We slept well in our hotel in Luxor. In the morning we went downstairs to eat breakfast, but as we kind of expected there was no comparison to what we had enjoyed back at the Safir Hotel in Cairo. Still, it was more than adequate for our needs and they had odd candy sculptures decorating the buffet area, including a Bugs Bunny kind of character that was made out of cake(?) a long, long time ago. Very, uh, unique.
Despite having just arrived in Luxor we were already leaving. The plan was to meet with a tour guide – we had arranged a tour and transportation for an overnight trip all the way down to see Abu Simbel and Aswan, and then to return to Luxor the next day. We checked out of the hotel and sat in the lobby waiting for our tour guide to show. He appeared about ten minutes late, but seemed like a nice enough guy. His name was Achmed, and his English was a bit confusing but with some effort we could understand it. It turned out he was studying Japanese as well, but I think he was in the very early stages of it as he didn’t understand Kuniko when she talked to him using Japanese. Achmed led us out to the street and introduced us to our driver, who spoke only Arabic and a bit of Chinese. We got in the car, looked for the non-existent seatbelts, and then settled back in our seats. Road trip!
We made a quick pit stop at the Egyptian equivalent of a convenience store before we left and Achmed bought us some bottled water and some snacks for the road. It was a nice gesture – it is always good to have a lot of water when traveling through the desert.
Driving outside of the big city was really fun. There was a lot to see on the trip, and since we had almost five hours of driving ahead of us it helped that there were so many interesting things to look at. Outside the city life was a little more primitive, and that was reflected in the scenes that we took in. It is hard to get a sense of how people live when you drive by in a car – but I think we got a nice survey of Egyptian life. We passed lots of houses, but out in the countryside there was much more space between them. An odd thing I noticed was that many Egyptian houses were built up floor by floor, and there was rarely an actual roof. The roof was the top-most uncompleted floor, complete with rebar sticking out of the supports and into the sky. I guess the idea is that if the family wants to expand it is easier to expand up than out – just build another floor.
We also saw a lot of donkeys out in the countryside, and I realized just how much the rural lifestyle in Egypt still depended on the humble donkey. The donkeys we saw often pulled carts on the road, and they carried farmers from their home to the family plot of land, and sometimes they were just carrying kids around. Â The road ran south along the Nile River, and you could quickly understand that the Nile was the source of life out here. The soil was black along the Nile, but the further from the river the more the soil became worthless sand. The people with land on the river were the ones who had the biggest houses and (probably) the more comfortable lives.
Along the road were all kinds of sights: big piles of cut rock, trash and debris everywhere, tiny markets and small roadside restaurants with dirt floors, and many white bricks – I’m not sure what they were made of – that lay around the roadside but sometimes appeared as part of someone’s house. Also as we drove we had to slow down for big speed bumps every few minutes. The speed bumps really slowed down all the traffic, and given the lack of traffic signals I could see why they put in the bumps. There were also quite a few military security checkpoints. Our driver had a collection of cards, and at each checkpoint he flashed a card, talked with the soldiers, and then we were waved through.
The checkpoints were interesting to me because some of the soldiers wore uniforms and carried AK-47 machine guns, and other soldiers wore regular casual clothes and carried AK-47 machine guns. They all stood around looking bored, and some elevated sniper points were built to shoot from high up down on any bad guys that might appear. At each checkpoint we drove over a metal cable that apparently could be raised by the soldiers to contain any vehicles that needed to be stopped. It was a primitive security system but interesting – I don’t have a lot of life experience driving through military checkpoints.
After driving for a couple hours nature began to call. We informed Achmed, and they stopped at a small town called Idfu. There Achmed took us to what seemed to be a restaurant, but for some reason the toilet was not available to us. Then he tried an office across the street, and an old man granted us permission to use the toilet. I was bracing myself for a scary toilet experience, but for what it’s worth, I can say that I’ve used worse.
Achmed expected us to eat breakfast here, but we had eaten our breakfast at the hotel already and so we recommended pressing on. That caught him by surprise, and I think the driver had already gone off to eat breakfast somewhere when Achmed called him and said that the customers would like to leave now. We got back underway after a while, and the driver had some takeout bread and beans for breakfast that they nicely shared with us.
Towards the end of our long drive we approached the town of Aswan, and there was some serious road construction going on. The last 45 minutes or so were on dirt roads, and I was surprised that the driver preferred to have his window open, letting in road dust, insects and exhaust from the other cars. We could really taste and smell Egypt!
Finally we reached the town of Aswan, home of the Aswan High Dam, and drove to our first sightseeing location on the agenda, the Philae Temple. What we didn’t know until we arrived (but we probably should have) was that the Temple is on an island. We walked down to the water with Achmed, and he arranged a boat from the hundreds of boats docked there. It was nice to have a private boat ride, but a little bit of a surprise since I didn’t expect to have a Nile cruise on this trip. Little did I know at the time that it wouldn’t be our last Nile excursion.
The Philae Temple was really beautiful. There were elaborate carvings of pharaohs and gods, Isis, Set, and all the biggies made an appearance. Achmed was eager to explain the significance of the hieroglyphics, but to be honest we struggled to understand him. Finally we asked him for a little time on our own to look around, and that was much better. We spent about half an hour going through the ruins of the Temple and I thought it was well worth the short boat ride.
We met back up with Achmed, and he asked us what was next. It was a slightly strange question since I had already paid for the package tour and their website had listed the complete itinerary so I assumed that the tour company employee would have previously worked out which things we would see. Achmed asked me to show him the itinerary from the website, and I honestly think it was the first time he had seen it. But he kept nodding and said “no problem” and suggested heading to see the obelisk quarry in town. Great!
It was a short drive back into town and we could start to feel the day heating up. Â It was the first time during the trip that we had felt hot in the winter weather of Egypt – we were a lot farther south than we had been before. Luckily we wore layers of clothing so it was easy to adjust.
We had seen obelisks from Egypt in two places previously in our travels, one in London and one in Paris. The obelisk quarry was the place where they carved the obelisk out of the ground – one giant continuous piece of stone, and then loaded them on boats and floated them down the river to Luxor, Cairo or Alexandria. There was a partially finished obelisk still lying in the quarry – half-carved out of stone and from that you could understand the sheer amount of work and skill it had taken to make one.
Next on the agenda was lunch. Â Being foodies we were pretty excited about what might be in store for us. Since the tour guide was covering lunch I wasn’t expecting much, but at least he would be there to help us select something interesting off the menu and explain about things that we otherwise might not have tried. They took us to a restaurant, and it looked pretty interesting – a real local kind of place. It was reasonably clean, and so we sat down at the table to eat. Achmed started talking to the waiter, and then after the waiter left our guide told us that he had ordered some koshary for us. We were a little disappointed as we had already tried koshary in Cairo, but he was picking up the tab. The koshary was pretty good though, similar to what we ate before, and it did the job of filling our stomachs. Cheap and delicious!
After lunch Achmed said that we should postpone the visit to the Aswan High Dam until the next day, and instead wanted to take us to something not on our original itinerary: a “Nubian Village” where we could make Nubian crafts, have our picture taken with a live alligator, and see Nubian culture. We vetoed it straight away – it sounded touristy as hell and really not our cup of tea. Then he suggested a place where we could see papyrus being made which sounded interesting until we saw that it was a shop that sold cheesy paintings on papyrus to tourists. Many tour guides pad their income by bringing tourists into these kinds of places – giant rooms selling perfume, papyrus, pearls, tea, you name it. We’ve seen them in China, Bali and other places and really it is just a sales presentation masquerading as a cultural experience. But we felt bad for Achmed and it seemed like he was running out of ideas for things to do, so we went along to see the papyrus making and help him get his kickback.
The setup was just like we expected with completely cheesy paintings (think black velvet Elvis paintings with a King Tut mask instead) but the papyrus demonstration was slightly interesting. The guy cut up the papyrus root and showed how they smashed it down and soaked it to give it strength. After his demonstration he abruptly placed a price list in front of us and left, which was a weird sort of sales pitch. We walked around looking at the artwork for about thirty seconds and then said that we were ready to leave.
It was becoming clear to us that the itinerary that was provided by the company I had hired was not really connected to what we were doing, and there was a great deal of improvisation and disorganization, which we tend to disdain. I was starting to worry about the “accommodation at a five star hotel” that the tour company had advertised for tonight’s stay. We decided to make it easy for Achmed and asked him to take us to the hotel a bit earlier, figuring that we could set out on our own without the guide and do whatever we liked later that night.
Achmed was happy enough to do that, so we drove through Aswan one last time. I kept looking around at the buildings and thinking that there weren’t many that seemed like they’d house a five star hotel. Our driver pulled off the road and drove down a short stretch to the side of the Nile River. Achmed indicated that we would ride a ferry, and my stomach dropped a little. Our hotel wasn’t in town, but on an island.
We rode the boat for about 10 minutes across the Nile to Isis Island, and the Isis Island Hotel. The hotel looked nice enough as we approached, and the bellhop came onto the boat and took our suitcase. Achmed led us up a short hillside to the entrance, and then we went into the lobby for check-in. The hotel had a weird vibe. Picture a hotel with 400 rooms, but with only 20 being occupied. You could tell that someone back in the 1970’s put a lot of money into this venture, but that was a long time ago. There was something creepy about it – the lobby had a real “Overwatch Hotel” feel, there was an abundance of staff with nothing to do and big empty spaces. Achmed checked us in, we got the key, and then we arranged to meet him in the lobby the next morning at 4:30 am for a very early start. We confirmed the time and location with him twice, because we weren’t sure about his English comprehension level and I didn’t want any mistakes. But we were very happy about the early start – we wanted to get to Abu Simbel as soon as possible.
So Achmed caught a boat back to town (he said he and the driver were going to sleep in the car that night) and we went up to our room. It was clean but old, with some odd stains here and there. There was no Wi-Fi so we had no communication link with the outside world, and all we could do was hope that Achmed would be there tomorrow at 4:30 to rescue us from Isis Island.
Since we had so much free time, we decided to walk around and review the hotel amenities. It was a little lonely to walk the grounds and see all the things that were built long ago but no longer in use. There was a big pool that stretched around half the hotel, with a bar long since cleared out (maybe due to changing attitudes about alcohol), something called an Art Café that was sitting empty, and a deserted building with a sign saying “Arabic Restaurant” on the south side of the island standing alone – dark and spooky among a clump of trees. All of things don’t sound too spooky on their own but on the grounds of this really big hotel that was almost completely deserted… yikes.
Speaking of restaurants, it was looking like our eating options were going to be limited. We were lucky that the hotel lobby restaurant was open – it was our only choice – and they served mainly western style food like hamburgers and club sandwiches. Even luckier was the fact that they served beer and they took credit cards. Hallelujah!
So we sat out on a nice outdoor terrace, surrounded by a hundred empty tables, and ordered some Stella beers while watching the sun slowly set over the mountains to the west of the Nile. Kuniko and I had one of those travel “moments” that I will always remember. Having shared in the same disorganized road trip adventure and then to be totally relaxed on some little island that nobody has ever heard of, sitting on a lonely terrace of an empty restaurant in Egypt of all places, and to watch the sunset with the Nile River and the big sky above us burning orange and then purple – it was just a perfect moment.
After dinner we went back up to our room, passing a quartet of musicians setting up for a performance with no audience in sight, and went to bed. What a strange place to end the day!
