The Upper Nile - Aswan to Idfu

Our first afternoon in Aswan and along the Nile saw us on a tour to the High Aswan Dam for a brief visit, then on to the island of Philae and the Temple of Isis. It was a beautiful evening out on the water, the first of many to come, and lovely lighting on the temple walls as we watched the sun set onto the Nile. It was a very very early start the next morning at 2.30 am to drive by convoy to Abu Simbel as they only open it in the morning, just after sunrise. Was pretty amazing to see the documentary and displays about how they moved the temples - almost seems unbelievable that they actually managed to! The original location now lies some 200 m away under Lake Nasser, formed when they built the High Dam. They have actually moved a number of temples and ancient sites, but many more remain submerged. 

Temple of Philae

Us at Abu Simbel

The afternoon saw us back in Aswan with time to swim in the pool and check out the local souq. Really great fun actually and we managed to bargain down a ghalabeia (like a kaftan) from LE 150 to LE 35 (about NZ$8). Have actually found in general the asking for baksheesh and hassling for shop custom not nearly as hard work as we thought it would be – definitely true that smiling and keeping your humour about you makes a huge difference. In fact, the Arab people are quite the jokers – something I think is sometimes lost on many of the tourists! It does get tiring after a while though and we couldn’t imagine having to haggle for everything if we were trying to do it ourselves – would be quite an epic! The thing that scares us the most over here is the insane driving. The Egyptian people have no regard for how dangerous driving is – there are no seatbelts, they speed, they text, smoke, drink and talk on their phones constantly. We have had two taxi drivers swipe off wing mirrors from other cars, nearly had collisions about half a dozen times and unfortunately we also came across a full head-on collision just minutes after it happened on the road from Luxor to Hurghada. There was one body and half a dozen bloodied, broken ones. Not a sight we ever want to see again, made worse by the actions of a few other drivers who were so impatient to get past they nearly ran over the dead man to get past.

The next morning in Aswan we took a water taxi over to the beautiful botanical gardens of Kitchener’s Island – a much appreciated cool walk amongst the trees, flowers and birdlife. Following that we headed over to the West Bank for a 45 min camel trek through the desert around St Simeon, before arriving back at the Nile and on to our feluccas for the next day and a half. We spent the first night past the new bridge just north of Aswan, on a sandy beach and celebrated Scott’s birthday with us all dressing up in the local clothes we’d brought from the Aswan souq. Our Nubian felucca crew were joined by others from their village that we had stayed with previously and provided us with some awesome African drums, dancing and singing around the fire. Was a great evening. 

Felucca on the Nile in Aswan

Dave camel riding

Us dressed up on the banks of the Nile

The next day was spent just relaxing and reading on the felucca as we drifted down the Nile towards the Temple of Kom Ombo. The wind rather died off about half way through the day so it was super slow going and we ended up sailing a bit into the night to try to get as close to Kom Ombo as possible to be right there for the opening at 7 am the next morning. We left the feluccas and the wonderful Nubians and visited the really interesting temples of Kom Ombo (temple to Horus and Sobek) and Idfu (main temple to Horus) the next morning. That afternoon we drove north to Luxor.

 Our feluccas

Temple at Kom Ombo

Temple at Idfu (Edfu)