Getting Away

This Friday, Dec 10/10 my husband, Mark are leaving for a five week trip to Italy and Egypt. In Italy we will really just be stationed in Rome though we plan a quick run up to Florence, probably just for a day to visit the Uffizzi Gallery. We will also do a bit of exploring around the area of Rome. On December 17 we fly to Cairo to hook up with a Gap Adventures group to visit Alexandria and then tour up the Nile to see the ancient temples and tombs. After we return to Cairo on December 28, we`ll have another 11 days there, to just breathe it all in, and again, to scout around the surrounding area of the Nile delta. Lastly we`ll return to Rome on January 9 for a few more days, and will head back to TO on Saturday, Jan 15. That`s the agenda.

We have been planning this trip for over a year. Every five years we have been taking a longer break to go to an area of the world that we want to explore. In 2000 it was South-East Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In 2005 we travelled to Paris for a week, then went by train to Brussells to catch a cheapy flight to St Petersburg. Once there we connected with a small group (7 of us all together) under the banner of Intrepid Tours to see Moscow and then Central Asia and China: Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara); across Kazakhstan to Almaty by train; into western China, again by train, visiting Turfan in the Gobi desert, across the country on a 36 hr ride to Xian where we saw the Terracotta Warriors, and on to Beijing. The tour ended there but we had contracted with another group for a further jaunt: more of Beijing, Nanjing, Suchow, and Shanghai. From there we flew to Vancouver and then home. Our round-the-world in six weeks trip!

This trip is less ambitious than the others but we are very keen to get some experience of Egypt. We have been to Rome and Florence before so those sojourns will be more in the nature of revisiting places we love. We became especially interested in going to Egypt after reading The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz over a year ago with out book club. It follows the life and fortunes of three generations of a middle-class Islamic family in Cairo from about 1920 to the early 1950s. It`s a terrific read: one really gets the sense of the effects of the British occupation, of the changing political climate in Egypt over the period, and of Western education on this family. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1984 for the trilogy. Cairo came alive for us in a way that demanded a visit. Since we have been reading more Mahfouz as well as other novelists, some history and travel writers. And now it is upon us. Let the adventures begin!

I will be posting on this blog during our travels. The frequency will depend upon internet capabilities at different locations. The fact that we will be in warm weather in Egypt and relatively warm weather in Italy is not lost on me as Toronto makes its way inexorably into winter. Anyone reading this blog is entirely welcome to hate me for my good fortune! All the best. Brenda