Upper Egypt

Upper Egypt: Aswan and Luxor

We left Cairo by train for Upper Egypt (basically everything south of Cairo, which is considered Lower Egypt. In addition to this flip from our thinking of north as ‘up,’ the Nile also flows from South to North.). Of the two most famous ancient cities of Egypt, Memphis was located near Cairo, while Thebes was located in Upper Egypt near Luxor, now known for Pharaoic sites and Victorian vacation spots-cum-tour group resorts.

We first arrived in Aswan, which our guidebook promised as much quieter, calmer and prettier than Cairo. Unfortunately, we found this to be true only in comparison with the noise of Cairo, as it was still far from quiet or relaxed. We found a cheap but grungy hotel and headed out to the Nubian Museum. The Nubian people have a separate history from Egyptians, as Nubia encompasses southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. While it had far fewer objects than the sprawling Egyptian Museum, and a better presentation than the laughable Police (which had a few old black and white photos and rusty objects) and Military (atrocious faux-palace interior decorating and unreadable captions) museums at the Citadel in Cairo, overall we were underwhelmed with the Nubian Museum.

Our next activity was a felucca ride, the traditional one-sail boat (our second experience, after taking a one hour ride after dinner on our last night in Cairo). The tourist office told us to ask for “Washington, like your capital” as our felucca captain; when we did so the captain walked over and said “Hi, I’m Muhammed.” His felucca was named “Devine Steel.” Muhammed exuded the felucca spirit—very laid back, he started singing the chorus of Bob Marley’s “Get up, Stand up” and said that he used to have dreadlocks. He told us about an American friend (from California, of course) of his who, after experiencing the felucca vibe, came back to Egypt and became a felucca captain himself. At one with nature, at the iftar (break-fast) at the end of our ride Muhammed dipped an empty water bottle into the Nile and quenched his thirst.

For dinner, we went to a place on the Nile which, according to the guidebook, served beer, but they told us that they don’t serve it during Ramadan. Being in Egypt during Ramadan has been difficult for us in multiple ways: not only restaurants but museums and stores have different hours, and while people are understandably more short-tempered and aggressive, we’re also expected to tip more. There are also some positives: one person told us that there are many fewer people at the tourist sites during Ramadan, whereas otherwise going to a temple “can be like being on the metro” (Our most crowded and unpleasant metro experience award goes to the Cairo metro (the only metro in Africa)—it was even worse than Mexico City, which Cairo rivals in somewhere between 2nd and 4th place (the exact population is unknown) for the world’s largest city.). And the Ramadan strings of flashing, brightly colored “Christmas” lights are nice.

When we returned to our hotel, we asked a third time for toilet paper in our room; after having been told “yes, we’ll bring it up in 5 minutes” previously, we were finally told the truth that actually, the hotel doesn’t provide toilet paper. Our first experience with it, but apparently it’s typical for Egyptians to not give you a direct “no” but to say instead “in 5 minutes.” After angrily buying our own toilet paper, we sat on some broken chairs on the roof top, with a terrific view of the town at night, including a busy market and kids playing soccer on a nearby field.

The next day in Aswan, we went to the Aswan High Dam and the Philae Temple. The dam is huge—over a kilometer thick at the base, with 17 times the volume of stone as the Great Pyramid. It’s proclaimed on a sign there as “Egypt’s challenge to the silent nature,” and provides hydro-electric power for much of Egypt. There’s also a towering, very Soviet-looking memorial to the Egyptian-Russian collaboration in building the dam. The Philae temple is one of the many sites that were moved (in its case stone by stone) in a massive UNESCO operation during the building of the dam, since they otherwise would have been underwater. It was a temple dedicated to the worship of the goddess Isis—lots of cool hieroglyphics. We had to take a boat to reach the island, and were just about to give up waiting for someone to share the price with when we met a group of an Egyptian-American couple who lived in New Jersey and Florida, and an Egyptian and German couple from Germany who let us share their ride. So far, it seems like Egypt is not very backpacker/budget travel friendly: most of the people are on package tours: Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and lots and lots of British (many of whom rival Americans as the world’s most obese, and, although we don’t want to become puritanical wardrobe police, seem to wear the most ridiculously inappropriate clothing for a conservative Muslim country).

In the afternoon, we paid to use the pool at a nice hotel (next to the beautiful Old Cataract Hotel, where Agatha Christie stayed to write Death on the Nile, and according to our cab driver costs an absurd $14 per person just to go inside and take a look), then caught the train to Luxor, where, as advertised, we were ceaselessly hassled on our walk to Happyland Hotel. It was a much nicer place than our hotel in Aswan, but also one which was constantly drilling us to recommend it to others (like the Manchurian Candidate line: “Happyland is the kindest, bravest, most honest hotel I know…). It was clean, had a good restaurant and a great breakfast—and provided toilet paper.

The next morning we considered renting bikes to go the Valley of the Kings, but postponed the decision due to the poor condition of the single-speed bikes, and instead walked to Karnak temple. We missed the turn off for the temple, and ended up on an interesting walk through daily life in a village, people working in the fields, etc. When we made it to the temple, we found it impressively was massive. Some of the highlights were rows of ram-headed sphinxes and a “hypostyle hall,” which apparently refers to an area with a lot of columns. The caption there read “This is the world’s largest hypostyle hall. It has no equal.”

On the way back to the hotel for lunch, we lost our appetite walking past all the meat (both alive and dead), produce, and other food being sold on the street. The combination of sun, heat, dirt, garbage, commotion and hanging carcasses/scraggly live poultry was nauseating. I suppose that in a way getting food in this type of environment is “closer to the source” (actually seeing the animal instead of a detached piece of meat in a sterile, Western-style supermarket), but my idealization of being closer to what you eat is more a combination of both pastoral setting and sanitation, instead of urban squalor.

That afternoon, I felt worn out, and Rachel had a fever, so we stayed in that night and the next morning. The next afternoon, we had to spend awhile in the heat hunting for hotel that a) would let us pay to use the pool and b) wasn’t ridiculously expensive (one of the cases where the prices have quadrupled from what the travel guide says). For dinner we went to a British pub, where we were happy to have some beer, less happy with what tasted like it may have been a camel-burger, and happiest to sit next to a super-friendly northern English couple, both nearing 70, who talked our ears off even though we couldn’t understand most of what they were saying because of their accents. The woman gave us both hugs as we left, and we headed for the train back to Cairo.