Temples: The Field Trip

This weekend we went to the Kharga Oasis, the larger oasis North of Dakhla Oasis. There, we visited about four sites a day, which meant a LOT of temples and fortresses! But it was really fun. And exciting. It was so cool to see all of these things in person!


This is a picture of a book I saw in a museum in Kharga. This book, however, was found in the Dahkla Oasis, at a site we visited, by an archaeologist (Colin Hope) who gave us a tour of the site. It is THE OLDEST BOOK IN THE WORLD. Isn't that incredible??? It is called the Kellis Account Book. You can look it up. I, however, have seen it in person. AND seen where it was dug up (although I didn't take a picture of that - it was backfilled with sand again, so there's not much to see...)


That's me! On top of a wall! At a huge fortress called El Deir, 30 minutes by car plus 45 minutes by tractor (really!) away from downtown Kharga. It was incredible.

This is some graffiti at the fortress of El Deir. This fortress was used during WWI/the Anglo-Turkish war, and they wrote all over the walls! It's a little sad, but a little interesting. S.F. Sellek clearly had a lot of time on his hands...


This house is actually an animal mummy tomb! There are 100s of dog mummies in here! But I posted it because it looks just like the Flintstone's house... This tomb is associated with the fortress at El Deir. In that it's quite close by... You can also see the escarpment to the left in this picture, a huge (300m high?) barrier to travel. The fortress at El Deir was probably built to control the two passes through this escarpment.

So that was the field trip to Kharga! A final story:

On Saturday night, we decided to head out in search of ice cream. I and a few others from the program were accompanied by Fatma, our lovely young Arabic teacher, because she travels with us everywhere and we adore her company. But it would turn out that we would be delighted to have her company.

After we'd been walking for approximately a block, a police man approached us. He wasn't dressed as a police man, though, so until he had an exchange with Fatma we had no idea! Luckily, she was there to answer his questions - who we were, where we were going, where we were from. Who knows what would've happened if Fatma hadn't been there, but as it was, we continued merrily on our way.

A few blocks later, another police man stopped us and spoke to Fatma. This one told us that he would need to follow us, because we were foreigners, and it might not be safe. (Kharga and Dakhla are, after all, in a militarized zone!) So we headed on our way again, trying to ignore the green pick up truck trailing behind our lone guard.

We didn't really know where to go for ice cream, but we wandered around for awhile before admitting defeat. By that time, we were a little more used to being followed by an armed escort, and had decided to treat it as exciting rather than sinister. So we asked our friendly police man (with Fatma's help) to guide us to ice cream. And then we were following him.

As we trailed along behind our police man, we passed several places that seemed to have Nestle coolers full of ice cream. We kept looking at one another, wondering why he wasn't taking us to one of those. Then we passed a homemade ice cream shop. We were confused, but Fatma looked relaxed and comfortable, so we didn't worry.

When we arrived at the location he had been guiding us towards, it was closed... We weren't worried, though, because we'd passed so many ice cream shops on our way. We simply walked back towards the legitimate-looking ice cream parlor, and I had DELICIOUS banana ice cream, which made me extremely happy.

Even better, we next had to go to another ice cream place to buy something packaged for my buddy Trisha, who had just been sick and wasn't sure she should eat anything questionable. But by the time we'd arrived at that ice cream shop, I'd finished my first ice cream! So I got another... this one was a chocolate and vanilla ice cream bar dipped in milk chocolate with hazelnut chunks in it! It was also delicious.

In the end, I was grateful to our awkward police escort for leading us past such delicious ice cream shops. I hardly feel I need to tell you that I went back the next night for more banana ice cream...