It's 1:00 am in the Cairo Airport - we have cleared customs in Egypt and a 4:15 am flight will start us for home. Hard to believe a year's planning is all over. Bill and I both agree that using Intrepid Travel was well worth the money. There were so many things that we never would have done - never would have considered - never would have even known about had we done all the planning on our own.

Siwa Oasis & Baharya Oasis are great examplkes of that. We wouldn't have even known they existed (not easy to find on a map!) and certainly Siwa was one of the best visits of our time here. The donkey cart from site to site, Cleopatra's Bath, Snowboarding on the sand dunes, the hot springs in the middle of the desert, Mountain of the Dead - All were fascinating and fun.

I bargained with our donkey cart driver (a boy of 11 or 12) for $2 USD NOT to hit the donkey with the stick to get it going... poking, prodding, tapping, fine; hitting not so much, please... He could not understand why, but $2 talks (it's a huge tip there) and our donkey had a few hours of relative comfort and, perhaps, our driver learned it was worth his while NOT to hit the animal.

The poor beastie was hauling Bill and Tom and Me - a considerable load for a donkey cart. Others were on bicycles of various states of operation. Cleopatra's Bath was a crystal clear spring, the size of a decent swimming pool, deep and clear, very refreshing and warm (85 F. maybe). The hot spring in the desert (in the middle of nowhere!) was more like the SNAP hot tub (100 F.) and a really welcome relief to well traveled muscles.

In Siwa we found wonderful locally made crafts and had dinner at the home of Fathi Malim, a locally famous author whose background in anthropology gives him a great perspective on his Siwian people. We now have autographed copies of "Siwian Women Unveiled" and "Siwa: Culture & Cuisine" which has some fantastic recipes of the wonderful food we have tasted over the past weeks. The food on this trip has been outstanding - and simple. The various spices certainly make the dishes what they are... copious garlic, cumin, curry, saffron, and others. Never spicy as we think of the word, but perfectly spiced to enhance the flavors of the food. Mostly veggies, rice, dips for the pita bread, stewed meats... We have eaten like royalty.

The Western Desert - the Black Desert - the White Desert... our 4x4's (Toyotas) went BOLDLY where few 4x4's have gone before. Huge 10 foot crystal formations with geodes the size of a small house and crystals the size of a chair. "Desert Flowers" of fossilized coral (remember that North Africa was once under the ocean during a long ago period of global warming) - the fossils are jet black but so obviously coral... certainly the last thing you would expect in the desert!

Camping at night in the White Desert was cold enough to freeze your nookies off and, in fact, I have seen no nookies recently, so they may have met their end. Absolutely unearthly formations of massive oceanic stone looking like something from a Star Wars set and, in fact, the Black Desert really did look like Tatooeen! We had a visit from a desert fox who, like his friends, is becoming more used to the incursion of humans and less fearful - not a good thing in the big picture (consider the bears of the US National Parks.)

We expected our final evening in Cairo to be uneventful and mostly geared to prepping our return to Charlotte. Wrong. A professional Sufi Dance Company was performing near the marketplace and Ghandi (our tour leader) got us in for free. Amazing! Sort of "Stomp" meets "1001 Arabian Nights". A strong and excellent percussion ensemble, a trio of guys playing probably a Salamiyyah (tho' I am not sure) andhonest-to-god whirling dervishes! One would not expect percussion solos from hand tambors or finger cymbals, and yet there they were and the solo work was just captivating on such simple instruments.

The drum work and even the salamiyyah's were musically within our musical psychic reach (a bunch of salamiyyah's sounds amazingly like bagpipes!) but Arabic singing is still an acquired taste that we have yet to acquire.

The dervishes were mesmerizing which is, of course, the whole idea. Wild and colourful spinning for 20 - 30 minutes with perfect control. Amazing. We were dizzy just watching but SO glad we caught the performance.

There have been so many of these little extras that we experienced courtesy of Intrepid Travel and Ghandi's knowledge. Any complaints (and we have a couple) are really overshadowed by dinner in a Nubian home, or dinner at the house of a Siwian author, or specialized out-of-the-way restaurants - Ghandi's friend who is a silver smith and from whom we ordered custom made cartouches for friends and family - all of these were just the tip of the cultural side of Intrepid's style of travel planning.

For those clamoring for pictures, we will begin posting selected albums in the coming weeks as we edit them out and share the best of the pix with you. I am AMAZED how many hits our little blogs have gotten... THOUSANDS! Really! I know that most are repeat offenders but we are humbled at the activity and interest. We'll finish up the blogging in the next few days and start pix posting and then...

Where shall we go next? In the back of our minds we are considering canoeing the Amazon...

Honest!