16 days , 5 months and 1 year since my last blog post. . . and suffice to say i'm pretty glad i didn't just pour out 7 shades of nonsense that pops into my head for a superficial feeling of self importance. But anyway i've finally acquired a truly worthy topic to write about which would be my trip to
Egypt.
Now i do not profess to be an avid scholar of Egyptian theology or of it ancient civilizations and the such but i do know enough of it not to get lost in its very intricate stories and the such. This substantial amount of knowledge is usually obtained by the usual ways . . which are either the internet or hitting the school history books which unfortunately have but a tiny dot of it in its pages.
Rubbish curriculum we're having i say! Well anyway , i acquired my interest of the ancient Egyptian civilizations due to my avid readings of the
Chronicles Of Conan comics where in it there's is a country called
Stygia whose denizens are depicted as malevolent and shady in which there are blood stained altars to dark gods and ancient creatures that do the bidding of the high priest
Thoth Amon . . These Stygians are represented very much like the Egyptian masses we know from depictions from various sources like movies and pictures. So anyway, my journey into the deserts of Egypt begins as such. .
Pic:Conan Of Cimmeria
8th February 2008 , Friday . .
Departed
Penang International Airport to
KLIA via
MAS and had to wait there for about 6 bloody hours in transit. It got so bad that I personally forked out about 12 ringgit for a pack of Malaysia's tourism playing cards . . . . yes i know, stupid. . but SERIOUSLY , matey(s). .it was THAT boring. Oh and me and my family had a scrumptious dinner at an absolutely delightful restaurant called
Mcdonalds. Yes , McDonalds. My sister wanted to have KFC but then again we thought better of it as we had KFC for more than 3 times in that week alone so it WAS kinda sickening.
The plane ride itself wasn't too bad. . .for a 7 hour flight i slept pretty much through the bulk of it. THIS of course being a rare incident as usually i'd preoccupy myself with watching movies back to back on the personal entertainment unit.
9th February 2008 , Saturday . .Reached
Doha Airport sometime in the early morning. . at what time exactly i really cannot remember and am to darn lazy to look up in the itinerary :D// Anyway spent a few hours there for transit and got to know of the nasty characters in my tour group which i will try my best to characterize now :
(Characters are in order based on the first pictures i can find of em in my camera :D)
The Predatress / Pigretor / Lion Queen
Most of her nickname's come directly from her very outlandishly styled hair, which as the names tell that it is EXTREMELY frizzy and might be a fake but i know not if that be a fact or not. She travels with her friend where my and my sisters concocted a story where she , a soon to be Predator (as in the alien from the AVP films and not a animal that hunts prey ) travels with a human guide(that being her friend) and is here on earth in the guise of a human to learn more about humanity to hunt em. . . . Such fantastic imaginations do we Chin siblings have eh? Haha
The Nasty Family
Now here's a whole family thats a real piece of work. The Nasty Family lives up to their name in every bit. The family consists of :
Strokeface - Primary father figure whose face is constantly in a state of a very bad case of constipation
Nasty Mother - Primary mother figure of the clan who keeps pushing and shoving others around to get to the front of the line . . . and the line being a line to get into a plane.
Uncle Lim - The Brother in law of either the primary figures. . .and no his name is NOT Lim but is a name given to him because of a striking resemblance to my
dad's friend whom i call Uncle Lim. Now this piece of the Nasties dresses like he's going to a board meeting every single day in the dusty , hot , sunny deserts of Egypt
NeferDOODOO - Daughter and most probably eldest. Now SHE'S got serious issues. Naming a few would be ; she walks like she's strutting her stuff on the catwalk of some Winter/Fall Collection , she covers her nose when she enters the museum because (i can't even explain how) of the smell of stone , she also asks the darnest of questions for example on the fourth day of the tour , personally asked our tour guide what he did for a living. . . our tour guide of
course gave a perplexed look at replied as best as he could to her "I'm a tour guide"
The Son - He. ..is the only sanity in a family of the insane. Relatively quiet and mild
mannered but is strictly dominated by NeferDOODOO as a kuli (slave- labourer) and translator for the English Language
The Valentine's Day Couple
A married couple who are very close and still foster a romantic bond which i've rarely seen in couples of their age whom by the way they already have 5 children. The husband's unbelievably patient as he translates nearly most of the explanations given by our tour guide to his wife that doesn't really speak English. The both of them have more love in them than the whole busload of us put together. Simply unbelievable!
Our Egyptian tour guide who's an absolute hit. . . . if it weren't for the fact that the general population of the tourists in our group were pretty unresponsive. However, he had a patience with us that i found myself admiring. Furthermore his charisma was like so that every time he speaks you'll definately want to applaud him as he makes such a show of it . He gets his name from an Arabic name pronounced as
Ha-Bee-Bee which means 'darling' or 'loved one' which he uses it to call our group but his real name's Mr Khaleed . As a tour guide he does his utmost best and fully utilizes his impressive amount of contacts everywhere to facilitate our tour. He even sometimes pays couriers with his own money to bring every single person's bags from i end of the station to the other while at the same time bringing some of the bags himself. He likes to use the word 'super' and i have to admit that he is simply super.
So anyway after about an hour waiting in Doha we then proceeded to get onto ANOTHER flight which lasted for about 3 hours to
Luxor Airport. 
Its here that we met with Mr Khaleed and then took a bus to our first destination. . .
The Valley Of The Kings . At this place ,were the tombs of the long deceased kings or rather pharaohs of ancient Egypt who were buried together with various 'personal effects' to be used in the afterlife. During the bus ride I saw some of the Egyptian youth literally
RAIDING a truck filled with sugarcane which stopped due to really bad traffic. . . These kiddies just ran up to the trucks and pulled shoots of sugar cane and proceeded to eat them .
Now i half expected the truck drivers to jump out of their trucks and shout their lungs out at the younguns and the other half of me expected the truck drivers to just reverse and roll em over. :D Evidently , the drivers did neither and just ignored them. . . Must be quite normal in these parts i suppose . Anyway , as i said before, we were on our way to the
Valley Of The Kings which was totally unexpected as I thought that we were firstly going to check a hotel or something to freshen up and apply sunscreen and the such. . . unfortunately checking into a hotel and freshing up was the last thing on the days itinerary . However , as dirty and nasty( in a physical sense of the word and not personality-wise) as i was i still pretty much enjoyed the whole day. At the valley , we were given the first look at the ticket which is used to enter the valley and to visit only 3 out of the 22 tombs. Similar tickets like that were used to gain access into most of the tourists sites throughout the whole of Egypt. I'm unsure of which tombs but i'm very sure i visited one or perhaps 2 of the tombs which had the name
Ramses which isn't all too hard by the way as there are about 5 tombs with pharaohs who have the name mind you. The tombs were dug into the ground and were rather big where 2 ground men could walk side by side with their arms outstretched at their sides. The walls of the tombs had various (of course) hieroglyphs that still retained some of their original colour....impressive is it not? That for more than 2000 years the colours neither faded not were destroyed by time. . . .However , i was pretty disappointed when i realised that the mummies were NOT in the tombs but in the
Egyptian Museum .
from left to right : Mum , Eldest Sister , Me
PS: Mum's reaction to me commenting what a sunny day it is :P
Biohazard suit of sister as seen in the above picture
So after the valley , we popped back into the bus and went to the temple of
Queen Hapshetsut or for easier pronunciation , Ho
t-Chicken-Soup as said by Mr Habiby . Queen Hapshetsut , in the shortest possible way explainable, was a queen who could not be king because of tradition ended up being King of Egypt because of a story told by the High Priest of Egypt at the time to the general public.
Posing in front of the Temple.
Inside the Temple at the one and only entrance
Oh, before i forget we were surprised by the friendliness of the Egyptian people in general. At the sight of us they'd ask where we're from and greet us by saying either "Nihao" or "Konichiwa" which were hello in Mandarin and Japanese respectively. The vendors were especially. They were always approaching everyone and telling you the prices of their wares like "10 pounds ! 10 pounds" and if you just ignored them they'd then say "Okay . . 5 pounds ! 5 pounds! " which was pretty hilarious the first time i heard it ! Khaleed, the tour guide , told us all about their hustler nature before we met them but still i was shocked when i first experienced them.
After our predetermined time wandering and taking pictures in the temple we proceeded back into the bus and off to visit the Colossi Of Memnon. In the bus we were told about various 'Optional Tours' where you can do more stuff in your stay of Egypt but have to pay for it. Khaleed told us about our first optional and one of my most memorable experiences lie there. He told us about touring the surrounding area in a hot air balloon which cost about 100USD per person. The currency of Egypt which were Egyptian Pounds or L.E were about 5 pounds to 1 US dollar. More or less RM 1 is to L.E 1 for us. We didn't agree to going on it right away but in the end the temptation to watch the Egyptian sunrise at about 1500 feet above in the air was overwhelming.
At the Colossi Of Memnon we were told about it in detail at how its name , "Memnon" was given to it by the Greeks who saw them and thought they were of a Greek warrior named Memnon. These giant statues served as protectors to the mortuary temple that was built in the ancient city of Thebes by Amenhotep III. Little did i know that there would be so much of "-oteps" or "-amuns" till i lost track of which were which and ended up calling Tutankhamun , Tutankotep and Imhotep , Imhamun !
Mum and Dad at the Colossi Of Memnon
After the Colossi of Memnon we went to an Alabaster Factory and was shown how statuettes and various furniture like pots were made using alabaster , granite and basalt. They also showed us how to differentiate the real deal from the fakes as seen in bazaars or roadside vendors. By this time the whole group were all pretty tired, dusty , hungry and were over zealously eager to get back to the hotel so it was over pretty fast and everyone just jumped back into the bus.
Dinner was surprisingly good and I found out that I enjoyed middle eastern food very much. I had stuff like plain vegetable soups , kishkeh salads , chicken kafkas , mid-eastern rice which does not taste at all like the rice we can get over here , stewed lamb , and pita breads. I had a piece of everything they had to offer and loved all of it ! After dinner , there was a show where a Belly Dancer was invited to give us a show. . . . until now i have yet to be sure whether she was a he. . . or the other way round as Khaleed told us that transsexuals were not exactly alien to the belly dancing scene are were in fact pretty darn common. . . .Scarrry...
The Belly Dancer( Sex Undetermined)
To Be Continued . . .
Doc Savage
