Hong Kong Island

We take a ferry across to the Island and another Big Bus Tour, which takes in the famous Stanley Market. We get off, wander around and make our purchases.

Then on to Aberdeen, where we take a sampang tour around the house boat filled harbour.

 

And pass the floating restaurant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on the bus to the Peak Tram, which we take to the top but unfortunately the cloud is so low that we have no views.

 

 

 

 

Back on the bus for a tour of the busy business sector and on to the ferry terminal to return to Kowloon and a walk back along the front and its great view of the Island.

 

 

 

A super day. What an exciting place it is: a riot of high rise urbanisation. A really good start to our long trip. Indeed promising 'Happy Holidays'.

 

Robert Cole

Kowloon

After an easy start and a good breakfast we take a Big Bus Tour of Kowloon.

The commentary on the bus is about the skyscrapers, their size, architect, cost etc.

 

 

 

 

In fact it is mainly a tour of Kowloon's shopping streets and in particular the 2 mile long Nathan Road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the afternoon we take a boat tour of the harbour which again gives us facts about the line of impressive buildings along the front of Hong Kong Island. An attractive array of all shapes and sizes.

 

 

 

A misty walk in the evening along the front weaving between the star struck photographers. Some taking pictures in front of the large statue of Bruce Lee.

 

Robert Cole

Air New Zealand to Shangri-La

Air New Zealand's pitch is that they have been voted the world's best airline. Well, they have just acquired two more votes. They are superb. Their business class layout is quite different from anything we've seen before with angled areas, each with some seclusion and providing room for the seating to be converted into a comfortable flat bed. But it is the food and drink and accompanying service which really excels. In my book they have overtaken Brittany Ferries for 'best restaurant'. Clodagh was more abstemious but I wined and dined well including a good port with my cheese.

We arrived at Hong Kong late afternoon and got a taxi to the Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel, in which we have a superb harbour view room.

 

It gives a great night time view of Hong Kong Island on the other side of the harbour.

 

There was then only time for an evening walk along the harbour front and its 'Avenue of Stars', which was thronged with people taking photos of their partners with their hands placed in the imprints of some Chinese film star. These were predominantly Chinese and one assumes they were on holiday from mainland China.

 

Robert Cole

Untitled

 

Robert Cole

The Valley of the Kings

Our last port of call was at Safaga from where we took a very early morning, 3 1/2 hour coach drive first to Karnak and the principal temple of the state god, Amun Re.

In the mid second millennium BC, the 18th Dynasty kings moved to nearby Luxor so that they could be associated with this cult and started to be buried in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank. Many of them added to the grandeur of the temple complex.

 

This ended up multi-columned enclosing numerous chapel-like areas, each containing their own decorations, inscriptions and statuary, all occupying a very large site. This east side of the Nile with the rising of the sun was for the living. We then moved on to the west side, which was for the dead where the sun disappeared below the earth.

45 tombs are open at the Valley of the Kings and we visited 3 of them, for Kings Rameses III, IV and IX. All the tombs have suffered from tomb robbers since they existed (apart from King Tutankhamen).

At first attempts were made to conceal the tomb with hidden entrances and false chambers but, on realising the subterfuge didn't work, later tombs in the Valley were constructed with guarded monumental entrances. None of these worked and, by the 21st Dynasty, the priests of Amun Re gathered together and hid the despoiled royal mummies, which were discovered in the 19th century and which we saw on our earlier visit to the Cairo Museum.

 

The tombs we saw reflected some of these developments and also contained differing wall and ceiling decorations. There were many wall paintings of guards, animal headed men, snakes and numerous boats to aid the dead king on his afterlife journey. One of the tombs had far more hieroglyphics than the others and it would have been interesting to know what was being said by or about the departed. In one there was an enormous stone sarcophagus, which it was impossible to imagine how it had been transported there. A thought provoking insight into the fascination with death and belief in the afterlife of the kings of that time.

On our way back to Luxor we stopped at the site of a palace of one of the Rameses Kings. This was grandeur beyond grandeur and made me realise that Cecil B De Mille had in no way exaggerated in his sets in his 'Anthony and Cleopatra'. Elizabeth Taylor would have graced this palace well. Another 31/2 hours back to Minerva and the end of yet another tiring but overwhelming day at the end of a cruise, where one has run out of superlatives. It was great!

 

Robert Cole

Back to Egypt and a day off from long Excursions

From Aqaba we sailed back down the Red Sea leaving behind the only Jordanian port and its close neighbour Israeli port of Eilat, with Saudi Arabia on our left and Egypt on our right, on to the latter's resort town of Sharm El Sheikh.

Where some rested.

Others took a morning coach shuttle into this green oasis of a town on the edge of the Sinai Desert. It was largely free of tourists partly because we heard tourism has dropped by about a third since the financial crisis but also we were told because the holiday makers party until four in the morning and rise late. The shops didn't expect much business in the morning and were anxious to extract whatever they could from us. We stopped for a drink and haggled over the price.

In the afternoon, after a leisurely lunch on board, we went on a glass bottomed boat trip to view the fish and corals. We were entertained to an array of fish of all colours, patterns and sizes swimming over corals of as many differing colours, sizes and textures. We were told that coral is an animal not a plant. It is apparently very sensitive, can easily be damaged or destroyed and can take a long time to regenerate or just remains dead in the sea, as we were shown. An undersea world completely different from what I thought I understood. I was left feeling I needed to read up on corals, as well as Greek mythology, Egyptology, the Nabataeans in between re-watching the films, 'Anthony and Cleopatra', 'Lawrence of Arabia', and perhaps 'Carry on Cleo'.

 

Robert Cole

Petra

We arrive at our new port of Aqaba, in Jordan, for a two day stop and we elect to use each of these to go to Petra, the remarkable sandstone-carved site dating from the 1st century BC.

On the 2 hour drive there, we were told by our Jordanian guides of the history of the Nabataeans, who lived in southern Jordan and from the 4th century BC controlled the important trade routes that passed through their area, carrying silks and spices from the Far East to the Hellenistic world? They became immensely rich and used their wealth to create Petra, which was built in Hellenistic splendour.

It was both a place where about 20,000 lived and a necropolis of tombs, which varied in grandeur according to wealth. The grandest had intricately carved classical, Graeco-Roman facades with rooms inside, whose walls and ceilings have often become naturally decorated by the iron and salts layered in the sandstone, producing richly coloured patterns, of which Jackson Pollock would have been proud.

 

 

Petra is in a secluded site entered through a 1200m long, high, narrow gorge, known as the Siq, and containing bizarre-looking, colourful, sandstone formations.

It opens out dramatically at the end to ones first breathtaking view of Al-Khazneh (Pharaoh's Treasury). It was cut from the natural rock, starting at the top and working downwards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From then on there is much to see in this vast UNESCO World Heritage site of about 240 square kilometres and we felt we had trekked over much of it during two fairly tiring days. Our guides were keen to assure us that there was much more to see and that ideally one should stay in the nearby town so as to see the varying colours of the stone early in the morning, captured in John William Burgon's poem as the 'rose red city half as old as time'.

 

During our two long journeys back and forth to Petra, we travelled across some country with attractive, deep, rocky Valleys, but much was bleak and arid occupied only by the occasional Bedouin encampment with their sheep and goats. Our guides told us that 5m of the 6.5m population lived in the 3 major cities. They have no oil and there is a lack of water. The king is very much in control. He appoints the Prime Minister who in turn appoints the ministers. There is an elected parliament that in theory can influence decisions. The king decided that education was most important, as Jordan has few natural resources. Our guides were university educated. One of them, Ibrahim, said his grandfather had been a Bedouin and 24 children. His father had 10 children, and each one of them had gone to university. He said of himself that he 'only had 4 children'.

We spent many hours over the two days listening to our Jordanian guides. They each came across as intelligent but above all as men of a deep morality. They spoke of their Islamic religion, which clearly is important to them and their families. There are religious differences with those of us brought up in the Christian culture, which are probably unbridgeable, but it was impossible not to like and respect them.

 

Robert Cole

Cairo and the Pyramids

While Clodagh stayed on board at our port of El Sokhna and our friends went off to look at monasteries, I had a 6.30 start for a long drive to Cairo.

On route our excellent guide, Rafda, gave us a run down of 7,500 years of the history of Egypt. The more interesting part starts from 3,100 BC with the start of the first of the 31 dynasties of kings, the last of which ended with the conquest of Egypt by Alexander in 332 BC.It was the Third Dynasty kings who started to build stepped pyramids to house their tombs and those of the Fourth Dynasty built the famous smooth sided pyramids at Giza, which includes the Great Pyramid and these we would see later. Later dynasties started to inscribe their pyramids with religious texts concerning the soul's journey to the afterlife. There are nearly two hundred pyramids in Egypt and the design of the interior tombs varied over the centuries, with great efforts being made to disguise where the actual king's tomb was to defeat tomb raiders. These efforts almost always failed.

Our morning excursion was to the Cairo Museum where there is a superb collection of antiquities from the tombs that escaped the raiders and especially the burial furnishings of the tomb of Tutankhamen. He became king at the age of 9 and died at 18, so he had no time to do anything notable during his reign. The only reason that he has come to our notice is that his tomb entrance probably got covered by rubble and escaped the notice of raiders up to its discovery in the 20th century. It does provide what one assumes is a typical example of what the other tombs would have contained but, as our guide commented, there is only once thing that is certain and that is that nothing is certain about the tombs of the kings.

This collection contains numerous outstanding items of furniture and objets d'art found including 110 walking sticks - it is believed Tutankhamen suffered some accident requiring the use of a stick. Most impressive are the 3 decorated body shaped coffins in which he was encased and which were in turn put inside a stone catafalque, which was put inside 3 ever larger decorated wooden cases. A truly memorable exhibition.

As we drove from the museum through the massive conurbation of Cairo (about a quarter of Egypt's population of 85m live here), we saw block after block of half completed apartments with no windows. We were told that Egyptians preferred to invest there money in these properties than put it in the untrustworthy banks. We saw 'ghost towns ' of hundreds of these with only occasional occupation as we drove through the suburbs to Giza and the Pyramids.

 

 

When these pyramids were built they would have been far away in the desert but, as can clearly be seen in this photograph, they are now right on the edge of the city. They have suffered much weathering over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

For me the most interesting part of this visit was the Boat Museum, which is situated by the Great Pyramid on the site where under large stones there was a long narrow cavity which had contained all the parts of boat, provided for the king's journeys in the afterlife. The massive stones had been carefully cut so that they slid together to prevent air getting to the wooden parts and ropes beneath them.

We saw this large beautifully elegant boat, which had been reconstructed, and thought it must probably be the first example of Ikea-like flat packing. We then took the long drive back to Minerva after a long but fascinating day


 

Robert Cole

Days at Sea and down the Suez Canal

We occasionally have days of rest from excursions when we have a long journey to the next port of call.

Minerva is small by cruise ship standards but very comfortable with plenty of places to relax. The sunny deck areas were a favourite place for our group to meet up. Here Chris, Liz and Annie with Clodagh and me. There are two restaurants and three bars where eating and drinking seems to fill much of the day between lectures. Below Chris, John and Liz with Clodagh.

The lectures were on such subjects as the conquests of Alexander, the travels of Herodotus, the changes effected in Turkey under Ataturk and the creation of Islam by Mohammad. The last was a somewhat partial lecture suggesting those of other religions and especially those of none should be making much stronger efforts to understand Islam. If any time is left in between, one could use the spacious and well stocked library, the card room or the Internet lounge - unfortunately there was some incompatibility problem in connecting to iPads.

My own preferred activity first thing in the morning was walking a few miles round the promenade deck. The most interesting of these early morning circuits of the ship was while travelling down the Suez Canal. We had arrived at Port Said the evening before, where we took a stroll along the noisy and grubby waterfront running a gauntlet of the merchants anxious to ply us with their wares. The ship had to wait there for permission to leave southwards in a convoy of other ships.

We eventually left port at 3.30 in the morning and were travelling through the canal by the time we got up. As I circled the ship, I almost felt it possible to reach out and touch each side of the canal; on the left the largely barren desert of the Sinai Peninsular; on the right some habitation with more trees and vegetation gaining its fertility from the River Nile a little further to the west. We travelled through these relatively narrow canal stretches, through a small lake, past the city of Ismailia on the west bank and then into the Great Bitter Lake where we anchored for an hour or so to allow the north bound convoy of ships to pass.

We had been 11th in our convoy of 12, with just a German naval ship behind us. But then the last shall be first and we followed the German ship as we sailed on again across the lake. This was followed by another canal stretch with sand on our left and palm trees on our right. No sign of life on one side except a few goats and all the villages and towns on the other, including the large town of Suez as we left the canal and entered the Red Sea. A fascinating journey.

 

Robert Cole

Cyprus

We arrived at the port of Limassol, which was nostalgic for me, as 50 years ago during National Service I had been stationed at nearby RAF Akrotiri. We passed it by on today's excursion and were reminded by our guide that the base was now regarded as British land, under the agreement granting Cyprus independence.

We travelled to the SW corner of the island to Paphos, which was once the capital and which features in both mythology and history. We stopped briefly at Aphrodite's Rock, regarded since ancient times as the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love and fertility. At Paphos we visited the site of excavations at Nea Paphos, which is situated on a small promontory on the coast round a small sheltered harbour. Recent excavations indicate it was occupied from the 4th century BC by the Ptolemies, the Graeco-Macedonian rulers of Egypt, who had their capital at Alexandria. Nea Paphos was therefore their nearest point in Cyprus and it became the island's political and economic centre.

The town was surrounded by high walls and had a street system which has changed little over centuries. When the Romans came along they retained it as their main administrative centre and built their villas on top of the sites of the old houses. These were grand even by Roman standards, with magnificent 3rd century floor mosaics in multi roomed properties. We visited three of these, named after subjects of floor mosaics in them: Dionysos, Theseus and Aion. The first of these is the grandest of those so far discovered and contains the most spectacular mosaics widely featuring Dionysos (Bachus) the god of wine.

There was also uncovered the Scylla mosaic, flooring of the Hellenistic period at a level 1m below that of the Roman period. The size of the building and the wealth of its mosaics initially suggested it was the residence of a very high Roman official but subsequent excavations have discovered that Theseus was probably the residence of the Proconsol. All that can be said so far is that these were the norm for Paphos during the mid-Roman period.

One is left reflecting on how little we seem to have advanced in 2,000 years except that this high standard of living was available to the very few. There is still much more to be uncovered at Nea Paphos and it will be well worth a future visit. By contrast we were then transported to the monastery of St Neophytus, who lived in a cave hewn out of the mountainside and which was turned into a cell and church. In the 12th to 15th centuries this was decorated with fine Byzantine frescoes. Fortunately St Neophytus was a very small slight man, which he needed to be to live in such cramped conditions. There is now a rather more grand monastery and Byzantine church nearby.

 

Robert Cole