Blogs from Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa - page 70

They didn't call our tour "felucca odyssey" for nothing. Though I think we put the "odd" into "odyssey" (if it had two 'Ds')....my point being...that what we thought would be an extremely loooong felucca ride down the Nile for 3 nights, filled with reading, journal writing, sleeping, chillaxing.....ended up being the most fun, crazy, adventurous days I've had...ever! Let me explain what life on a felucca is like... You're all on this little boat which has one huge mattress on top and that is where you eat...drink...play...and eventually sleep. Down below there's a really narrow spaced shaft where we put all our bags and you literally have to army crawl along the floor of the boat to get to your stuff. This is especially fun at night with no lights. The feluccas just drift down ... read more

The sailboats we met in the afternoon after our Abu Simbel trip are called feluccas. I'd say ours, called Moodshadow, was about thirty feet long, with a single, curved sail. Yes! After all this running around and getting up super early, we had 2 days and two nights of sailing down the Nile doing nothing! Boarding the felucca by a little gang plank, we piled our bags underneath and lounged in the sunshine on a bed of floor cushions and pillows. Within moments our group of 10 had unfurled their sleepingbags and we were in full lounge mode, sipping some hot Egyptian tea and having a traditional lunch, everyone sharing everything. This was cool! As we tacked down the river, the riverbanks looked more like I'd imagined they would be: narrow strips of green dotted with ... read more

Well quite a bit has happened since the last entry... we got on a train to alexandria at around 12pm and it took about 3 hours. Alexandria and Cairo were much different than I was expecting. I expected cairo to be a more world class city with skyscrapers and just more modern over all and I expected Alexandria to be a bit nicer as well since apparently a lot of european tourists visit alexandria but both places were a bit run down. The hotel in Alexandria was really nice, no doubt the nicest hotel in th city and we got a really good dinner at a restaurant called Tikka Grill which is right on the corniche (boardwalk)... After that we headed towards Fort Qait-Bay and met a group of 3 Egyptian men who just kinda came ... read more

Today is not a good day for me… I didn’t mention that over the past few days I had some gastro bug. However since this is very common for foreigners from western countries to catch I didn’t bother mentioning (especially the fact that it did not stop me from enjoying the 5 star food aboard the ship or going out to visit the sites) however it must have resulted in me becoming quite run down. As I was mentioning today I’m not feeling the best for wares, the past couple of days my sore throat appears to have turned into some kind of nasty cold. Last night after the Egyptian party I did not get very much sleep at all with all the aches and pains. So today I sit in my cabin room trying to ... read more

Today we packed up all our things and headed off at 3am by coach under army/police escort to the impressive temples of Abu Simbel. These temples were once a couple of hundred meters further down hill but had to be relocated to higher ground when the Egyptians flooded the area in order to dam up the Nile. The temples were painstakingly walled off and then drained of water so they could cut them up and relocate them in pieces to higher ground. They did an amazing job of this! After we got back from the temples we boarded a five star river boat (floating hotel) and headed down the Nile towards Luxor. Dinner on the boat has been five star plus with a nice mixture of cultural cuisine. Lately my fellow tour members seem to be ... read more