Bananas Don't Travel Well

dealing with vulturesI wish I could report that we just slipped easily back into our travelling shoes and breezed through Egypt, but I'm afraid our first week and a half was, um, a bit difficult. In retrospect, Egypt was perhaps not the best place to start. Nothing about it was really a surprise, but we overestimated our ability to deal with the heat, the touting, and the nickle-and-diming. But the experience has forced us to dust off our bargaining skills, take things slowly, and recall a few tricks. We just hadn't realized how much we'd forgotten!

The journey south

After a few overwhelming days in Cairo, we took a train to Luxor. (Actually, we bought tickets for Aswan, further up the Nile, but when we finally pulled into Luxor 12 hours later, we made a split-second decision to bail on the last 4-5 hours to Aswan.) The train ride itself was quite pleasant, taking us through the farmers' fields and small villages of the Nile valley. The valley is fertile and green, with palms, bananas and papyrus crops, in stark contrast to the tawny desert cliffs on either side.

On the train, we sat behind "newspaper man", who spent fully nine hours crashed out with several sheets of a newspaper wrapped around his head. Every so often he would stir, just long enough to rearrange the newsprint over his face, before going back into his suffocated slumber.

We also made our first discovery of the love affair that Egyptians have with their cell phones. Not only are they talking all the time, but whenever their phones ring, they listen for a minute or longer before picking up. At first, we weren't sure if they were just having trouble finding their phones, but we've since seen several people sit there, phone in hand, synthesized arabic tunes blaring.

Luxor and the touts

Our arrival in Luxor was stressful. We stepped out into torrid heat and some of the most obnoxious hotel touts I've ever encountered. We tried very hard to be polite, but after 45 minutes of being pursued (while we sweated with our backpacks trying to locate a hotel) we lost our patience; an altercation ensued. Not a nice first impression. We finally found a fairly decent hotel; a bit pricey but no touts. Unfortunately, our hotel owner felt the need to explain at length just how much more honest he was than all the others. I didn't doubt his honesty, but the song and dance was almost as tiring as the nickle-and-diming game.

To put things into perspective, Luxor was the world's first tourist destination: Europeans starting coming here to see the temples in the early 1800s, and Thomas Cook got his start running Nile cruises. The town owes its existence to tourism, and tourism has been down since the 1997 Luxor massacre (which has left its mark in the form of hundreds of bored, armed police) and 9/11. So on the one hand, the locals are pretty desperate for business. But everyone we met had bad experiences with the Luxor touts. We have been to other places with equally (or more) desperate people who did not feel inclined to behave this way.

More generally, Egypt has a culture of baksheesh: tipping or (viewed more cynically) bribery. We have encountered this in India before. It is a system whereby small tips are expected to make wheels turn. As a foreigner, one is often the recipient of services not requested or desired, but for which payment is expected: the taxi driver trying his hand at tour guiding with comments like "here pyramid, very old", the waiter who cleans your table six times in a row. It results in a constant drain on your wallet, but the backsheesh dance can at times be amusing, when it is not entirely ingratiating.

Temples, tombs and frescos

colossal statues at LuxorThings did get better over the next three days we spent in Luxor. We saw Luxor and Karnak temples and took a guided tour of the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut's temple, Madinet Habu and the Colossi of Memnon. The heat was ferocious: 42 degrees. At the valley of the kings, we saw three tombs, each done in a different period. The 3000+ year old wall paintings were largely intact and were quite amazing. The temples, too, were well preserved: so well that they almost didn't seem old. I suppose because there have been so many copies of Egyptian temples (Disney, Vegas), seeing the real thing has less impact than one might think. This is not to say that they weren't impressive: Karnak and Hatshepsut's temple were both astonishing for their sheer size.hieroglyphs

Bailing out to the coast

After three days, we were still vacillating about whether to go on to Aswan and Abu Simbel. In the end, the prospect of even hotter weather (48 degrees!), more admission fees (each temple seemed to cost an extra $20), more baksheesh, and more touts made us decide to head back to Cairo. Despite exhortations to the contrary, the train was not sold out, and we made the long journey back down the Nile.

We are now in Dahab, a backpacker resort town on the Sinai penninsula, where things are much more laid back. One dip in the Red Sea seems to have eased all the tension. We move on tomorrow to Nuweiba, an even quieter spot, where we plan to go diving for the next week. This should refresh us for our next stop: Jordan.