Ryan's Egyptian Adventure

 In late April/early May, Ryan got to go on a trip to Egypt for a research/development project that some of his students had helped with. He was there to supervise students and help them ask the right questions to learn what BYU's excavation needs for a website to store and share their findings. It was a lot of hot days in the sun at the dig site in the desert, and lots of afternoons touristing around Cairo.

At the dig site, they got a GPS tracker to help them map out where the burials are for better reporting. We can't really share any pictures from the dig because they are the property of the Egyptian government until they clear them for publication.

This is the view of the pyramids from the hotel roof where they stayed for the two weeks. Every few nights there was a light show on the pyramids and they all got lit up. It sounded a lot like the narrator from the Disneyland railroad in the dinosaur part.

The hotel had this great shampoo in little packets. Besides shampoo and maybe body wash, I'm not sure what the other 5 functions were. Toothpaste? Lotion? Butt cream? I'm not sure.

Down the street from the hotel (and across the street from the pyramids entrance) was a Pizza Hut. Most days we ate delicious Egyptian food, but we had to do Pizza Hut once, just for the view :)

For a couple days we went down to Luxor with a tour group to see the temples and things down there. It was very impressive. Unfortunately because we were there on BYU business, they told us we weren't allowed to ride in the hot air balloons that fly over the valley of the kings. We got to see them from below though. There were probably 50 balloons in the air at once.

Just trying to make statue faces

First visit to the Giza pyramids. It was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel room to the pyramids and Sphinx. So cool!

Turns out there's a lot of sphinxes in Egypt. It's a whole thing over there.

This is at the base of another pyramid. There's a lot of those there, too. 

And another one!

A little farther away

Another pyramid!

This is at one of the temples in Luxor

This is most of the group at the Valley of the Kings

A beautiful view of sunset over the pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Saw a sunset like this about 5-6 nights while we were there

Going up inside the pyramids often involved long stairways in hot, humid environments. The humidity apparently all comes from the breath of sweaty people coming to see the pyramid.

And a lot of times the stairways were so low that you had to crouch or even climb backward just to make it without smacking your head on the ceiling. And almost always it was about 1 1/2 people wide, and you had to squeeze past somebody going the other way when you were trying to get out.

On our trip to Alexandria, we went to a fish restaurant (not my favorite) and about the only thing on the menu that sounded at all edible was tilapia, so that's what I ordered. Then this is what came. It was... an interesting dining experience.

On our last day at the dig site, the van broke down on the way back. We spent about 2 hours on the side of the road in the blazing heat waiting for people to drive back and forth to town with various parts to try. While the workers and security guards tried to get it fixed, the rest of us just sat around talking and telling stories next to a necropolis. When we got back into the van, it was completely full of flies. Like, thousands of flies. We drove the rest of the way back to Giza with the windows open just to try to keep the flies down.

Our driver and overall arranger of things: Ahmed. This guy was awesome. If we wanted to go somewhere, he'd make it happen. If we wanted to do it in tuktuks, he'd do that. If we wanted a tour of a museum where we needed private security, he'd have it there. And he was always cheerful and friendly.