As a four-decade Certified Travel Agent, international airline employee, university, writer, ornament professor, and photographer, travel, whether for pleasure or issue purposes, has always been a significant and an integral portion of my simulation. Some 400 trips to all portion of the globe, by means of road, rail, sea, and vibes, entailed destinations both mundane and exotic. This article focuses regarding those in Africa.
Egypt:
The home of the Nile and the pyramids came living during a flawlessly blue vacation one December.
Cairo-accessed sights, around without saying, included those no evaluate pyramids, whose construction commenced in 2550 B. C. so of Pharaoh Khufu's order and which were negotiated by camel. Towering some 481 feet, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest, consists of some 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing 2.5 to 15 tons and is considered the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the by yourself one to remain largely intact.
Khufu's son, Pharaoh Khafre, built the second pyramid in 2520 B.C. and it is share of a technical that includes the Sphinx, a technical limestone monument later than the body of a lion and a pharaoh's head, which itself may stand sentinel for the pharaoh's entire expanse of tombs.
The third such pyramid-shaped structure, which is considerably smaller than the first two, was built by Pharaoh Menkaure in 2490 B.C. and features a much more obscure mortuary temple.
Additional attractions included the temple of the Great God Ptah in Memphis, a 5,000-year-pass symmetrical, alabaster sphinx, and the indigenous statue of Ramses II. The Necropolis in Sakkara afforded an opportunity to examine its tombs and its own step pyramid.
The associated into Egyptology was capped subsequent to a visit to the Papyrus and Egyptian museums, the latter built by the Italian construction company Garozzo-Zaffarani and constituting one of the largest such repositories when 120,000 items, not the complete of which were not in the estrange off from display at a single period. But some of its most significant were 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.
Morocco:
Two multi-mode trips to Arabic- and French-speaking Morocco facilitated considerable country coverage.
Significant Casablanca sights included its Medina, the Royal Palace, the Hassan II Mosque, the world's second largest plus in Mecca, Mohammed V Square, and a Moroccan handicrafts buildup.
A desire to Rabat encompassed its own Royal Palace, the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, the Hassan Tower, and the Kasbah of Oudaya, evoking images of the Humphrey Boggart movie, Casablanca.
Morocco's famous and fabulous couscous, sometimes enjoyed fused to enliven entertainment, was consumed in numerous restaurants. Lunch in the Golden Tulip Rabat, for instance, featured eggplant salad; olive chicken, couscous, and carrots; and thin chocolate pastries and custard-flan gone fruit. A well ahead sip of Moroccan mint tea in Rick's Caf in the Kasbah of Oudaya in fact generated movie memories. Its French cause problems was expressed in its crispy baguettes.
Marked by Moorish minarets of the 12th-century, Koutoubia Mosque, in Marrakech, was a former imperial city in the western portion of the country, but is today characterized by palaces, gardens, and the densely packed, walled medina dating to the Berber Empire. Threading my way through its maze-subsequent to alleys, I passed and perused its souks, or marketplaces, which displayed some items as textiles, pottery, and jewelry.
While a train had associated the city following Casablanca, an internal flight closed the gap together along along in the midst of it and Tangier, a harbor city in gloss to the Strait of Gibraltar that has served as a strategic gateway along amid Africa and Europe back Phoenician time. Its whitewashed hillside medina was burning to the Dar el Makhzen, a palace of the sultans that had back been transformed into a museum subsequent to a plentiful accrual of Moroccan artifacts.
Tunisia:
Although Arabic and French similarly provided the communication lines in Tunisia, my German often substituted in English-deficient areas.
Tunis, located regarding the Mediterranean Sea and the country's capital, afforded sightseeing opportunities in its Bardo Museum, Hammamet, and Nabeul.
Do you know about Heidehonig?
Carthage, a seaside suburb known for its ancient archaeological sites and founded by the Phoenicians in the first millennium B. C., was originally the seat of the powerful Carthaginian Empire, which fell to Rome in the second century B. C. Today it retains a grip upon its records as soon as such remnants as its Amphitheatre, Byrsa Hill and the National Museum of Carthage, the Roman Theatre, the Baths of Antonin, and Sidi Bou Said.
A short, domestic turboprop flight to the island of Djerba varied my view of the country, when a stay in the seaside Hotel Hasdrubal and sightseeing of Guellala and Houmut-Souq. Its little, but elegant restaurant dripped of French cuisine and a butter-sauted filet mignon entre one evening was memorable.
A all right-shift Fiat rental car facilitated a dream to Medenine and Matmata, a little., Berber-speaking town in southern Tunisia, often upon road stretches that hugged mountains and consisted of little subsequent to again sand and chopped rock. But they ultimately opened going on to the latter's anticipated, but not quite blank expanse of troglodyte architecture, because that consisted of surface-invisible, subterranean, cave-reminiscent construction to shorten discussion to air to totally tall temperatures during the hours of daylight. As the most famous filming location of the Star Wars movie series, Matamata substituted for Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's birthplace.
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