Cataracts old and new

Mahmoud and me - he was a softly spoken, very charming young man who worked as a waiter. He looked after me exceptionally well, always had a smile and was a lot of fun as well. Also an excellent dancer! I am wearing one of the several galibaya I bought - very pretty, wonderfully comfortable.


Mohamed and me - Mohamed manages the restaurant and bar and is the Maitre D'. Very caring and solicitous, can do everything from fix an earring to produce a clear consomme at a moment's notice. Wow for Mohamed!

Well here I am in Aswan at a public terminal in the New Cataract, next to my hotel, the Old Cataract (as if you couldn't guess), a magnificent old hotel that has seen many VIP guests including King Faroud and Winston Churchill and is where Agatha's Christie' s Death on the Nile was filmed. I have completed my cruise down the Nile and have had extremely limited internet access and here of course I can't upload any photos again. Maybe my hotel in Cairo will have access in my room and I can do more.

I have a great deal more to say about Ethiopia but I will tell you a bit about Egypt for now.

First of all Egyptian men are SO smooth and romantic and I'm sure have all read Omar Khyam. Why is it that all the men who adore me are so far away from home? I have paid for photographs with kisses and photographs of myself (and he was about 25!), been given free food, free drinks, asked to dance, asked to dinner, given out my email and phone number innumerable times and have quite lost my heart. It often goes like this:

Question 1: Where is your husband?

Q2: What, you have no husband?

Q3: Where is your friend?

Q4: What, you have no friend?

Q 5: You have no love?

Q6: Why not?


Statement 1: My queen, I will be your love

Statement 2: My darling, you will be my Australian love


Q 7: How long are you staying in Egypt?

Q8: When are you coming back to Egypt?

Q9: May I have your phone number, email, etc. etc.


Now that is all wonderful from some, not so wonderful from others. However, I really have found Egyptian people warm and generous and friendly and I have felt extremely comfortable and very safe here. Last night at 11.00 pm I got in a taxi and went to an Arab coffee shop (of which I only had the name and address written down in Arabic) and met some of the crew from the boat for coffee (completely male crew by the way and everyone one of them fabulous) and took a cab back to the hotel by myself again (with strict instructions from Mohamed to the driver) without feeling in any way that there was a possible problem. The crew kept assuring me that I was absolutely safe in Egypt, and I believe them.

The cruise was excellent and I can't speak highly enough of the guide and crew who were all fabulous. I actually got quite sick (gastro with a high fever) - there was a doctor among the Australians (she kept asking me was I sure that I'd had my typhoid shots and telling me that they weren't 100% effective) who helped keep an eye on me and I needed the antibiotics I'd brought from home. The crew were so kind and caring, they cleaned up after me, got me any sort of liquid or food that I needed (once I began to recover a little) and really were genuinely concerned and helpful. I am still on a diet of dry toast and honey, and mint tea but today I do feel much better (and did have a coffee when I went back to the boat to say goodbye - no ill effects so far). But it meant that I missed two days of touring and my flight to Abu Simbel and the big Egyptian galibiya party and the farewell party and the felucca ride and yesterday when I got to my hotel I slept 6 hours. Today I have only been out and got the photos of all the great crew printed and delivered to them to say thanks and then back to the hotel. So I have not seen anything of Aswan and I leave in the morning. Tarek (the Aswan guide) is coming to take me to dinner tonight I think but I suspect that I will have another sleep this afternoon although I refuse to miss high tea on the terrace overlooking the Nile...

So for me it's a huge thanks to Mohamed, Mohamed Bedwy, Mahmoud, Ali, Ahmed, Genewy, Hassan Amen, Hassan the waiter, Hassan (security), Hassan the guide, Mohamed at Reception, Atif and John, the housekeeping staff and all the restaurant and bar staff. And the chefs who just made anything they were asked - such as clear soup etc. when the dinner was a candlelit French extravaganza, vegetarian food anytime, fruit anytime etc. And also the Manager, Gamel, very kind and professional.

And also thanks to my fellow Aussie travellers Judy and Ben and Marek, Cheryl and Peter and Eva and Ivor for being so kind.

As to Egypt - what I've seen has been amazing and I need to come back and finish what I've started. To see all the places I've studied and read about and seen so many pictures of was quite awesome. My favourite isn't the pyramids, but (of what I've seen) it's the Temple at Karnak which still awes me every time I think about it. The pyramids were a magnificent feat of engineering, as I discussed with Hassan, but Karnak has engineering and art and a spiritual dimension, and I found it quite moving to stand among the huge columns in the hipostyle hall and see the beautiful carvings and hieroglyphs and imagine life there all those thousands of years ago. Even though there were plenty of people there it was so peaceful if you got off to the side, I just sat and looked for ages. I have some decent photos. And Luxor temple was also lovely, and the Valley of the Kings - the paintings in the tombs are still so vibrant, and Queen Hapshetsut's temple is on such a grand scale and looks so modern from the front and Edfu is also so HUGE and well preserved (built in Greco-Roman time however, so later).

And the Nile itself? Clean and calm and beautiful and so fertile either side with the desert in the background as a complete contrast. Three hundred boats on the Nile travelling between Luxor and Aswan - we queued for quite a while to get through the lock while we were beseiged by small boasts with hawkers selling galibaya, towels, cloth of all sort - they were incredibly accurate at throwing stuff up to the top deck - I only saw one thing go into the pool! We actually went through at 5.30 in the morning and seeing the sunrise was spectactular.

All in all I recommend Egypt to anyone. Even though I'm near the end of the trip I'll try and keep posting until I've told it all. I'll also try and go back and fill in Cairo and Alexandria as well as Ethiopia....

Gotta go, my time is up and there's a queue. Back home on Friday to Melbourne, can't believe it's nearly all over, it hasn't been nearly long enough.

love to everyone

Lyndall