From Cairo, we decided to travel the Nile Valley, starting in Aswan. To do this, we took an overnight train from Cairo to Aswan, which was scheduled to leave at 11 pm and arrive the next morning at 11 or so. It was going to be a slightly arduous trip in any case, but the train took three extra hours so we ended up being on it for 15 hours in total. While we were sleeping, the AC either broke (which is what they told us) or they simply turned it off, because at some point I woke up worried that I had a really bad fever because I was sweating, dry and flushed, only to realize that everyone around me was that way too and that it was about 40 degrees on the train. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep!
Arrived in Aswan and caught a cab to the Keylani Hotel, which had a nice rooftop patio where we would be served breakfast and a big internet area downstairs. Since we were exhausted from teh train journey, and since it was far to hot to actually undertake any activity when we arrived mid day, we crashed out and surfaced only later to check out the market lanes. Sellers were pushier in Aswan, but kind of funny usually. Aside from the common calls of "I give you good price" and "come in my shop", we were told things like "let me help you spend your money." We were also hit on occaisonally, with the most common lines being, " you are very beautiful" and "you have beautiful eyes, where are you from?" Some more creative approaches were one where two guys stopped us and said " two of us, two of you?" (I suppose presuming that having an equal number was the most important part of the pick up attempt?) and one where a guy told me that I'd dropped something, and when I turned around, pretended to pick something up and said, "no, it's just a piece of my broken heart..." It's all in good fun, they're not serious so you can't take it seriously, and most of the time this kind of stuff made Rose and I laugh, or we just ignored it.
The next day we took a felucca ride across the Nile to see the botanical islands on one of the islands and to see the Nubian tombs. A felucca is basically a small sailboat, and there are loads of them around, veying for your business and offerring terrible prices at first which you can bargain down to (at least!) half the price initially offered.
Our felucca captain was named Sayad, but called himself "Ali-baba" as a joke, and had a great sense of humour and attitude. He was originally from Sudan, but worked in Egypt because he could make more money for his family doing this. He proudly told us he was Nubian, not "Egyptian." Most of the people around Aswan are Nubian, rather than Arab Egyptian, and the Nubian population stretches into Sudan as well. They have their own language and culture, which is distinct from the Arabic language and culture found around Cairo, and they look different as well - darker skinned and with different facial features.
Sayad sailed us over to the botanical island, which we strolled through leisurely, looking at their collection of indiginous plants, and then got back onto the felucca for a cruise of the Nile. We then headed over to the opposite side of the river to see the Nubian tombs which were carved into the cliffs on the west side of the Nile. To see the tombs we were required to have a guide, who unlocked the tombs and let us in to look inside at the fairly well-preserved artwork inside and who told us about which king/queen/famous person was buried where. As we ascended the hilltop, we saw three guys performing the unenviable job of shovelling sand off the stairs which led up the hill - clearly they have to do this every day! We took our little tour, and by the time we finished, the force of the sun was upon us and we decided it was time to head home for a siesta. We started down the sand path that led back to Sayad and our felucca, but the sand was scorchingly hot and with every step down it invaded our flip-flops, so we ended up doing a rather undignified dance of hot-sand-on-the-feet-pain all the way to the bottom, at which point we cooled our poor footsies in the Nile. I'm pretty sure the Egyptians watching from below must have found our stupid tourist behaviour quite amusing.
After our trip, we took the requisite siesta during the hottest part of the day, emerging that evening to first meet up with Sayad to help him write an email regarding selling a second felucca to a german tourist who had been interested. The man speaks about 7 languages to quite a reasonable degree, but can't read or write, so asked us for help, which we gladly gave.
After that, we went to a restaurant highly recommended by the Lonely Planet for its views over the Nile and its food. The views were adequate, but the restaurant experience was probably one of the worst I've had. First, they only had about three of the items actually listed on the menu - so we ordered those, along with drinks. The drinks took approximately 45 minutes to arrive, and the rest of the dinner took about an hour and a half. When it finally did arrive, Rose, who had ordered a hummous and a tahini, received instead two plates of hummous. When she complained, they told her they were out of tahini, and were confused why she didn't want to eat two plates of hummous! For my part, I fed most of my meal to the hungry cat under the table, which clearly enjoyed it more than I was. To be honest, the best part of the evening was evesdropping on the conversation behind us, in which the Egtptian guide hired by the two women he was with told them a tale of woe about his being slighted by an american girl who had apparently not returned any of his 10 phone calls and how confused he was by this behaviour because she had said to him that she wanted to be friends.
The next day we went to the Nubian museum on Aswan, which was absolutely amazing and which I woudld recommend to everyone. It was well-organized, well-labelled, informative, and generally had everything that the Egyptian museum in Cairo lacked. That museum housed so many amazing artifacts, but had no explanation of what they were or why they were important or how they fit into the lengthy history of Egypt. The Nubian museum detailed all of that, as well as how things were discovered, preserved and restored. It showed a great exhibit on Abu Simbel, a historic site along the Nile which was threatened by imminent flooding when the Egyptian government decided to dam the Nile, and which was saved through the efforts of the international community and moved above the level of the water and which still stands today. That afternoon, we took another felucca ride, this time with another Nubian captain who sang to us and who showed us some well preserved cartouches cut into the rocks along the rivers edge as well as the "Nile-o-meter," a device used by the pharohs to guage how much to tax the inhabitants each year based on how much water there was in the Nile and therefore how much harvest there would be.
After our felucca trip, we once again ran into Sayad, who invited us to have dinner with him - fresh balti he had caught that day! We went home and changed, and came back to a delicious dinner of salad, bread and fresh fish, which we ate while sitting on the bottom of his boat.
We greatly enjoyed our time in Aswan, especially our time with Sayad, but planned to continue up the Nile to Luxor the next day.