Blog Like an Egyptian

By the time we boarded our boats for two nights on the Nile River, the trip had already been pretty wild.  We had left Cairo on a night train for Aswan, spent a night there and woke up at 3:30 a.m. for a trip to Abu Simbel.  After Abu Simbel, we drove 3 hours back to Aswan, got our bags and boarded the feluccas that would be our homes for two nights.

So what is a felucca?  I’m glad you asked.  It’s a sailboat.  The sail is at the front of the boat; behind it is about 15-20 feet for sleeping and chilling.  A mat is laid down to keep passengers comfortable, and a canopy is put up about 4-5 feet above the mat to keep the sun out of everyone’s eyes.  It’s about 15 feet wide, or just wide enough for two tall people to sleep end-to-end.

Once you get on the boat, it’s big enough to seat about eight people sitting cross-legged with their backpacks.  And you sit.  Unless you go to the front of the boat, you spend the whole time on the boat sitting down.

Small as it was, the boat was rather pleasant.  We were just chilling there, in the shade, on the Nile, on a sailboat.  I mean, how is that anything but a recipe for awesomeness?

Our group started out with a game of Apples to Apples, only one of the most fun group games ever.  Then there was some reading, journaling, resting and napping when everyone realized, “Hey, this is home for two days.  Time to relax.”

I mean, there was nothing to do.  No e-mail to check.  No sites to see.  Nowhere to go.  Just … a boat.  I took me awhile to decompress, sit back and realax.  But once I did, oh what a joy it was to chill with no real worries about time or anything like that.

*I should note here that I actually worried a fair bit about my grandma.  I found out the night before she was in the hospital following a heart attack.  My mom reassured me that she would be fine, but do you think that stopped me from worrying?  Not for a second.  And the worrying only got worse once I was powerless to check e-mail, call or anything like that.  But I was with a good group who helped put it out of my mind.

Around sundown on the first day, we stopped at a small beach and docked for the night.  A few other boats had shown up, and there were groups from New England and Australia.  In fact, later that night, they played some kind of drinking game that involved chanting “BLOWJOB!” over and over again.  Someone explained it to me, but at the time, I was like, “Wait … what?”

(See that?  That was our bathroom both nights we spent on the boat.  See, we would dock, and someone would dig a small hole.  The ship’s crew covered the hole with a toilet seat sitting on a very small table and put a curtain around it all for privacy.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.)

Anyway, shortly before sundown, we went for a walk.  We were walking through this forest when we noticed a Nubian farmer riding a donkey behind us.  We got to the side of the trail so he could pass, but he declined.  Instead, he motioned for us to come with him.

A few seconds later, we were at his farm.  He grows bananas and mangoes, and Asho (that was his name) even had a bull.  He walked through the farm with us and even looked for some ripe food to give us.  Unfortunately, we were just a little early in the season, and he didn’t have anything.  He didn’t really know any English beyond “Welcome,” but I was incredibly touched he would invite these random strangers into his farm and offer them food.

*I actually finished this day’s journal entry with the line, “This trip keeps getting more and more surreal.”  It’s one thing to go overseas for the first time in your life; it’s quite another thing for that first time to include a walk through a Nubian farm and dinner on the banks of the Nile River.  I wish I was a better writer and could use a word other than surreal, but seriously … it was surreal.

The next day, we woke up and set sail once again.  It was the halfway mark of the trip, so I spent a lot of the morning writing in my journal, trying to catch up on everything I had seen to that point.  (Fun fact: My journal totaled 48 pages at trip’s end.)

Then we stopped at the Kom-Ombo Temple.  We were only there about 15 minutes before one of the group members got sick and needed to go to the hospital.  So everyone went back to the boats and waited for about three hours (remarkably, we weren’t allowed to swim at this point, even though locals swam in the same water, about 100 yards away).

This was much tougher than it sounds.  We ate a really filling lunch, but the rest of the time, we tried to keep cool in the shade.  But when the temperature hits 100+ degrees out there, even the shade doesn’t always come through.  At one point in the afternoon, I began dipping my towel in the river, ringing it out and draping it around my neck and shirt.  That helped a lot.

The sick group member came back okay, and we were off.  The only problem was, since we were so far behind, we had to make good time to get to the docking area that night.

Shortly before sundown, the crew took the canopy off the boat, leaving us exposed to the big, wide world around us.

And let me tell you, it was magnificent.  The stars have never looked as pure as they did that night.  I saw one of the dippers as plain as day.  I saw a shooting star.  I fell asleep under the stars, on the Nile.  It doesn’t get any better than that.  We reached our docking area well after dark, and after a quick dinner, it was time for bed.  There were no crazy drinking games this night.

The next morning, we woke up, ate breakfast, zig-zagged across the river a few times and met up with a van that was waiting to take us to the next temple.  We were back on the mainland.