Protected: The unbelievable filmmaking feats of our American friends on the Kuril expedition.

The next stop on our Nile boat-trip from Aswan to Luxor, the ancient capital of the Upper Kingdom, was the city of Esna, home to the temple of the ancient Egyptian god Khnum. The ancient Egyptians had a great many gods (here’s the list); Khnum was a creator-god who molded the first humans out of […]

Sixty kilometers down the Nile from Aswan in the town of Edfu, there’s another ancient Egyptian temple complex that shares the town’s name: the Temple of Edfu. It’s one of the largest temples of ancient Egypt – and a pretty well-preserved one at that. Alas, the oldest structures have been almost completely destroyed, and what […]

Onward!… Down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor… We’d finished checking out the tourist sights at our point of departure (the Aswan Dam, an unsuccessful dash to the ancient quarries with the unfinished obelisk, and the Philae temple complex), our boat barge pulled away was pulled away from the pier, and our leisurely 2.5-day journey […]

Bye-bye, Indonesia! Hello… Changi Airport, Singapore! Yes – to the most luxurious airport in the world. I’ve already written about, and shown you photos of its Jewel shopping and entertainment complex with its ginormously gorgeous waterfall. And here I was again. On this layover, just like last time, I was lucky enough to land at […]

This year’s anarchic SAS has been duly covered. “But what about tourism?” you might ask. To which I’ll reply: we found time for that too!… At long last I got to see up close one of the biggest statues in the world with my own eyes – Garuda Wisnu Kencana, which depicts the Hindu god […]

An absolute must-see for tourists near the Aswan Dam is the Philae temple complex. Its origins are truly ancient, but it’s been ruined and rebuilt many times over – so in the end it’s not so much genuinely Egyptian as something remade “Egyptian-style” later on, in the Greco-Roman eras. And then other cultures/religions came along […]