Week Seventy-Seven

We're not up until 11.00 or so - great: I'm feeling pretty okay, but Milla's still suffering. Today's our last paid-up day in the hotel, but I've already had a discussion with the manager about staying longer - it seems he has a large group of Egyptian students arriving soon and so will move us upstairs: we want to see the upstairs room first, but he's not around this morning when we go for breakfast. The cleaning woman asks if she can do our bathroom today (maybe she thinks we're moving out), but we decide not - mainly on the strength of the non-existent job she did last time.
By early afternoon Milla's asleep again, tired and unwell, and I go out to find something useful to do: first stop is the Post Office, which turns out to be closed (for no discernible reason). Next stop is postcard-shopping, where I'm also frustrated: there are half a dozen stalls around the centre with pretty extensive (50+) collections - they have different cards, by and large, but almost universally only have rubbish. Favourites in this area seem to be wall-paintings from tombs, which are largely uninteresting. Ah well. I get hijacked next to the tourist bazaar by a pair of guys wanting a letter read to them: it's a form letter, which they've no doubt had many people read, and is just an excuse to get me into a shop (to have a cup of tea, look through their merchandise, etc.). That little detour only takes ten minutes, but is harmless fun.
I locate the Mummification Museum (Luxor's other museum) and then spend a while right down at the Nile talking directly with cruise boats: most of them are being cleaned or loaded, or are mostly deserted and they're not really interested in talking about cruises and prices. It's interesting nonetheless, since they're all pretty plush inside: they each have a "Reception" desk in the middle, with a door at either side of the boat. Since they parallel-park out from the shore, this means you can cover a number of boats just by stepping from one to another. I try a number of travel agencies as well - the best price I hit is directly from one of the ship operators at $35 per person per night - their shortest cruise, though, takes 4 days/3 nights which makes the whole thing too expensive. A couple of people recommend Discovery Travel on Sharia Television (seriously) as a more affordable place, but I wander up and down and fail to locate it. I do manage to find a few more roads being dug up: in the last week the council (presumably) has dug up about 25% of Luxor's roads - unfortunately they're much slower at re-laying them, so the resultant network of uneven dusty tracks is much worse than the worn tarmac with occasional potholes which it's replaced. I also locate Luxor's "International Hospital, which looks kinda naff on account of being designed to look like a pylon from some Ancient Egyptian temple.
Milla's feeling much better on my return (with chocolate) and, shortly after, we go out again and after a little searching find Discovery Travel just off Sharia Television. The guy inside seems nice enough and, after discussion, offers a 5-star boat on Wednesday or a 4-star boat on Friday for $40 a night each, but both only taking 3 days/2 nights. This is our best offer so far and we tell him we'll think about it. We go for something to eat, which takes forever: one of the distractions is a guy who just start mucking about on the pavement outside with a large snake and draws a small crowd - Milla is terrified, but I'm tempted to go for a closer look: he moves on, for no apparent reason, pretty quickly. We end up not getting back to the travel agency before it's closed: we decide to catch him tomorrow morning instead, since he's apparently open from 10.00.

Up on schedule, breakfast on schedule, out on schedule (the manager isn't around, so again we're unable to discuss moving rooms): our nice guy at Discovery Travel isn't so organised, and hasn't opened even by the time we have a tea next door while waiting for him. A little pissed off we return to the hotel to try to phone him (we have his card with his mobile number) and end up in discussion with the manager - we've already talked with him on the subject of cruises a couple of days ago, and he apparently works as an agent for the same company. We tell him about the boat and that we only want to pay $150 and he assures us he'll do his best. Not entirely trusting him, but seeing the day gradually slipping by (it's over 35ºC today, by the way), we leave the matter in his hands and set off for the west bank, again.
We still have Ramses III's temple to re-visit, three tombs from the Valley of the Queens and the workmen's village - quickly over by ferry, pick-up to the ticket office, and then to the temple (with Valley of the Queens tickets already in our pocket), our only delay was when we had to wait for someone to turn up at the ticket window. This time the sun's lighting up the east-facing walls (it's half-twelve), so at least I'll get different photos from our first look round. Also this time the place is full of Egyptians - it seems to be New Year's Day in the Islamic calendar and they're all out and about - it may explain why the tour agency wasn't open, and it certainly explains all the kids everywhere. As a quick aside, the Islamic/Hejira calendar is gradually catching the Gregorian one up since their years are shorter (their New Year moves gradually back through the seasons - sometimes it's in the middle of summer) - they're currently in 1424, and I reckon they're gaining three years per century.
This time in we spent more time looking at the reliefs in the two courts and in the host of chapels around and behind the hypostyle hall: apart from battle scenes, it's the usual pharaoh-offering-to-the-gods and scenes-from-the-life stuff. There's a chipped-away coronation scene which is interesting: as usual it features Horus and Seth (the Egyptians understood that you need Law and Anarchy - very Moorcockian of them), but whereas they mainly portrayed Seth as a Thoth-like Ibis, this time he's the more traditional dog-like figure. We haven't actually figured out what animal he's supposed to be (possibly a fictional monster) - he's very similar to Anubis, but with square ears (Anubis' are pointy): it's yet another of those areas where we wish we'd done more research.
The chapels (to Horus, Hathor, Amun, Sekhmet - one of our favourites, Osiris and others) are okay but, being on a smaller scale than the outer halls, show up the poor quality of the workmanship more clearly. There are a lot of reliefs to look round, but that's really about it for the temple (after an hour and a quarter) except to check out the Nilometer (most temples seem to have had Nilometers) and note the little carved lines of four heads of different ethnicity which intermittently grace the walls (peoples he defeated?) and the cute little birds which nest in the cracks between blocks and even in some of the more deeply-carved hieroglyphs. There is a bizarre incident when a group of Egyptian kids (12-14) ask if a photo's okay: we assume they want us to take a photo of them as a group in the temple, but no - they want a photo with us. Hm. It seems Egyptians visit the west bank at Thebes mainly to see foreigners . . .
The temples of the west bank, now we've thoroughly seen all the ones you need a ticket for, get a solid 5/10: Hatshepsut's was disappointing; the Ramesseum was much as expected; and those of Ramses III and Seti I were both excellent.
We trek round the back of the temple, cross a police checkpoint and walk the short but desolate road (everything here is desolate) to the Valley of the Queens. It's much like the Valley of the Kings (a cluster of paths with little numbered tombs branching off - here, many of them are simple vertical shafts), but on a smaller scale and (with Nefertari's tomb closed for renovation) we only have three to see. The first we come to (and only one of a real queen) is that of Queen Titi: it's a single descending corridor which ends in a squarish room with three smaller chamber off, one on each side. As well as being pretty small (some tombs of Nobles were bigger), the execution isn't great - it's just paint on plaster: all coloured, but the colours are fading and the plaster has large patches missing. The thematic material is grander and more metaphysical than the Nobles' tombs, but doesn't bear even brief comparison with the Valley of the Kings. It's mostly of interest only because there's a lot of rarely-seen gods inside, apart from the usual Ra-Harakhty, Hathor, Isis and good ol' blue/green-skinned Osiris: there are ones we know, like Sobek, but also curious gods with the heads of vultures, snakes and animals we don't even recognise (hyenas? rabbits? donkeys?).
Second up is the tomb of Amunherkhepshep or Amen-Khop-Shef: there's a tour group in there for ages before we go in/down, so we have high hopes. It turns out that they were Germans, however, and just being very thorough. Down a deep flight of steps, it's pretty much three rooms in a row with a couple of unfinished chambers off to the right. As with Queen Titi's tomb, the decoration is mostly large figures rather than the densely-packed detail of the Kings'/Nobles' tombs, but at least here they're well-preserved and bright. Most of it comprises scenes of Ramses III introducing this son (who died aged 9 - he has the young man's sideways pony-tail hairstyle) to the various major gods and goddesses. Ramses is particularly familiar with some of the goddesses, giving Mut a quite intimate embrace and being tickled under the chin by another. There's a story that Amen-Shop-Shef's mother was so distraught at his death that she miscarried and the foetus was also entombed here - there is a fairly gruesome mummified 5-month foetus in a case in one corner, but the accompanying text appears to imply that it wasn't found in this tomb.
We're moving disappointingly quickly through these, and climb the hill to the last of the open three, the tomb of prince Kha-Em-Was(e)t. Like the last two, this tomb seems to have been excavated by Italians, and they label him Chamosa (their Egyptologists seem out of step with the rest when it comes to interpreting names). He's another son of Ramses III (who seems to have spent most of his reign/money building temples and tombs), and is pretty much one long passage with two side-chambers just past the entrance. As in his (step-)brother's, this tomb mainly depicts him progressing; greeting and worshipping a whole host of gods (though mainly on his own): the quality's not great (typical Ramses III work - there's one figure of Isis, looking as if she has a mobile phone on her head) and there's quite a bit of empty white space, implying that the tomb may not have been completely finished. Even so, despite looking like the least visited, this is the best and brightest we've seen today so far. Even so, it can't save the Valley of the Queens from getting a lowly 2/10 - not much to see, and it's not that good. Perhaps Nefertari's tomb (at which there's no sign of work in progress) might have saved it.
It's about 15.00, which is earlier than we thought we'd finish here, so we should have time to completely finish the west bank today: just to make sure, we take a taxi down to the ticket office and then up to "Deir el-Medina" (the workmen's village, or "Town Monastery" since Christians later used the buildings). We have two tickets for here (actually six each, since the ticket office had run out of the right denomination): one for the tomb of a chap called "Peshedu", and one to cover another two tombs and a temple. The locale is unusual - rather than a deserted valley, or pits in a "modern" village, or a square of land on the border of the cultivated fields, these tombs are set in the ruins of the two where the tomb builders lived. Drab and sand-coloured, the little mud-brick enclosures are all in close rows and many seem to have had steep basements below (digging was presumably a core skill here rather than, say, the ability to construct a first floor).
At the southern edge of the complex there's a little souvenir/postcard/bookshop which seems to be where all the custodians hang out: you have to specifically ask them to come and unlock the various monuments covered by the tickets - so they're gonna be particularly into the baksheesh concept. First up we hit the single-ticket tomb of Peshedu: the guide leads us up the hill with the usual baksheesh talk: 'Romania? Ah - Romania Number One - very good.' and 'This tomb very good, the best.' At the gate he supplies us with cut squares of thick cardboard to use as fans down in the tomb. "Down" is via a lot of steps and three low-marked arches ('Mind your heads,' the solicitous custodian-turning-guide warns). The actual tomb itself is a single chamber, with paintings of Anubis at the door: inside is all painted, ie. with no reliefs or stonework, and isn't in great condition - there are missing patches (stolen by the ages). What survives is pretty colourful and bright and the quality of the artwork is okay, though the hieroglyphs are pretty crappy (he or his friends were presumably artists). The most interesting item was an image of an Eye of Horus floating in the air, offering a bowl of burning incense with two outstretched arms.
We return to the postcard stall without giving any baksheesh and hit the tomb of Sennejem/Sennetem next door to it. Also down a steep, stepped incline it turns out to be better (once we persuaded the custodian, again, that we don't want him to accompany us round pointing out the pictures). There's not a huge amount to see, but there's a good cat-killing-a-snake at the entrance and an image of Anubis working on the mummy (similar to that in Siptah's tomb): again the hieroglyphs are pretty crappy - not even in straight lines. By the time we reach the surface again, the custodians are talking amongst themselves about us Romanians - doubtless how mean we are.
The third tomb, that of Anherkha, turns out to be the best of the three: again down steep steps it comprises two chambers - the decoration on the walls of the first chamber is mostly gone, but is pretty much intact in the second (deeper). Overall it's a bit jumbled, but there are numerous interesting sections: a ceiling section made up of rows of Hathors; a giant headless (worn) crow opposite; Anherkha's daughter shown (uniquely so far) with pubic hair; a harpist with eyes; and a strange rabbit/sheep-headed (or just badly painted) cat-creature attacking a snake. We emerge and wander through the remains of the town across to the temple, easily visible and covered by the same ticket: there's a guy there, but he's trying to sell us antiques rather than letting us inside. He waves back to the stall for us and, eventually, someone sets off from there with the key: they've probably been drawing lots, or discussing baksheesh strategies.
The temple turns out to be Ptolemaic, ie. much more recent than most of the west bank stuff. Dedicated to both Maat and Hathor, it's pretty large but is much less monumental than the various pharaonic mortuary temples we've been looking at so far - it's almost intimate. Only the central chapel is made of stone and decorated with reliefs (and it still has an intact roof, which you can climb up or views across the valley to the Ramesseum): other buildings, and the encircling wall, are all from mud-brick. As we saw at Karnak Temple, these big walls are kinda wavy and seem to be built in sections which lean laterally against each other. The chapel reliefs are okay, reasonably well-preserved, but nothing special: our custodian (again, we have to firmly discourage him from acting as a poor man's guide) suggests it's okay to take photos of the still-painted sections (more baksheesh ammunition, since you're not supposed to). When I point out, in reply, that the flash is really bad for the paintwork, Milla observes him withdrawing and carefully moving a large metal lamp which he'd just casually leaned against one of the walls.
As we move out, he makes his play for baksheesh - our most insistent yet (they may have been discussing us amongst each other): acting as if we don't understand doesn't work (he replies very clearly that he wants money); neither does just saying no (he keeps getting in our way); our other strategies like explaining that we have a ticket, and asking if he doesn't get paid for doing this (he claims not) also don't work; and Milla getting impatient and angry also has little effect. Eventually he just gives up and wanders away to sulk somewhere (we don't see him again as we finish wandering around the courtyard and then leave): still, at least he didn't lock us in.
We skip down to the resthouse at the Ramesseum (pretty much at the foot of the hill we're on) and stop there for a beer (warm, which Milla hates) and finally try some of their food (it's okay, but probably 30% overpriced) before leaving the west bank for the last time by our usual combination of pick-up and ferry. Overall we're pretty happy - despite our doubts due to today's slow start, we've now finished pretty much everything (except the remote Tomb of Ay, a handful of tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and the closed tomb of Nefertari) over four days of about six hours on-site each. In fact, apart from the Mummification Museum, we reckon we've finished Karnak and Luxor as well: so naturally, when we get off the ferry, we head straight for the aforementioned Mummification Museum.
It's . . . well it's a bit of a let-down, especially after the excellent Luxor Museum - designed, it seems, only for people at a loose end in Luxor it comprises only one medium-sized room - and costs the same to get in as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Around half the walls are line-reproductions of scenes from tombs relating to mummification: a line of these leads you to the museum's single and rather dull mummy. There are a handful of mummified animals as well (cats, ibis, baboon), but they're all still in bandages so aren't much to see; and a selection of tools and implements for actual mummification; and a cross-section of a mummified skull, still with linen stuffing inside. Most interesting are their old (3,500 years old) wooden artefacts - an ankh (they explain that the shape possibly derives from a strapped sandal), a djed column (the one with the bars, symbolising stability and continuity, called the "backbone of Osiris" during the New Kingdom), a Ba bird and so on. Oh, and on the inside of one of their scant collection of mummy cases is an interesting two-headed god: one head is a snake, and the other appears to be Daffy Duck.
Feeling a little cheated after 35 or 40 minutes, we sit by the riverbank for a bit and then wander back to the hotel to find out what the manager's done with our cruise-boat concept. Since we managed to find a quote for a 5-star boat (they only seem to come in denominations of 4- and 5-star) for $160, we figure (because that's the way things are in Egypt) that he'll have managed to get a 4-star boat for the same money, rather than the same boat for $150 (as we reckon we could have done). We meet him at about 20.00 in the street (it's chaos - they're pouring tar in preparation for actually laying new roads), and then meet back at the hotel for 20.45. He has, he claims, found two options: he also claims that there were no spaces on the Discovery boat, so he went to another agent (uh-huh). This seems very suspicious, but we hear him out - there's apparently a 5-star boar leaving tomorrow for two days, and another leaving on Thursday. Both, apparently, stop for four or five hours at Edfu (for the Temple of Horus) and Kom Ombo (great name, for the twin temple of Sobek and Horus the Elder), our two must-sees en route. We prefer the Wednesday option (now that we've finished Luxor/Thebes), even before we learn that the Thursday boat is travelling from Aswan to Luxor (what would be the point of that?). Then, then of course, he tries to hit us for $180 for tomorrow's boat. We beat him down to $160 and are reasonably content with this, since it now equates to the lowest offer we'd previous had (actually, the guy at Discovery Travel started at $180 as well). There's still a nagging though in the back of our minds, of course, that given a chance we could have got it for $150. Ah well, not to worry.
Having now been on the road for 22 weeks since leaving Bucuresti, our total expenditure is currently sitting a staggeringly accurate $6 over my original August 2002 estimate (out of $4,600+ total spend). Mind you, however accurate my financial forecast was, the original plan called for us to be in Ethiopia this week. Now, it seems, we've just bust our budget by $160 for two days!
Mind you, a cruise on the Nile sounds pretty stylish (if a bit Agatha Christie).
We get a reasonably early night's sleep (just after 01.00) on the basis that we'll apparently be collected tomorrow at about 10.00. The boat, equally apparently, sails at 11.00.

We wake earlier than expected: the Egyptian "students", whose arrival has been so long heralded and was the reason we were to move rooms, have finally arrived. And they turn out to be schoolkids. They arrive at 06.45 and spend over an hour running, screaming and slamming their way around the hotel as they find their rooms, install themselves and so on. Lovely. Unbelievably Milla sleeps through it until 07.15, when our first alarm goes off. At breakfast (as the kids go to bed, or go to kick a football in the street outside), which we share with a small part of similarly besieged-looking Japanese, we run over our plans one more time. Finishing packing and checking out the hotel takes us to a neat 09.45, at which point the manager lets us know that we won't actually be picked up until 10.30. Super.
We sit in Reception with one of the manager's wives as small groups of Egyptian boys hurtle through, occasionally pausing to stare at the immobile foreigners: where, we wonder, is our lift? The hotel manager phones the tour office at 10.25: the guy's apparently just left to collect us, they say. This (of course) turns out to be a lie - an obvious lie, since a taxi turns up at 10.40 to take us there: "there" turns out to be the office of Karnak Tours, rather than the boat. We reach the office at 10.50 and there's no obvious sign of "Mahmoud": he's apparently taking care of us. In good Egyptian fashion this entails emerging a few minutes later, joining us in the taxi and then making small talk in the back seat as we drive up to Karnak: he then spends some time walking along the shore looking for our boat (no, he doesn't know where it is), with us crawling behind him in the taxi. It's a relief when he finally indicates that he's found the boat he's booked us on, and we carry our rucksacks along the gangway and into Reception (much to the consternation of the boat's personnel - they don't understand our paranoia). The boat crew give us tea, and a cabin, and tell us that the boat will in fact set sail at 12.00; lunch will be at 12.30. We, in return, tell them that no - they won't keep our passports at Reception. Just until tomorrow, they promise: I glance at my watch and ask them if the paperwork takes 13 hours? They end up photocopying our passports and returning them, and then we set off to explore the boat - from the top deck, we're quite relieved to see Mahmoud leaving.
Now - this boat. Well, its got four decks and is very flat (draft only about 1.5m): we're on the bottom deck - 28 cabins there, another 28 on the main deck and 6 on the upper deck. That makes a maximum 124 passengers: there are also 40 crew, which seems like a pretty good ratio to me. Apart from the cabins, there's Reception on the main deck, the restaurant (and kitchens) on the upper deck and the bar with dance floor on the "sun deck": the back, open two-third of the sun deck is a.) a big open area with awnings, b.) another bar and c.) the swimming pool (too small for real swimming). Finally, above the main bar, is a true sun deck with 40-odd sun loungers: the whole thing is actually quite pleasant.
Our cabin has a double bed which fills most of the room, a cabinet with internal phone and radio, one chair, a wardrobe, a sideboard-thing with TV on top (terrestrial Egyptian channels only) and a little en-suite shower/toilet. We also have a window (unopenable) with Nile water just outside - seriously, the floor of our cabin is where the water would normally be.
Our nightmare scenario was that the boat would be full of geriatric German tour groups - in fact it turns out to be full of (four) geriatric Swedish tour groups, and they turn out to be running late. At 12.30 a little man in a red uniforms walks around ringing a bell - lunch is apparently served, though we haven't left Luxor yet: this, we think, will be the test of how much we're going to enjoy ourselves. In the dining room, we have a table to ourselves (reserved by cabin number) and it's at pretty much the best window. Lunch is a buffet, so we heap up a couple of plates each and sit eating and gazing out at the Theban Hills: very stylish, we think. We also think, after ten minutes, that the Theban Hills are moving - it seems we're setting off! I rush upstairs to the sun deck and get off a few photos of Luxor disappearing behind us: rushing was a bit unnecessary, it transpires, since the boat's cruising speed against the current seems to be about 6mph (brisk walking speed).
After finishing lunch, largely an exercise in eating as much as we can (the strawberry tart was particularly good), we check our itinerary at Reception. It seems we'll stop for a couple of hours in both Edfu and Kom Ombo tomorrow (not the four-five hours in each that our agent/manager claimed), which is vaguely worrying since it may not give us enough time to see the temples. Other than that, the next 48 hours will be spent doing . . . not a lot, actually. Contrary to one's (my) expectations, your average Nile cruise mostly consists of lounging around in the sun, on deck, watching Upper Egypt drift by rather than (say) exploring ruins. They have a whole bunch of stuff laid on to fill the time - apart from three meals a day, we also get afternoon tea, and this evening there's a cocktail party and disco; tomorrow there's a "galabiyya party". From what we've seen of our fellow travellers, the excitement of either of these last two could finish them off - I'll keep my camera ready in case.
As soon as the boat really starts, of course, that's when everything else pretty much stops: the very fact that it takes about an hour before Luxor is finally out of sight behind us seems to induce a similar pace among the passengers. Almost before we know it everyone's up on the sun deck, a number in swimming costumes sitting with their legs in the pool - a quite frightening sight. Almost magically "Afternoon Tea" has come and gone (a cup of coffee) and we're sailing (it feels like drifting) into the sun: Milla sleeps in the cabin, while I write. At 15.15 we're overtaken by another cruise boat, with its horn sounding a little tune as it passes: in fact there's a whole bunch of boats heading south from Luxor on approximately the same schedule as us. Other river traffic includes occasional barges (laden with bags of . . . stuff) and some feluccas: the river itself (the Sewer of Egypt) is a lot cleaner here as well, now that we're away from the larger towns. Instead of cardboard boxes and plastic bags, most of the flotsam seems to be clumps of palm leaves.
The further south we go, the higher the density of palm trees along the shore (with quite a few fallen dead trunks, half in the water), though the fertile strip along the river varies in width quite a lot. There are a number of places where the sandy and barren hills come pretty much right down to the shore, and the vegetation unsurprisingly dies out there: the green strip flanking the river, therefore, drops to (say) half a dozen plants instead of the two kilometres or so which seems the norm. Of course this two kilometres is artificial anyway: every so often we pass a "Pumping Station", getting water up into the network of irrigation canals. Individual farmers, who in the past presumably used Archimedes Screws to fill their own little canals now have little diesel pumps instead. From stretch to stretch, the Nile also gets quite flat and lazy: the grass-covered sandbanks form a progression of tiny islands and those islands mostly have donkeys on them: which implies that donkeys can swim. Hey-ho: live and learn.
Other things to look at are mainly people: there's a bunch of little villages strung along the Nile, mostly mud-brick houses, leaning against each other for support, though there's also occasional concrete. Fields also run the length of the river, though farming these doesn't seem to take too much effort: we pass far fewer people actively working in the fields than people sitting around beside the fields watching the boats go past - as far as we can tell, this activity can take all day. Other people visible are mainly fishing from little one- and two-person boats, either with dragnets or else (believe it or not) with spears - it's like tomb paintings . . .
We reach the big barrage at Esna at around 18.45: Esna is the first major town south of Luxor, and the first lock on the Nile. I'm snoozing in the cabin when we arrive and I'm awoken by, bizarrely, the sound of people outside the window - bizarre because we're in the middle of the river. It turns out that the enterprising locals row out on little boats to the cruise boats, which stop and queue here to pass through the lock, and try to sell tourist stuff to the passengers. According to Milla, who went up on deck, one old Swedish dear was hit on the head with a T-shirt. I put some clothes on, and we scare them away by tapping on the tinted glass when they try to peer in our window. After fifteen minutes, another boat arrives and they paddle away in the darkness to besiege that one instead.
The cocktail party is at 19.00, where a "cocktail" is apparently fruit juice: drinks, and that includes (say) mineral water with any meal or coffee with breakfast, are not included in the price - and the boat's price-list is terrifying (suspecting that, of course, we brought plenty bottled water of our own). Dinner kicks in at 19.30, which is about the time the boat finally starts edging towards the lock, and we abandon the meal to go and look (they seem to have timed all the meals to coincide with the few interesting things outside) - as when we left Luxor, no-one else seems to be bothered. The massive hydro-electric barrage and lock, a sign proudly proclaims, were built by Romenergo S.A., Romania - this cheers Milla up immensely, but worries me a little as we shuttle through the giant engineered contraption with another cruise boat (the lock takes two boats at a time, and there was a queue when we got here).
They've saved food for us in the restaurant (damn right), so we finish up while watching the town of Esna drift past and then toddle back down to our cabin: there's a "disco" in the bar but, unlike most of the other passengers, we're not so far from our youth that we're that desperate to recapture it. We also discuss options for tomorrow - since we don't seem to be stopping that long in Edfu or Kom Ombo, I quite favour the idea of spending longer in Edfu and then catching a bus and rendezvousing with the boat again at Kom Ombo temple. Milla's against that plan, on account of the hassle-factor and on account of a desire to just bum about on our luxury boat for most of the day. We'll see what happens at Edfu tomorrow . . .
One more thing - I'm surprised to note that the Nile has waves.

We wake up in our little cabin for the last (second) time, have our buffet breakfast (we've eaten so much in the last couple of days that I feel we don't make the best use of it) and then pack (including useful stacks of toilet roll and soap) before setting off around 09.00 to find somewhere to stay. Our boat has conveniently docked almost directly opposite the station so a.) we're fairly central and b.) it's easy to find where we are on the map.
Aswan's pretty large, but the centre is much smaller than in Luxor: all the cheapo hotels are off the main street of souqs (Sharia al-Souq), which runs parallel to the river. As we've seen pretty much everywhere in Egypt so far, rubbish (organic and inorganic) is simply heaped up on rooftops or in backstreets and the smell when the wind blows the wrong way is pretty bad. There is the whole issue of hygiene and cleanliness here (Milla almost runs out from one particularly filthy hotel we looked at, which seemed to be mainly for locals), but there's another side to the story. Like the Bedouin moving around Sinai with hardly any possessions and hardly any non-biodegradable waste, Egyptians have been using their streets and river as a rubbish tip for millennia: the problem today is with their adoption of Western-style packaging (cans and boxes and plastic bags), and that they haven't updated their behavioural patterns to suit.
We spend a couple of hours walking, checking eight or nine hotels, before (typically) settling on the very first one we saw, closest to the station. It's not quite as good as the place in Luxor, but is pretty much equivalent and charges the same. We collect our bags and get back to our new room around midday, where we fall asleep after all the effort (!). Actually, that's not entirely fair, since Milla's still feeling pretty ill and I'm not entirely well either, and Aswan turned out to be very, very hot.
Evening comes and we go out for a wander: apart from the Corniche along the Nile and the souq street parallel to it, there isn't much in central Aswan. There are a lot less calèche drivers than in Luxor, but more "felucca" captains along the riverbank. As in Luxor, 50% of the tourist souvenir items appear to be textiles - mainly scarves: other than that, it's the usual. One nasty surprise is the price of cigarettes, 4EP - at least for foreigners: in the face of our protestation, one woman produces a newspaper which proves that the prices did, in fact, go up overnight (to 3.75EP, but she still wants to charge us 4EP). Goddam - we should have brought more from Luxor. There is one guy selling them much cheaper, by the carton: we insist on checking his stock, discover them to be fake, and have a bit of a stand-up argument (we've opened one of his cartons, obviously). After that, we bite the bullet and buy some at 4EP.
We find a local fast food place and order an Egyptian pizza (fateer) and a sweet, fatty pastry circle for me ("malatash" or something - I didn't catch the name exactly, but liked the look of it); both turn out to be huge (though fairly cheap), and we end up taking half of each back to the hotel as a takeaway. There's still enough left over by the time we go to sleep to feed us for half of tomorrow.

With the window open and the noise from the street and station outside, I wake up at 06-something and get up around 07.00: Milla joins me at 08.45 and we go down to check out breakfast. Breakfast turns out to be the usual - a couple of rolls and a crappy glass of tea, in the deserted lounge with the Arabic news on: there only seems to be one story today, which is some UN meeting about the forthcoming war. After that we sit around until 10.30 or so and then finally go out to explore.
Last night we had the vague intention of starting with the west bank: the Aga Khan's mausoleum, a ruined monastery and some tombs, apparently. I reckon, since the west bank is actually mostly desert, that it's gonna be way too hot soon - so we postpone that until tomorrow. Instead we explore some of the market streets around the hotel, and parts of the Corniche (much more expensive shops there), find the Post Office and Thomas Cook and finally catch the ferry across to Elephantine Island. Now comprising the monumentally ugly but expensive Oberoi Hotel and a couple of Nubian villages, this island was the site of the original Aswan settlement (Yebu in the Old Kingdom; Syene in Ptolomaic times): just as Aswan is Egypt's southernmost town today, and the southernmost boundary of Mediterranean civilisation, so it marked the southern border of Ancient Egypt and, later, was the most southerly town in the Roman Empire. South of here, you're really into Africa.
The ferry is a little chugging boat which plies back and fore across the Nile: it's divided into two tiny sections (yep, women sit up front) and you pay on board. We'd heard it was 25pt, we end up getting charged 50pt and as we disembark an older foreign couple seem to be being charged 1EP each: hey-ho. The trip takes only five minutes and drops us in one of the Nubian villages: up the stone steps from the landing, it's like we're suddenly in a different world. I mean, a different world from the different world we've been in for the past few months. The narrow twisting streets are like a medieval European village: actually, the "streets" are just dirt-tracks in the narrow gaps between the houses, occasionally with an irrigation stream taking up half their width. The houses are almost exclusively mud-brick covered with plaster - there is a little concrete, and glass in the windows, and electricity, but otherwise it's pretty much like dropping back in time a few thousand years. The population is definitely Nubian, not Arab: they're taller, darker, have more and curlier hair, and don't have those silly round faces: they also seem much more competent at basic walking.
By luck more than anything else we negotiate our way through the tiny winding tracks and find ourselves on a more major trail leading south, slightly inland from the shore: it's lined with mud walls and on our right are palm groves and irrigated fields. On our left, incongruously sporting modern house numbers, are little single-storey mud houses which seem organic (literally as well as metaphorically): they seem to have just grown out of the ground. We emerge surprisingly and without warning in a second village - you can tell it's the village because most of the houses are suddenly painted in bright colours rather than just left their natural brown. Just south of the main open area (not really a square) is an ancient triumphal stone staircase, oddly separate from anything vaguely contextual. It's heaped with garbage, showing that there are some things which the Nubians have in common with their arab neighbours.
Just up the hill is the archaeological site and attached museum: the ticket gets you into both. The main part of the museum is an old colonial house and, frankly, isn't up to much: it's a bunch of wooden display cabinets, with a small amount of labelling and a couple of minimalist wall panels. We also have some doubts about the accuracy of their labelling and their organisation: in their Pre-Dynastic room, for example, they have little Eye of Horus and Anubis amulets (neither of which we thought dated back that far). It's mostly pieces found locally, and they're mostly not that good (though there are some great pieces of painted linen). Of interest are a number of stelae with both hieroglyphic and demotic script (strange lines and squiggles - a bizarre half-way mix of Greek and proto-Arabic letters) and a number of gravestones with "Coptic" script as well, which is basically Greek with a couple of extra letters. They have a panel which explains that the scarab beetle's habit of rolling balls of dung led to its equation with the progression of the sun, and hence to its totemic status.
Not only is the museum pretty second-rate, but the guard expects baksheesh as we leave. This is presumably baksheesh for wandering around behind us, talking when we're trying to look at things, and repeating information in the labels (in even worse English than the labels were originally written in).
Outside the door there's a jaunty little sign pointing to the "Annex" and we reckon we may as well have a look, in the spirit of completeness. The annexe, of course, has been put together by the same Swiss-German effort which is carrying out the current excavations and is infinitely better than the main museum. Nice clean display cases (with text in Arabic and English) in a nice clean building, it's like . . . well, it's like a museum. There's plenty general explanatory text as well as comprehensive labelling, and the overall impression is that the collection itself is far superior to the main museum (though, in retrospect, I'm not sure if it was that much better). Highlights include a marriage contract, where the woman paid the man a lot of money (to be paid back if either he chucked her out or she left) and he agreed to supply her with basics (oil, clothes, etc.): there's also a note about demotic script, which apparently derived from hieratic, which (in turn) was a quick 'n' easy version of hieroglyphs. Finally (actually, on the way in) they had four nice maps showing the layout of different phases of settlement in the 3,500+ year occupation of the site (from early-Dynastic fortress through to Greco-Roman temple complex).
We potter through the museum's tiny garden before going through the little gate into the archaeological site: again, here, the Swiss-German effort is evident in the maps, plaques, little signposts and extensive reconstruction - it's a pity that the site itself is a bit of a dump. Mostly it's a jumble of mid-brick walls, ruins of houses and strange buildings and so on, all from different periods and at different levels but looking pretty much identical (the ol' mud-brick building technology never evolved that much). Amongst this Troy-like warren there are a number of (remnants of) stone-built temples and gates. The most complete is the Temple of Satet (or Satis), but only because it's been largely rebuilt: a small temple, it's now intact again, but built mostly from modern materials with the older blocks embedded in the appropriate places. Satet, who has a solar disk and ram's horns, was the daughter of the ram-headed god Khnum (creator of humanity and often appearing in birth-house reliefs, making new souls on his potter's wheel) - Aswan was his cult centre, and his wife Anukis and daughter were also worshipped here. From the reliefs, Satet spent most of her time opening people's mouths with her ankh. The other much-restored temple in the site is to Heqa-Ib, a local official who was deified and worshipped for centuries here: it's locked during our visit, but we can see a number of mostly-complete statues in the niches inside. From outside, they look like the largest (semi-) complete pieces in the site: possibly they're modern replicas.
Excavation is still ongoing here: apart from us, the only other people in this fairly large site are local Nubians slowly digging and scraping, and four German or Swiss archaeologists. Amusingly, the Nubians seem to be pouring the removed topsoil over a section which has already been excavated - I don't know whether this will need later re-excavation, in which case it may be a job creation (or extension) exercise. Other significant remains here are what's left of the main temple of Khnum (not much, except the courtyard), short stretches of the old city walls, a small number of Greco-Roman fragments and the (19th-century restored) Nilometer. A notable feature of the site is how much masonry was re-used from era to era: all the Greco-Roman layers have pharaonic blocks embedded in them, and similarly the New Kingdom layers feature Middle Kingdom blocks. Other than that, the site was mainly interesting for a.) the millions of shards of pottery which are everywhere, b.) the fact that there were no tourists there apart from us and c.) it's a good place to watch feluccas drifting between the islands: it gets 1/10.
The Lonely Planet map indicates a ferry from the other side of Elephantine Island to the smaller, parallel Kitchener's Island - an expensively-priced botanical gardens: we decide to stroll down the far shore to see if the ferry exists in case we want to visit the island some other day. Back in the village, of narrow and twisting car-free lanes, actually getting to the far side of the island proves trickier than it sounds and involves several dead ends and an endless number of greetings from locals - locals here, as in the Arab town of Aswan, seem to spend most of the day just sitting in the street outside their houses. En route we meet two local lads - they have a boat, they tell us, and can ferry us across to Kitchener's Island: would we like to see it? Sure, we say.
We trek up along the coast among the palm trees and little irrigation channels that cover most of the island, chatting (they don't much care for Arabs, these Nubians): since we haven't seen any other agriculture on the island, and these palm groves are irrigated with little open streams, we have to assume that the piles of machete-hewn leaves and timber are actually some kind of produce that we're clambering through. The boys meanwhile lead us to a high rocky promontory overlooking the botanical gardens that are Kitchener's Island - rowing boats seem to leave from a little cove below us. We hang out there for a bit but, seeing a whole host of boats of different types already moored on the other side, and knowing that it costs a bit to get in, we opt not to take up their offer of a trip across. The two brothers (it transpires) invite us to their sister's wedding which (apparently) is tonight: suspecting a tourist trap, we avoid making any kind of commitment - they lost interest and wander off.
We make our own way back across the island, through the strange mud-built (or concrete-built and mud-covered) houses, stopping in at the "Nubian Oasis" - it's a café-come-beach hangout (not on the beach, though) where the guy wants to tell us all about Nubian culture and traditions, but doesn't know how to make a coffee - so we don't stay. The (different) guy on the ferry back tries to charge us 1EP each, but we ignore him and pay the same as we paid this morning (which is quite easy, since they don't collect the money until the trip's over).
Apparently the grand Old Cataract Hotel at the southern end of the town centre serves a decent High Tea, so we set off (just to say we've been there) - it also gives us a chance to walk the whole length of the Corniche. Where the shore becomes rocky and the road swings inland there's a little park (the Ferial Gardens) - we fancy a wander, but they want to charge us money so we pass on the experience (it's not that good, and it has silly-looking metal animals inside). Instead, just round the corner, we talk our way past the armed guards outside the huge and unfinished Coptic Cathedral (white, and visible from all over town). It's the biggest non-ruined church we've seen in the Middle East, easily (apparently they also have a new Cathedral in Cairo, but it was out-lying and we didn't get there): it's a traditional cross-shape, with a dome and two bell-towers. So far they've finished the actual building, and the interior of the ground floor (currently acting as the church - there are hundreds of seats): we peek a look at the ongoing work inside the massive upstairs hall - it'll be dull, we decide, but huge. On the way out, a guy begs for money, appealing to our Christian nature: I scornfully and derisively take offence (that'll teach him to use such ploys); Milla gives him some money, though - we're such a well-matched couple.
The Old Cataract Hotel just up the road turns out to have a dress code just to enter the grounds (!), and a steep minimum spend inside. Instead we head back north and watch the local youths standing staring at the bathing-suited foreigners on the top decks of the moored cruise boats.
Our evening's pretty dull (we should have gone to that wedding): we do some wandering around the shops and the souq (just one long street, really: smaller than at Luxor, but with more textiles . . . so they possibly manufacture them somewhere around here), and then back to the hotel where I sleep for a couple of hours and Milla plays patience. There are noises from the roof which, on investigation, turn out to be a tiny kitten (two months or younger): we find it and talk to it and have no idea how it got up here to the fourth floor. After that to bed, after closing the curtains against the balcony over the road - the guy there's taken to standing and staring in our window.

We intended today to be our day to visit Aswan's west bank, but we also agreed that since a.) Aswan's noticeably hotter than Luxor and b.) most of the west bank definitely appears to be in the Sahara, that we really need to be out by 08.30 to do this. We set the alarms last night, but our bodies refuse to budge until about 09.00. By the time we manage a spurt for breakfast and actually hit the streets, it about 10.30: we produce a revised plan instead, which entails visiting the Nubian Museum and the Unfinished Obelisk on the south side of town, and then seeing the Temple of Philae in the late afternoon - if time permits, our transport to Philae should be by felucca to the old damn, and then a 2km walk to the boat landing on the far side.
We walk along the Corniche into an alarmingly thick crowd of local Copts, evidently (from their lack of headscarves and their neat suits and shirts) just discharging from Sunday worship at that huge cathedral. There are so many and they're so obvious that we assume they're all headscarved on the other six days of the week - otherwise we would have remarked on their number before.
Past the Unfinished Cathedral and up the hill a little takes us to the modern and quite Nubian-looking Nubian Museum: again under armed guard and with fairly tight security, it's presumably also considered a potential target for whacko extremists. Since just about everything in this town is under armed guard (banks, churches, museums, boats) except mosques, it does seem to confirm the notion that most local extremists are muslims. The Museum is pretty expensive to get in, but we can't not see it: a little unfortunately, past the X-ray machines and so on (another set of non-functioning bar-code reading turnstiles), it looks pretty good inside: this is unfortunate because it closes for four hours at 13.00, and it's already 11.30.
The layout is roughly chronological, though involves a little doubling back (both in time and among the exhibits) and starts with the usual bone fragments and oddly-shaped flints of the paleolithic. On balance, the paleolithic seems to have been one of the best times for Nubia - the Nile was both wider and more fertile: when the Old Kingdom dominated Egypt, with its raids south and systematic, centralised and official policies of exploitation, poverty kicked in here in a serious way. A couple of hundred years later things got so bad that the Nubians buggered off into the desert and further south, and left this part of the Nile valley virtually uninhabited.
Come the Middle Kingdom, Egyptian policies mellowed to militarily-enforced trade monopolies: physically, great fortresses were built and culturally, the Nubians were pretty much subsumed. The artefacts from that period onwards become very mainstream Egyptian, except that they're lower in quality and they feature quite a lot of elephants (further north the Egyptians didn't have a big elephant thing). The New Kingdom policies of colonisation and imperialism in the area resulted both in the enlargement of the earlier fortresses (some had pretty advanced defensive features) and the Egyptian temples south of Aswan (most famously at Abu Simbel, courtesy of Ramses II).
Further south, in modern Sudan, the Nubians kept their independence and their own Egyptian-esque kingdoms and empires along the Nile: the museum is full of references to Kordofu, Napota, Dongola, Atbara, Meroe and so on - all places on my proposed trip through Sudan, now in serious doubt since Milla's found out more about the area. My wistful musings aside, this Nubian heartland eventually provided them with the means to form the all-Nubian 25th Dynasty: they came sweeping up from the south and successfully re-unified Egypt and kicked most of the foreigners out (though I bet a lot of Egyptians at the time considered them foreign too). They were well on the way to creating the Newer Kingdom when they made the mistake of meddling with regional politics: in 656BC, the Assyrians invaded and kicked the Nubians entirely out of Egypt. In fact, the Nubians retreated all the way to Meroe (south of their initial capital at Napota) and after a period of insignificance, the Meroitic kingdom resurfaced to be roughly contemporary with the Ptolemies and the Romans, building pyramids and worshipping the old gods long after everyone else had stopped bothering.
We're pretty low on time by this point, and have to rush the last sections - it's not that much of a loss, since the 25th Dynasty was the last time the Nubians had much of an impact on anything. Most interesting in the last couple of millennia is that the Nubians were always that little bit behind everyone else - the last ever hieroglyph was carved at Philae in 394AD; ancient Egyptian Demotic script continued in use even longer; the temple of Isis on Philae was the last operational temple of the ancient Greco/Roman/Egyptian religions - there were armed clashes with believers in 453AD and it wasn't converted to a church until 540AD. At the time Justinian was arguing theological niceties in the rest of the Byzantine sphere, he was still having to send missionaries to the Nubians. Islam was equally slow to penetrate, eventually being introduced by force around 1300 (ie. after the Crusades). The last exhibit of interest (ignoring ethnographic stuff) was the influence of the Aswan-Wadi Halfa Post Boat ("El Bosta") on modern Nubia until recent times. Now, of course, after the dam was built and Upper Nubia was pretty much completely flooded, Nubian culture's pretty much on the skids.
It's an odd museum, and the exhibits are very Egypt-centric: the larger and more notable pieces are from elsewhere in Egypt, and serve to demonstrate mostly Egyptian rather than Nubian history. Nonetheless, there are a lot of interesting smaller Nubian items (there's a quite good Meroitic oil lamp in the shape of a camel), and a number of the information boards are written in a tone best described as anti-Egyptian. It's reasonably busy and visitors seem to be split roughly equally among Nubians, other Egyptians and foreigners.
It's damned hot outside, and we set off in a leisurely way towards the Unfinished Obelisk: we don't know exactly where it is, but it's pretty close to the museum. Our 1990 guidebook starts "In the desert south of the Aswan train station . . .": by now, it would have to read "In the suburbs south of the Aswan train station . . .". Following our sense of direction we, unknowingly, get within three blocks of the entrance: a "helpful" local, working on a taxi, directs us (unasked) in a different direction which pretty much doubles us back to the museum through the Fatimid Cemetery (it's a barren, desolate cemetery with a few larger and more interesting tombs). This route takes almost half an hour, in the early afternoon sun.
Even with our student cards, the Obelisk still costs us $1 each to get in, which is quite steep: it also features the most ineffective security yet, since the guard is only frisking and checking the bags of male visitors, presumably from some Islamic sensibilities. There's a short climb through the ancient granite quarry, with a handful of other tourists and a couple of Egyptian school groups (their footing is just as unstable as other Egyptians we've observed on slopes) and then we're at the Obelisk. It's . . . well, it's an obelisk: it cracked when they were quarrying it, but otherwise would have been the largest piece of worked stone ever. It's interesting to see the toolmarks on the three faced sides but frankly a.) it has no hieroglyphs so it's really boring, b.) they don't let you walk on it and c.) frankly, lying on its side, it just doesn't look that big or impressive compared with some of the completed obelisks we've seen.
We have a cigarette there (otherwise our visit would have been less than fifteen minutes) and head out: en route back (much straighter) we pass the same taxi guy as before, who tries to get business from us - presumably on the basis that we'll be tired from walking the route he directed us along. It's too late for Philae now (it's coming up to 15.00: we reckon if we take a felucca then we wouldn't get there until 17.00, by which time it would presumably be closing), so instead we head back to the hotel and have a sleep. It's odd but, even without doing much exercise, just walking about in the heat is very tiring.
In the evening, after dodging the management's Abu Simbel trip again (45EP each), we do a little internet at a place attached to an outdoor men-only coffee shop (our hotel's sign says "internet", but actually they just give us directions), do a little food shopping, and play with/feed the kitten on the roof - Milla builds it a little shelter from cushions. Obviously getting attached to us, it follows us a few steps down the stairs and meows at the hall for half an hour before eventually giving up - boy, that could get really irritating - Dahab all over again.