Aswan

I have to apologize for my last post.  There are so many spelling mistakes, typo's and repeat of pictures, it's ridiculous but the only place to sit and use the internet is in the hotel lobby which is bustling with people coming and going so it has been hard for me to not to be distracted.
  I forgot to mention, that today, which is Nov 28th, is the assembly house elections here in Egypt.  This has ramped up the energy all over the country.  We are lucky to be out of Cairo, because there often is violence during election time.  We are told that we will see fighting the street today, but they will be fighting with each other, not with tourists.  OOOOOooooKay, this should be interesting. 
So our day yesterday started off when we got off our train in Aswan. 

 This is the home town of our tour guide so he knows everything there is to know about it and it seems everyone in the town knows him too!
We checked into our hotel and went up to the roof top terrace to look at the view.

 The Nile river is across the road.  For some reason this seems mystical to me, some place I only dreamed about but here it is, right there!  We had some free time this morning to explore the town so Joe and I and a couple of the woman in the group went for turkish coffee.  None of this whimpy espresso coffee they give you in Italy, no no, we are talking coffee thick like mud!  It is the size of an espresso but the last 1/4 cup is literally mud.  The tradition is that when you are finished your coffee you flip the cup upside down then someone will come along and read your fortune from the sludge. 
After coffee we went to see the market.  The first stop was the spice stall. 

OMG, I have died and gone to cooking heaven.  Baskets and baskets of ever spice you can think of.  At one point the stall owner took my hand and added 5 spices crushing them with his fingers before dropping them.  He told me to smell them.  It was like the most rich curry aroma that you can imagine.  There are vendors of spice in every other stall.
The vendors all come into the street to convince you to come to their stall.

 There are thousands of stalls. Because Joe was walking down the street with 3 woman the stall men  would yell out to him "You must be a rich man if you can afford 3 wives"  Others would say" Hey you must be a virile man  to have 3 woman!"  The further down the street we went the bigger his ego got. But according to Muslim law, a man is allowed 4 wives so the running joke is he needs to find one more before he goes back to the market.
When we got back to the hotel it was quite hot (around 28 degress so Joe and I went to the pool for a swim. We quickly had to get changed as we had to catch a boat to go down the Nile to our next destination.

  The ride on the Nile was peaceful and beauiful. At one point 2 little boys paddled up in their home made boat with with thin little boards they used for paddles.  The driver of the boat usually slows down when he sees them so they can catch a ride.  When they pulled up beside us they began singing in several different languages, little songs on the hopes that the people in the boat will give them money.  Our tour guide told us he wished his father had built him a boat when he was that age because he would be rich by now if he had.  The kids by the way couldn't have been older than 6 or 7. 

Can you imagine sending your kid down the Nile River in a boat that leaks when he was 6 years old???
The river at this end is very clean and blue.  The closer you get to Cairo the dirtier it gets.  There is a huge dam just before Aswan so the water in the Nile is probably the most clean here.  That said, I am still not swimming in it or drinking it.
Our boat ride took us past monestaries and temples, and the hotel where Murder on the Nile was filmed.
  The final stop was a big desert sand dune.  We were told to walk up the dune and our camels would be waiting at the top for us.  This wasn't just a little ride around a field on a camel kind of trip, this was a get on the camel and ride for almost an hour through the desert kind of trip.

  I don't know if any of you have ridden a camel but they are really tall and most of them are quite ornary.  Anyway the camel kneels down, you climb on and hope and pray you don't fall off.  It is a long way down.  Some people were given a camel and a rope to ride like a horse and others were led by a man holding the reins and walking either in front or behind.  I was led by a man but Joe, Mr Indian Jones Camel rider was given his camel and set free.  I have never laughed so hard than during that hour.  Camels are not comfortable to ride and the guys were complaining profusely about how "crushed their manhood was getting" by being on the camel.  I would like to say, it wasn't comfortable for woman either but the men said it was torturous.  We rode for about an hour through the desert.  By this time it was about 30 degrees and there was no way you could drink anything as we were all holding on to our camels with a death grip for fear of falling off.  I was ecstatic for the experience and just as happy when it was time to get off.  One woman, Cheryl, had a camel that she named Muffin the race camel.

This is Cheryl, she started at the back of the group and beat us all by 15 minutes.  She is still in agony today!

 It ran the whole time.  She was bouncing like a wild woman on  a crazed animal, but I must add she was unbelievably composed during her desert version of the Indy 500.  Our smiles lit up the desert yesterday and every time we think about it, we laugh aloud.
 We left our camels in the desert and transfered to the back of a pickup truck to be transported to a Nubian village where we were to have a traditional dinner with a  family.  The ride through the village was fun in itself, if for no other reason than we were riding in the back of a pickup truck.

  I haven't done that since I was a kid riding in Uncle Gilbert's truck on the way to Dairy Queen.  Sorry, I digress.
A Nubian family can have huge homes because up until recently land was free so they would build a house as big as they want.  Saeed has a friend who has a house that is almost 2 acres for just the three of them.  Dinner was much like what we had at the restaurant last night but the highlight for me was seeing the kids playing with their father.

 They had gone out to the desert and picked up only the most pretty rocks (these were desert rocks that weren't pretty at all) to show him.  He in turn oogled over every one saying this one was prettier than the last one and the kids would giggle with delight.  I could not contain myself, the whole thing was just so touching.  When we finished eating we were asked if anyone in the group wanted to get a henna tattoo.  The daughter of the man who owns the house will paint a tattoo for you for 20 Egyptian pounds, or about $3.60 Cdn.  A couple of people in the group got it done and it was amazing how quick they artist was

Joe standing beside our dinner table in the Nubian house

.  We thanked our host and said good bye to the kids, (we never saw the women, they were doing all of the work of course) then we were off again to catch our boat back down the Nile for a short but beautiful ride down the Nile at night.  We climbed back in the pick up truck and drove for about 30 minutes through the village.  There were children lining the streets yelling Hello and waving madly as we drove by.  These kids are taught from an early age that tourist mean money so smile and wave, they were all so cute but it also made me realize what a hard life they must have. We arrived back at the hotel about 8 o'clock.  We have to get up early in the morning to head to Abu Sempel which we have to have a police escort to get to it. 
I will tell you that 3 a.m. wake up call came as quite a shock but it was okay because the hotel had hot coffee waiting for us as well as a box breakfast.  It seems that the universal breakfast food here is croissants and jam.  Just for the record if I never see another white bun/croissant I will be fine and dandy with that.
We boarded the bus then drove to the convoy meeting spot.  All the buses go together and they all come home together like I said with a police escort.  I asked our guide why we needed the escort and he gave me some "pc" answer about tourists safety was Egypt's priority.  I don't know the reason but we saw a lot of oil wells and drilling going on and perhaps that had something to do with it, but I don't think I will ever know for sure.
The ride was a long 3 hours thru nothing but the Sahara desert.  The sun rising on the desert was spectacular.
Abu Sempel is the place where Ramses 2 built the temple for himself and one for his wife.  It was jaw dropping. In the 1960's the government decided to dam the river but the flood waters would have covered over the temples so in 1964, they painstakingly took the temple apart and moved it to higher ground.  The amazing part is you cannot tell where one part was moved from inside.  It is seamless.  No pictures allowed inside the temple unfortunately but the outside speaks for itself...

This is a long distant zoom shot inside the temple

After we left the temple we got back on the bus for the long journey home.  All of us fell asleep because of our early start but by noon the temperature outside had reached 30 degrees and because we are in the desert, the mirages started to appear.  Our tour guide woke us up so we could see a real mirage.  These pictures are a bit blurry because we were still on the bus driving 130 kms/hr but you get the idea.  There is no water in this picture, there is nothing but sand! 

And that wraps up Aswan.  Tomorrow we board our felluca to sail down the Nile and sleep under the stars on the deck of the boat.  It's rough, but somebody has to do it!