In case you haven’t been following along and you’re opening the “Do It Now” series for the first time; my husband and I returned from our big Egyptian adventure on Thanksgiving Day.🦃🏝️🏜️
So here we go! Time to take a break from Christmas cards, shopping, and baking and head back to the desert!🎄🤶
When we left off from the last post, we had just finished visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx.
On the docket for the day were touring more pyramids located about an hour south of Giza; Pyramids of Dahshur and Sakkura.💠😍🌙
But before heading outta town, we made a stop at the Church of Abu Serga, a hidden gem where the holy family sought refuge.
As told in the Bible, the Holy Family, Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus Christ fled from Palestine to Egypt to seek refuge from the persecution of the Jewish King Herod the Great. As they stayed in Egypt for three years, they lived a nomadic life, traveling through a total of 11 of Egypt’s modern-day governorates.♚👶🎅
During their time in Old Cairo, the Holy Family rested in a cave for three months, and like many other holy sites, a church was built on it; the Church of Abu Serga.
This church is basically a cave located in the middle of the city. Sobhy informs us that there are still active church services being held in the cave weekly.🛐⛪
We were very pleased to drive out of the city for the day. Cairo has a lot of smog and congestion. My husband has sensitive lungs and was really struggling with the air quality in Cairo.
On our drive to Sakkara, we had the opportunity to experience a little bit of the Egyptian rural life. And rural it was! We’re talking water buffalo pulling carts of various farm crops like sugar cane, potatoes, watermelon, oranges, dates, and mangoes; to name just few. I saw no tractors. 🐃🟠🥭
When I think Egypt, I think Sahara Desert. However, the Nile River (which is the longest river in the world) runs north/south through the eastern third of Egypt providing an extremely fertile river basin and is solely responsible for the existence of life in Egypt.
We had the opportunity to witness the abrupt change in landscape where the extremely lush, fertile river basin filled with growing fruits, vegetables, and palm trees meets the desert, quite suddenly.
Nature drew this dramatic, literal, line in the sand; this side of the line has palm trees, the other side of the line is desert….where NOTHING grows!🌴🌊🌵
Sobhy drives us to what just looks like a big hump of rocks, which is supposedly a pyramid. We’re informed that it’s King Teti Pyramid from 6th Dynasty, 2350 B.C.
“Trust me; you’re gonna want to go inside this one,” claims Sobhy.😊❤️
Unlike the Great Pyramids of Giza, we basically have this pyramid to ourselves, which isn’t surprising because the “pyramid” is certainly unimpressive from the outside.
We scrunch down and climb down this diagonal path into the pyramid. We pop our head’s up and find ourselves in a room with walls covered in hieroglyphs! Each symbol is carved perfectly and replicated thousands of times. The symbols look like stamps. How is it possible for each individual hand carving to be so perfect?🔣🎃🗿
There is a passageway to another room containing a tomb; of which I crawl inside. As I’m lying in the tomb, I look up and am rewarded with the site of thousands of star fish carved into the ceiling! Again, each replicated perfectly.
Starfish carved into ceilings is an ongoing theme we continue to witness in various tombs and monuments throughout Egypt, I’m assuming symbolizing the stars in the sky.🌟🌠✡️
We next drive out to the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the desert, where there are just a few huts and some Bedouin folks trying to sell camel rides to no one because there is no one out here except us. We park and Sobhy just starts walking out into the desert towards this fence.
“Where are we going now?”, I’m thinking. Sobhy hasn’t steered us wrong so far, but what could possibly be out here that’s worth our time?🗺️⏱️⌛
Sobhy leads us to these steps going down into some kind of underground tunnel system carved out of limestone. We were at the Serapeum of Sakkara. With all the Egyptian homework I’d done, I hadn’t run across this place.
This extensive underground tunnel system, “The Great Gallery”, was occupied by 24 large black granite boxes, and several much smaller wooden boxes (sarcophagi).🚞🚇🎄
Each granite box measures around 10 feet in height, 13 feet in length and over 6 feet in-depth, with a weight estimated at around 80 tons! 22 of the 26 boxes were inserted and perfectly centered in a niche on a lowered floor. The outside of the boxes was not perfect, but the interior had precise 90-degree angles carved into an ultra-polished granite surface.
Mummies of bulls were found in a few of the wooden sarcophagi; however, the granite boxes were found empty. Classic archaeology maintains that a group of tomb raiders stole the bull mummies inside the black granite boxes but left the real treasure inside the galleries.🐄❤️
What the heck?! Will someone please give a logical explanation for how in the world these huge, heavy containers are not just perfectly created, perfectly centered, but also somehow end up deep in a complicated underground tunnel system?
This place was both fascinating and confusing. Again, in my opinion, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, no practical explanation makes sense for the construction of these structures; so, another mystery remains.⚗️👁️🗨️🎅
The next day involved a 3-hour road trip from Cairo to Alexandria. I was really looking forward to this drive. I knew it was 3 hours and wasn’t sure how remote the road would be.
I thought we might see some extremely rural scenes, dirt roads, farms, oxen, etc. I was wrong, just a normal 4-lane highway. There were some farms along the way, but mostly just industry.🚜🌾🧺
Alexandria, the 2nd largest city in Egypt, is a port city located on the Mediterranean Sea in northern Egypt founded in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great.
Once serving as the capital of Egypt, Alexandria attracted scholars, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and historians.🧮🎨🏺
Alexandria was ruled by the Greeks (Alexander the Great), and then the Romans (Cleopatra’s alliance with Julius Ceasar and then Mark Antony), the Persians, and then the Muslims. Her history is vast and juicy.
Alexandria just feels different than Cairo. There’s a different vibe. You can really feel and see the effects of the Roman rule on this city. Parts of the Roman theatre still stand and many times I just felt like I was in Rome.📳💓
Some highlights of our visit there included visiting the Catacombs, getting stuck in traffic and witnessing 5 different walking funeral processions, having fresh seafood for lunch, and checking out the groovy scene by the famous lighthouse on the Mediterranean Sea.
Ok, I’m gonna cut this one short cause’ I still have some gifts to wrap and some cooking and baking to get done before the weekend.🧇🎁👨🍳
We’ll pick back up next week with “Do It Now Part 4”, where I’ll fill you in on Luxor (our favorite) and the Red Sea.
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We’re taking a few days off over the holidays, but we all have some hours available next week, between Xmas and New Year’s.
I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season! Check back with me next week where we’ll head back out to the desert!
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