I Have Five Days In Egypt - What Do I Do?

[Wanderlust_tim]

If it is horribly hot then maybe a day trip to Alexandria to escape the heat.

I really enjoyed my short time in Alexandria. The Bibliotheca was gorgeous and had a nice dinner at the Fish market. I left wishing I could spend more time than the one night work afforded me.

 

[RSD]

I really enjoyed my short time in Alexandria. The Bibliotheca was gorgeous and had a nice dinner at the Fish market. I left wishing I could spend more time than the one night work afforded me.

Alex is nice - and a great escape from the bustle of Cairo, with convenient train connections from Cairo. The corniche (El-Gaish Rd) is really nice of an evening, Qaitbay is worth a visit, if you visit the Roman theatre on Ismail Mahana you will also find some of the several thousand year old statues etc that have been recovered from the harbour. Agree that the Bibliotheca is a must see highlight. I'm going to have a few trips to Alex for meetings etc over the next few years and am really looking forward to the stays in Alex.

 

[RSD]

Dare I say it… you can probably skip the new Grand Museum!! (runs and ducks for cover)

It’s out by the pyramids, so unless you are staying locally, you’d probably want to do it the same day you go visit the pyramids.

The museum itself is a gigantic building. Two halves. One is dedicated to large statues, monuments and the like. The other half is filled with 53000 exhibits. Yes, 53,000.

But the thing is, it can be ‘too much’. If you see one pot, you have another 300 beside it. You see one set of friezes, and you have another 30 beside it. You see one set of god-statues, and there are another 1500 right there.

While you can scan a QR code for further information, the wifi wasn’t (isn’t) working. And there are no maps other than if you take a photo at the information booth on entry.

What would have been great would have been a one-pager giving a timeline… old kingdom -> unification -> etc. Somat least you knew what you were looking at as you walked around.

It’s expensive to get in, and lots people. You could take a guided tour, but plenty of folk on those were looking pretty bored by the time they got to the main exhibit hall.

You wonder if it would have been better to leave some of these things in their original place to encourage tourism to other parts of the city or country.

The pyramids can be pretty exhausting… long walks between attractions. If you intend to go in the main pyramid, the queue was about 45-60 mins. But disappeared completely at 3pm. Which is the time I’d probably recommend to go.

Walking to the ‘panorama’ is a waste of time. Many people took a buggy ride, but the poor donkeys and horses were really struggling to get up the hill. On that basis I’d advise against supporting the owners of those donkeys and horses.

If you really want to do the museum I’d probably get there around 11am, spend a couple of hours. Have lunch at one of the restaurants there (mostly chains, including starbucks, but soooo cheap), then head to the pyramids. Uber is dirt cheap, will cost about $2 to get from the museum to the pyramids (you can’t really walk it, nor would you want to).

The King Tut exhibition hall still hadn’t opened when we were there two weeks ago. No idea when that will open.

Most of the 53,000 exhibits are items that were in storage in the basement of the "old" museum on Tahrir Square or have been stored in warehouses for decades - the new museum is the first time that they have ever been displayed properly.

Things like wifi not quite functioning when the museum first opened - that's just Egypt - you just learn to not even notice these sorts of little annoyances when you live in Egypt - there are always far more important problems.

It was announced a couple of days ago that the full opening of the GEM including the King Tut hall will take place on the 3rd of July.

My hope is to establish a new museum on the site of the old Roman port just north of El Quseir on the Red Sea coast to tell the story of the Roman trade with India and how the goods being exported (wine, olives etc) were brought across the Mediterranean and then offloaded onto smaller boats and sailed up the Nile to Qift before they were then transported overland (probably by elephant) through Wadi Hammamat to the Roman port of Myos Hormos, where they were loaded onto sailing vessels that sailed as a big fleet of several hundred vessels every year to catch the monsoon winds to India, and then they had to wait a couple of months for the winds to change before they could sail back bringing silk, spices, Chinese ceramics etc back to Egypt that were then transported overland to the Nile and then onward to the wealthy of the Roman empire in Europe. At the site of the old port are the foundations of the buildings, grinding stones, broken amphora etc, and there is still a lot of archaeological digging that could be done as most of the site hasn't been investigated yet. It will take a lot of money and be a big job, but my hope is that we can raise the 32 metre wreck of one of the boats that did the India run that has sunk just outside the old port and put it on display in the proposed museum at the old port. Despite it having been down for 2000 years the wooden hull is completely intact due to the low oxygen environment of the Red Sea, and the boat is fully laden with wine amphora and other cargo. From an archaeological perspective the wreck is quite important as it is the first wreck of the Roman trade with India that has ever been found that is anywhere close to being intact - the only other two known sites mostly are just some scattered amphoras.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Yeah. I grew up in developing countries so am very comfortable with hiw things ‘work’… or don’t

But if you are charging eye-watering prices for foreigners to go into your museum, and your wifi for the QR codes to take you around isn’t working, then print out some A4 pages!! No excuses there.

I’m sure if you were an archeology student, or an academic studying ancient Egypt the displays would be invaluable. To the average tourist, it doesn’t necessarily quite work. If people are getting bored by gallery 8 of 15, there’s room to make the experience better. For example different paths to take depending on what you might be interested in.