Aswan, Egypt

Miles: 2.5 Steps: 6686 Flights: 7

My oh my was it hot today! Most of the day it hovered around 115°! We took the little ferry across the Nile (10 Egyptian pounds or 50 cents for both of us) back to the city.

We went to the “unfinished obelisk”. It’s basically a giant monument, or obelisk, cut out of stone on the ground. This one is the largest obelisk ever found, dated back to 1490BC. They figure work was abandoned on it when cracks started appearing in the granite. This thing was huge!

We had decided to walk the 20 minutes to the obelisk - mostly to see the surroundings. Was a mistake. The people here are very insistent on trying to sell you things. They literally will throw items ONTO you and not take them back, grab your wrist and place bracelets on your arm .. it’s pretty intense. Between that, the young children running beside us with their hands out screaming “money?” at you, and the intense heat - it was too much! I was in pretty bad shape.

After we toured the obelisk site, we decided to take a tuk-tuk back to the ferry dock. Cost us a whopping $1.50 - worth not getting heat stroke. Had we known it was only $1.50 we wouldn’t have walked in the first place.

There’s only one American restaurant in Aswan - KFC - which sits at the ferry dock. When we asked the tuk-tuk driver to take us to KFC, he didn’t understand and finally said “Kentucky”? Kind of funny. All the way across the world and here’s a KFC.Read more