In De Nile!

Ha ha ha ha! In De Nile! We've been waiting for DAYS to say that! Ha ha ha. Somewhat appropriate to this entry though, as we recently took a two-day felucca trip down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor. It actually only took us as far as a smallish town called Kom Ombo, where we hopped on a minibus and went via Kom Ombo and Edfu temples to Luxor.

The felucca boat was very peaceful; about 25 feet long, simple construction, with essentially the whole deck being converted to a large futon upon which 11 tourists spent 48 hours, sleeping, eating, lounging etc. Feluccas are distinct by way of their single 'sharp' free-floating sail. Our 'captain', Faddy, cooked our (very basic) meals for us; the highlight of which was Brigid's favourite, 'Koshary'. All the meals were pretty bland though to be fair; they seem to have essentially one spice (or spice mix) and they use it pretty liberally in everything, meaning that while textures change from dish to dish, usually the taste doesn't!

Dubious encounters with local village boys... especially for Brigid. There is no toilet on the boat so we would occassionally pull into the side to find a bush for everyone. The boys would see the boat coming in and swarm it, showing off by diving into the water etc, and not-so-subtly following the girls into the bushes to try and sneak a peak. It is crazy; these people live in decrepid, crumbling mud-brick houses, but they all have camera enabled mobile phones with which to take pics of squatting tourists. Quite 'skeevy', to steal a phrase from Anne!

The one downside of the boat trip was the endless disruption of giant tour boats. We saw at least 30 a day, often in 'convoys' of up to 7. None of them seemed to have more than about a dozen people on board (since it is not the high season right now). The bow waves from these boats would rock our little felucca quite severely, and since they run all night long, sleep was often disturbed with wild-eyed awakenings, fearful of capsize! Ha ha ha! Anyway, the water was otherwise calm and gentle, however we felt like we were rocking to and fro for 2 days afterwards. Who knew you could develop sea-legs so quickly! I felt like I was going to either fall over or puke all day long, and sometimes thought I might do both. If anyone has heard tales of my visit to 6 flags rollercoasters, you'd understand....!

Buses around these parts will only take tourists as part of police convoys, which meant that we were restricted to only short periods of time at the temples... an hour is not enough time to adequately peruse Edfu temple especially, but we did fairly well and understood a lot of what was depicted in the scenes thanks to our lonely planet guide book. Edfu temple has a good scene depicting Seth (the god of Chaos) being subdued by means of succesful warring conquests. He is depicted as a hippo (diminished in size to symbolise his futility), and as 'hippo cake' which everyone was eating to symbolise his being vanquised and order being restored! We subsequently went out and bought stone-carved hippo (Seth) for our kitchen back home... only he is more likely to be quite strong there! A good buy actually, as we haven't seen another hippo statue anywhere since!

In luxor we went to Karnak temple, which defies all words. Even the pictures give a poor representation of it, but it is fabulous and amazing and all those other words. We also saw the valley of the kings (desolate and hot!) and the valley of the queens. Some amazing artwork in pristine condition but no photos allowed I'm afraid. The best was the tomb of one of Rameses III's son; which has very tender and sentimental scenes showing the pharaoh escorting his son on his journey to the afterlife, and introducing him to the various gods along the way. These images were entirely undamaged and in splendid colour.

After the initial harassment of Luxor (it is a very heavily touristed place) we have come to discover a more peaceful side of the town. Today is the first day of Ramadan and last night felt like christmas eve with a somewhat supressed sense of excitement and tension in the air. There are flags hanging everywhere, and it felt essentially like christmas; they even have those tacky little christmas song-toys, playing jingle bells and wish you a merry christmas etc! Hilarious! Ramadan is an annual holy time where the people eat and drink NOTHING between the hours of 6am and 6pm. Wholly uncivilized (Ha ha ha ha) but they have big feasts everyday as soon as they can eat, and at the end they apparently have a massive party!

Anyway... we'll not write anymore at the moment, since we had such a huge blog the other day, but there is so much to talk about here in Egypt that we'd miss it all out if we didn't make frequent entries. We're off to Sharm el Sheikh (15 hour bus ride!) for some snorkelling this evening, and hope to climb mount Sinai sometime before we leave for Mumbai...

Hope all is well back there. The Cards better step it up and sweep the Cubs this weekend!!! :)

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