Pyramids, we visited a museum behind the Pyramid of Khufu that exhibited a 141-foot long wooden boat only unearthed in 1954. It was in that little museum that we began to experience the reaction we as American tourists would receive from the Egyptian people throughout the trip. I kid you not, it was something verging on adoration. These young girls crowded around us wanting to be photographed with us.

The Pyramids themselves are truly beyond words and also beyond the scope of a photograph. The magnitude of these things is practically beyond the power of conception. You have to include some people in the frame to even begin to get an idea how gigantic they are. Each one of the thousands of blocks that make up the pyramid is itself huge in relation to a human being.

And then there is the Sphinx, small compared to the pyramids, but vast compared to most other things on a human scale. What was that about? We can imagine and speculate based on evidence, but most of Egyptian life still remains a mystery. The body of the Sphinx was only excavated in the 1950s. Before that, it appeared only as a head emerging from the sand.

On Sunday, while still based at the Mena House, we took a little excursion to Sakkara and Memphis, and we weren’t in search of Graceland, my friends. At Sakkara we saw what is known as the Step Pyramid, said to be an attempt at pyramid building before the pyramids at Giza. Like those in Giza, it is said to have had an outer shell originally that is no longer there. With all of them we are looking today at the core of the original structure. The Step Pyramid is undergoing a restoration.

At Memphis we saw a statue of Ramses II. Because the feet have been broken off, the statue is now displayed in a prone position, as though the old gentleman is having a rest.

At the Mena House a beautiful Egyptian woman played a qanun, a stringed instrument related to what we know in the States as a dulcimer. The music she created on it was enchanting. The trapezoidal soundboard of this kind of instrument would form the basis of the clavichord, when a keyboard mechanism was added, and later the pianoforte.

After visiting the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities (sorry, no pictures allowed), we had a serene lunch at Andrea’s restaurant, a Greek restaurant in Cairo.

On Monday we flew to Luxor to begin our exploration of Upper Egypt. As we boarded the Egyptair flight from Cairo to Luxor we encountered a group of highly energetic young Egyptian students on a field trip to Upper Egypt. They were effusively friendly and interested in us and we became fast friends. We were to encounter them again at Aswan.

The flight to Luxor was only about an hour and we hit the ground running. Well, not exactly running, but we did go right to the Temple of Karnak, a colossal structure that even in ruins with the roof missing is mystifyingly grand. It is the greatest of Egyptian temples, and one of the favorites of our splendid Egyptologist guide Ahmed Abu Ella. It was there that we began to get a glimpse of the vast knowledge of the meaning of the hieroglyphs that Ahmed would share with us over the coming days.

In the west we often think of women in Islamic countries as being very suppressed in the expression of their femininity, and that may be true in many cases, but the young Egyptian women were very colorful and creative in their dress. Even those who wore scarves often did so with great flair and glamour. Egypt is a very modern and progressive country, which is why there was such a backlash when Morsi tried to crack down with severe fundamentalist laws.

At Luxor we had our first encounter with the Sun Boat IV, which was to be our home for the rest of our time in Upper Egypt. It was an exquisite place to call home, and the crew, which numbered nearly as many as the guests, lost no time in endearing themselves to us with their graciousness and attention to our needs at every point. They treated us as the most highly honored guests, and as they told us, the ship had been sitting idle for most of two years, so they were extremely pleased to see us.

To get from where the Sun Boat was docked to the Valley of Kings we had to cross the Nile and we did so on colorful little water taxis. Each had its own design scheme, a personal expression of its owner, but all were brilliantly colorful with cozy cushions and they ferried us across the Nile in serene comfort. The one my group was on was called The King of Love, which I thought could not have been more perfect.

Ahmed continued his education of us as we went from site to site in Upper Egypt. His presentation was not just a trip around looking at cool things, it was structured from beginning to end to build our understanding piece by piece so that when we left we would have seen an integral vision of Egyptian history, both ancient and modern. The Ptolemaic Temple of the Goddess Hathor in Denderah was one of many visually stunning environments in which this learning process took shape.

We traveled from the ship to the Edfu Temple by horse carriage through a noisy, traffic-jammed village with highly charged activity on all sides.

We had some charming young people with us, who were very good travelers and took in all the presentations as we did. I wondered what it must have been like for them, seeing such phenomenal sights at such a young age and hearing the stories of ancient Egypt from the Egyptologists. What will these memories mean to them as they grow to adulthood? It reminded me of something I read once to the effect that, “Your children will inhabit a world that you cannot visit even in your dreams.”

We rounded out our tour of Upper Egypt with a visit to Abu Simbel, some of the most colossal and spectacular of all the Egyptian monuments. It was a perfect finale to a fantastic exploration of the Upper Nile.

Back in Cairo (on the Giza side) we lodged at the Four Seasons, overlooking the Nile and a huge green area on the other side that housed the Giza Zoo. The view of the Nile from my room on the 23^rd floor was …. I’ll say it – awesome.

On Saturday, our last day in Egypt, we plunged into the inner city of Cairo. We fast forwarded from the ancient kingdoms to Old Cairo, the Cairo of the present millennium. We surveyed the architecture of the medieval Islamic period, the grand mosques that are still active today, and immersed ourselves in the present moment as we walked through crowded streets of the Khan El-Khalili Bazaar. Here again we experienced the great hospitality and welcoming of the Egyptian people. It was an enthusiastic and passionately friendly welcome, and for us, unfortunately, it was “Hello I must be going.”

For more photos of Egypt