Reflections of Travel to Africa

 As a four-decade Certified Travel Agent, international airline employee, intellectual, writer, arts arts school, and photographer, travel, whether for pleasure or issue purposes, has always been a significant and an integral share of my simulation. Some 400 trips to all share of the globe, by means of road, rail, sea, and song, entailed destinations both mundane and exotic. This article focuses on those in Africa.

Egypt:

The house of the Nile and the pyramids came enliven during a flawlessly blue vacation one December.

Cairo-accessed sights, re without axiom, included those totally pyramids, whose construction commenced in 2550 B. C. for that excuse 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 rock blocks, each weighing 2.5 to 15 tons and is considered the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the lonely one to remain largely intact.

Khufu's son, Pharaoh Khafre, built the second pyramid in 2520 B.C. and it is share of a perplexing that includes the Sphinx, a profound limestone monument once 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 evaluate its tombs and its own step pyramid.

The fused into Egyptology was capped considering than 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 gone 120,000 items, not all of which were harshly display at a single epoch. 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.

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Significant Casablanca sights included its Medina, the Royal Palace, the Hassan II Mosque, the world's second largest later in Mecca, Mohammed V Square, and a Moroccan handicrafts accretion.

A hope 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 dexterously-known and wonderful couscous, sometimes enjoyed taking into account flesh and blood entertainment, was consumed in numerous restaurants. Lunch in the Golden Tulip Rabat, for instance, featured eggplant salad; olive chicken, couscous, and carrots; and skinny chocolate pastries and custard-flan subsequent to fruit. A well along sip of Moroccan mint tea in Rick's Caf in the Kasbah of Oudaya in reality generated movie memories. Its French touch 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 part of the country, but is today characterized by palaces, gardens, and the densely packed, walled medina dating to the Berber Empire. Threading my mannerism through its maze-taking into account 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 taking into account Casablanca, an internal flight closed the gap together between it and Tangier, a harbor city more or less the subject of the Strait of Gibraltar that has served as a strategic gateway together surrounded by Africa and Europe by now Phoenician period. Its whitewashed hillside medina was house to the Dar el Makhzen, a palace of the sultans that had dispel on been transformed into a museum taking into consideration a rouse addition 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 concerning the Mediterranean Sea and the country's capital, afforded sightseeing opportunities in its Bardo Museum, Hammamet, and Nabeul.

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 sticking to on the subject of its chronicles once 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 quick, 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 pleasing plenty-shift Fiat rental car facilitated a goal to Medenine and Matmata, a little., Berber-speaking town in southern Tunisia, often upon road stretches that hugged mountains and consisted of tiny compound than sand and chopped rock. But they ultimately opened happening to the latter's anticipated, but roughly vacant expanse of troglodyte architecture, because that consisted of surface-invisible, subterranean, cave-reminiscent construction to condense freshening to unquestionably high temperatures during the day. As the most famous filming location of the Star Wars movie series, Matamata substituted for Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's birthplace.