After Cairo, Sean and I took the overnight train south to a town on the Nile called Aswan. It was a great a change of pace from the chaos of Cairo, sitting on the roof of our hotel, drinking a couple beers (remarkably difficult to find sometimes in these muslim countries) and watching the felluca sailboats go by. There are a few sights to see in the town itself, including a stone monolith that, had it ever been removed from the rock it was carved from, would have been the largest known.
But most people use Aswan as the base to visit a site called Abu Simbel. I think most everyone has seen this at one point - it's those four massive, three-story-tall, sitting statues of Ramses carved out of a cliff - but few people actually know that it's located really close to the the Sudanese border. Hence our 4:30 AM police convoy to the site. Run in typical Egyptian fashion, we get out the door of the hotel at 3:00 AM, hop into our waiting cab, drive about a block before realizing that the cab wasn't actually for us, run back, find the waiting bus, then spend an hour and a half picking up other tourists and waiting for the massive convoy of tourist busses to congregate. I would say that the tourist to police ratio was probably about 100 to 1. Not that it would matter if anything happened, anyway, as the "convoy" quickly broke up and didn't get back together until three hours later when we arrived at the site. Now it seems to me that having a huge convoy of tourist busses leaving down a desolate desert higway at the same time every day, someting which has become pretty common knowledge, might be a bad idea. Yet, it happens every day witout incident. (At least so far.)
Abu Sibel is amazing - the preservation of the temple, and the massive, labrynthine interior is outstanding. Maybe as remarkable, though, is the fact that it isn't located in the same place where it was found by Swiss explorer JL Burckhardt in 1813. With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960's, the site would have been flooded, so an international team set to work of relocating the entire complex further up the cliff. It took four years. But the result is impresssive - if you didn't know it had been moved, you probably wouldn't ever notice.
The next part of our trip involved hiring a medium size sailboat to take us down the Nile to Luxor. We talked to a few of the thousands of captains who offer this service, but in the end decided to book a trip through our hotel. First, we were told we would leave in the morning. Then noon. At noon, we waited for our cab driver, and waited. He eventually showed up, but once we actually got to the boat around 1:00, and met our two felluca operators, Allah and Ramadan, it became clear we weren't in any great hurry. This gave us the opportunity to have some overpriced beer delivered to take along with us. We finally set sail around 2:30, and shortly after, well within sight of where we had left, we pulled up on shore to pick up a young fellow from Mexico. We stopped a little further downstream to have our papers checked by the police. Allah, the rastifarian Bob Marley wannabe, then treated us to the musical rythyms of a propane tank being beaten within an inch of it's life in order to get the valve open, creating only few minor, temporary, leaks.
We finally left sight of the town around 4:00, but the eight of us on board were a little surprised when we docked, again, to pick up another group of five people. This was followed by some angry discussion from the newbies on the bank as to why there were already so many people on the boat? (We had also been told there wouldn't be more than probably four. Or six. But no more than eight.) They reluctantly joined us, having been assured that they would be picked up by another boat once we got a little farther downstream. The Skipper and Gilligan started to get nervous about doing this, though, as by 8:00PM, we were past the sailing curfew that fellucas have placed on them. After a few more unexplained stops, we got to where the other fallucas were docked.
We were now near Ramadan's village, so when he said he had to go into town for a while, I asked if some of us could join him. I'm glad he agreed - the walk through the sand and palm trees with the full moon out was a beautiful sight, with all the colors of the desert muted into various shades of blue. Meeting his mother and sister in their simple adobe house was great. They treated us to red hibiscus tea, and we sat around on the floor talking about life in the village. Ramadan stepped out for a while, and when he returned, he sat with us and divided up the pot he had apparently just bought. Seemed a strange thing to do in front of your mom and sister, but maybe that's just me. (They didn't seem to mind.) He then explained how much dowery it would take for him to take a Nubian wife (I guess they are the luxury model, though, as he never gave a price for the standard Egyptian model. It's 40,000 Egzptian pounds, in case your wondering.) and I couldn't help but wonder how much he forked over for the weed he just bought, knowing that this was also probably a routine occurence.
Back on the boat, we managed to find enough blankets, but just barely, to sleep side by side on the deck.
The next morning, Lucia, a young woman from the US, confessed she hadn't gotten much sleep the previous evening - apparently Allah had cozied up next to her during the night for an extended bought of footsie. (This wasn't her only bit of bad luck at the hands of the less-than-Dynamic Duo. That night, after we finished sitting around the campire, she was walking up the plank from the beach to get back on the boat, when it came loose and she dropped straight down into the Nile. Impressively, she was able to laugh it off.)
Later in the day we were presented with an opportunity to visit a large camel market in Dawa, and it just so happened that it was on the day that the big gathering was supposed to be there. (Really- it even said so in Lonely Planet.) It would only cost us $5 a piece. Now, I realize that this seems to be a piddling amount of money, and it is, but it really was a lot by Egyptian standards considering that we wouldn't have very far to go once we got on shore. When we balked at the price, and started thinking of ways we could go without the private escort, suddenly Dawa went form being 45 minutes away, to being 4 hours away. This prompted negotiations between me and Ramadan, who finally agreed to take us to a small village near Dawa, where I was hoping to score our own minivan/ collective taxi. (I sweetened the negotiations by helping with the dishes.) Alas, the village was a lot more rural than I expected, and all we found were took-tooks. Still, it was fun, as all the kids in the village thought we were quite the attraction, and all came out to run around the streets with us and play. Pretty danged adorable, really.
The next morning, at the end of the trip, I couldn't bring myself to give Cheech and Chong (Sean's nickname for them) much of a tip. (Did I mention they helped themselves to our beer without asking?) Ramadan, in fact, seemed insulted by the amount I offered, and initially refused to accept it. He changed his tune, though, when it became obvious I was going to fall into the high tipper bracket among the group. Allah, in typical fashion, stood by and seemed rather confused and/ or stoned.
Having been on the boat for a few days, we were unaware that things were starting to get violent in Cairo. Protesters were starting to gather in Tahir square, and each day their numbers were growing exponentially. There were violent clashes with the police, and people on both sides were getting killed.
Meanwhile, we were simply temple/ monument hopping. There really is an inexhaustible supply of amazing temples in Egypt. I met an archaeologist from Texas who had been working at the Karnack complex for 20 years. The thing I most wanted to know was where all the money we were spending on entrance fees was going, as it obviously wasn't going into signage. (Seriously, I have never seen such institutionalized ineptness in my life. If anyone, before shelling out thousands of dollars on interpretive materials, had even bothered to ask a 10 year old tourist to proofread the text before putting it up permanently, it might not come off as quite so laughable.) He explained "The money all goes into the government pool. From there, who knows? Very little makes it back to us."
We then took a terrifying bus ride through the night, with another "police convoy" across the Sinia to the Red Sea-side resort town of Dahab. (WHY, for the love of Allah, don't they drive with their headlights?! Passing is done, at any point, at any speed, regardless of oncoming traffic, with the ever-blaring horns somehow signifying who wins the deadly game of chicken. Imagine yourself in the front seat, without a seatbelt, nothing but glass between you and the oncoming traffic, only inches away at times, and you might understand how easy it was for me to be chivalrous and trade my seat with the your Irish woman who was getting carsick sitting in the back.)
The final time we spent in the country was relatively uneventful. Everyone was glued to the TV watching events unfold in Cairo and Alexandria. Mainly, though, we went snorkeling (I had so missed that!) and soaked up the sun. There was one small protest in Dahab that came bustling out of a mosque, which I didn't see, and apparently quickly dispersed. The government shut down the internet for a time, in an attempt to keep the protesters from gathering, but by then is was too late. Everyone was coming to Tahir square, now dubbed "Liberation Square", even from neighboring countries. As we now know, Mubaraks days were limited. There was some concern among the small group of friends we had collected along the way how this would affect our travel plans, and people did end up having to get alternate flights to avoid the chaos of Cairo. I heard a number of stories from people that had actually been there, and despite my instinct at the time to want to go check it out for myself, I think I'm glad I didn't. Despite my long fantasy of being an international correspondent, I also realize that to put myself in harms way without some sort of compensation (hopefully, substantial) would be, well... stupid.
Still, I would love to go back someday and see how all this has changed things, if it has. If it will. The Egyptians I spoke with don't want their own religious right in power, or the military. They want a real democracy, with capable candidates to choose from. I neglected to tell them, though, that that can be a tricky proposition anywhere in the free world. But why rain on anyones parade?
