A different kinda felucca ride

Location: Aswan, Egypt

My head feels like its being cooked alive. I’m wearing sunglasses and a cap and I still want to die. You open your mouth and your throat dries up like you’re sitting in a sauna.

Checked out of my beautiful hotel this morning, and walked downtown. Found a decent budget hotel, Orchida St. George, and paid 35 LE for the night. I also booked a trip to go to Abu Simbel, the High Dam and Philae Temple tomorrow morning for 65 LE. The trip starts at 3am and returns back to Aswan at about 2pm. Then I plan to head to Hurghada.

Spend the afternoon aboard a felucca on the Nile. The Nile here is oh-so-different to that stream of gunk we have in Cairo. It's cleaner, quieter and just so much more like what I imagined of the Nile BEFORE I came to Egypt. It's not lined with 5 star hotels, and it actually has grass-reeds lining its banks, and I can totally imagine a baby Moses floating by on a straw basket (that’s my standard for a good Nile). The boat ride is awesome, my Nubian captains play the drums and sing for me, and I take pictures next to their Bob Marley boat-mast. It's hilarious, a lot of the boats seem to have this Bob Marley mast hanging off their end — I wonder where that came from.

I settle down with lunch on the boat, a feast of Mahroussa and howowshy (one of the best I've had so far) and dip my feet in the water as the boat cruises lazily up and around various little islands dotting the river. The felucca drivers try to get me to go on to Elephantine Island and the Botanical Gardens, but it's so hot that each time I get off and come back within 2 minutes, whining about the heat and collapsing back into the boat. I’d much rather sit on the boat then bake in the sun walking around a bunch of bushes.

Afterwards, I head back to the hotel and rest until the sun has gone down a bit, I walk through the super long bazaar that snakes through Aswan, parallel to the Nile, which conveniently starts from my hotel, and ends at the train station, where I go to enquire about trains/buses to Hurghada.

Unfortunately, the tourism office next to the train station informs me that there is a bus to Hurghada from Aswan but that its very unreliable, and his best advice is to take a train to Luxor first, then catching a bus from there on to Hurghada. That creates a bit of a pickle, because the only trains to Luxor (somebody explain this to me) are at 6am, 6pm and 9pm. For 2 cities 3 hours apart, why are there such infrequent trains? Catching the 6pm means I’ll reach Luxor at 9pm, making it way too late to catch a bus to Hurghada. So I end up booking the 6am train, legging it back to my hotel and having to cancel my Abu Simbel trip. After much persuasion, the dude gives me 50 LE back and pockets 15 LE claiming he already paid the police registration people for my place among the convoy.