Aswan

At the crack of dawn—one of many dawns we were tragically forced, I mean wonderfully lucky enough to experience—we fly in a semi-sketchy EgyptAir jet that needs some serious 409ing. In fact, I recommend 409 as an import business to anyone with marketing talent and an eye toward a very vast market. I’m not entirely sure it has yet been discovered yet. The ever present bucket of old-sock gray soapy water and a squeegie mop appears to be the extent of the cleaning arsenal for many companies. In Aswan begins several relentless days of “110 bazillion degree” weather. Though possibly an exaggeration, the 110 most certainly isn’t. The thermometers didn’t inch below 40C (104F) during the day for the entire Aswan-Luxor jaunt.
Day 1 is Aswan is a local day and as our taxi driver strikes up a camaraderie with Dad and speaks English with passable skill, we agree to hire him as our driver for the day. First however, we must check into the hotel and arrange about some breakfast. The hotel check-in isn’t extraordinarily painful and we proceed to sit on their front porch overlooking the Nile. Ostensibly, their internet café and coffee shop is just behind us and able to serve breakfasts. It doesn’t exactly look open, but we’re willing to give it a shot—we order three Turkish coffees and eagerly await the breakfast menu. But wait? Breakfast menu! Perhaps I am getting slightly carried away in this designation. Upon the delivery of our three horribly bitter and nasty coffees (but hey, we need the caffeine), we see the menu and realize it is the 10-item room service menu from before. As the hotel is “out of season”, this coffee shop is a phantom and instead one must subsist off of either a hot dog or an omelette for breakfast. Right… but never fear! Lonely Planet to the rescue!!! Just down the corniche (the ubiquitous name for any waterfront road), there is a place serving good breakfasts throughout the day. Except apparently at breakfast time. See, it doesn’t open until 11am, which is not entirely adequate, so Mom drags Dad to the nearest restaurant where he can obtain some baladi bread and a small omelette. Whew… disaster averted.
Onto the main day’s adventures, we first went to the High Dam and saw a fatally ugly piece of Soviet art commemorating the immemorial friendship between the Soviets and the Egyptians. It was tacky and a little creepy no matter what language it was in. This was also incident #1 of the guards being jerks, saying that my student ID “isn’t valid”. It’s from a school in Egypt; how much more valid do they want it to be? Ma’lish.
Philae temple was stop #2 and well worth the somewhat extensive effort to get to. Rebuilt on a new, higher island after the High Dam’s construction in order to preserve it, this beauty of a temple is mostly Greco-Roman and one of the four main temples studied in my Ptolemaic temples course over the past semester. We almost didn’t make it as the ricketiest, sketchiest, most about-to-stop-working boat picked us up, stopped a couple times mid-jaunt, and I was momentarily forced to consider if I could get myself and my camera dryly to the temple’s island.
Thank god, this potentially disastrous decision was averted as the engine kind of spilled to life. Not spilled in the sense of s smooth stream of water either—we’re talking spilled as in the whole toolbox was just upended and clattered about the garage for a couple minutes. But we made it to Philae and it was breathtaking and beautiful in yellow-gold sandstone. I gave temple lecture #1 to Mom and Dad, we looked at the pretty columns and the side kiosks and generally flitted about, before re-boarding our death-felucca for a relatively uneventful trip back to the ferry landing.
For dinner, we went to the Nubian House Restaurant, promising spectacular views, German tourists, and good food. Well, the view was to die for—a sunset over the Nubian hills, the Germans were out it a full ocean of tanktops and man-capris, and the food was divine. Unfortunately, by the time it arrived 2 hours after we got there, we were too crazed with hunger to notice that our Nubian meatballs were served with french fries instead of rice and that this restaurant is one of approximately 6 in the entire country of Egypt where one can obtain actual whole wheat bread. Again, ma’lish, and off to bed as tomorrow is the 4am convoy to Abu Simbel.
Day two, Abu Simbel. I almost died. No seriously. Convoys are a bad idea for several reasons: it puts all the “targeted” foreigners together, Egyptian police are too inept to do anything if there was a threat, it leaves too damn early in the morning; and it turns the roads of southern Egypt into the Upper Egypt-500. Engines ready… rev engine… start!!! Race across 2-lane roads at 60mph with random bumps, pedestrians and bicycles randomly crossing, other vehicles clearly in the way, all in the attempt to be the first one to the site. Two hours later, this horror will be repeated—only this time, it will actually be light and we will be forced to watch our eminent demise, passively wondering if it will be the 60-person charter bus of German tourists or the elderly, tottering biker that does us in.
Our last day in Aswan we take a sailing felucca ride around the small green islands dotting the Nile, generally enjoying the water, escaping the heat and, in Mom’s case, putting her new bird identification book to good use. I sit and am completely useless, but greatly enjoy actively ignoring the boat captain. We eat some yummy fateer (a Middle Eastern pizza) and board the train. Tragically, this “air conditioned, first-class car” is anything but. Rather, it is a constant 95 degrees with no air movement and we sit, silently and morosely sweating for three hours. On the positive side of things, I think I lost some weight (great dieting technique!) and I can now consider myself fully trained for facing the rigors of hell, purgatory, or Death Valley in summer.