Options
Through the Middle East
Hi everyone,
My wife and I recently went on a trip through a few countries in the middle east. I posted a few photos in the landscape forum and decided to take up a suggestion of David_S85 in the landscape forum to post a bit about my experiences.
My flight landed in Cairo in Friday, June 19 and a bout of jet lag prompted a 6am visit to the Giza Pyramid Complex, home and located just 20km and an easy taxi ride. Unfortunately, I arrived about 3 hours before the 9am opening time of the complex, which gave us quite a bit of time to wander the streets of a less than immediately photogenic suburbs that surround the Great Pyramids. Although there were few people on the streets, those that were there were very friendly and seemed amused to see a camera clad couple wandering the alleyways. In retrospect it was the perfect way to be introduced to the realities of modern Cairo.
What is shocking to most visitors is the close proximity of the Giza Pyramids to the sprawling city of Cairo. Tens of thousand live within a close distance of the only remaining Ancient Wonder of the World. This is a typical scene (note the ferrel dog and camel in the background):
I caught this man on a camel nearby. He was making his way to the pyramids for tourist rides but he allowed me to snap this quick photo:
Poverty is also a reality:
After a few hours the complex opened and after taking the inevitable photos of the Sphinx we approached the three main pyramids. What the endless photos I had seen of the pyramids had failed to fully communicate was the sheer scale of the buildings. At 40 stories high they dwarved the 3-8 story buildings that surrounding them and their bulk make them seem more imposing than modern skyscrapers. For nearly 4000 years they stood as the tallest buildings in the world. This photo was my attempt to communicate the scale:
My favourite pyramid was the second tallest, the Great Pyramid of Khafre. This is the only pyramid that has a portion of the original limestone casing that once encompassed all of the pyramids. The casing is visible at the top:
There is a vast network of structures surrounding the complex and new discoveries continued to be made to this day:
We then left the pyramids and took time to recovering from the heat, crowds and the most intense driving I've ever witnessed (over four days we were in one car accident and four near misses). Over the few days, we had the opportunity to see a bit more of the modern Cairo, which is considered the largest Muslim capital for good reason. We climbed a minaret in the Islamic Quarter of Cairo and came upon this sunset view of the city of a thousand minarets:
The interior of the mosques were equally as beautiful. After removing our shoes to enter one mosque, I came upon this scene. The person slumped against the wall is the muezzin, the mosque official who announces the call to prayer that echo through every middle east city at regular intervals. Moments later he stood up and sung the call. Shortly afterwards the mosque was filled:
I snapped this photo from the outside of another mosque shortly after sundown:
We had the opportunity to wander the streets at night. Despite the significant poverty we always felt safe (a byproduct of having an autocratic regime). I stumbled upon this scene of men playing backgammon in a covered market in the evening and was glad to have help to get the tripod up and the camera mounted before the old man and horse moved on:
Although the city itself was amazing our desire to see as many things in the 5 days we had in Egypt led us to take a 6am plane to Luxor, in the south part of the country, for a 14 hour whirlwind through a city that was the capital of Ancient Egypt during much of the Middle and New Kingdom. We hired a taxi for much of the day and went first to the Valley of the Kings, where the ancient egyptian. It is here that King Tut's tomb was found. The tombs themselves were simply carved into the mountain and so there was not much of photographic interest. No photography was allowed in the hieroglyphic filled tomb interiors and so I do not have any photos of the place worth sharing.
We did get the opportunity to do a hike to the top of the valley and despite the fact that it was midday and boiling hot it was a breathtaking view. On the other side of the valley was the well preserved ancient egyptian temple of Hatshepsut. You can actually see a portion of the path we hiked, which is at the top of the cliff wall directly above the temple:
Our excellent cab driver was waiting for us on the other side and we took a cab to the world's largest open air museum, Karnak Temple. We did stop for a quick view of the Collosi of Menmoi, ancient statutes that are the only remnants of a disappeared temple. To give a sense of the age of this statue it was partly reconstructed by the Romans 2000 years ago:
The temple itself was massive in scope, its scale so difficult to communicate that I opted to just focus on a few small details. A pillar:
And hieroglyphics:
Sometime during the 12 hours we had in Luxor we had a disaster where an ATM ate our bank card. A trip to the bank later and with some assistance from locals we were able to convince them to retrieve and return our card. Shortly afterwards we were on our flight back to Cairo. Unfortunately our last day in Cairo was erased by a massive stomach issue I had. The day after we hopped on a six day tour that we opted to do in order to assist us with getting to some more remote locations. Our tour bus went east to Sinai. We got up at 2am with 150 of our fellow tourists and pilgrims to see the sun crest over the mountains, which was worth the 2-3 hours of hiking straight uphill:
On the mountain climb down I passed this couple preparing their donkey:
We then lost a day to transportation crossing the remaining portion of Egypt's Sinai and then waiting 6 hours to take a ferry that took us to Aqaba, Jordan. Our next stop was the famous Wadi Rum desert (the stomping grounds of Lawrence Arabia for a few years during WW1). The desert was breath taking and it was my greatest regret of the trip that the tour had only allowed for a 3 hour, midday, jeep ride through the city. I loved what I saw though:
From there we went on to Petra, home of the cliff carved buildings made famous in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. My view from the hotel that night was pretty, but the 4am call to prayer did disrupt things somewhat:
The next morning we made our way to the ancient city of Petra, which was a highly secluded city that grew wealthy from the desert caravan trade. The locals constructed a well protected city deep in a mountain valley. The approach itself could not have been more spectacular. A 2km hike down a narrow chasm that eventually opens on the most beautiful building in the city:
This 10 story building, which was the home of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones was carved from the top down into the cliffside, was beautiful. What struck me the most was the scale of the remaining part of the city. Petra is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of cliffside buildings, nearly all of which were tombs. This is a stitched panorama of just a small portion of the ruins. This is actually a crop of a full panorama that is twice as long:
We spent about 12 hours wandering the ancient city, which culminated with a sunset hike to the top of one of the cliffs to see the second most famous building in the ruins. When we reached the top we had the entire site to ourself, with the exception of four German backpackers who had a similar idea:
Our tour forced us to move on the next day where we visited two other locations in Jordan. We first went to the well-preserved ruins of the roman city of Jerash:
That afternoon we floated in the salinated Dead Sea:
After spending a night in the Jordan capital Amman our tour ended and we took a public bus across the border to Syria, which was an adventure in of itself owing to the strict border scrutiny. We didn't have too much difficulty getting though though and ended up in Damascus, one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. We loved the city, which has been generally been uncorrupted by tourism (a comment I cannot make about Cairo, which was filled with touts trying to extract a buck from you and markets that just hawked tourist crap). Much of the old city was filled with covered markets, known as Sooqs, that were thronged with locals.
I loved the metal roof of the Sooqs:
Many of the roofs were riddled with bullet holes from French biplanes, which had attacked the city during a local uprising against French occupation:
I took this photo of the spice market from the third floor of an adjacent building:
The city felt alive and was still a work in progress. This was a local construction crew:
The markets were just as busy at night:
The city had many Christian churches and a significant minority of Arab Christians. However, the most prominent structure is one of Islam's holiest mosques the Ummayad Mosque. It had huge minarets:
My favourite part of large mosques is the grand central courtyard, which is filled with families and children at play:
After a few days in Damascus we took a local bus to the Syrian desert and the ruins of the Roman city of Palmyra. The desert air and remote locations had allowed the city to become one of the best preserved Roman ruins in the world. We spent a few hours wandering the ruins during the day:
This tree was growing in one roman building:
We had plenty of time to scout the best location for the sunset. Unfortunately, as the sun went down a sandstorm was kicked up and much of the site was obscured:
snapped this photo of a tomb during a moment of clarity. The figure in the bottom left corner was a backpacker from our hotel and the only other person who was in the city during the sunset. The joy of traveling in Syria is the opportunity to feel alone in places of grandeur:
Fortunately, the sunrise the next morning was clear and the scope of the city was finally revealed. This photo shows the remnants of a roman street and temple. At the top of the mountain is an Arab fort from the 1000s:
This was another street in the area:
This stitched panorama didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped but communicates some of the scale of the site:
After the sunrise we headed back to our hotel and had the hotel owner drive us to a local bus station. We arrived at a fortuitous time as the bus to our next destination was just pulling out. The kindness of the locals was demonstrated again as the packed bus of locals came to a skidding help to people helped us load and even were willing.
A few hours later we ended up in the world's best preserved crusader castle Krak Des Chevalier. Wandering castles is something I've done before and while this was a particularly nice one after a few days of desert heat we were wiped and so it may be no surprise that the photo I like most is from our the balcony of our hotel room ($40 USD a night):
The next day we rose to begin the final leg of our journey to Israel. It was a day of transit (in a taxi that cost $70USD for 400km of driving and 2 hours at the border) back to Jordan's capital Amman and the next day we bused across Jordan's border to Israel and arrived in Jerusalem. Jerusaelm was a beautiful city, although I found the old city of Damascus more realistic and dynamic than Jerusalem's old city. The Dome of the Rock was, however, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen:
The Dome contrasted with the many Christian churches in the old city:
The contrast between the new and old in Jerusalem resulted in this fairly stereotypical photo of the old city walls:
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most revered churches in Christianity but it's location wedged in the middle of the old city makes it difficult to take classic photos of it. This photo shows the area near the church:
And this photo shows the entrance from the interior:
We made a trip into the West Bank and the city of Bethlehem on one day while we were in Jerusalem. Although I had been reading articles about how the West Bank economy is picking up I was shocked at how quiet the city was. We were one of only handful of tourists in the birthplace of Jesus. It turns out that security fears have caused the tour buses to just drive straight to the Church of the Nativity and then back out. We had the rest of the city to ourselves. There was some signs of local commerce:
Unfortunately the reality is that economic development is greatly hampered by border realities. This was was the 5pm lineup of people trying to get back into West Bank through the Israel security barrier:
Depressing realities aside, we concluded our trip, and this epic post with a trip to Tel Aviv, a beachfront city that we took full advantage of:
And so concludes this extremely lengthy post. I apologise for the demands it places on your bandwidth. I hope it was worth it and congratulations on making it to the end!
I would love any comments or criticism about the photos. I'd be happy answer any questions about the trip or travelling in the Middle East generally.
My wife and I recently went on a trip through a few countries in the middle east. I posted a few photos in the landscape forum and decided to take up a suggestion of David_S85 in the landscape forum to post a bit about my experiences.
My flight landed in Cairo in Friday, June 19 and a bout of jet lag prompted a 6am visit to the Giza Pyramid Complex, home and located just 20km and an easy taxi ride. Unfortunately, I arrived about 3 hours before the 9am opening time of the complex, which gave us quite a bit of time to wander the streets of a less than immediately photogenic suburbs that surround the Great Pyramids. Although there were few people on the streets, those that were there were very friendly and seemed amused to see a camera clad couple wandering the alleyways. In retrospect it was the perfect way to be introduced to the realities of modern Cairo.
What is shocking to most visitors is the close proximity of the Giza Pyramids to the sprawling city of Cairo. Tens of thousand live within a close distance of the only remaining Ancient Wonder of the World. This is a typical scene (note the ferrel dog and camel in the background):
I caught this man on a camel nearby. He was making his way to the pyramids for tourist rides but he allowed me to snap this quick photo:
Poverty is also a reality:
After a few hours the complex opened and after taking the inevitable photos of the Sphinx we approached the three main pyramids. What the endless photos I had seen of the pyramids had failed to fully communicate was the sheer scale of the buildings. At 40 stories high they dwarved the 3-8 story buildings that surrounding them and their bulk make them seem more imposing than modern skyscrapers. For nearly 4000 years they stood as the tallest buildings in the world. This photo was my attempt to communicate the scale:
My favourite pyramid was the second tallest, the Great Pyramid of Khafre. This is the only pyramid that has a portion of the original limestone casing that once encompassed all of the pyramids. The casing is visible at the top:
There is a vast network of structures surrounding the complex and new discoveries continued to be made to this day:
We then left the pyramids and took time to recovering from the heat, crowds and the most intense driving I've ever witnessed (over four days we were in one car accident and four near misses). Over the few days, we had the opportunity to see a bit more of the modern Cairo, which is considered the largest Muslim capital for good reason. We climbed a minaret in the Islamic Quarter of Cairo and came upon this sunset view of the city of a thousand minarets:
The interior of the mosques were equally as beautiful. After removing our shoes to enter one mosque, I came upon this scene. The person slumped against the wall is the muezzin, the mosque official who announces the call to prayer that echo through every middle east city at regular intervals. Moments later he stood up and sung the call. Shortly afterwards the mosque was filled:
I snapped this photo from the outside of another mosque shortly after sundown:
We had the opportunity to wander the streets at night. Despite the significant poverty we always felt safe (a byproduct of having an autocratic regime). I stumbled upon this scene of men playing backgammon in a covered market in the evening and was glad to have help to get the tripod up and the camera mounted before the old man and horse moved on:
Although the city itself was amazing our desire to see as many things in the 5 days we had in Egypt led us to take a 6am plane to Luxor, in the south part of the country, for a 14 hour whirlwind through a city that was the capital of Ancient Egypt during much of the Middle and New Kingdom. We hired a taxi for much of the day and went first to the Valley of the Kings, where the ancient egyptian. It is here that King Tut's tomb was found. The tombs themselves were simply carved into the mountain and so there was not much of photographic interest. No photography was allowed in the hieroglyphic filled tomb interiors and so I do not have any photos of the place worth sharing.
We did get the opportunity to do a hike to the top of the valley and despite the fact that it was midday and boiling hot it was a breathtaking view. On the other side of the valley was the well preserved ancient egyptian temple of Hatshepsut. You can actually see a portion of the path we hiked, which is at the top of the cliff wall directly above the temple:
Our excellent cab driver was waiting for us on the other side and we took a cab to the world's largest open air museum, Karnak Temple. We did stop for a quick view of the Collosi of Menmoi, ancient statutes that are the only remnants of a disappeared temple. To give a sense of the age of this statue it was partly reconstructed by the Romans 2000 years ago:
The temple itself was massive in scope, its scale so difficult to communicate that I opted to just focus on a few small details. A pillar:
And hieroglyphics:
Sometime during the 12 hours we had in Luxor we had a disaster where an ATM ate our bank card. A trip to the bank later and with some assistance from locals we were able to convince them to retrieve and return our card. Shortly afterwards we were on our flight back to Cairo. Unfortunately our last day in Cairo was erased by a massive stomach issue I had. The day after we hopped on a six day tour that we opted to do in order to assist us with getting to some more remote locations. Our tour bus went east to Sinai. We got up at 2am with 150 of our fellow tourists and pilgrims to see the sun crest over the mountains, which was worth the 2-3 hours of hiking straight uphill:
On the mountain climb down I passed this couple preparing their donkey:
We then lost a day to transportation crossing the remaining portion of Egypt's Sinai and then waiting 6 hours to take a ferry that took us to Aqaba, Jordan. Our next stop was the famous Wadi Rum desert (the stomping grounds of Lawrence Arabia for a few years during WW1). The desert was breath taking and it was my greatest regret of the trip that the tour had only allowed for a 3 hour, midday, jeep ride through the city. I loved what I saw though:
From there we went on to Petra, home of the cliff carved buildings made famous in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. My view from the hotel that night was pretty, but the 4am call to prayer did disrupt things somewhat:
The next morning we made our way to the ancient city of Petra, which was a highly secluded city that grew wealthy from the desert caravan trade. The locals constructed a well protected city deep in a mountain valley. The approach itself could not have been more spectacular. A 2km hike down a narrow chasm that eventually opens on the most beautiful building in the city:
This 10 story building, which was the home of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones was carved from the top down into the cliffside, was beautiful. What struck me the most was the scale of the remaining part of the city. Petra is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of cliffside buildings, nearly all of which were tombs. This is a stitched panorama of just a small portion of the ruins. This is actually a crop of a full panorama that is twice as long:
We spent about 12 hours wandering the ancient city, which culminated with a sunset hike to the top of one of the cliffs to see the second most famous building in the ruins. When we reached the top we had the entire site to ourself, with the exception of four German backpackers who had a similar idea:
Our tour forced us to move on the next day where we visited two other locations in Jordan. We first went to the well-preserved ruins of the roman city of Jerash:
That afternoon we floated in the salinated Dead Sea:
After spending a night in the Jordan capital Amman our tour ended and we took a public bus across the border to Syria, which was an adventure in of itself owing to the strict border scrutiny. We didn't have too much difficulty getting though though and ended up in Damascus, one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. We loved the city, which has been generally been uncorrupted by tourism (a comment I cannot make about Cairo, which was filled with touts trying to extract a buck from you and markets that just hawked tourist crap). Much of the old city was filled with covered markets, known as Sooqs, that were thronged with locals.
I loved the metal roof of the Sooqs:
Many of the roofs were riddled with bullet holes from French biplanes, which had attacked the city during a local uprising against French occupation:
I took this photo of the spice market from the third floor of an adjacent building:
The city felt alive and was still a work in progress. This was a local construction crew:
The markets were just as busy at night:
The city had many Christian churches and a significant minority of Arab Christians. However, the most prominent structure is one of Islam's holiest mosques the Ummayad Mosque. It had huge minarets:
My favourite part of large mosques is the grand central courtyard, which is filled with families and children at play:
After a few days in Damascus we took a local bus to the Syrian desert and the ruins of the Roman city of Palmyra. The desert air and remote locations had allowed the city to become one of the best preserved Roman ruins in the world. We spent a few hours wandering the ruins during the day:
This tree was growing in one roman building:
We had plenty of time to scout the best location for the sunset. Unfortunately, as the sun went down a sandstorm was kicked up and much of the site was obscured:
snapped this photo of a tomb during a moment of clarity. The figure in the bottom left corner was a backpacker from our hotel and the only other person who was in the city during the sunset. The joy of traveling in Syria is the opportunity to feel alone in places of grandeur:
Fortunately, the sunrise the next morning was clear and the scope of the city was finally revealed. This photo shows the remnants of a roman street and temple. At the top of the mountain is an Arab fort from the 1000s:
This was another street in the area:
This stitched panorama didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped but communicates some of the scale of the site:
After the sunrise we headed back to our hotel and had the hotel owner drive us to a local bus station. We arrived at a fortuitous time as the bus to our next destination was just pulling out. The kindness of the locals was demonstrated again as the packed bus of locals came to a skidding help to people helped us load and even were willing.
A few hours later we ended up in the world's best preserved crusader castle Krak Des Chevalier. Wandering castles is something I've done before and while this was a particularly nice one after a few days of desert heat we were wiped and so it may be no surprise that the photo I like most is from our the balcony of our hotel room ($40 USD a night):
The next day we rose to begin the final leg of our journey to Israel. It was a day of transit (in a taxi that cost $70USD for 400km of driving and 2 hours at the border) back to Jordan's capital Amman and the next day we bused across Jordan's border to Israel and arrived in Jerusalem. Jerusaelm was a beautiful city, although I found the old city of Damascus more realistic and dynamic than Jerusalem's old city. The Dome of the Rock was, however, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen:
The Dome contrasted with the many Christian churches in the old city:
The contrast between the new and old in Jerusalem resulted in this fairly stereotypical photo of the old city walls:
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most revered churches in Christianity but it's location wedged in the middle of the old city makes it difficult to take classic photos of it. This photo shows the area near the church:
And this photo shows the entrance from the interior:
We made a trip into the West Bank and the city of Bethlehem on one day while we were in Jerusalem. Although I had been reading articles about how the West Bank economy is picking up I was shocked at how quiet the city was. We were one of only handful of tourists in the birthplace of Jesus. It turns out that security fears have caused the tour buses to just drive straight to the Church of the Nativity and then back out. We had the rest of the city to ourselves. There was some signs of local commerce:
Unfortunately the reality is that economic development is greatly hampered by border realities. This was was the 5pm lineup of people trying to get back into West Bank through the Israel security barrier:
Depressing realities aside, we concluded our trip, and this epic post with a trip to Tel Aviv, a beachfront city that we took full advantage of:
And so concludes this extremely lengthy post. I apologise for the demands it places on your bandwidth. I hope it was worth it and congratulations on making it to the end!
I would love any comments or criticism about the photos. I'd be happy answer any questions about the trip or travelling in the Middle East generally.
Reverb
www.alexdimson.com
www.alexdimson.com
0
Comments
I really enjoyed your story as well as your stunning pictures
My Photo Blog -->http://dthorpphoto.blogspot.com/
You also have several very lovely wide shots from locations my guides never suggested.
A wonderful collection.
Dave
The Intrepid Berkeley Explorer
Thanks for sharing
Peter
http://www.imageinuk.com
Btw, how long was the trip?
Ana
SmugMug Support Hero Manager
My website: anapogacar.smugmug.com
Canon 40D, XTi, 17-40L, 70-200L f4 IS, 50 1.4, 28-105 II, 18-55, Nikon FE2 and lenses, etc.
Thanks so much! I've really enjoyed this armchair travel to such exotic places. Great shots and a wonderful journey.
My Gallery
www.morffed.com
Thank you very much. I shot it with a Digital Rebel xSi (450D) and an even balance between Canon's 10-22 lens, 17-55 2.8 lens and the 70-200F4L. I had no problems or concerns with hauling that level of equipment through the desert or crowded cities.
www.alexdimson.com
If any of you are curious I have more photos up of the trip up at www.alexdimson.com/mideast and some other journeys from previous years are there as well.
I'd be happy to answer any other questions anyone has about the process of planning such a trip.
www.alexdimson.com
beautiful images accompanied by great text. thanks for sharing
Moderator of: Location, Location, Location , Mind Your Own Business & Other Cool Shots
Kevin
www.rightangleimages.com
Thanks for the compliments guys!
www.alexdimson.com
Los Angeles dance photographer
Website: http://www.allenparseghian.com