Day 19 - Aswan

Still here, still waiting.

Last night, our local facilitator Mohammed invited us to his family's home up by the First Cataract, taking us there in his boat- up the silky smooth, black Nile by moonlight (with just a bit of help from distant sodium lights). His sister had prepared a welcoming glass of hibiscus tea followed by a hefty meal. Then another sister painted a henna design on the feet of Anki, Karina and Rose before we had a guided tour of the house (including the two crocodiles being bred for future food in a small tank - not good for us, but perhaps a sort of cross between keeping chickens and a goldfish in a bowl?). This is a Nubian village, where the first language is Nubian and the children have to go to school to learn Arabic.

Oh - and stand by for shock horror. I had a haircut just before leaving home, but decided my hair was still too long here, so subjected myself to the mercy of an Egyptian barber in the souk yesterday. Definitely no photographs! Anki says that I look "very suave" but I wonder if that means something less complimentary in her native Swedish?

PS. Postcards posted - how many will arrive????


Bryan

Day 18 - Aswan

Am killing time before we go to the Sudanese consulate at 09.00 to give us an answer. I see that there have been some comments posted to the blog - many thanks to all, as it is good to know that I do indeed have the occasional reader! I think I have replied by email to all that seemed to need an answer but if I have failed and missed some, could I please ask you to repeat by email ?(bryanhanlon@me.com). Catching up with blog comments is, I can assure you, not easy. Apart from anything else, wifi is at best very patchy and does not last long.

We may have missed out on our fantasies of great big steaks at the Cataract Hotel last night, but ended up in a superb fish restaurant in the back streets of Aswan. I am not sure if you should call it a souk or a bazaar but there is one long street in the centre of Aswan (with a variety of offshoots) which seems to go on for ever. As in Alexandria, it seems you can buy anything here (many times over) - how can all this many gold and jewellery shops survive? Busy during the day, it really comes alive at night.

My backpack needed some attention, so I left it with a local tailor there, who has done a very good job - for thirty pounds! However, as we are talking egyptian, this works out at some £3 so not a bad deal at all. In the UK, you would probably just buy a new one.
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Well, it is now after 18.00 and we have spent the whole day in the grotty stairwell of the consulate, and then out on a patch of waste ground, while
Ross our joint leader pleaded for our visas. This I am sure has been the most boring day of my life (worse than 12 hours at Paris CDG airport), and we still do not have them. They have now been "promised" for 09.00 tomorrow but that is cutting it very fine for the ferry (if they have indeed kept our reservations) as we should be on board by 09.30!

I suspect anyway that this will be the last blog from me for quite a few days so if anyone is still reading this, you will have no idea where I am! I am therefore going to send this now while there is (in theory) a connection

Day 17 - Aswan

A leisurely start to the day, so off to see the High Dam (built largely by the Soviet Union - very stylish "friendship memorial" combining the lotus flower of Egypt and a gear wheel to symbolise soviet engineering). When completed in 1971, the body of water behind it became (then) the largest lake in the world - Lake Nasser, 500km long, stretching into the Sudan.

On the way back, we drove over the Low Dam (built by the British in the late 1800s) from which you can get a rather fleeting glimpse of the First Cataract. No stopping for photos!

Then it was on to the Temple at Philae. This of course was drowned by the flooding of Lake Nasser, and later rescued from the depths, but only after all of its superb colours had been washed away. It has been transported to a new island, so you have to take a little ferry boat to get there. (The many - hundred or more? - unused boats shows the poor level of tourism in Egypt right now).

This was just great for us, as we had the whole temple to ourselves, apart from our own guide and one other family, and we spent goodness knows how long there, trying desperately to take everything in, including the relationship of all the many gods. Philae was dedicated to the beautiful Isis (devoted wife of Osiris, mother of Horus etc etc), and the Greeks / Romans identified her with Aphrodite / Venus.

PS the great obelisk from here went to Rome, where it stands at the centre of the piazza in front of St Peters - and we of course have the almost invisible Cleopatra's Needle. Sorry, am I sounding rather disgruntled??

Late afternoon was time for our cruise on a felucca and, yet again, this was just fantastic. I have always thought that a felucca looks so graceful, so elegant and here we were sailing up to the First Cataract against the sunset, the only sound being the creaking of the sail as we tacked, and the lapping of the water against the bow. And then, from absolutely nowhere, two young boys (surely max age 10?), appeared at the side of our boat. They were literally on a plank of wood and "serenaded" us with a variety of songs (eg "singing aye aye yippy yippy aye" etc). Quite fantastic - we all felt that they deserved a good tip, they had definitely deserved it. Then they paddled off into the gathering gloom, and caught hold of a passing tourist motorboat and did they same to them. We gave them a very deserved round of applause.

Passing by the Cataract Hotel (where Agatha Christie wrote "Death on the Nile"), we all decided to have a blow out and have a really good meal there - hang the cost! (expected to be very substantial, so perhaps it was a good thing that we found out that we had nothing like the correct dress attire, so were barred from entry). So we wandered around downtown Aswan again, and found an excellent local fish restaurant.

Tomorrow is the day when we should find out if our visas have been granted from Khartoum. If they do not, we have something of a problem as:-

a) we have had to send Helena off today with almost all our luggage on the freight barge. I am sure the other hotel guests are relieved at this - not sure what they thought of this large truck, surrounded by official bollards and chain, parked slap bang outside the entrance to this rather smart hotel.

b) if we do not receive visas, we miss the weekly ferry on Monday, and somehow have to take some kind of alternative action- watch this space!

I am not at all sure that I am looking forward to the intense heat of the Sudan, but as this will be unlike any country I have ever visited, I shall suffer in silence (well, knowing me, probably not in silence). Having said that, I think I must be honest and say that, whatever happens or does not happen on this trip, it has been worth every penny - and we aren't out of Egypt yet.

PS. If anyone knows how I can put the attached photos in the right sequence, please do let me know. Whatever I do, they always to end up rather jumbled, and they seem to have to go in a line at the end. Having said that, this may be the last set of photos that I ever send as this machine now says "this device is not supported by Ipad", or something similar, no matter what I do - as I have said ten thousand million times before "how I hate technology"

Day 16

A (very) early start - up at 03.00 (but with very posh breakfast boxes for us all), to meet our guide and minibus in order to meet up with the convoy (with armed police escort) for the long journey to Abu Simbel. I had originally told myself that I was not going to join in this part of the trip as the last time I was here (on my 50th birthday so just a short while ago), we - our group of 12 - had the whole place to ourselves. Quite magical - we found that we were talking in whispers and almost walking on tiptoe to preserve the atmosphere. In the end, however, temptation got the better of me, so I joined the crowd - in fact the convoy had 30 or so vehicles of all shapes and sizes from large tourist coaches downwards. The road is something of a long long line of black tarmac that stretches on and on through a decidedly boring desert, (and they were laying a new surface here as well as in the Western Desert) but we got there in the end.

Yes, the site was rather crowded (but I am pleased to say not particularly noisy), and just as magnificent as of course it always was (although, similar to Edfu, it also was almost totally covered in sand and lost until some 200 years ago).

I could of course go on and on about it but perhaps just a couple of points:-

A). In the great temple of Rameses II, on just two days of each year - the anniversaries of his birth and of his coronation - the sun shines directly on to his statue at the far end of a 48m passageway. Can someone please explain to me - in words of preferably one syllable - the astronomy, geometry and sheer engineering logistics that allowed them to do this over 3000 years ago???

B). And from one extreme to the other, in the smaller temple to his wife, Queen Nefetari (not Nefertiti), there is a beautiful carving of the great Rameses himself presenting his wife with flowers - said to be the first such portrayal by a man to a woman in recorded history.

NB. strictly no photos inside. One chap tried to be clever - the guard soon sorted him out (and his phone camera as well).

Of course, both temples are no longer on their original site (now buried well below the waters of Lake Nasser) but the scale of the UNESCO rescue is pretty daunting in itself. As usual, water can make a dry site very attractive.

The journey back was hotter than ever - large "mirage" lakes - but we got home in the end, fortified by the usual large bottles of water that we seem habitually to carry with us.

Then it was on to the "unfinished obelisk". All the 29 obelisks in ancient Egypt came from this one site - the Egyptians gave one to France (where it stands magnificently at the centre of the Place de la Concorde) and one to us. We put ours on the Embankment where no one really sees it.

This unfinished one, at 40m, would have been by far the tallest ever quarried here but, not much before the end of the quarrying, it developed a fault (clearly seen) - I would hate to have been the worker who made the fatal chisel blow! You can easily from the site how the workers chiselled out these great blocks from the bedrock.

Ross made the brilliant comment that it is from this obelisk that the Egyptians developed their passion for leaving so many buildings seemingly uncompleted

PS photos from our balcony across the Corniche and the moored cruise boats to Elephantine island and the far west bank.

Day 15

The hotel laid on a great spread for us last night in the courtyard as our last night in Luxor, but we have now left this and all it's wonders behind us, and driven down the Nile valley - really rich and green, it certainly proves the old saying that "Egypt is the gift of the Nile".

We stopped off at Edfu to see the temple there, which is different to all the others in that it was lost under the sand for nearly 2000 years, and only discovered in the mid 1800s. The massive pylons are over 100ft high, and still it was completely covered - the people living on top of it had no idea it was there. Because of this, it still has its stone slab roof over the hypostyle hall and inner sanctum so that you get a real feel of how an ancient Egyptian temple must have been when in use, totally dark except for oil lights and what ever daylight filtered through. (Although of course there is now low level electric light).

Then it was a long drive on to Aswan, and our visit to the Sudanese consulate here to obtain our visas. With no tourist infrastructure of any kind (rumour has it not even one ATM machine in the entire country), this was an introduction to what we can expect when (if) we cross the border. After having been kept standing for ages in a rather unprepossessing corridor up a flight off unprepossessing stairs in a very (guess what?) unprepossessing building (no water in the wc) we have now been told that a letter of acceptance from Khartoum is needed before any visa is issued. Tomorrow is if course the sabbath, and the ferry leaves on Monday so we wait to see what happens!

Day 14

A walk down the Corniche (i.e. the "prom") along the Nile to Luxor temple. Nowhere near as large as Karnak, but still massive. Another, I regret to say, big Mac caramel sundae (well it was very hot) and time for me to take up the promise I made nearly 20 years ago that I would go the Winter Place hotel (not, I hasten to add to stay- rooms are up to £1000+ per night) but simply for a drink. We went into the Royal Bar, but were very politely told that we may prefer to sit out in the gardens or by the pool (we had seen the signs saying "no casual wear" etc but hoped that did not refer us - it did!). Still, most enjoyable - how the other half live.

Then back down the Corniche to the Luxor Museum. New building, and contents and layout most impressive. The BBC were filming a two part documentary while we were there but did not wish to interview me - or any of us - for our expert knowledge.