We spent a few days in Cairo before going down to visit our friend at her home on the Red Sea for three nights.

We returned to Cairo and spent a very full day visiting the sites. In the evening we attended a Rotary meeting of the Cairo West Club.

It was a late night followed by an early start as we flew to Abu Simbel and then back to Aswan to join our cruise ship.

The temples and tombs that we saw over the three days were amazing and although familiar, from books and documentaries, they were still awe inspiring seeing them for real.

Hopefully we are somewhat wiser about these great monuments.

Our cruise finished in Luxor with visits to the valley of the Kings and Queens and great temples.

We returned to Cairo for a night and then we went up to Alexandria where once stood a wonder of the ancient world, the famous Lighthouse. It is nowadays the site of a fort originally built in the 14th century using some of the original granite from the lighthouse.

We visited the new library which is situated some 200m from the original library and aims to be the biggest collection of books in the world. We spent a very full day sightseeing and it will be very much on our list of places to return to. They intend to build an underwater museum to reveal, to the general public, the part of the ancient city which was lost to the sea during an earthquake.

We are now back in Cairo and intend to revisit the museum which contains many artefacts, so many that if you just take one minute to look at each item, it would take you 5 years to see them all.