Travel – Egypt – Day 4

2019-02-15

Previous day: Egypt – Day 3
Next day: Egypt – Day 5

Feb 12, 2019

What a wonderful experience! The whole day was hambling and exciting. Not a boring moment.

Summary of the day: Amazing ancient ruins for the first half, a surprise afternoon on the Nile and an opportunity for some great memories and photos!

Morning

Even though Day 3 was the official start of our Nile cruise, our boat hasn’t moved a bit. We are still at Luxor. We have some more sightseeing to do. There is so much history around here! You can spend days visiting the various sites.

Talking about Luxor. I asked my guide about the population of the area. He says 1M people. Well, Wikipedia says 0.5M 🙂 Tourism has supprassed by far all other sources of income. I thought with all the agricultural activities around me, there would be some balance but that’s not the case, not even close. Unfortunately, the events of 2011 have resulted in a signficant drop in tourism throughout Egypt. They tell me that the tourism industry is currently working at about 30% the capacity for this period (which is their high season for tourism) compared to the pre-2011 numbers. I don’t know about the % but they tell me that the impact has been significant.

I never felt threatened. At every place we visited security is very prominent. In Cairo, the tour guides have to submit their daily plans. Entry into a site is recorded. Cars are checked. Every entrance has a metal detector. Policy and military are present with machine guns. Luxor is no different.

The day is about the West Bank, which is associated with death (sunset).

We first visit the Colossi of Memnon and the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. The temple has been reconstructed by the Polish archeological team that has been responsible for its restoration since the early 1900s. They are still working on the entire site which is massive. In fact, as we drive around, there seems to be an excavation, restoration, or some other archeological activity everywhere.

Side note: I have mixed feelings about reconstructions of ancient sites. On one hand, they give us an idea of the amazing accomplishments of our ancient ancestors. They attract generations of people who learn about these amazing civilizations. They contribute to the local economy. On the other hand, the reconstructions might, some times, represent an interpretation, a subjective point of view, of how things might have looked like. This is what happened with Knossos.

Anyway… back to the tour.

Final archeological stop for the day is The Valley of the Kings. No photos here. It’s a very humbling place. In the desertous, rocky mountains, there is a small valley where all the kings were burried. There is another valley for the queens, yet another for the nobbles, and a different one for the workers. The toombs for the kinds are impressive. I got to visit three of them. Wow! The hieroclaphics were amazing. The toombs are built into the mountain and they go downwards. The engineering is impressive.

Afternoon

It’s time for our floating hotel to sail for our cruise up the Nile, towards Aswan.

I stood for hours on the sundeck of our boat. Not because there weren’t any seats available. I just wanted to absorb everything, to grab photographs. As a result, two days later, when I write this, I realize that I got sunburnt 🙁

A convoy of floating hotels departed. I stopped counting how many after about 30 of them. I asked the crew about how many of the same-sized boats operate on the Nile. Apparently there are about 300 of these. I wondered why they all have the same size. A quick, back-to-the-envelope calculation… 300 x (aprox 60 rooms) = 18,000 tourists on the Nile in a period of few days. Of course, remember… everything operates at a fraction of the capacity it used to before 2011.

The captains seem to sail the same way the drivers in Cairo seem to navigate the traffic. There doesn’t appear to be a concept of safe distance. We came so close to other floating hotels few times at “full speed”, it was crazy. Well, “full speed” is relative but for this size of boats and for being on a river, it wasn’t slow either. And what was this overtaking all about? Was it a race? Our captain seem to nudge everyone else, we starting cutting in front of other boats. The peacefulness of the river Nile was disturbed by the constant soudn of these boats’ sirens. Crazy. The answers to the “size” and “overtaking” questions came later 🙂

And then, the place where these types of floating hotels come to die, get repaired, or perhaps this is where they are born…

The river Nile indeed brings life along with it as it flows through the desert. It brings human and animal activity. The human activity isn’t always good 🙁 The positive energy that you get from experiencing everything that’s around you is interrupted by images of humanity’s environmental impact, which eventually results in self-destruction. I appreciate my own hypocracy in writing about the environmental impact given that I am on a floating hotel in the middle of a river, together with many other thousands of tourists. Then again, there is no excuse for dumping waste to the same river that brings life to these communities.

As I am taking all the images in, these two guys appear. At first, I thought they were two youngsters racing to row in front of our floating hotel, as they were crossing from one side of the river to the other. But then, they stop. They are obviously on our boat’s path, just a little bit to the right. I am worried that we are going to hit them but they don’t seem to be bothered at all. Something else is going on.

They take rope and they throw it to our boat. There is no one assisting them. They know what they are doing. And yes… as you can see from the last photo, they are “river vendors” (term (C) by Savas) as opposed to “street vendors”. They shout to attract the attention of thosee onboard and then throw them their merchantise. And there were the first ones. There was a group of such little river-vendor boats following them. Inginuous and very dangerous.

The bridges remind you where you are:

As the sun sets, we arrive at a dam. Now it all makes sense. We have to go through a lock. So, I speculate that our captain was sailing past other boats in order to avoid the congestion. Hence the boat race. Also, it makes sense for the sizes of the boats to be the same. They have maximized the width and height of what can go through the locks.