Travel Log 5 - Cairo to Luxor and Aswan

28/01/09
The train ride from Cairo to Luxor was relatively comfy and mildly amusing. Before boarding the train we thanked our lucky stars that we had asked someone to right the Arabic numbers down for us. The station was a mass of confusion. During the hour delay, as we fretted about whether we were going to be getting on the right train, we were able to watch some kind of ruckus involving wailing women and a surging crowd forming around one man. Men in various uniforms (navy, army, dog handler, police), tourism police nonchalantly crossed the train track and had a look. Upon arrival, the heavily armed guards at either end of the train gave a sense that were going to be entering Red Indian country. The carriage TVs were not working, and looked as if they had not, for quite some time. Our alternative entertainment was a group of young Muslim girls playing charades.

29/01/08 – 31/01/08
The boat from Aswan to Sudan would not leave until Monday so we saw the standard Luxor sites as part of a group; Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens and the Hatshepsut Temple.

After sixty tourists were shot ten years ago, one left with a note stuffed inside his eviscerated body reading 'no tourists' the crowds at the sites were a quarter of what they had been a few years before. Even so, they heaved with all nationalities. The sugar cane on the roads to these sites was cut back to make an area of no mans land, twenty metres in width, in order to discourage terrorists from attacking the buses. This seemed like a rather cosmetic solution.

The first tomb we entered was the most spectacular – that of Rameses II. Much of the colour was as fresh as that of Egyptian shop fronts a few years in age. It was the first occasion when the imaginary and garish Egypt of school books was in any way realised. The imagery and repetition of imagery was even more alien than that of the Islamic art.

A man with an elongated head (a hereditary condition and in some cases, induced with the use of a wooden press) was offered a symbolic feather by a god with a beetle for a head.

The anatomical accuracy of the horses and be-headed Nubian slaves far exceeded any of the Roman art we saw in Libya. However, we did pine for the empty ruins to saunter through.

The graffiti from antiquity had rendered many of the depicted faceless and the fertility god with one arm, one leg and a giant penis had been castrated. It seemed to be lacklustre defacement because everything above arm height was in tact.

We visited the temple of Hatshepsut or ­'hot chicken soup' as she is otherwise known by tour guides who took advanced humour in their tourism certificates. She ruled Egypt as the daughter of a god and her embalming temple of three stories which took eighteen years to build and was closed after the seventy days required to complete the embalming process.

Although these sites were busy and our guide seemed far more interested in selling us key rings than anything else, it was hard not to find the enormity of their vision and execution of it awe inspiring. Trying to imagine these places at there respective times of construction (a time period spanning several hundred years, yet with such an unnervingly consistent perception and depiction of the sublunary and preternatural) was like looking over the edge of precipice.

We hired clapped out bikes and negotiated the assault course of Luxor's roads to the temple of Karnak with its hall of a hundred and thirty four huge lotus or papyrus pillars (depending on your source). The way the afternoon light presented them and the hieroglyphs, statues and obelisks gave the place a forceful air made it partly unwelcoming, like a proud old man in his sick bed, who did not want visitors. This was compounded by tourists who did not treat the sites with a semblance of the tact usually associated with holy places, irrespective of religion.

Cycling along the Continental side of the Nile in the with hot sun and a cool breeze, lined with globe shaped street lighting and absurdly uniformed cruise ship workmen, allowed the cries of the felucca sailors (the felucca is a white, curve-masted, single sailed Egpytian boat), taxi drivers and the horse drawn carriage drivers float gently out of ear shot.

01/02/08 – 02/02/08
We went on the train from Luxor to Aswan, along a track following the Nile as in gently meandered through the landscape. We were able to watch the architecture become more Nubian as we headed south.

We later visited the Nubian Museum to find out more about this intriguing and persecuted ethnic group that was almost decimated by the construction of the Aswan Dam. Its construction forced them to relocate and much of their homeland and culture was submerged by Lake Nasser. We saw thousands of years of their beautiful jewellery and painting and statues. There were descriptions of the incredible feats of engineering performed by international teams of engineers and scientists to preserve Nubian monuments, which in one case involved the winching of a temple to higher ground.
It would be nice to think that the Czech funding of the museum was inspired by an ancient Eastern European atonement – it was a group of marauding Bosnians who deposed one of the Nubian kings as part of the expansion of the Byzantine Empire. It was clear as well from the pictures of the Nubian people, that there faces are quite un-Arabian alluding to the next phase we waited for with baited breath as we prepared to travel further south.

Aswan was picturesque enough to warrant it banks to be rammed with cruise ships. As light flickered on the Nile excitedly like millions of silver fish leaping above the surface, with feluccas in the background and an old man fishing with a simple line from a boat in the foreground, it was all a little saccharine. It may have been cynical to think so, but surely the very same image from the perspective of someone in his position would be to think, that man has a hard life, I bet he wishes he had a trawler. Profiting from poverty via tourism seemed unsustainable, but with tourism as Egypt's primary source of income, something for the time being, unavoidable.

We managed to reduce the increasing annoyance of the curb-crawling, hooting taxis and felucca sailors and shop owners by treating their monotonous questions, 'hello my friend, where you from?', 'what you want?' and 'where you going?' as an opportunity to give more and more brazened answers.

Our top three Egyptian sales patters are as follows;
΄Bedouin coffee never end, you stop when you see the pink elephant΄
΄What you want?΄ ΄Nothing΄ ΄I have nothing!΄
΄How can I take your money?΄

During our visit Aswan was a hive of activity as the school children were in there winter holidays. It was interesting to see how the resort treated them differently to the non-Africans. It would be unfair to begrudge the Egyptians whatever money they can harvest from the tourist crop because it the same crop that sails around in cruise ships that are polluting the Nile. Having spent relatively little time in Egypt though and only at major tourist destinations it feels like we have not been able to see a genuine side to Egypt as we understandably are seen immediately as a source of cash and along with the language barrier which makes interesting debate and gaining a real insight pretty much impossible.

A Canadian man we met who visited the town thirty five years ago had seen it without the cruise ships and without its riverside promenade an extremely different vision, although, how different were most places thirty five years ago. When we took a boat to the west bank of the Nile it was just about possible to imagine what he had seen. After the initial nonsense of being told that the hill we wanted to climb closed at four and we were only permitted out of the village on camel back, we sneaked our way through the back of the village. The pace of life after a five minute boat ride was entirely different. There were children playing football under the date palms and old women huddled together, dressed head to toe in jet black chuckling away and finding the very sight of us hilarious, in a joyful and inclusive way. Of course the children chasing us through the streets asked us for money but when we declined, they did not take it as a personal affront, it was more of a game than a career. As the sun set we had birds eye view of both banks from our unauthorised hill, backing onto the endless desert, it was a chance to ponder which side of the Nile had it better, the one with the big road and the railway line or the one without.