Nile Boy

Back Blip

Today´s trip was meant to be to Philae island and Temple. We co-ordinated it with the hotel reception to get a decent taxi with aircon to leave at the agreed time of 3.45pm. The journey we were told would be half an hour. We left on time and our first surprise was arriving in 10 minutes. 'How long on island?' the taxi driver asked. 'Two hours?'. We told him just an hour, knowing it would be hot and with not a lot of shade. 'Ok, you call me when finish', he said. Off we went across the scorchingly hot stretch to the ticket office, waving off all the good quality Egyptian cotton pyjama sellers. (Mind you, at 5 LE a pair (50 cents), I was tempted!) The more persistent of the sellers accompanied us across to the ticket office and so we had an audience when we got our second surprise. It was closed! 'Close at 4', came the chorus! 'Come at 7 for sound and light show', we managed to work out from all the voices. We couldn't believe it. We didn't want the sound and light show. It was too hot to run and catch our taxi driver before he headed off to the shaded parking area up the hill, but with the help of our little band of followers we caught his attention.

We then went on a very untouristy tour of the Aswan sights: the Sunset Cafe, which had been described as the perfect place to enjoy a mint tea and enjoy the sunset. What we found were lots of basket chairs, dusty cushions and a view over a construction site. Then we decided to check out the restaurant described as ´a notch above other Aswan restaurants' and promised a cold beer on the terrace. What we found was more dusty, sad basket chairs on the Nile. It looked like it hadn't seen a customer for years and that was probably sadly true.

A bit stuck for ideas at that time of the day, we headed back to the hotel and decided to plan for a felucca ride a bit later. And that's what we did. It was a lovely, relaxing hour and a half on the Nile with Captain Mohammed. Here's one of the 'Nile boys' mentioned in Bb's blip. They paddle furiously up to the very few tourist carrying feluccas using their sandals as oars and serenade them in the hope of getting a few coins. 'Where you from?', they asked and then sing in that language. Well, almost that language. We got 'Frere Jacques' and 'She´ll be Coming round the Mountains when she comes' and they got their few coins. A lovely end to the day!