Camel ride, anyone? Let's travel to Egypt next ...

We made it to Friday, thank the Lord, and another travel video has dropped on this author's secondary YouTube channel. This time it's quite an exotic locale, a trip to another continent, and a tour of ancient holy sites. Back in 1996, I traveled with my mom on a Holy Land pilgrimage, I guess they call them. We just called it a two-week tour of holy sites. We spent a lot of time in Israel, and we also spent a couple days in Jordan that were fabulous (now there is a surprisingly lovely country, and a peaceful one, at least at the time -- we stayed in Aqaba). But then the tail end of the trip was spent in the amazing Egypt. We saw the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, stepped inside one of the pyramids at Giza, had dinner aboard a boat on the Nile. It was all quite astonishing, and I've always wanted to go back. I was using a regular film camera back then, so I have no video of my own from the trip. But a member of the party named Terri was kind enough to make a copy of her own extensive video for my mom and I, and that's what you'll see here in two parts.

Terri did the hike up Mt. Sinai at sunrise, which my mom and I did not do. It was way too early in the morning for me to get up, and there has always been the question as to whether or not this truly is the real Mt. Sinai (read Howard Blum's "The Gold of Exodus" and you'll get a whole different view). So that time at the top of the "accepted" site of Mt. Sinai is what you see at the beginning of this video. 

You'll also get a quick glimpse of an Egyptian wedding ceremony taking place at our hotel. It was loud and grand, and as I was watching part of the procession in the hotel lobby, a kid who was attending, maybe about 12 or 13 years old, was sitting nearby with friends and asked me if I would go into the reception with him for a couple minutes. I said sure, so we went inside and sat down, and all the adults at the reception who knew him starting laughing and clapping for him, that he brought a young American female to the party. It was a very funny moment, not shown on this video but just going on behind the scenes.

At the end of this first part, as our tour bus arrives at the Pyramids, you can get a feel for a phenomenon that I was very struck by -- the bursting metro region of Cairo (we were told the city and its surrounding areas had a population of 16 million at the time) comes up to the Pyramids and just stops, and there's nothing but desert beyond, on the other side of the Pyramids.

But wow, as I watch this video, I can hear my mother talking in the background in parts, and I can feel like I'm right back there, all those years ago, as I see our group sitting on the floor of the Muhammad Ali Mosque. I remember how it felt, what temperature that cavernous room was, how it all looked with the bright lights above us everywhere, how the carpet felt. So thankful to Terri for capturing this video.

See the other videos on the "Let's Go Adventuring" playlist -- another one is dropped each Friday, at least for the next few months.