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Published: February 5th 2008
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So to my pleasant surprise, our riverboat was not scheduled to depart from Aswan until Saurday afternoon, which gave us lots of time to explore Aswan. Friday morning we had a 3 am wakeup call so we could be on the bus at 3:30 to join the convoy to Abu Simbel. To get to Abu Simbel, it's about a 3 hour drive from Aswan and you have to go in a tour bus or minivan as part of the convoy which is lead and followed by the tourist police. How this provides any safety for tourists, I don't know. As Shady pointed out to us, it is basically screaming to a terrorist, here are all the tourists if you want to attack them!
Anyway, Abu Simbel is the sight of 2 huge temples built by Ramses II, one of the greatest kings of Egypt. Besides just their pure size and magnificence, they are significant because they were completely taken apart, moved and re-assembled to preserve them when the Aswan High Dam was built. They had a whole display showing the whole process, but it's still pretty hard to comprehend how they did it. Anyway, the convoy was uneventful aside from
the fact that it was FREEZING. They go way overboard on their air conditioning here! We were all soooo cold. My toes were frozen. And because we arrived at Abu Simbel about 6:30 or 7 am, it was still pretty chilly out. After a couple hours there, we headed back to Aswan.
That afternoon, most everyone in our group wanted to do a felucca ride on the Nile, but that didn't really appeal to me. I really wanted to explore a little and check out the Tombs of the Nobles on the West Bank of the Nile. I convinced Chantelle to join me so about 2:45 pm we set off. According to my Rough Guide, we could take the local ferry across from 1 Egyptian pound each. So we headed out to find the local ferry, which wasn't too difficult aside from being bombarded with offers of felucca and carriage rides on our way. One guy we told we were planning to take the ferry and he tried to tell us we couldn't - that it was only for Egyptians. But one we found it (totally by guessing - we saw a small boat pull up to a dock
full with locals, in between a gazillion big cruise ships). It ended up being 2 Egyptian pounds each instead of 1 (still only about 40 cents). We got on the boat and realized women were sitting on one side and men on the other, so we followed suit. We also put our sweatshirts back on (it was very sunny and warm by this point) because all of the women were so covered up, we felt like we should be respectful and not show much skin). Suprisingly, no one seemed to really notice or care that we were there.
After a couple minutes across the Nile, we were on the West Bank near a little village. Following the directions in my Rough Guide, we found the ticket office (20 pounds each). The Tombs of the Nobles are a series of tombs built into the cliffside up in the hills. And not very touristy at all, which was part of the attraction. So we started heading up a long staircase, most of the steps covered in sand. A man frm the ticket office followed us at first and then jumped ahead and we quickly realized we were supposed to follow him.
What followed was probably one of the highlights of he whole trip. This guy Mohammed, who spoke very litle English, proceeded to take us around to the tombs that were open and explain to us, in very broken English, what the gist of each tomb was. And despite the language barrier, he was a total jokester. He let us take lots of pictures inside the tombs (which had some amazingly well preserved drawings and artwork) and posed with us for pictures too. Soon a friend of his joined us (we never got this name) and they both took us around for about an hour, trying to explain the tomb and joking and taking pictures. I would go into more detail, but the story is best told in person.
Oh - and how could I forget? When we first got to the top of the stairs to where the tombs were, there was an Egyptian family up there with 2 young girls and they asked to have their picture taken with us! Of course we obliged and then I had a picture taken with my camera too.
After we went to the last tomb, we of course tipped Mohammed
and his friend (we weren't really sure what the norm would be for something like that so we gave them 50 Egyptian pounds each). All in all, the whole excursion only cost us like $15 so it was well worth it even if we did overtip them. Not only were the tombs amazing to see - some of the colors remaining were just unbelievable - but the view from up thre was great and we got to have a fun time with some locals. That's something you just dn't get that much with a tour.
Once we got back to the East bank, it was still just about 4:30 so we spent the next couple hours wandering all the way through the markets. Had another fun encounter there with a shopkeeper who decided to dress me up in a Nubian headdress and shawl to go with the tunic I was trying on. We got some good pictures of that! Unfortunately, because we spent like half an hour with him and he laid a major guilt trip on us about how he's just trying to run his business, etc. etc., we did not bargain nearly as well as we should
have! I got a tunic and a scarf and Chantelle got a galabiya (like a dress) and a scarf. He started off at 870 Egyptian pounds for all of it and we got him down to 400, but we still probably overpaid. But, again, it amounts to only about $40 each so it's pretty cheap overall.
Friday night ws our first night on the riverboat, the MS Sinbad. It was just us and one other Geckos group and a Spanish group, which was kind of nice. We all just hung out on the boat Friday playing cards and Yahtzee. Shady taught us some Egyptian card game which I was horrible at, so I moved on to Yahtzee - much better results there!
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