Apparently I had no problem sleeping in a spooky hotel, but for Kuniko it was another story. While I lay on the bed snoring, she was unable to get comfortable enough to sleep. She told me the next day that soon after I fell asleep she heard some music coming from down the hall, possibly from the four musicians that we had passed on our way out of the restaurant. The music was faint but occasionally moved around, sometimes coming from other directions as if the musicians were walking around the hotel grounds in the dark. Despite putting out the “Do Not Disturb” sign on our door, there was a knock quite late at night, which Kuniko decided to ignore. Apparently the knocking was persistent for a few minutes, and then finally they stopped. Now and then sounds of some sort of party somewhere in the hotel could be heard.
Meanwhile, I was dozing away oblivious. At around 3:45 am my alarm woke me up but I don’t think Kuniko had slept at all. I got the shower running, but there was no hot water. I did my best in the chilly shower and Kuniko skipped it altogether. At 4:15 am we left our room, eager to leave this hotel as soon as possible.
We checked out at the desk, and we were able to pick up our breakfast pack – to eat on the road because of our early start. It was nice of them to put that together. We sat at the designated meeting spot and waited patiently for our tour guide to meet us. Surprisingly, other people were checking out as well, and it appeared as though a Chinese tour group had stayed the night – they must have checked in after we went to bed. They all left at the same time. The hotel bellhop said that we should go too, but I assured him that we had made arrangements with our tour guide to meet at this spot.
But ten minutes past our agreed upon meeting time there was no sign of our guide. Uh-oh. The desk staff looked as worried as we did, and so I looked up the guide’s cellphone number and went to the front desk to have them call and remind him to pick us up. However, when I arrived at the desk the clerk was on the phone already with our guide, and he told us that we needed to go on the boat to Aswan and meet the guide there. Apparently the plan had changed. We took our suitcase down to the dark shoreline of the river, and the hotel staff kind of woke up a boat pilot who groggily led us to his boat. We got on board, and had our third Nile Cruise of the trip in the cold darkness of the morning. At least we were leaving Isis Island.
The boat took us down the river in almost complete darkness. Our suitcase sat in the center of the boat in front of us and I idly wondered where the life jackets might be kept and thought about how hard it would be to find them in the dark. But the boat arrived safely, and while the pilot futzed with the engine we eagerly grabbed our suitcase and got off the boat. There was a shout from behind me as the pilot realized that I had taken the suitcase and deprived him of a tipping opportunity. I didn’t care – I just wanted to find our guide and get to Abu Simbel. I carried the suitcase up the hill, and we found our guide and driver standing around waiting for us. The driver offered to take the suitcase but I brushed by him and put it in the car myself – it was a little childish to be honest but I wanted to show them that we were unhappy. We all got in the car, and finally we were underway. The guide explained that he had tried to come meet us, but there were some “government restrictions” and he couldn’t take the boat over to the hotel. It sounded to me like something from the Egyptian tour guide handbook – if you need an excuse for something, blame “government restrictions”. Why would the government care if a tour guide took a 5 minute boat ride to pick up his customers at their hotel?
Anyway, now that we were in a car and driving towards our goal, our mood improved dramatically. This would be another long drive – almost 300 kilometers. We drove over a big dam, waited through a very thorough military checkpoint for almost half an hour, and then got out into the open desert heading south. The desert was empty and beautiful. It really had a “Mad Max” kind of feeling, with occasional buildings or burnt out buses partially visible as we sped by. While our tour guide slept in the front seat I kept an eye on the driver but he seemed to be thoroughly awake. With the long straight roads it would be easy to doze off. We had a visual treat when the sun rose over our left shoulder as we headed south. The sunrise was slow enough that we could enjoy the whole thing even while traveling at 120 km/hr. We drove past a bus full of Chinese tourists pulled over, and the tourists were dashing across the road to get pictures of the sunrise. Our tour guide offered us the chance to stop, but we declined. Pressing onward!
The driver turned out to be a trouper. He was drinking tea and water to stay awake and that meant a couple of toilet stops in the middle of the desert, but otherwise he was solid. The guide and the driver spent most of the trip talking to each other in Arabic, and we were happy to not have to keep up small talk with them and to be left alone in the back seat. Our tour guide did receive lots of phone calls during the trip, and apparently he was doing some arrangements for tours later on in the week. It sounded like business was good for him.
Finally, we arrived at Abu Simbel. This was Kuniko’s only request for our trip to Egypt. The temple has a long history among explorers of Egypt and it featured prominently in both of the books on Egypt that I had read before we came. The temple was originally in a low valley, but construction of the Aswan High Dam would mean that the Temple would be submerged, so UNESCO led a major project to completely relocate the temple to a place above the waterline. The temple was methodically and carefully cut up by archaeologists and Egyptian history experts and moved block by block to the new location. It was quite an undertaking, and so we were really looking forward to seeing it for ourselves.
The location of the temple is quite dramatic: on the shore of Lake Nasser (formed by the dam) it is carved out of stone and built into a mountain, and then surrounded by blue sky and blue water. Four temple guardians sit outside protecting the entrance, but the second one from the left has been partially obliterated at some point in history. Our guide was kind enough to take our picture out front, and we had an immense feeling of satisfaction on reaching our goal. We stood in sight of the border with Sudan, just on the other side of the lake, pretty much the southernmost part of Egypt. What a journey!
It turned out that tour guides were not allowed inside the temple, so we got a welcome respite from our guide’s slightly confusing explanations. We were just happy to walk through and see the remarkable carvings inside. As with most temples in Egypt that we visited, photos inside were prohibited. Apparently you could bend the rules by tipping the right guys, but we stuck to the high road and just took in the sights for ourselves.
Before leaving the temple our guide asked us to take his picture in front of Abu Simbel with our camera, which was kind of weird. He looked in the camera without smiling, sort of like a determined look of satisfaction. I’m not sure why he made the request, but it was the only firm request he made the whole trip. Maybe it was some sort of proof that he actually took us there? Not sure, but I still have the pictures and it is an odd reminder of an odd trip.
So, we had accomplished our goal for the tour – we saw Abu Simbel Temple, and really every other activity on the itinerary was just icing on the cake. As far as we were concerned we were done and completely satisfied, despite our spooky hotel stay. We got in the car, stopped for breakfast for the driver and the guide (we had our breakfast packs still) and then started driving back through the desert to Aswan. This time there was more daylight to see things on the return drive. In the middle of nowhere there was a huge housing development, completely deserted, cooking in the sun. Some dunes appeared now and then, and it really felt like a wasteland out here. I kept my fingers crossed that our car wouldn’t suffer any breakdowns.
The basic plan that day was to drive back to Aswan, we would stop there and eat lunch, see the Aswan High Dam, and then spend the afternoon driving back to our hotel in Luxor, hoping to be back around 7-8 pm. Our lunch was not an inclusion on the trip, so I was looking forward to something a little more exciting than koshary. We talked with the guide and requested maybe stopping at a nicer restaurant or even a hotel restaurant, someplace a little upscale with better food (and clean toilets). He said that he knew many cheap restaurants, and that seafood was the most popular in Aswan. We assured him that we were not interested in seafood having come from Japan, and would prefer something else – price was not an issue. He seemed to understand, but later we found out that he in fact did not.
A few hours of driving later, we arrived back in Aswan. We drove through town on crowded streets, and we had a chance to witness a near-fight when a motorcyclist and driver got into a confrontation. They stood toe to toe yelling at each other and effectively blocking three lanes of traffic as people slowed to watch. Road rage is apparently universal. Eventually they cooled off and we could continue driving.
Our car stopped in a market area, which looked like an interesting place. There were stores and restaurants lining a big shopping street. It wasn’t really upscale, but this kind of location is just the kind of place where we would find great street food. I didn’t think we’d find a clean toilet here, but you have to keep an open mind when traveling. Our guide led us down the street, and right into a seafood restaurant. Kuniko and I looked at each other and realized that he hadn’t understood our request at all. The guide sat us down at table splashed with water, next to a fish tank full of goldfish, and there was a fishy smell in the air – not the fresh kind of fishy smell. The waiter saw us and handed us a special menu that was all in English – the place with the prices written had been covered with stickers, and the prices on the stickers were more than double what we had paid at nicer restaurants in Cairo. Ah-ha. The guide pointed to the bottom of the menu where it said that there was a 12% service charge and said he could probably get the restaurant to waive the charge for us.
We weren’t concerned about price – we just wanted a nice dining experience with a clean toilet – and we were willing to pay whatever to get it. But the guide was really hung up on a “cheap restaurant”. There was clearly a communication problem here, and we were getting fed up with the way things were going with our tour guide.
I figured since we were here we ought to just order and get it over with, but Kuniko was tougher than me. She told our guide clearly and to his face, “We said we don’t want seafood, and this place smells terrible! And we’d rather not eat with you.” The guide sensed something was up, and he said he could recommend another place. We stood up and left, and the waiter looked disappointed as we walked out his door. Our guide led us around the corner and to another restaurant, this one also advertising seafood in the window. We were shaking our heads and the guide couldn’t understand why we didn’t want cheap seafood.
So that was really the final straw for us, and we told him just to take us back to Luxor. We’ll skip lunch, we’ll skip the Aswan Dam, and we don’t need a toilet at the moment. We just wanted to get back and finish the tour. The guide was surprised but he said OK, and the driver had to give up his lunch break and get back behind the wheel again.
As we left Aswan the driver and the guide were talking rapidly back and forth in Arabic and the guide was clearly unhappy with how things were going with his tour and the strange couple sitting in the back seat with no taste for seafood or getting their picture taken with a live alligator or Cleopatra papyrus paintings. They talked back and forth in a sort of debate, and behind them we dug into our breakfast packs. There were some rolls – some sweet and some filled with beef bacon, and a boiled egg. Nobody would starve to death, and we were OK for the rest of the trip.
An hour out of Aswan, they stopped the car suddenly in a small village, and without explanation they both left the car and crossed the street towards some shops. It was the first time they had done that – usually they asked us if we needed a stop, so we guessed they were angry and probably pretty hungry. We didn’t mind – they needed to eat and take a break and that was fine by us. We sat in the back of the car and watched the villagers walking around conducting their business and ignoring the two foreigners sitting in the car.
Suddenly our guide appeared back at the car, this time holding two big glass mugs of sugar cane juice. He offered them to us, but we turned them down. We just wanted to get this trip over with, and it seemed a little risky to drink a whole mug of freshly pressed sugar cane juice with a two hour drive ahead of us. The guide looked confused that we didn’t accept his peace offering, and he walked back across the street with the mugs – I hope he could give them back to the vendor. The driver and the guide came back and we continued down the road. The guide spent more time on the phone, and we imagined that he was consulting with someone: “No, the sugar cane juice trick didn’t work – what should I do next?”
Finally we got back into Luxor, and we were ever so happy to see it again. As we approached the hotel our guide asked us if we would like to arrange a tour of the Luxor area with him tomorrow, and I admired his audacity. Maybe there is a one in a million chance that we would accept, but you have to try! We thanked him for his kind offer but we said that we would make some other arrangements. At our hotel we got out of the car, collected our bag, and I tipped both the driver and the tour guide 200 pounds each – not a lot but (hopefully) not insulting. It was nice to see them drive off.
So we were back at the Sofitel Winter Pavilion, the same hotel, and we checked in again, and we even got the same room, so that was convenient. It felt good to be back in control of our own destiny, and so we hit the streets to go get dinner. We first stopped at the hotel next door, also by Sofitel, but the place was a bit too upscale. The restaurant required a dinner jacket and we felt a more relaxed atmosphere would be best. We walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Sofra, recommended by several guidebooks, and it turned out to be perfect.
Sofra was located in a busy part of the older downtown, and when we arrived there were prayers blaring from a nearby mosque. Kids were playing on the street and cars rushed by, but inside the restaurant things were very calm. It turned out to be one of the best meals we had of the whole trip. The restaurant had beautiful tilework and we ate off of copper dinner tables in an arbor off the main dining room. We started with some falafel as an appetizer Рthey contained some unique herbs and had a very light taste. For dinner we ate an eggplant dish that consisted of two thick cuts of eggplant saut̩ed in oil until golden, then layered with cumin rice and spicy beef like a sort of hamburger. The rice spilled out across the plate and the flavors layered together to bring the whole dish into the comfort food category. Kuniko ordered a roasted lamb shank, also liberally herbed and perfectly tender. We had fresh squeezed fruit juices (guava and banana) and for dessert some rice pudding with dried fruits and rosewater Рa great finish. It was one of those perfect meals that makes you want to come back again, so we planned right there to come back the next night, too.
So that meal was a very nice way to close out our day. We were so happy to be able to see Abu Simbel and to be back in a comfortable hotel on our own – and already we were laughing about the tour and tour guide – in our experience the problems that come up on a trip end up making the best memories.
