Kim vs. The World!

Leaving the city life behind us, we left on a 4 day safari into the Sahara Desert (the Western Desert, as the Egyptians call it). It was many, many hours of long drives through absolute nothingness. Just flat lands and sand as far as the eye could see. Sometimes we drove for 6 hours without seeing another car anywhere.... just us, our three 4 WD vehicles, and our crazy driver who sported massive D&G womens sunglasses (clearly, leftover from another tourist). Along the way, we stopped at some pretty unreal places. We saw the White Desert, which had crazy calcite formations... left over from millennia ago when this area was actually at the bottom of the ocean. It was pretty surreal to think about that, and if you looked at some of the calcite, you could see coral and shell fossils. We also stopped at the Black Desert, where the underwater volcanoes from millennia past made the landscape look burnt. Our first night of the safari we stopped at a really small town (supposedly an oas...

Traveling by bus again, we arrived at the famous city of Luxor . Our first stop upon arrival was a visit to Karnak Temple. This is MASSIVE site that each ancient Pharaoh built upon during his (or her) reign. The site was continually expanded/added to/defaced/rebuilt for a span of 1300 years. It is the largest religious complex in the world. Our awesome guide, a local girl named Shaima , explained the long history of the temple, and how certain elements were defaced or destroyed by both political and natural forces. Like most of the ancient sites here, it was awe-inspiring to walk through these ruins and imagine them in their glory at the height of the Egyptian civilization. We also had a pretty funny moment when we were walking through the temple and spotted a European girl (French, I think) wandering around in just a tank top and hot-pant style underwear. Everywhere here, foreign women are strongly encouraged to cover knees and shoulders... and here is this girl with her entire ass...

After getting our fill of the pyramids (if that's even possible!), we traveled by bus to the beautiful city of Aswan. However, before I get into that, I have to tell you about the Egyptian men. Literally unlike anything we've experienced so far. The Chinese men just stare at you with blank or confused looks on their face. The Indian men stare at you with mostly innocent and curious smiles. The Egyptian men shout at you, follow you, and make you feel seriously uncomfortable. I swear, the word le er was invented only to describe the men here. There is no other word for their stares, except that they are leering at you. The vast majority of them have the impression that foreign women are all easy and slutty, because we don't cover our heads/arms/etc, and because their only frame of reference for us is usually Hollywood movies. It's quite crazy. I guess since they are not inclined to treat their own women too well, the men here feel it is their right to stalk you on the s...

Arrived in Cairo to... traffic. LOTS of traffic. Insane traffic in the middle of the day for no apparent reason (not rush hour, no accidents). So, take this statement as a monumental one coming from someone who battles traffic on the 401 twice daily... it's BAD. Why?? Because the lovely (read: dirty and loud!) capital city of Cairo has 25 million people (almost the population of Canada!) and it is quite normal for every member of a family in the city to have their own car. So there is constant traffic, at all hours of the day here. Pretty crazy. So that was our first impression of Cairo, but it got simultaneously better and worse from there. Our first venture out onto the streets was to find a famous shwarma place that Samir (the really nice, really old Egyptian dude from our China trip) recommended. It was a long ride (in traffic, of course!) but the shwarmas were good, the pitas and hummous even better. Next we were off to the Egyptian Museum. Our favourite parts of the massive c...

Yup... in another of the joys of budget travel, our around-the-world ticket took us from Delhi to Cairo via MUNICH! It was so strange to be back in a Western country. It was cold outside and the stores already had Xmas stuff stocked in them! We took advantage of our brief 2 hour stop there by reveling in the clean washrooms, reading English gossip magazines, stocking up on tampons, and stuffing ourselves with Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream :) Despite having some of the lovely advantages of home, we realized (as we froze in the hallways) that were not ready to come home yet! It's going by too fast!!!!!! Note: I finally got some time to catch up on my blog! There are many posts below from the remainder of our time in India - Enjoy!

One. Last. Train. ....... ... To Kolkata (Calcutta). We celebrated the start of Diwali on an overnight train that was a few hours delayed. When most of the train was asleep and I was reading, the loudest explosion of sounds erupted on one side of the train... it sounded like either rocks were hitting the train or parts of the train were falling off. We screeched to a halt, the power failed. (Mars woke up briefly, looked confused, and went promptly went back to sleep!). I wandered out to the washroom area of the car to find, as usual with anything of even marginal interest in this country, a group of men gathered around the open train door. They were casually chatting with a train employee who was attempting to fix the problem with a pair of pliers. Haha! As our guide would say "TII" - "This Is India". 3 hours later a real train mechanic showed up and we were on our way. I never did find out what happened, as every time I asked what was wrong, the men treated me like...