Post-Felucca Purification

We just spent our night on the felucca. It was a wonderfully slow way to drink in the Nile, floating windlessly down-river past palm trees, drinking donkeys and sand dunes. Breathtakingly beautiful – but we really roughed it ! In my terms, anyway.
Our captain and his helper, Mohammed and Joseph, were fine. The food was simple but good – for dinner we had a sort of vegetable stew with rice and bread. Breakfast was french toast (very very fried) made from pita-type bread and scrambled egg and more bread and jam. I guess what put me off a bit was the fact that Joseph washed the dishes in the Nile. Yes, near Aswan the Nile is very very clean, but we did see bits of human waste from cruise boats floating by. So far all of our tummies haven’t reacted.
We pulled over to one spot for a swim, but it was very green and weedy and reedy, and there were lots of local guys swimming there – no women – so Rachel and I didn’t swim. Hugo had fun. The second spot we pulled over to was incredible. It was sandy, at the base of a huge dune. An old man and his donkey were there, with two young boys, swimming. We tried to race up to the top of the dune to see what was on the other side, but it was so hot, even a foot below the surface of the very loose sand, that we only made it halfway, and even after we ran back down to the very cold water of the Nile, our toes kept burning underwater for a while. It was hot.
Hugo made friends with the two boys – Mohammed and Ahammed, and we all skimmed some shards of pottery which may or may not have been ancient, but probably wasn’t. We played for quite a while. In the spirit of the whole Nile-as-the-life-of-Egypt thing, I felt inspired to rub some of the sand on my cheeks, but the old man started screaming – our guide translated and said that it was too dirty. Mind you, his boys and Hugo kept putting their heads under the water. All in all, it was an amazingly beautiful spot.
We sailed on, with the three of us sitting on the bow of the felucca, the sunset on our left, to the west, and then we just floated for ages. The sleeping arrangements weren’t that great. Two thirds of the felucca was covered in boards and foam, with fabric on the top. The guides moored the boat next to a fairly steep incline and we had dinner. I was very proud that I only made one trip to the loo. Something about sand, prickly bushes, nearby villages and possible scorpions makes my renal tract get with the program. I was very grateful that my digestive tract also came to the party. You see, you think about these things when there is no plumbing available.
During the night we were very cold – I looked up to see our guides asleep on the bow with blankets, but we had none. I didn’t want to wake them up. Rachel and Hugo were awake, cold, so I pulled up the fabric from on top of the foam and we slept on that. It was a very hard, grubby bed.
It was absolutely beautiful, and an unusual experience for me to do nothing but float for hours – I found it a little scary, actually, not doing anything, or really going anywhere, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to anyone who likes any level of comfort. I was a little envious of the cruise boats that zoomed past, imagining that they’d be sitting down a table for dinner and sleeping between clean sheets, but I’m really glad we had the chance to sail down the Nile like the did a couple of thousand years ago, slowly, and sleep beneath a millions stars. At least we didn’t have to worry about crocodiles and hippos !
This morning we gratefully and grubbily got into the air-conditionned van that took us to Kom Ombo – great temple honouring both Horus and Sobek, the crocodile god. Then we travelled to Edfu, to see the temple of Horus. It was buried for a very long time by sand, and a village was built on top of part of it, so it’s very well preserved, and it’s the temple that has most helped archeologists learn about ancient Egyptian culture. There is even some colour left on some of the carvings.
Next we travelled to Luxor, where we are currently taking turns to cycle through the shower. It feels wonderful !