Day 117 Saturday November 27th A rat in the room. Indian Hotels.

We fly from Bangalore to Delhi and pre-pay a taxi 190rp ($4) to go to the airport hotel “Lohia”. We pass a sign saying “Clean and Green Delhi” and an electronic sign tracking the Carbon Monoxide levels. The driver doesn’t speak English and the taxi is firing on one cylinder but after a lot of pointing and hand-waving (since we can see the hotel) we get there. It’s on the frontage road just below the airport access freeway and so the one-way street is busy and noisy. Some large trucks and a man pulling a cart load of water melons with his bicycle are making their way down the road-all in the wrong direction and therefore against the wall to wall direction of the traffic. Every vehicle blows its horn continuously. Three unattended cows cross the busy intersection: Dad, Mum and (I think) daughter cow. Traffic gives way to them but the only thing that the Daddy cow could be aiming for is the Internet café across the street. It’s probably the pile of garbage that they are making for, it’s a common sight on any Indian road or freeway.
I remind the hotel’s owner that we are after a non-smoking room (we have pre-booked this one at about US$76/night) and I am told that will not be a problem but he then tosses a deodorant spray to one of his assistants who runs ahead to the room. The room is windowless and very dreary, the plumbing works (although it’s old and everything leaks) and the place is clean but, as normal in any Indian Hotel, only half the lights work. My bedside light is missing its shade, there is no light bulb anyway and there are wires hanging out the top of the fixture.
(Most of the hotels do now use the new low-energy bulbs). The hotel corridors badly need a clean and a coat of fresh paint and I simply cannot understand this. It should be possible to maintain the hotel with supposedly cheap Indian labor rates and I am going to add this to my quest to understand India as much as I can.
Luckily I don’t spot the rat until the morning. The bathroom exhaust fan is so poorly fitted that there are several fist-sized gaps between it and the surrounding wall and that allows me to see into the ceiling crawl space-and the rat. George Orwell never had it this bad.
I can get an acceptable airport hotel bedroom in the San Francisco Bay Area for $76/night. Lower end probably but painted, clean, electricals work and to code, plumbing newish and working. Definitely no rats. I am amazed that I cannot get that in Delhi. Ramesh had already cautioned me that, to get American/Western accommodation quality, I will need to pay at the upper end of American room rates but I refused to believe him.
Christine and I have Saturday afternoon and evening free and we set out to explore old Delhi, some of the markets and to have a decent Indian dinner. The hotel gets us a taxi and we head off to the recommended Chandni Chowk Bazaar and a determination to chart our own course and to get to know this place. Lonely Planet: “Old Delhi’s bazaars are a head spinning assault on the senses: an aromatic muddle of flowers, urine, incense, chai, fumes and frying food, and a mindbending array of things to see”.
The taxi driver had pretended to speak English but he actually doesn’t and so, when, after thirty minutes, we become hopelessly clogged in Delhi’s traffic we struggle to understand the fact that it will take us another hour to get even close to where we need to go and also that vehicles aren’t allowed in the area we are aiming for-it will be rickshaws only. We instead chose to get dropped at “Cannaught Place” in New Delhi, an area of broad avenues laid out by the British Raj and now a busy shopping area and it’s packed with people shopping and the street vendors selling books, food etc. Now I need a bathroom but there are none. We head to one of the public bathroom fixtures placed sensibly at many intersections but it’s locked. We head down into one of the new Metro’s stations (the 2010 Commonwealth Games were recently held in Delhi and the place did a lot of good preparation and clean up for that) to look for a bathroom but are told that there isn’t one. Back at street level I see a McDonalds and, sure enough, there is a bathroom there - a line of five men but I will soon be relieved. Most dark street corners have a man peeing against a wall.
The original colonnaded buildings still look fine but the streets are packed with people and the sidewalks in a jumble of broken concrete decay with open, and unmarked, manholes with bottomless drops into the dark and large electrical cables snaking everywhere. But everyone is happy and, in what we are learning is a typical Indian style, intent on getting their business done. The place is full of noise, bustle and color and a million things to gape at. We struggle to find an interesting and fun restaurant and so, after a forgettable meal, we go in search of a taxi and accept a ride in a tuc-tuc (golf cart) for a cold and windy ride back to the hotel where the owner tells us that we should have gone to Old Delhi by the new Metro.
It’s tough being a tourist and things don’t always work out. I will hate the comment from a friend that I know is waiting for me back home: “You mean that you spent a day in New Delhi but didn’t visit Old Delhi?” but we will keep trying to get to grips with this country and to get what we can out of it. We loved Southern India but had the benefit of staying with our good friends Ramesh and Lakshmi and seeing India partly with their help. Now we are by ourselves here in Northern India for the next 17 days and we already have a large part of the Lonely Planet’s 1200 page book on India read and re-read to help us on our way.

Day 116 Friday November 26th Shopping in Bangalore. Advertising for a husband.

We have returned to Bangalore from Goa and Ramesh and Lakshmi take Christine and me shopping. I already have my Egyptian Galabiyya but now Christine and I are treated to the Indian Kurta gown (down to below my knees) and Pyjama pants. Lakshmi and Christine get complex detailed Henna patterns drawn onto their hands, it will last about 14 days. I’m also becoming real Indian now and have got used to eating with my hands using the Chapati instead of a knife and fork.
I browse the local newspapers advertisements section and read those from parents looking for spouses for their sons and daughters. A very common practice and we have met friends who found each other through this. “Looking for a young male medical doctor, less than 35 years old, tall and good looking for our very beautiful daughter. Must be Brahmin.” Hmmm…
Tomorrow we have one night to ourselves in Delhi before joining the tour group for the next 17 day tour of Northern India. The tour’s first night is Sunday and is in the Ashok Country Club and so we ask the price for us to stay there Saturday night as well and are quoted $190 and so we instead book at Hotel Lohia near Delhi airport for $76/night instead.

Day 113 Tuesday November 23rd. Buddy passes

Our 15 1/2 year old Beagle is taken by a friend to the vets. He had slow growing cancer and an accumulation of old age problems. It is tough to say goodbye, our girls grew up with him and he wove himself into our hearts and family stories the way all pets do. I will remember the games of hide and seek he and I played around the house and we will all remember the many funny things that happened including the time he tried to make the eight foot leap from our boat to the dock (Beagles hate water) while forgetting he was on a six foot leash. Hence the artificial hip.
It was hard on the girls since were so far away. Bye bye Buddy.

Day 112. Monday November 22nd. Goa.

We fly for an hour NW to Goa and then hire a taxi to look for an hotel. The Lemon Tree only has studios available (it’s approaching high season) and quotes us 24,000rp plus taxes. (43rp=US$1 so that’s about $650/night!). An American couple in the lobby tells us they used a “cheap on-line booking site” and that they paid $200/night for a regular room). We have no idea why you would choose to stay in such a place while in Goa. We take the taxi to look for another hotel and have to park 400 yards away, since there is no vehicular access, and we walk down a narrow dirt track and meet “Jessica” (she tells me that her Indian name would be too hard) with her 20-room hotel Dona Florina. All the rooms face the beach and are simple but clean with tiled floors, en-suite flush toilets and showers, whitewashed walls and a double bed with a mosquito net over it. Room fan, no a/c. 850rp/night (about $20) and we have found our place to stay for our planned three night visit to Goa. Shower is usually cold, a gecko and a beach frog share the room but it’s a barefoot 200 yard walk to the beach and a great sunset over the Arabian Sea. We eat at “Pete’s”-one of the many beach shack restaurants here and it’s great. Good Indian food and a drinkable bottle of Indian wine for less than $20 for both of us. The beach is good and the ocean is warm.
Jessica is a 53 year old widow and has a four year degree in English Literature from Bombay University. I grab an old paperback copy of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” from the hotel library and will donate a book back.
We rent a scooter for $3/day but after wobbling along the dirt track and then looking at the chaos of the street traffic we decide against it and take the scooter back. I have had too many two-wheeler accidents.

Day 110. Saturday November 20th. Back to Bangalore and more explanations of Hinduism over dinner with friends.

We try to understand the role of the pink, pot-bellied elephant that is, apparently, riding along on top of a mouse. Lakshmi gives me some children’s books on Hinduism to read.

Day 109. Friday November 19th. We are glad to leave the boat.

The air conditioner pumped out cold but damp air all night, the bed had no top sheet, cold water only shower, no soap or shampoo, one small towel for two people. Couldn’t open the window since it didn’t have a mosquito screen. Breakfast was a cold omelet, cold toast and water. This isn’t the fault of the captain and his mate, it’s partly India and partly the owners (who are beyond our reach). The Indian staff in all places are very anxious to please and equally anxious to know that they have done so. We try to be happy with what’s on offer. We recommend the Rice Boats for an outing including lunch but not for an overnight.
We fly back to Bangalore tomorrow and then, on Monday, we fly up to Goa for a few days on the beach before flying to Delhi and three weeks touring Northern India.

Day 108 Thursday November 18th. Aboard the Shivaganga Rice Boat with Captain Sigi.

Part of our package with the Golden Waters Resort is an overnight tour on a Rice Boat. We are taken to the boat over a rutted out old road in a three wheeler “auto” which is basically the 2-stroke golf cart type thing that serves as a taxi in most cities in India. Gives us a chance to look at the people living in the woods around here as we bounce by. We have a captain and a cook and then just us. It comes with a double bedroom with air conditioning and attached bathroom/shower. We board around noon and we are each given a coconut with its top cut off and a straw shoved in. A man is on the top of the boat next to ours and he’s splitting canes with his machete to repair the thatched roof. These old rice boats have been converted into 1* hotels. We set off across Lake Vambanad to explore some of the 900km of inland waterways and see a way of life that hasn’t changed in centuries. Women are pounding washing on rocks, villagers are collecting cashew and coco nuts and loading them into boats. The large cantilevered fishing nets stand at the ready all along the shore amongst the palm trees. A vegetarian lunch is served on the foredeck. No alcohol on board. The usual evening storm will hit around 5.00pm (we can see it coming at us across the lake), we’ll have dinner and turn in early-no choice here but to relax and take it slowly.
I sit up with Captain Sigi and try to hold a conversation but his English isn’t understandable. At 4.00pm we are served overly sweetened tea with chips (fried potatoes). Sigi is all the time on his cell phone talking with his fiancé, he’s getting married next January. As in Egypt they seem to have some sort of - - $30/year and you can talk all you want -- deal, we are being gouged in the US.
The storm hits and we pull up against some trees for the night. Sigi offers us a “Toddy”-now we know where the phrase comes from. It turns out it’s made by the guy who lives in the shack on the bank and costs 100 rupees. This is true moonshine I think and we keep patting our heads and stomachs and asking him if it’s OK for us. It’s a natural coconut liquor. I make Sigi take it first and then check his pulse, then we try it. It’s bloody awful and we stop after a thimbleful. Water will be fine thank-you, we give the jar back to Sigi for him to drink and try not to offend him. 5 minutes later Christine reads me the following from the Lonely Planet, page 87:
“An estimated ¾ of India’s drinking population quaffs “country liquor” such as the notorious arak liquor made from coconut palm sap, potatoes or rice of the south. (i.e. Kerala where we are now). This is the poor man’s drink and millions are addicted to the stuff. Each year, many people are blinded or even killed by the methyl alcohol in illegal arak.” I have to learn to read first and act later.
It’s dark now and the insects are out hunting, we are covered in Deet.

Day 107 Wednesday November 17th The Golden Waters Resort, Kerala. Dinner-time is language time.

6 waiters wait on us and we learn the reason why. They all want to learn or practice their English and so they all gather around to hear the more proficient ones have a go at communicating with us. The State language here is Malayalam. We are practicing the Indian Head-Wobble, an essential part of communicating here. (We watched the movie “Outsourced” with Ramesh and Lakshmi the other night and it’s very funny, you can learn the head wobble from that).
Breakfast is toasted white bread, butter and jam; cornflakes; weak black coffee.
This state apparently has a literacy rate of over 90% and they have a freely elected communist government that has been in power for a long time. However, the suicide rate is also high since there is very little for educated people to do.
The young staff are insatiably curious about us. Indians will ask you very personal questions without meaning to cause offence. “Where are you from? Does it rain or shine there? What is your job and how much do you earn? Do you like India? What is your home like?”
Lunch: (Is great), Lettuce Finger; Avial (Banana, beans, carrots-all mixed in coconut oil); Snakegar (Kottu, (Curry) Dal); Sambar (Lentil and mixed veg.); Rasam (Tamarind juice, mustard leaves, salt, curry leaves, garlic, cumin, peppercorn); Thoran (cabbage and carrot chopped and mixed with coconut oil).
Over dinner we watch a Bharatha Nathyam (traditional Kerala Dance) and it’s pretty good.

Day 106 Tuesday November 16th Bangalore to Kochi/Kerala.

We fly down to the very South-West tip of India and into the state of Kerala where we will spend five days. It’s much hotter and humid down here, we are in the tropics. The Indian man in the seat next to me on the flight down turns out to be the cousin of the person we are having dinner with next Saturday.
We are met by the driver and then it takes 3 hours in a wreck of a car to navigate the potholed roads to get to the Kerala backwaters where we will spend the rest of our time. This is an all-inclusive package and we have one of the cottages set amongst the canals. I notice a gecko in the rafters up above my head but just before I drop off to sleep I see that he’s disappeared. I figure he might get some of the mosquitos before they get me and, judging by the small gecko droppings on the floor in the morning, he managed to eat something. The rich choice of activities here include chess, billiards and yoga. There is nothing for hundreds of miles, it’s time to relax.
Three men come to turn down the bed, they want us to watch and we cannot understand why and so decline and wait outside in the deckchairs. Then they leave and we go into our bedroom and it’s a work of art, they have arranged hundreds of flower petals in colorful designs all across the bed and twisted the towels into two love-making swans….
It’s hot and humid and the power goes out three times before bed-time.

Day 103 Saturday November 13th. More color. More noise. More spice. Everything is moving.

A taxi driver has a small, pink, plastic elephant wearing purple jewelry on his dashboard. This is the god Ganesh and just one of the many manifestations of the one god Brahman. As we travel we pass a twenty foot high plastic version of the pink elephant Ganesh at the side of the freeway, again all decorated with cheap looking purple jewelry.
As we left Greece behind it was Egypt that began to get us into the Eastern mood of bright colours and percussive dance music but it’s in India where the difference between East and West becomes unmistakable. The shopping malls play non-stop vibrant dance music and they are running some sort of game show where contestants answer questions for prizes-that’s also simultaneously broadcast over the loudspeakers. Everything is colorful, vibrantly so, particularly the clothing which is also very beautiful. Easterners must think that a lot of the West is grey- with our suits and white shirts and pastel Starbucks interiors. If there were a Starbucks here it would have a purple fluorescent light playing on a bright yellow wall. Even the food is more colorful than ours at home. Not everything is attractive-to our eyes at least. We pass a wedding chapel which Westerners would call garish or gaudy and so much stuff here seems like that to us. We are trying.
Like the Egyptians the Indians overall seem a happy lot and have a ready smile for you. That’s also really different to Greece and particularly Crete. The Indians, around Bangalore at least, and unlike the Egyptians, seem to have a serious tone as well, however, and are clearly busy making a living.

Day 101 Thursday November 11th The cleaning lady. Colorful India.

I first see her hunched over on the floor bashing a shirt against the marble floor as she washes it. Whites go in the machine but coloreds get bashed against a rock. It’s hard to tell but she looks about 50 and is too shy at first to offer eye contact. She has a red dress of some sort with a blue top and then a very colorful sari wrap over all of that. She is barefoot. She has a gold colored necklace and earrings and a dime sized nose stud of white diamonds and numerous bracelets to finish it all off. She doesn’t speak English and doesn’t speak the same state language as Ramesh and Lakshmi. Communication is difficult. Over the next few days I gradually manage to work on the eye contact and then some smiles and then, after a few days, she comes over to ask if she can make us anything to eat-all with sign language.
Indians love color and it’s all bright primary colors as well. As we travel East on our 8 month trip everything gets more colorful. (Take a look at Day 70-“Crete” to see why their national color is black and their songs mournful).

Day 100. Wednesday November 10th. Bangalore, India!!!

We land at 4.00am and our good friend Ramesh is there with his big smile waiting to greet us. It’s a welcome sight and Ramesh has his driver there to drive all of us back to his house for us to meet his wife (Lakshmi), his 11 year old daughter (Maghana) and his 7 year old son (Siddtharth). Ramesh and his family have just returned to India after living in California for 11 years. They live in a gated community and, as well as their children, support their driver, their cook, their gardener and the cleaning lady. They are Brahmin Hindus and so we are on a vegetarian diet without eggs. We are invited to look at the Hindu shrine in their home and we begin our journey at trying to understand a little of yet another new culture for us. The Lonely Planet Guide for India, at 1200 pages of size 8 font, is twice the size of the one for Egypt. The Indian culture seems less accessible to us and so we have our homework to do but we’ll give it a shot.
India is one third the size of the US and has four times as many people-1.15bn and growing.
Many Indians speak three languages. There are 28 states each with their own language (surprisingly different from one another); the National language of Hindi and then English.
Ramesh’s daily newspaper is full of stories about corruption and so we discuss that a little. While we might think that the power in Zimbabwe and perhaps Egypt is held by a corrupt few the corruption in India is much more pervasive and systemic. It’s become much more of an accepted way of life and thus much harder to dig out but it’s clear to Ramesh and others that we talk to that it’s regarded as a real issue and a real barrier to progress. Ramesh tells me the story of how he had to register his electricity meter in his name after recently buying his house. The junior bureaucrat held all the cards-he told Ramesh that he had to get a sign-off from the previous owner then (who had moved out of India), and on the next visit, he told him that he would need to visit to get the serial number of the meter. Ramesh visited three times and then eventually gave up and paid the extra needed for the office guy to agree the job was done. 300 rupees and a receipt for 100 rupees.
We are told that Bangalore particularly has enough tax money but the roads etc are never finished, the money goes somewhere. The living standard seems reasonable as far as we can see anyway. We visit shopping malls full of young people buying stuff and chatting on their cell phones. If you took away the lack of sidewalks and the traffic congestion a lot of it would look like a city in the US. This place is crowded though, it needs mass transit and push bikes. The noise and fuel pollution from two-strokes is awful (they are building a metro). Someone needs to invent an electric bike and forget about an electric car for now. Cows graze unattended in the medium strips, we pass a cow that has been hit lying in the road and surrounded by people.

Day 99. Tuesday November 9th. Doha, Qatar.

We have a six hour lay-over on our flight from Luxor to Bangalore, India and so we pay the immigration taxes and hire a taxi to drive us around for a couple of hours. A thunderstorm arrives and so we spend some time in Souke Waqif looking for an umbrella. It pours and pours for an hour and then stops. We are told that it will rain like that four times a year and that’s all the rain they will get. That’s OK., it’s the first we have seen for a while, it hasn’t rained in Egypt for four years. Doha doesn’t seem very interesting, looks like the pictures of Dubai that we have seen with newly constructed islands with skyscrapers on them and Rolls-Royce and Ferrari dealership showrooms connecting them. But we have never been to the Gulf and so it’s still interesting for us. Our Pakistani taxi driver manages to get home once per year to see his wife and kids. He tells us that 70% of the people in Qatar are migrant workers.

Day 98. Monday, November 8th. We are all Egyptians now.

I can’t beat the following quotes about Luxor (Ancient Thebes) and so will share them here. Lonely Planet quotes-Homer. The Iliad, Book 9.
“Royal Thebes, Egyptian Treasure-House of countless wealth, Who boasts her hundred gates, through each of which, With horse and car, two hundred warriors march.” And Lonely Planet then continues,
“There is simply nothing in the world that comes close to the grandeur of ancient Thebes. The setting is breathtakingly beautiful, the Nile flowing between the modern town and the west-bank necropolis. Scattered across the landscape is an embarrassment of riches, from the temples of Karnak and Luxor on its East Bank to the temples of Deir al-Bahri and Medinat Habu, the Colossi of Memnon and the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank.”
But we fly to India tomorrow and have just started our 90 day course of Malaria tablets. Now we notice that the packet states that we need to stay out of the sun, fat chance of that. We wonder what will happen.
Luxor is going up market, the Governor of this region is rebuilding the waterfront, excavating antiquities and restoring them well and the fancy hotels are being built to join the famous Winter Palace here. There is so much to see here but get here soon before the prices start to climb. We try to get into the Winter Palace for a drink and to look around this famous hotel but we are refused entry. 1) We are wearing shorts, 2) Mrs. Mubarak is about to arrive. We’ll go and improve our appearance and try again later and then tell Mrs. Mubarak to do something about the litter.
We have spent more than three weeks in Egypt and Jordan and will be back, Inshalla- we have had a fabulous time and we now love Egypt and its people and places.
Goodbye Egypt and Assalam Alaikum. (Peace be with you).

Day 98. Monday, November 8th. There’s a ship of the desert on my plate.

So far I have three words..
Inshalla-god willing. Which you are supposed to insert into just about every sentence. (I will now use it each time Christine asks me if I am going to take the trash out. If something doesn’t happen the Egyptians think it just wasn’t God’s will and so I will explain that to her).
Shoukrun-thank you (although every time I say it someone corrects me)
La’ Shoukrun- no thank you.
Now, heading out to find the local ATM (they tell me that it’s behind the mosque and in front of the McDonalds) I ask the Hotel to teach me “I understand”. . It’s something like Ana Fahim and I wander off muttering it but by the time I get to the local bookstore to ask about the ATM again I have forgotten the word and so the store manager teaches me all over again. Now I head out across the square toward the ATM, which is now in sight, but I have forgotten the word again and I am muttering something like Ana Hadrin, which I know isn’t right. I am accosted by a tout selling something or other and so I divert his attention by asking him to teach me the word for “I understand”. He doesn’t have much English but we get by and I have the word again but this time it costs me an Egyptian Pound for his trouble. Perhaps now, after a month in Egypt, I have four Arabic words.
Dinner at the Hotel Nefertiti. There’s a ship of the desert on my plate, (camel meat), I think I will go vegetarian from now on for a while.
No beer can be sold by the Hotel and we have had no wine or hard liquor since Greece and there is none in sight in our next stop, India, but we are getting used to it.

Day 98. Monday, November 8th. Christine’s first blog.

Sayd was a charming young man of 26, who was very proud of the fact that he had completed his military service here and happily showed us the stamp he received on his ID card. All men have to do military service and the length depends on your educational level. If you quit school you have to do 3 years, high school grad 2yrs. And a univ. grad 1 yr. If you don’t do the service you are unable to get a passport, and the gov. will keep on your case. Apparently as always money can get you an exemption. Several people have commented that the military service is TOUGH for these boys.
A quick comment about the WCs. Generally public bathrooms are pretty bad, but every once in a while you don’t have a choice. Usually you have to pay 1 Egyptian pound for which you receive two sheets of toilet paper. So the other day I needed to use one and only had a 5 pound note. I asked for change as recommended by our guides, but the guy of course had no change. I refused to give him 5 pounds so he sent me off to the men’s toilet, even grosser! Today at the ballooning site there were no bathrooms and several of us needed to use one (pre-flight wobbles), so the guy in charge just knocked at a private home and asked if we could use their bathroom. Again we had to pay to gain admittance. The bathroom we have in the hotel is 4ft. by 4ft. and includes a toilet, washbasin, and shower! It is a challenge to keep the toilet paper dry. I really miss my bathroom at home!

Day 98. Monday, November 8th. A last Felucca sail.

We walk to the Nile and meet Sayd, the captain of the “Mama Africa” Felucca who stands out as a nice guy amongst all the touts. We negotiate the price of a two hour sunset sail on the Nile, but to do that, he first invites us to have tea with him on board-the normal precursor to doing business in Egypt. I tell him about the popular American book “Three cups of Tea” and explain that the book describes the journey over tea one takes in Afghanistan from visitor to guest to friend and I can see Sayd absorbing this.
When we go back as arranged he is there waiting for us but there is no wind and so he arranges for a friend to pull us upstream for a while with his small motor boat but then that boat has engine trouble. Then that is fixed and we continue for a while but then the friend refuses to go any further since he doesn’t want to damage his engine. Sayd’s younger brother hops out with a rope and pulls us along behind him as he walks the bank past water buffalo and herdsmen with their sheep and goats. I can see a farmer pulling a plough with an ox. Two fishermen nearby in a very small boat throw a fishing net into the river and then make bongo drum noises on the side of the boat and slash the water with a long pole-all to scare the fish into the net, it’s hard work for them. After 5 minutes they haul the net in with five 5“ fish and then start again, they will sell them in the souk tonight.
Now Sayd has processed the “Three cups of Tea” story and has our journey to friendship all planned out, his brother starts by making curry tea for us as we drift downstream under a light wind. (He tells us that the tea is good for our stomachs). We all start singing “row, row the boat gently down the stream” and Sayd and his brother try to memorize the words so they can sing it to the next English tourists they host.
When we dock (and after more tea) Sayd invites us to come to his home and meet his large family and have dinner and listen to them make music together. We would love to do that but we have been up since 4.00am to go ballooning and we have to fly tomorrow and so we reluctantly decline and poor Sayd seems genuinely sad and that makes us sad. We dock, hug and part best friends with an exchange of e mail addresses. (He has since already e mailed me twice). I pay him but only after confiscating his pack of cigarettes and extracting a commitment that he will stop smoking as of now.

Day 98. Monday, November 8th. Up at 3.50am for a dawn balloon ride over the Nile and Valley of the Kings.

First time for both of us. Quick cup of coffee on the boat and then it’s a short boat ride across the Nile to the West Bank and then about ten of us get into a balloon with our Pilot and we’re off. It’s magical, we are up before dawn and so see the sunrise over the Nile as we sail over Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb and the Valley of the Kings at 2,500 feet. Now it’s easy to get a grasp of the size of all the continuing excavation work taking place around Luxor. We get a ballooning T-Shirt and so my wardrobe expands by 33%.
We say goodbye to MS Hamees, our home for the last seven nights. It’s been good to have the same bed to sleep in for a while. We have one day left before leaving for India and so we taxi to the Nefertiti Hotel in Luxor and agree a room for LE160 (US$30)/night. (Loose wires dangle from the ceiling in our room but the room is fine and clean). It’s opposite the Luxor Temple and, like most of the hotels we choose, has no elevator and so we have to lug our suitcases up to the 3rd floor step by step. The hotel has a great rooftop “bar” (no alcohol license) with views over the Nile.

Day 97. Sunday, November 7th. The Temples of Karnak and 3,500 year old flip-flops.

Our boat is at the end of its journey as far as we are concerned and we are now re-docked at our port of embarkation at Luxor. This thanks to our captain who apparently cannot read or write but has spent his life on the river. This afternoon we visited the Luxor Museum and it’s very good, not very large but well designed. Some of the exhibits were only discovered between 1989 and 2004, (Luxor is often called the World’s Largest Outdoor Museum), of course they are still excavating all around Luxor and all over Egypt. Daily life artifacts include some flip-flops and bows and arrows used for hunting. (Found in Tutankhamen’s Tomb).
Then we visit the Temples of Karnak and it is as awe-inspiring as the Great Pyramids of Giza. The site is large enough to contain ten cathedrals and the inner temple compound itself could contain Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica plus St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Started in 1300 BC and then continuously enlarged and augmented right up to and including Alexander the Great who shows himself paying homage to the ancient Egyptian God Amun to whom the entire site and temples are dedicated. (It’s interesting for us to visit this site because it was built roughly around the same period as Olympia in Greece that we visited about a month ago).
There used to be a 3km stretch connecting the Temples of Karnak with the Temple at Luxor but it was built over by the modern city of Luxor. The current Mayor is pulling down houses, hotels and Mosques so that the Avenue of the Sphinxes can be excavated and re-exposed. They have about 100m done and it’s already impressive. We will come back to see it when it’s done.
Tonight we have cocktails in the Temple of Luxor, a short orientation speech and then some free time to explore the Temple after it’s lit up and quiet. That will be our last Egyptian antiquity and it’s a good thing- it’s all becoming porridge and we need to go and digest and read, and make sense of it all.
The evening at the Luxor Temple turns out to be very good, there are just 70 of us and it’s not the normal kitsch/cheesy sound and light-it’s just lit with white lights and we are able to walk around quietly while Aida plays in the background. Suitably eerie and all the hieroglyphics stand out.

Day 96. Saturday, November 6th. Goodbye Aswan and now downstream on the Nile to Edfu.

Aswan is enjoyable, it’s an approachable size (500k) and attractive to visit. We leave our dock at 6.30am and so I am on the sundeck watching Egyptian village life go by again. Making about 20 knots now since we are going downstream and North toward Luxor. But the first stop is going to be the Ptolemaic Temple at Edfu. It was started in 246BC by Ptolemy III and finished 180 years later by Ptolemy VII, Cleopatra VII’s father. The Greeks wanted to show the Egyptians, that they ruled at that time, that they also thought the Egyptian Gods were great and so they built this temple to the Egyptian God Horus. It’s the best preserved of the Egyptian Temples and the carvings and hieroglyphics are great and the stories they show are very interesting.
Christine and I didn’t intend to spend so much of our 8 months of travel getting into the antiquities but after almost 2 ½ months in Malta, Greece and now Egypt we find ourselves unexpectedly fascinated and we want to learn much more about it all now. We will see- we have 5 weeks in India and a month in SE Asia yet and that may test our stamina and appetite for all of this history.
Back to the boat for dinner as we sail further downstream for an overnight stop at Esna.

Day 95. Friday November 5th. Army convoy to Abu Simbel. An Egyptian Souk shows its origins in the old trade routes. How to negotiate.

Wake up call at 4.20am for tea and then a 3 hour coach ride further south almost to the border with Sudan. Although things are a little more relaxed now since the last terrorist attack on tourists in 2006 we still have to be guarded by an armed escort as our three coaches are grouped into a convoy for the trip to one of the most famous temples anywhere. Built for Ramses II this is the one that had to be relocated to avoid it being submerged under Lake Nasser following the construction of the Aswan Dam. We arrive at 8.30am and it’s hot. We are a lot further south now. The temple was carved into a mountain and the façade carved onto its face. The modern feat of cutting everything up and moving it above the new water level, reconstructing it and then building a new mountain around it was also quite an achievement. The antiquities and modern technology comes together. It’s well worth the effort of the 6 hour round trip, the inside of the temple is also well preserved.
We are back on the boat (which has been waiting for us at Aswan) by 2.30pm and relax on the sun deck until the steward announces afternoon tea in the salon. This is the life.
We brave the Aswan main Souk in the evening but are too tired to enjoy the touts and the bartering. Being well rested and a sense of humor are essential to enjoy it. It’s interesting that Agatha Christie has Hercule Poirot moan about the Souk touts in 1920s Egypt. They stand in the middle of the street and shout their wares and pluck your sleeve or block your path. Some shout “no hassle in my shop” so they know that their approach puts most Westerners off but they just can’t help it. It’s been going on for thousands of years. Aswan was an old camel trading site in the days of the Old Silk Road and you can still see the roots of that with all the shops that sell buckets of spices (Saffron, Cumin, Paprika, Turmeric, Cinnamon, Vanilla), perfumes made from the flowers of Jasmine; Mimosa; Hibiscus; Lotus; Nubian Henna; and silver and gold trinkets. It’s fun to watch the shop owners and locals shopping, however. Christine and I buy an Egyptian cotton scarf and the tout starts at LE250 (Egyptian Pounds, about US$40) and I open at LE50. We settle at LE100, probably too much-but that’s OK, but I do wish I could get more fun out of it. It’s Friday and so all the men are visiting the Mosques to pray, we can see into many of them as we walk through the Souk. I look over the railing onto the foredeck of the M/S Hamees and see one of the engineers unfold his prayer mat and pray for a few minutes.

Day 94. Thursday, November 4th. Aswan Dam and Nubile Nubians. Philae Temple. A Felucca sail on the Nile.

35,000 workers (451 died), ten years and help from the Russians dammed the world’s longest river with this 6km long dam that created the biggest artificial lake in the world-550km long (150km of that in The Sudan) and 35km wide at the max. It will still hold the most water even after China completes the Three Gorges dam. Philea Temple, Abu Simbel and all the Nubians living in the valley had to be relocated and they suffered the most. The Nubians are regarded as the first tribe of Egypt and look very different than most later Egyptians with their darker skin and different facial features.
The Nubians now run the motor boats that take us to the new island on which the temple of Philae had to be relocated when the dam flooded the Upper Nile here. 50 motor boats try to dock at a landing that has space for 20 but there is no organization or queuing agreement, it is a mini Cairo with no road rules, so they all just thrust nose first to the dock with their load of tourists and rev their two stroke outboards until the air is blue with smoke and noise and their shouting. All part of the fun.
We go on an evening sail to the Kitchener Island/Botanical Gardens on a Felucca (wonderfully romantic looking sailboat of a design used by Nile fisherman for hundreds of years). Lord Kitchener based himself here during the British campaigns in The Sudan and fell in love with the spot and built a house and garden with imported trees and plants.
Back to the boat for tea. Aswan, the city, looks nice at night. We would like to come back another time and sail Lake Nasser South to the Sudanese border.

Day 93. Wednesday November 3rd. Brian and Christine in Egyptian Jalabayas. We sail up the Nile to the temple of Kom Ombo, early dentistry.

The temple is dedicated to two Gods. The Crocodiles were eating everyone at this spot and so they decided to make them a god and build a temple to them to see if that would help. I think I might do the same for the American Tax Authorities to see if that would make a difference as well. The Temple shows the first calendar (started with 350 days, 3 seasons and 40 weeks, then they changed it to 365 days. You can clearly see the instructions to the Priests to tell them what to offer the gods on specific days with the day marked with the season, week and day. Also all the early medical instruments are depicted. Hieroglyphics and pictures of Cleopatras #1 & 2.