Schiavoni Files

I have been in a magnificent time warp over the last few days. Shane and I just got off a boat that took us from Aswan, Egypt and down the Nile River to Luxor, Egypt. The trip lasted four days interjected with daily tours beginning at the 6 Kilometer-wide quarry that mined all of the Granite we saw along the way, from the Greek-Roman highly decorated splendid temples in Aswan and Komombo, to the older, massive Egyptian temples in Luxor. The temples and tombs we saw revealed so much information about life here 3,000 years ago but also beg so many questions... I am still pondering how they managed to get so much granite so many miles with so little equipment. We both have new dreams of scubadiving the Nile to find lost relics buried under the silt. We heard a Swiss group is attempting these underwater excavations currently and we were considering running off and joining them for a few months. We are also amazed how much is still left to be discovered! Every year they seem to undercover another tomb full of treasure, another layer of history. At one Luxor temple there is a Mosque on top of a Christian church on top of the Egyptian temple all buried to different degrees at different points. There is way too much to write about here! But it has been an amazing trip so far. Very surreal. I definitely recommend it. It's cheap too. We did one night at a beautiful hotel in Cairo, a four-day cruise all meals and tours included, a night in Luxor in another gorgeous Nile-view room and are doing 4 days in Sharm El Sheikh at the Marriot all for $1500 each which includes airfare to and from Amman (which costs $350 each ticket alone). Here is the link to our cruise ship: www.oberoihotels.com
Of course it hasn't been all rosy, we both have had varying degrees of food poisoning since we got here, the poverty here is stunning and the locals hassle you almost everywhere you go but it has been very well worth it. Okay, I've got to get off of the computer now there is a line and they are bugging me to get off the computer. More later...
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