Cruising the Nile

by Ryan Markiewicz | Oct 11, 2025 | Berlin's Wall

Hallie, getting in the spirit (of the Pharaohs 🙂 )

Literally, the sky looks like this—blue/no clouds almost 365 days a year here!

What’s incredible about these temples is not just how grand they are (I think you can sense the height from this picture) but that they were all buried under the sand for thousands of years until they got “discovered”. There is actually graffiti at the top of many of these columns from kids writing on them when the sand was up to the top of these. Crazy!

Somali pirates in training attacked our boat, but we were able to repel them with water hoses and machine guns. Just kidding. I think, like NYC “subway surfers” they just wanted to latch onto our boat for a faster ride 😉

Cruising down the Nile. Lots of rocks and caves that people lived in.

Valley of the Kings

by Ryan Markiewicz | Oct 10, 2025 | Berlin's Wall

The colors in this tomb are over 3,500 years old

This is the ceiling

The hieroglyphics, over 3,000 years old, are truly stunning.

Walking like an Egyptian?

That is the tomb King Tut was buried in.

Like those Russian matrushka dolls, Tutankhamen was buried with three of these, each inside another. He remained safely there until thousands of years later, when he was discovered in 1920.

King Tut! The original. Ruled from the age of 9 til he died at 18. Crazy!

Another tomb. The tomb of King Hatshepsut. These are all in the middle of this arid, rocky desert in “the middle of nowhere”. Incredible.

Scary what you can find down in these ancient tombs.

An Egyptian minivan for a family of 5 😉

Luxor

by Ryan Markiewicz | Oct 9, 2025 | Berlin's Wall

Luxor is about 400 miles south of Cairo and is the home to many ancient temples and tombs. No pyramids, since the Egyptians stopped building pyramids as the resting place for their rulers, as they found that they were easily robbed. So these tombs were easier to protect.

The Temples, again, have ancient Egyptian influences, but also Greco-Roman, Christian, and Muslim influences easily seen and recognized. I don’t want to bore y’all with lots of details, but if you Google Temples of Luxor, or Valley of the Kings, and Valley of the Queens, where they are buried, I am sure it will explain a lot better than I could anyway.

Again, incredible to witness such buildings from humanity’s ancient past.

View of the Valley of the Tombs from our boat

These hieroglyphics, over 4,000 years old, are still pretty clear and crazy detailed

This is a bas relief carving on the wall of Alexander the Great

Sunrise over the Valley of the Kings

We also took a hot air balloon ride this morning. That was also very cool. Hallie was a little nervous to get onboard. (I was not. The first 2 hot air balloon rides I took ended up in kind of crash landings–not truly crash, like the balloon exploding and falling for the sky, but one landed too fast and too hard and the basket tipped over and we got dragged through the rocks and sand. The other time we landed in a tree and got tore up a bit by the branches. Nothing serious. But I figured this 3rd time HAD TO be a charm 😉)

And it was. Flew for about 45 minutes without incident. 👍

Crazy that the basket held 28 of us. You wouldn’t think a balloon could lift that many people, but I guess some are even bigger than that.

A memorable experience for sure. 

From our hot air balloon

Heading down the Nile now (though “down the Nile” means heading North/not south. One of the few rivers that flows northward. It is also the longest river on earth and helped shape the history of mankind for sure.

Cruising the Nile

PS – if anyone has questions they’d like to ask, please just email me and I’ll be happy to reply one-on-one.

Onward!

Cairo Day 2-Camels, Pyramids, & Sphinx

by Ryan Markiewicz | Oct 7, 2025 | Berlin's Wall

All,

Today we hopped on a bus and made our way to the pyramids. Even cooler than you can imagine. There are a few of them here, and even though they’re all about 5,000 years old, some are “newer” and better built as the Egyptians learned along the way. Amazing that these things got built at all — and amazing they were tombs. (Also amazing that the Taj Mahal — MUCH newer but still pretty old — is also a tomb. I guess royalty has always liked to be buried in style 🤣).

Here’s one thing that’s always struck me, but even more so now:

When you think about building these monuments — the Great Pyramid alone is made of 2.3 million blocks, each weighing between 2.5 and 15 tons, quarried and hauled from Aswan hundreds of miles away — let that sink in for a minute:

1.    First you’ve got to imagine it.

2.    Then you’ve got to design it.

3.    You need to calculate, find, order, ship, and deliver everything (ah…logistics 😊).

4.    Someone has to track it all and make sure you got what you ordered.

5.    You need to build it — with no electricity, forklifts, or cranes.

6.    And all this happened before humankind knew the Earth orbits the sun or understood gravity — discoveries that came thousands of years later.

Crazy.

So to me, not that much — beyond technology and science — has really changed. Those have advanced in unimaginable ways. But the buildings and monuments they built have stood for 5,000 years and remain breathtaking. I’m honestly not sure we can say the same for most of our modern buildings. Time will tell, I suppose.

And think about it: even back then, there were architects and draftsmen, quarrymen and haulers, loaders and drivers, foremen and accountants — and lawyers, doctors, judges, priests, and politicians too. Life wasn’t all that different in some ways.

Weird… and humbling.

Tomorrow: Luxor.

Onward!

The pyramids!

We actually got to go down into one of the tombs

The Great Sphinx protects the pharaoh’s tombs

Hallie got to take a camel ride

Sporting both the Bills and LP 😉