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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 10
Final Day in Cairo, return to Kochi & sundry thoughts on the trip We were afforded the rare luxury of waking up at 8am, having a leisurely breakfast and then getting on the bus by 10am. By the time our luggage had been identified and loaded it was a bit after 10:30 in the morning and then got on the bus for our sightseeing experience before making the trip to Cairo International airport. The last of our sightseeing trips conducted was a Coptic Church, St.Sergius and Bacchus which was built on what was believed to be the hideout of the holy family when they had to flee to Egypt from…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 9
Cairo After a good breakfast which was a choice of continental and Middle Eastern food we got on the bus with Mehmood our guide explaining that our first stop is what any person who has heard of the Great Pyramids of Giza would look forward to visit with much anticipation, which summed up the feelings of our tour group. The Pyramids were very close to Le Meridien and we were among what seemed like hundreds of tourists flocking to see one of the great ancient wonders of the world. We started with the biggest one which is called Khufu or Cheops (as the Greeks called it) and if one were…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 8
Travel to Cairo/St Katherine Monastery/Suez Canal/Cairo We were told that the bus journey from South Sinai to Cairo was going to be a long one, and to be on the bus by 8am. So we started on October 25th, the route was along the coastline of the Red Sea and the last part would be the Gulf of Suez. We would then cross the Canal through the tunnel to enter into Cairo. Our only stop on the way was to be a place which is commonly known to Christians as St.Katherine where there is a monastery and a church built centuries ago over the burning bush that Moses had seen,…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 7
Transit to Egypt/Red Sea/Tabha Of the 10 days we were on the Holy Land trip, this day was one of the less productive ones as far as sightseeing was concerned. We were supposed to have been taken to the House of Bethany, home of the two women who took Christ in to their house and the famous recounting of Martha washing Christ’s feet after anointing it with expensive and sacred oil. This however had to be cancelled due to local strife between the Israeli authority and Palestinians, from what was recounted to us there was stone throwing and tear gas to dispel unruly crowds. Unfortunately this happened on the route…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 6
Mount of Olives/Church of the Ascension/River Jordan/Dead Sea At the crack of dawn we were up at the hotel that we were put up, not due to any time constraints as it was in the previous days but because we wanted to explore a bit of the Palestinian side, and with Shyni’s friend and coworker mentioning that she was from Ramallah we had limited time to step out and try to get the feel of the city. As any traveller can attest, to step into just one neighborhood in any city especially in a foreign country is not really a taste of what daily living is, it was a cool…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 5
Church of the Holy Sepulchre/Tomb of David/Last Supper/Western Wall As each day passed it became routine for us to start out early, as our two guides Bindu & Shehadi urged us to do so, after an early breakfast, usually by 6 or 6:30 in the morning. On this day in particular, we had a full itinerary starting with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As we combed our way through the old city of Jerusalem, with Shehadi explaining about the various quarters in the path of the Via Dolorosa (the way of suffering) where Jesus walked carrying the cross to the site of his crucifixion. One remembers that this is…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 4
Cana/Bethlehem/Church of the Nativity We started our day after breakfast early as usual, on the bus the morning prayers and devotional songs were sung and chanted. Our trip for the day according to the schedule sent out to us was going to be first to Shepherd’s Field – as the name suggests it is where the shepherds “watched their flocks by night” when the birth of Jesus occurred. Many of the songs, Christmas carols, passages from the bible and our memories are closely associated with these illusory figures, the shepherds. It was a short walk from where the bus was parked and we managed to see what must have been…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 3
Amman to Israel Again, an early start to our day after breakfast. Once settled in the bus, morning prayers songs were sung – our bus took us from Jordan to Israel and we started going through what would become routine on our travel security checkpoints, this one was at the Jordanian border into Israel. A TSA type of scan of all our luggage and our papers were scrutinized, with some questions thrown in to ensure that we were all part of the group. At this point we changed buses and guides, Talal the experienced guide was replaced by a younger man by the name of Shehadi a Palestinian who would…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 2
Amman, Jordan Our day started out early, we had been forewarned by Bindu that this will be the trend for most of the days, the idea being to keep to the itinerary with some of the places that we need to visit being far apart. After breakfast, which was opened by 6 or 6:30 am at the hotel restaurant, again, the menu would be repeated throughout the trip, with slight variations. There would be a choice of eggs, bread, fruit, maybe even some meat such as chicken or beef in the form of sandwich slices or sausages, of course never any pork. We were in a Muslim country and later…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 1
Introduction by Rana: In 2013, we went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and I included several posts on our trip. Since then I have told quite a few people – mostly Indian Christians – that it was one of the more fulfilling trips that we have undertaken. My brother, Peter (Eapen Joseph Panicker) went with his wife, Shiny, and several others and used the same tour operator that we did – Royal Omania Tours in Kochi. He kept a journal of his trip to the Holy Land and he recently shared it with family and friends. He did a far better job than I did in recording the…