Egypt travel blog
G’day all and welcome to the Midlife Crisis Odyssey Podcast, where not all who wander are lost, but some of us definitely are. Having spent the first day of my visit to the Pyramids of Giza getting a feel for the place, and venturing inside the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre, I returned the following day ready for some wider exploration. If you would like to see the post for this podcast, you can find it here If you liked…
G’day all and welcome to the Midlife Crisis Odyssey Podcast, where not all who wander are lost, but some of us definitely are. After a 20 minute walk from my accommodation I arrived at the Giza Plateau. I paid to enter the site, and bought extra tickets to venture inside two of the Pyramids. Not only was I visiting one of the most amazing historic sites on earth, I was going to enter two of the spectacular ancient monuments! If…
G’day all and welcome to the Midlife Crisis Odyssey Podcast, where not all who wander are lost, but some of us definitely are. I had been too nervous to jump on the taxi minibuses in Egypt’s heaving cities, but figured I couldn’t go too far wrong in the beachside resort town of Sharm El Sheik. Riding the minibuses turned out to be a really enjoyable local experience. If you would like to see the post for this podcast, you can…
After three months and some amazing experiences, it was time to be leaving Egypt. I decided that the next stop on the odyssey would be the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. After a mandatory Corona PCR test to permit me to leave Egypt (I was thankful that the bloke who did the test was shithouse at his job, and barely stuck the swab into my nose, unlike the other testers who nearly entered my brain), I booked the two bus tickets…
‘WHERE ARE YOU FROM MY FRIEND?’ Travelling in Egypt, this is one question from the locals you hear all the time. Egyptians mostly assume I am American, German or French, as presumably the majority of tourists are. (Whilst staying in an apartment in Cairo, the circa-12 year old daughter of the manager came up to me in the lobby one morning, and with a serious expression and the utmost courtesy said ‘Bonjour’). When I answer that I am from Australia,…
Jacques Cousteau was the first to dive on the S.S. Thistlegorm in the 1950s. Sadly, as was the practice at the time, he took various items from the wreck, including the ship’s bell. Cousteau kept the location of the Thistlegorm quiet, and it was not until the early 1990s that divers once again located the site, using information from fisherman. The UK’s Dive magazine estimates that since then, over one million divers have visited the wreck. The dive boat lurched…
Merchant seaman are arguably the forgotten heroes of World War II. Sailing the unarmed, or lightly armed, cargo ships that delivered troops and vital supplies was a dangerous game. Merchant shipping endured constant threat of attack from the air, or from the silent, unseen submarines beneath the waves, and one in four merchant seamen who served in WWII lost their lives. Crewman ranged in age from mere children in their mid-teens, to seasoned mariners in their seventies. On board the…
‘Round round get around, I get around’ Sharm El Sheikh, a holiday town on the southern end of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, is a long straggle of resorts and hotels that seem to go on forever. European holiday makers keen to escape the cold flock to Sharm in non-Corona times, with Russians still arriving on masse during the pandemic to get sunburnt on the dusty coast. Newly arrived in Sharm El Sheikh, I was keen to get to the supermarket to…
When you’re a kid, especially if you are fortunate enough to grow up in a nurturing environment, you experience things regularly that completely blow your mind. Things that are so amazing, or exhilarating, or fun-scary, or all of the above, that they leave you frothing with excitement. As you get older, these moments grow further and further apart. Perhaps you have experienced the sensation before, or something close to it, and although it’s still cool, it isn’t quite as magical…
Egypt Although I had spent over a month in Egypt, and had visited a few places on the arid edge of the Nile Valley, I hadn’t gone deep into the desert. Having spent many years living in Central Australia, I was keen to see the country’s dry interior. I had read a little about the Siwa Oasis, and decided to extend my car hire for a few days so I could drive the 300km inland from the coast to have…