Cairo again...just for one more night.

---

Well, that was a whirlwind trip down south. Train to aswan, then an early morning wake-up (2:30) and a 3 hour bus ride to the temples of Abu Semple. Magnificent, don't know how they managed to cut the temples out of the mountain and move them, but they did a fantastic job and a beautiful site. A bit of a jaunt, 3 hours each way in a convoy with a hundred other busses, but totally worth it. Back at Aswan we boarded our Faluca and sailed up the nile for the afternoon (well, seems I did most of the sailing while the captain sat up front smoking his sheesha. Spent the night on the bank of the river at the captains village where he took the 5 of us to his house or one of his houses and his nubian wife or at least one of his wives where she prepared for us a fantastic meal followed by sheesha of course. Spent the night sleeping on the faluca with a clear warm sky full of stars to keep us company and a few mosquitos as well. Off the faluca we jumped into a van and continued northwards along the nile stopping off at a couple temples along the way, one was the temple of Horus, don't remember the others name. Getting into Luxor at about 3 pm, just enought time to check in and grab a quick bite to eat, then off to the temples of Karnak (WOW) and Luxor (equally wow) and then back to the hostel for eats.
Managed to find an egyptian/english bar nearby with a brazilian fellow and spent the evening enjoying a few beers with a british neurosurgoen who moonlights as a luxorian party boy. Interesting fellow, spends two weeks a month partying it up in the egyptian underground party scene, then back to manchester to act in his professionalo manor cutting into peoples heads. Guess he found a balance to relieve the stress.
The next morning it was off to the valley of the Kings and the valley of the queens and a couple other temples, don't recall the names. The valley of the queens is totally underrated. The tombs aren't quite as lengthy as the Kings ones, but the paintings and plaster work is in almost perfect condition.
The nile valley is certaily beautiful with the desert easily showing in the distance on both sides. Except for all the diesel exhaust from the multitude of nile cruise ships, it's faily clean air in the south, not like the thick smoggy, dirty Cairo atmosphere.
Couldn't get a train tickety yesterday and a bunch of us ended up on a bus. I'm not going to get into the details of it here, but i'll just say that during the course of the 13.5 hour, hot, uncomfortable and sometimes nerveracking bus ride, I noticed a mechanical problem that scared the shit out of me. That bus was a moving accident waiting to happen. Ugh, glad I didn't see it earlier. Now I just have to get over this chest cold I managed to catch, cause it's off to one of the oasis's tomorrow and then a night in the desert at a bedouin camp.
Hope all is well at the home front.

---