Blogs from Aswan, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa - page 18

For the past five years I have been travelling to Egypt. One of the most charming things a traveller can do is to travel up the Nile from Aswan to Edfu by felluca. I am not a young traveller, but I have found that the most rewarding experiences in Egypt come when you get to know the people. Not the hucksters, the regular Egyptians. I was fortunate on my first trip - which was a standard fully booked tour, that I met a few and in the years since I have taken advantage of these friendships to get to know the people more intimately. One of my favorite people in Egypt is a young man named Habibi. He has two boats - a regular motoring boat and a felluca. He offers completely personalized tours around the ... read more

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 ... read more

This blog should more accurately be called ‘a trial in sleep deprivation’ More on that soon… Well you may or may not know that Egypt was kind of thrust upon us - or at least chosen without our usual thorough planning. At about the same time as we reached the conclusion that we wanted to go somewhere hot for Christmas - the Arctic Circle in Norway and the freezing wet & windy Edinburgh for Hogmanay did seem to drag out the cold, dark winter last year - we were invited to join some friends in Egypt for the Christmas break. Jonsey (Gareth Jones), who completed his CA with Brendon, was on one of the London Walking tours with, Brendon, Adam (who did the CA with them) & their respective better halves. Julie, Jonesy’s partner, raised the ... read more

(Sorry for the lame title, we've been up since 3am) Since our last blog your intrepid (or at least tepid) travellers grabbed their packs and headed to the Lycian Way. The Lycian Way is a long distance hiking trail along the southern Anatolian coast. We were dropped of by a crazy old "taxi" driver who took us on a hair raising ride to a cliff face in the middle of nowhere. After getting lost (twice, before we even found the track) a friendly beekeeper (carrying his bees) and an equally friendly goat herder set us on the right path. It was a long walk down hill to Kabak beach, passing under unstable cliffs to the tune of loud rumbles. We found the only other tourists sleeping over in Kabak and joined them in the only joint ... read more

Okay, so the train journey was an experience but I was impressed we braved the tea in the buffet cart. Believe me I would have starved rather than eat the food but we had eaten well before we left anyway. We arrived in Aswan after 14 long hours, fortunately we both slept surprisingly well thanks to reclining seats and our own blow up cushions - well organised Tim !!!! We were picked up from the train station by our tour guide whose English was limited to say the least. However, we got to the hotel and were given an hour to get showered before we departed for our afternoon tour of the area. Our guide for this spoke much better english. First up was Aswan dam, this is the second dam built across the nile to ... read more