As a four-decade Certified Travel Agent, global airline employee, researcher, writer, teacher, and photographer, travel, whether or not for satisfaction or enterprise purposes, has continually been an extensive and vital part of my life. Some four hundred journeys to each part of the globe, by way of the road, rail, sea, and air, entailed locations each mundane and exotic. This article specializes in the ones in Africa.
Egypt:
The land of the Nile and the pyramids got here alive all through a perfectly blue journey one December.
Cairo-accessed sights, nearly without saying, blanketed the one’s very pyramids, whose production began in 2550 B. C. because of Pharaoh Khufu’s order and which had been negotiated with the aid of using camel. Towering a few 481 feet, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the biggest, includes a few 2.3 million stone blocks, every weighing 2.5 to 15 heaps, and is taken into consideration the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the most effective one to stay in large part intact.
Khufu’s son, Pharaoh Khafre, constructed the second pyramid in 2520 B.C. and it’s far a part of a complicated that consists of the Sphinx, a mysterious limestone monument with the frame of a lion and a pharaoh’s head, which itself can also additionally stand sentinel for the pharaoh’s whole expanse of tombs.
The 1/3 such pyramid-fashioned structure, which is significantly smaller than the primary two, changed into constructed with the aid of using Pharaoh Menkaure in 2490 B.C. and capabilities a miles greater complicated mortuary temple.
Additional sights blanketed the temple of the Great God Ptah in Memphis, a 5,000-year-antique symmetrical, alabaster sphinx, and the unique statue of Ramses II. The Necropolis in Sakkara afforded a possibility to check out its tombs and its very own step pyramid.
The immersion into Egyptology changed into capped with a go to to the Papyrus and Egyptian museums, the latter constructed with the aid of using the Italian production organization Garozzo-Zaffarani and constituting one in every of the biggest such repositories with 120,000 items, now no longer all of which had been on show at an unmarried time. But a number of its maximum extensive had been Tutankhamun’s Mask, the Grave Mask of king Amenemope, the Narmer Palette, the Mummy Mask of Psusennes I, the Statue of Khufu, the Statue of Khafra, the Statue of Menkaure, and the Merneptah Stele.
