Up the Nile
Monday, July 21st, 2008To go from Aswan up to Luxor you can drive, train or go up the Nile, depending on your budget this means a big fancy cruise ship, or a very basic felucca- nothing much in between. But to be honest, I would rather a felucca any way as it seems more romantic and authentic, plus it is cheap, very cheap. I kind of expected it to be pretty basic, and it was. Just a big mattress with a shade sail and a tiny cabin type thing where the crew slept. We has 13 of us on the boat and I am fairly certain that some of them did not expect it to be so simple. Two American girls looked shocked when they arrived, “Is this it?” and went to get McDonalds to make themselves feel better. We did have a good group, myself and Hugh (English) and 2 older and very strange french people and the rest American, a guy called Brian a cool older couple, a group of 4 friends and 2 girls. The last 6 people were only staying one night so left the next morning which left us a bit more space on the boat.
So we pretty much just lay around reading, talking and watching the coast go by. Despite warnings about swimming in the Nile, the water looked too good to resist so me and Brian spent a lot of time swimming. We stopped for lunch and then went up river a bit to camp for the night. Our big mattress area was a bed, table and seats all in one. Basically it was a lot of lying around doing nothing and after Aswan this was perfect, no one to hassle you and staying out of the heat.
We went for a bit of a walk around the local village and then after tea it was bedtime. Surprisingly it got cold, very cold during the night and so not much sleep. Around 6am someone said they were cold and blankets appeared which meant I got a good couple of hours sleep during which time half our boat team left to continue on to Luxor by car while the rest of us, now which more room spread out for another tough day. It took a bit to convince the crew to actually keep moving, not so easy to get any information out of them about when we were leaving or where we would go but eventually we sailed on and stopped for another long lunch break and some more swimming where we got the American couple in the water, Hugh though was far too sensible and wouldn’t go in….I am sure he would have secretly laughed at us all if we got sick from it!
After more sailing and talking trash we pulled up with a few more feluccas to watch the sun set and eat some tea, later that night we moved up the river a bit more to where we would get picked up from. Sailing at night was amazing, the moon was big and bright and reflected on the water, the stars were out and a mosque was playing its call to prayer in the distance. There was something slightly surreal about moving quickly and quietly through the water that night. Very cool.
A night close to a main road and traffic and a lot of bugs was not so great however, so not a lot of sleep again. Then it was up early to be bundled off in some sort of pick-up to see some temples on route to Luxor. Generally the trip was great, cool people and good to see rural Egypt, however it would have been nice to do a bit more moving and get closer to Luxor as we didn’t even make it half way and drove the rest of the way, but good times, good people.
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