April 26th – Still Amazed By Luxor

When you travel as much as I do, you can get a little spoilt by the succession of amazing sights on offer – “oh no, not another trip to the pyramids!”. When faced with a crack-of-dawn start and 3 and a half hour coach ride to get somewhere, it can be easy to say you’ll give it a miss this year.

But, if there’s one place that I make sure that I never miss a chance to go to, it’s Luxor in Egypt. I was amazed by this place when we first came here 24 years ago, and it’s still as amazing as it ever was (even if the rest of modern Egypt appears to have gone backwards in that time).

This year, I joined a trip to the Karnak Temple, for me, the most impressive temple in a country of so many outstanding temples. This was the holy of holies for the Pharoahs of the New Kingdom, and it’s incredible to think that a temple of this immense size and architectural complexity was put together 3,500 years ago. From the forest of dizzyingly tall columns at the Hypostyle Hall, to the immense obelisks of Tutmosis and Hatshepsut, it’s the scale of Karnak that impresses. While, the small details are great to draw you in on a more personal level – superb reliefs, and patches of the original coloured paintwork that have somehow survived millennia of being outside in the hot Egyptian sun.

Then for lunch, we got onto a Nile Cruise Boat for an atmospheric float around while we feasted on some lovely Middle Eastern food. It was good to see these boats actually being used – even with a bit of a rebound in the tourist trade, only about 100 out of 400 are actually in operation at the moment. Our guide told us that Hotels are running at about 40% occupancy at the moment, so this is the busiest that I’ve seen Luxor in about the last 8 years. I’ve enjoyed our visits when we’ve had Luxor pretty much to ourselves, but Egypt desperately needs its tourist industry to recover.

Our boat deposited us on the west bank of the Nile, so we had a short ride to the Valley of the Kings, for a visit to a couple of tombs that aren’t on the standard tomb-visiting trips. First we called in at Tutankhamun’s Tomb – a small affair that isn’t particularly richly decorated, but fascinating to visit because it puts into context the incredible finds that we’ve seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Plus, it also puts into context how amazing must have been the contents of the more important pharaohs, whose tombs are much larger and grander affairs.

As a case in point, we visited the fantastic tomb of Seti I – the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings. This unbelievably well-preserved tomb has been pretty much off-limits for the last 20 years, and now it’s being opened up for abut $70 for a 15 minute visit. That’s quite a lot of money per tomb-visiting minute, but the size, the decoration, the quality of the artwork were about the best I’ve ever seen in Egypt – a real privilege to see.

If that was an Egyptologist’s highlight, I wasn’t prepared for just how magnificent our next stop would be – a visit to Nefartari’s Tomb in the Valley of the Queens. Even this jaded traveller was inspired to gasp out a series of involuntary “wows”, as we ventured into the bowels of this unbelievably decorated tomb. If I hadn’t been told to the contrary, I would have thought that this was a modern re-creation of a tomb – the colours were just that perfect and vibrant. It was like they’d been painted yesterday, and the quality of the artwork was amazing for something that was 3,500 years old. To think that in Britain, we’re bursting with pride at a bunch of balanced rocks at Stonehenge, when they were creating art as advanced as this at roughly the same time (give or take a thousand years or so!).

Sadly, we weren’t able to take photos in any of these tombs, but you’ll just have to take my word for it that this trumps anything that I’ve seen in Egypt before – and that’s saying something.

If anything is worth a 3.5 hour coach journey to get there – then today was it.

April 19th – A Bumpy Boat Ride in Muscat

When we sailed into Muscat’s attractive harbour, with the Sultan’s huge yacht (the size of a small cruise ship) manoeuvring next to us, it seemed like a great day to go for a boat ride – clear skies, warm breezes and what looked like smooth seas.

I should have guessed that trouble lay ahead when they offered us seasickness pills before we got on the boat. We all laughed – don’t they know we’ve been on a ship for the last 3 and a half months, the odd little wave won’t trouble us!

Wrong. We then embarked on an incredibly bumpy ride on a small speedboat through what were probably 2-metre high waves, getting smashed around like we were on an out-of-control rollercoaster, while getting regular soakings from the waves. The purpose of our boat ride was to try to see some dolphins, but the dolphins had clearly been better briefed on the sea conditions than we’d been, so they stayed below the surface.

After an hour of fruitless dolphin hunting, I finally persuaded the boat driver to end the torture and take us to the coast for some snorkelling. Fortunately, we found a sheltered cove and dived in. The water was “refreshing” but not too cold to stop us having about an hour’s snorkel over the coral. I don’t know if it was the sea conditions that day or if it’s always like that, but there was a lot of sediment in the water so visibility wasn’t the best, however there was plentiful sealife down there – a couple of people even spotted a turtle emerging out of the murk.

Then it was time to get on the rollercoaster again, as we bounced our way past the spectacularly stark coastline, passing plenty of luxury hotels along the way.

At the end of our trip, I was feeling a little queasy, but I’d arranged to meet up for lunch with some friends in town. We ate at a nice Omani restaurant called Bait Al Lubain, which isn’t too far from the port gates (opposite the fish market), however the morning’s stomach-churning activities had meant that my appetite had left me somewhat. We had expected (I’m not sure why) that the food would be similar to Lebanese food, but there wasn’t a hummus, falafel or moutabal in sight, and the food seemed to have more of an influence from India than the Levant. Nevertheless, the food was tasty and the company was good.

Today was a reminder that sometimes, when you take to the water, it’s better to do it on a large luxury cruise ship with stabilisers than on a small, bumpy speedboat.

April 15th and 16th – 2 Days in Mumbai

Our two days in Mumbai were, exhilarating, exotic and exhausting. The colours were eye-popping, the tastes were mouth-watering, and some of the smells were stomach-churning.

Everywhere you looked there was something photogenic – enthusiastic games of cricket being played out on the street, cows sitting by the side of the road, incredibly busy markets, people having haircuts on the pavement, shops piled high with colourful saris. This city is as close as you can get to sensory overload.

Our first day started gently – being a Sunday, there wasn’t too much traffic on the road in the morning (over the course of the day, the traffic volumes steadily increased, as did the volume of the constant hooting of the increasingly jammed roads). We decided to do a walking tour of Mumbai’s collection of Art Deco buildings – it’s a little known fact that Mumbai is home to the second largest collection of Art Deco in the world (after Miami), over 200 buildings. We started at the Oval Maidan, where the Bombay Deco buildings stare across at Mumbai’s more famous Victorian Gothic buildings in a fascinating architectural stand-off.

Mumbai is only just beginning to celebrate its Art Deco heritage (apparently it’s applied for UNESCO World Heritage status for them), so they are in varying states of disrepair, although some seem to have been renovated recently. We wandered through the Churchgate district which is being rapidly gentrified (although the construction work for the new, much-needed underground Metro system may hold that up), and then enjoyed the sea breezes on Marine Drive, with its sweep of graceful Deco buildings.

We then headed to the super-busy street markets along Bhuleshwar Road, and escaped the crowds (and the almost as relentless heat) at Shree Thaker, where we had a wonderful Thali lunch. Unfortunately, eating a ton of food and then emerging onto the chaotic streets and being blasted by furnace-like heat is a bit of a shock to the system, so we headed back to the A/C of the ship to cool down.

That evening, we had another World Cruise Event at the Trident Hotel – loads of effort had been put into re-creating scenes from Slumdog Millionaire and trying to capture the spirit of Mumbai. Another fun evening.

The next day, we had booked a private guide from Reality Tours to show us some more markets and to experience some of the transport systems of this huge city. We caught a bus to the amazing CST train station (probably Mumbai’s most impressive colonial relic), and we joined the hordes on the train system. Fortunately, we were going against the traffic but it was still pretty busy.

It’s a times like this that the scale of Mumbai hits you – a city crammed with 22 million people that seems like it’s on the verge of absolute chaos and gridlock that somehow still functions. We paid a brief visit to Dhoby Ghats, the world’s largest open-air laundry where hundreds of people toil away cleaning the city’s dirty washing. We saw the Dabba Wallahs in action at Churchgate station, as 5,000 people deliver personalised lunches to up to 200,000 people in one of the most amazing daily logistical exercises.

Mumbai is an exhausting city to be a part of, but the energy of the place is just awe-inspiring. Life isn’t easy here – it’s hot, dusty and humid, while the congestion and noise are relentless, never mind the prevailing poverty for a large chunk of the populace. However, there’s a colourful charm to this place that I just love – the people are friendly and there’s always something to see. Incredible India just about sums it up.