Felucca? I barely even know 'er!

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For years my mother scolded me at the dinner table about starving kids in Africa, and today I’m one of them. Given the routine of constant grazing I’ve adopted since reaching Egypt - the mid-day schwarma, the koshary dinner, the hummus night-cap - it’s taken a bit of work to adjust to life on a felucca. We boarded the ship in Aswan - an auspicious breeze puffing its sail out against a backdrop of startling blue - and the hunger pangs set in before Captain Mohamed dished out the first overbaked balls of falafel. It’s hard to enjoy a lazy glide through the cradle of civilization when your stomach has begin to digest its own lining. For dinner I’m hunched over a steaming bowl of vegetable stew: a fine prelude to a nice slab of beef, if only that beef were char-grilled on a plate in front of me, not swishing its tail and lowing on the river’s banks.

But there are worse ways to spend a couple of days, the sun broiling above us, the shimmering river doing its best to distract us from the plastic bags and soda bottles bobbing on the surface. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you haven’t lived till you’ve spent a day at the office drifting along the Nile. If I’ve got the best job on the river on this sun-drenched afternoon - scribbling in my pad, snoozing into the sunlight, waving to the kids scooting between the palm trees on shore - Captain Mohamed is running a close second. He works the rudder in a dreamy trance, his eyes lost in the distance, his mouth pulling on the cigarette he’s rolled with nimble fingers. We pass some row boats coasting along beside us, the fishermen slapping the water with an oar - “waking up the fish,” the captain tells us, with a marvelous burst of laughter.

There are ten of us onboard - an American backpacker from Portland, an English teacher in Palestine, a young Austrian hippie who repairs watches, his girlfriend clinging tightly to his arm and making little noises of adoration. There’s an old Irishman with a gray plait of hair dangling past his neck: he spends most of the trip hunched over a book, or curled into a ball with his back to us. There are two Japanese girls - strangers before the trip - who bond with the sort of intensity that suggests they’re plotting a mutiny before day’s end. There’s a pretty, perky Australian who recently left a marketing job in Sydney. She forges a quick connection with Paul, who works in online advertising, and there follows a frightful half-hour talk about branding strategies that probably has old Ramses II spinning in his tomb.

It’s fortunate that we’re getting on so well, because by nightfall we start to realize what a tight squeeze we’re in for. The first night feel less like a pleasure cruise than the Middle Passage, huddled under our blankets and sleeping bags, our feet fighting for position. The temperature drops and drops, the wind picking up from out of nowhere, a certain scribe wishing he hadn’t decided to bed down under the shivering stars. In the morning Paul’s a portrait of misery: something’s bitten his face, and he suspects it came from the mangy blankets the first-mate’s pulled from the felucca’s belly. He’s lost some of the feeling in his hands and feet. “There are homeless people in Egypt who are warmer than me right now,” he says, wrapped in his blanket like a refugee. Next to him Quinn - the Australian - is cozily curled inside of her sub-zero sleeping bag. There are currents of envy and hatred sweeping across the river, and Paul’s wisely decided to dig up some extra layers before the sun sets on day two.

You don’t appreciate how many hours are packed into the day - as the old saying goes - until you’ve spent them on a felucca. We’ve exhausted the conversation and read until our eyes are sore, and Captain Mohamed - howling into his cellphone while he works the rudder - has apparently decided that now’s the perfect time to recite the Thousand and One Nights to friends in Cairo. It’s become a test of endurance to make it through the day. When we coast ashore between a few boats of local fishermen, dejectedly pulling their empty nets from the river, four of us decide to head with the captain into town. He’s offered to show us a local camel market, which promises plenty of entertainment in its own right, though I suspect we’re in it more for the sake of just the slightest bit of stimulation.

We take a rickety truck into town, passing through emerald fields where the men are hunched beneath the sun and reaping the harvest. Donkeys clop by, tugging carts piled high with sugarcane. Invariably there’s a mischievous kid perched on top, grinning broadly, giving us a thumbs-up, apparently hoping to impress us with the skill and ferocity with which he can whack the living shit out of a beast of burden. At the market there are men in gelabbiyah and turbans haggling hard, the camels - nonplussed and serene in a way that only camels can be - standing around, batting their long eyelashes, pissing and shitting as freely as they please. A guide points out the choicest ones: their humps proud, their flanks padded with muscular flesh. A sad crop of new arrivals has just arrived from the Sudan - a 1,500 kilometer trek without food or water - though they could’ve just as easily been bused in from an orphanage in Bucharest. Neglect and mistreatment are written on their drooping faces. You can see the thin outline of their ribcage. Some of them have nasty-looking wounds on their legs, the blood clotting beneath a scar the color of a nice Bordeaux.

It’s clearly a hard-knock life for your average camel, a fact that’s reinforced as we watch them getting loaded into flat-bed trucks. They wail and moan and hold their ground; a couple of guys - lowering their shoulders like fullbacks - slam into their haunches with a running start. One sadistic buyer is punching a camel in the neck, winding up for the sorts of roundhouses that could floor a heavyweight. There’s a murmur of approval as the beast finally gives in, its legs roughly taken out from under it. Nearby old men sit Indian-style in the shade, drinking mint tea and lazily swatting away the flies. All of which goes to show that a day at the camel market is nothing at all like a day at the A&P.

We stop for supplies in a busy market town nearby. Paul buys a bag of falafel for an Egyptian pound - about 18 American cents - and we load up on fresh produce. Quinn’s causing quite a stir, flashing some skin beneath her capris, going braless in a t-shirt that almost causes a four-donkey-cart pile-up. There are hisses and catcalls; one young guy, his shirt immodestly unbuttoned down his chest, is trying to lure her to his fruit stand. “I am here. I am here,” he says, his arms outstretched. There are sacks of dates and peanuts on the floor around him, tomatoes piled high, and the scene gives his desperate pleas a pathos that is, I’m sure, hardly the aphrodisiac he intends.

Devilishly handsome though I may be, it’s hard to imagine getting that sort of attention all day long. Later on we moor for the night beside a small pasture of grazing cows and donkeys. There are cheers and laughter drifting our way from a field nearby, where the locals are playing soccer. The captain gives Quinn a stern look that suggests she’s as likely to leave the boat as he is likely to tap dance on the Nile. The Austrian couple linger warily on-shore, looking anxious when a group of kids take too much interest in their expensive camera equipment.

Me and Paul lace up and decide to investigate, hoping to do our part to improve cultural relations by showcasing our crippling ineptitude with our feet. It’s a humbling moment when we reach the field, our assumption that we’ll be kicking the ball around with a bunch of barefoot villagers undone by the fact that they’re all in matching jerseys and fancy footwear. There’s a referee tooting on his whistle and directing the flow of play, a gravity about him that suggests the donkeys impassively swishing their tails on the sidelines could just as well be 100,000 rabid fans in Wembley Stadium. Paul gets accosted by a scruffy young kid with dry, cracked lips who wants to wear his designer shades. Another is brandishing a jagged little farm tool that must make him the world’s most menacing eight-year-old. It’s exactly the sort of moment they don’t highlight in the felucca brochures. Later, when we get back to the boat, Quinn is scrunched up into a trembling ball, her face contorted with pain. Captain Mohamed won’t let her run to the bathroom until the game’s finished, the locals have left, and the testosterone’s cleared, and she spends a half-hour looking hopefully toward the shore until the last donkey’s been led back home.

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