Kharga Oasis

 Jan 23^rd

Work today was extremely exciting for me because one of the grad students, Chris, let me dig for a few minutes in a pot that he found. I’m not sure I can disclose exactly what was in there, but there were lots of goodies some of which I got to find!! Definitely one of the highlights of the whole experience.

The middle of the desert

After work on Sunday we took a shower and hopped in a van for a 3½ hour ride to Kharga. On the way, we stopped next to a sign that said we were in Baghdad and Paris (obviously not the real one) to take pictures. We also saw real mirages once we were pretty far out. I always thought they were exaggerations or something caused by dehydration’s effects on the brain, but we were hydrated and in air conditioning and still saw them. It scary how much it actually looks like there are lakes in the middle of the desert when there obviously aren’t any. I can’t imagine being stuck out there. There’s literally NOTHING as far as the eye can see. We stopped in the absolute middle of the desert for lunch. We ate tomatoes like apples, some falafel and Egyptian bread which were all delicious. Since I take at least one jumping picture on every trip, I started a series of jumping pictures in the middle of the desert. Jay, the photographer has all of these pictures and I can’t wait to see them. We also took a Beatles Abbey Road photo.

In the temple we climbed at Dush

We rode the rest of the way and stopped at a temple called Dush (pronounced douche). After exploring by ourselves, the Egyptians showed us a horned viper they had caught with a stick and placed in a clear jar. Horned vipers, the letter f in middle Egyptian, don’t have an antidote so if you are lucky enough to be bitten by one, you die. It was very strange to be staring one in the face with a piece of glass separating us. I also got to see a scorpion for the first time! They had also caught this and put it in a jar for us to see.

Horned Viper

Scorpion

That night Dr. Bryan paid for us to spend a night in a really nice hotel. We all tried to watch Asterix and Cleopatra together, but we all started falling asleep a few minutes into it. That’s what happens when you wake up before 6 every day and when your days off are busier than your work days. The desert is much colder at night, so I woke up a lot during the night but at least it wasn’t because of Luxor’s noise polluting my sleep.

Supposedly the oldest complete books in the world

In the morning we got to sleep in until 8… well we left at 8 but that’s still an extra hour of sleep. After a crappy breakfast at the nice hotel, we visited the museum of Alwady Algadid which holds some amazing jewelry, the earliest complete books ever discovered, and lots of famous ostraca. We then visited approximately 4 temples on the way home one of which was the Hibis Temple. It had some of the coolest iconography I’ve ever seen. My favorite is the double hawk headed crocodile with wings. I had definitely never seen that before. We sat in the back of a pickup truck to see where Yale is working at another temple and also stopped at a pottery factory and got to see every part of the process.

Double headed hawk/croc thing at the Hibis Temple

Mmmm. Shrimp flavored chipsies! They were actually really good.

Old school pottery factory