Home » Egypt Malaysia Singapore Thailand » Odyssey Update 4 - Thailand/Malaysia/Singapore/Egypt

Four countries in 2 weeks make a lot of material for this update. On April 14th, after 51 days of rice, I finally left Asia for Egypt, but not before relaxing for 4 days in the South of Thailand and making my way via Malaysia to Singapore.

Odyssey Update 4 - Thailand/Malaysia/Singapore/Egypt

Mark Morin
2006-04-29 14:32:58

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may be ancient Canadian history, but I'm afraid the Egyptians have us beat with 5000 years of recorded history and artifacts galore to back it up. I visited the enormous but disorganized Egyptian Museum, the timeless Pyramids at Giza, Roman ruins in Alexandria, the Karnak Temple and tombs in Luxor that looked like new after 3500 years. These were already ancient when Homer wrote
Petronas Towers (452 meters x 2)
about them in the "other" Odyssey!

A WANDERING MIND

* It occurred to me while buying my hundredth (at least) bottle of drinking water, that in Canada we flush our toilets with this precious stuff!
* Anyone who has visited western Canada will know the stereotypical Japanese tour buses. Well in almost every country I've been so far, there are countless coach loads of French tourists following tour guides with little flags yelling "Allez allez, par ici!" In Egypt, easily 90% of the tourists are French, here to see what Napoleon (among others) failed to plunder.
* Canada Dry is a strong brand in Egypt. They even have Canada Dry Cola. So the inevitable response to my saying I'm from Canada is "Ah, Canada Dry!" This from desert dwellers!
* My new Egyptian haircut makes me look just like a pharaoh. Ok maybe not, but that's what I thought from the amount of time it took the barber. I had a train to catch and didn't even have time for tea and sheesha (apple flavoured tobacco smoked through a 1 m tall water-filled pipe).
* The Pharaonic equivalent to a web page must have been carving on the wall of your temple (what, you don't have your own temple?). Hatshepsut (the first and only woman pharaoh) did and she devoted much of her wall-site to pictures and text describing travel such as her visit to the very large queen of Somalia, who rode a donkey to the beach each day. There is an image of the donkey has the hieroglyphic inscription "World's most miserable donkey".
* I learned the hard way that some metro cars are reserved for women only. If looks could kill....
* Ever since some tourists were gunned down at Giza a few years ago, security is very tight anywhere foreigners may go: tourist sites, downtown, metro, train station etc. The very heavily armed tourist police may be protective, but they are not reassuring.