Adventures By Design

Woke up on the train, arrived in Cairo, taxied to the airport, told the driver the terminal one, but he took us to terminal two (which was closer, and therefore cheaper for him), eventually boarded our plane, flew to Istanbul, flew to Shanghai.

Got up early (3:30 am), drove to Abu Simbel (wow!), noticed that the artwork looked more animated, rather than the stiff grid-locked older carvings, drove back, saw Aswan High Dam on Lake Nasser, boarded train to Cairo.

After breakfast we waited for our guide to find us and take us to Edfu Temple. Traveling with us is a friendly Chinese couple who we traveled with since the day before yesterday, but didn’t talk to much. From our sundeck we could see scores of other boats, all docked side by side. We counted more than thirty, each with five or six decks and hundreds of tourists. We watched as our boat docked right next to four other cruise ships, and we wondered how we would get off our boat to the shore. Cleverly, all the cruse ships had been built with a entrance and lobby in the middle of the boat running the width of the boat. When more than one boat parks side by side, these doors line up and people are able to walk through the lobby of each boat until they reach the shore. This gave us a brief tour of several other boats, and we realized that many of the other boats were definitely better quality than ours.

Having finally made it back to shore, we now waited as hundreds of tourists’ guides hailed carriages to take them to the temple. Of course chaos reigned (“Welcome to Egypt.”), and we had to wait for ten minutes. During this time we were constantly assailed by vendors vying for our attention. One man started chatting to us, asking where we were from (“Oh, Canada Dry”), and telling Ric that Gin was very beautiful, and asking how many camels he wanted for her. Although in many places it is distasteful to refer to your wife as chattel, in Egypt apparently it passes for humour. He repeatedly tried to give us bookmarks (?) as ‘gifts’, and seemed insulted when we politely refused to accept his gift. “Why you no take? Is gift.” he said, to which we replied with the hard-learned truth: “There are no gifts in Egypt.”

Edfu Temple was impressive. Built in the 2nd century BC, it is one of the youngest and thus best preserved of all Egyptian ruins. Not surprisingly, it was very popular with tourists, and when we arrived it was packed solid with people. Much of the hieroglyphics and imagery is clearly carved, but we noticed that most of the images of gods were defaced. Our guide told us that the Coptic Christians who lived here after the Egyptians had objected to the Egyptian gods and so had chiseled the heads and arms of the gods, leaving the bodies and clothes intact.

When we got back to the dock, the vendor was still there, demanding that we visit his shop. He seemed to think that we had committed to take a look, even though we refused his gift, and told him no thank you. As we waited for our guide (who didn’t arrive), he continually called out to us, at one point gesturing with the international sign of badness: a thumbs-down. Did he really think that insulting us was going to get us to come to his shop?

Today was lazy. Life on our cruise ship is relatively comfortable, and our cabin is probably the best room we’ve had in Egypt. Life is easy here: our meals are prepared for us at specific times, we have TV with movies (at least we did until this afternoon when our Nile cruise actually started to cruise up the Nile), our twin beds are great for reading or drawing on. Unfortunately, there is no internet, so we have to stockpile our blog postings for when we can reconnect to the digital world (this also means that we don’t know how Addie’s doing).

wake up, breakfast, head out to see West Bank: Valley of the Queens, Hatshetput Temple, Valley of the Kings, drive back to town and check into cruise ship, lunch, lounge on ship, can finally relax for a while.

Arrive early at train station in Luxor but no one picks us up, WTF?, borrow a phone & call Cairo (“Oh, Canada Dry”), finally someone picks us up, drops us at hotel, check-in to a shitty vibrating room, change rooms, guy at breakfast sucks up to us, sleep/read, go to see Karnak & Luxor temples, eat dinner at beautiful Oasis Cafe with Peace Corps Americans working in Moldova, and served by “Giggles”, the happiest waiter ever, return to the hotel and sleep.