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.