Email from March 23 - Vienna

sorry it's been so long between emails. There#s not really any net cafes in the sahara desert. Since I last wrote we've been on a 12 day tour around egypt. Starting with the pyramids. We would have liked to have a bit longer there cos they were quite interesting and liz was slowing things down by stopping every few steps to pick up rocks and examine them. Apparently they were, or used to be stone tools... at least that's what they looked like. We then went to the a papyrus museum which was a bit boring, then to the cairo museum where we could look at all of tutankamen's goodies. He had a lot of stuff, it would be interested to know how much stuff a pharoah that ruled for more than 10 years would have been buried with.

Next was the overnight train down to Aswan. Apparently the toilets on the train were the worst ever but fortunatly I didn't feel the need to go and look at them. We didn't sleep much on the overnight train. It's hard to remember all that we did because i don't have the itinerary here with me but we basically did all the tourist stuff, looked at way too many temples, went on a felucca for a nubian dinner and party which was a lot of fun, shopped in the bazaar which was quite frustrating after a while. The first time we went we just wanted to look and not buy anything. A guy offered up 2 outfits for 300 egyptian pounds. we didn't want them, we were ust looking and would buy something tomorrow, but then he said "ok ok ok.... 290 pounds" we would say we were just looking but thanks anyway" then he would say "ok ok ok, since you are very nice people i'll give them to you for special price 280" again we said no but he kept going down by 10 pounds. when he was around 200 pounds i said "you could tell us 10 pounds and i'll still say no, we're not buying anything today" but he wouldn't listen. He ended up going down to 70 pounds. We still didn't buy, but we had a good idea of what price to look for the next day.

We went on a 3 day cruise down the Nile which was a highlight of the trip. Beer and a pool with the occassional trip to a temple or two, it was a fun time. We also rode on donkeys to the valley of the kings from the nile (those photos are uploading onto my facebook right now), and we went in a hot air balloon over the valley of the kings, which was another highlight. We went out into the sahara for 5 days. The 12 of us went it 3 jeeps and camped under the stars for 3 night and stayed in a terrible "reed hut" that was made of concrete or something - probably the worst nights sleep i've ever had. But the desert camping was so so great. We all loved it and would go back without hesitation. We occassionally had police escorts which seemed strange and unnecessary. I thought the food was a bit average during the desert trip as well. We swam in a natural well and it was one of the strangest feelings I#ve had It was just water down to about the waist and after that it was like "swimming in wizz fizz" as one person described it. There was no ground, or bottom to it, but you couldn´t sink cos bubbles and air kept pushing you up... Actually, bubbles and air are probably the same thing so just ignore my stupidity in that last sentence. You could just into it from the high ledge and it went deep but pushed you straight back up. We all turned orange from that swim, it was quite funny. We also rode on camels for an hour to get to a campsite and probably did other fun stuff as well.

Getting back to Cairo was a bit sad cos we were back in traffic and bad smells but the hotel we thought was a dump at the beginning of the tour suddenly seemed very nice and i got to have my first proper shower in about 6 days.Some of the showers during the tour were like standing under a dripping tap.

And so now we're in Vienna. We had no accomodation planned cos it's supposedly only busy in the summer months. No one told us we'd be arriving the night before easter sunday though. We managed to book into one place for the night but were spending more than we would have liked. The next day we found a nice hostel but it was a bit out of town, we had to go to the end of the train/underground line and then on the bus. But it#s a good hostel and worth it when this morning we woke up to about 10 cm of snow on the ground!! I was quite shocked. I opened the curtain to check if the sky was blue and was pleasantly sueprised to see snow everywhere! Vienna is really easy to get around and we haven't had too many problems with the language yet. Just a couple of tiny ones. We haven#t really done anything exciting yet. Everything was closed yesterday (Easter sunday) and today as well. Highlight here so far was probably the snow this morning. If I don't run out of time i'll stick some photos of vienna up on facebook.

Glenn (and Liz but she's not actually here at the moment)