Day 4 - Sailing Up the Nile

Merry Christmas from Egypt!

Last night was a lot of fun. The 12 of us bonded over the past 3 days and have enjoyed each others’ company. I really like the fact that conversations are interesting and positive and we are like-minded when decisions have to be made. A very good group.

All of us eat our delicious meals together and noisily around a big table. The youngest is 21 years old and the oldest, Chris, is 72. We have lots to laugh and talk about. Our surprise dessert was a big heart-shaped cake decorated for Christmas! And then the chef and crew came out with a drum and sang for us. All of us got up and had fun trying to dance like the Egyptians.

Today we sail to Daraw and take a walking tour to the village to visit the largest camel market in Egypt. It was once the last stop on the famous 40-day desert road between Sudan and Egypt.

Camels are sold here every day of the week but Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays are the main days and today is Sunday. The Sudanese camels are kept in quarantine for 2 days before being sold. From here, most of them go to another camel market north of Cairo where they are either sold to farmers or slaughtered for meat.

We sailed onwards to the Nubian village of El Koubania, near Aswan. The town, which seemed like a ghost town to us, lies on the eastern banks of the river. The land around the dusty village was lush and with green farmland. I read that “ Nubians are an ethnolinguistic group of Africans indigenous to present-day Sudan and southern Egypt who originate from the early inhabitants of the central Nile valley, believed to be one of the earliest cradles of civilization.”

We arrived just as the little children were getting out of the school and riding their donkeys home. The rest of the village was quiet. There are no cars there. All the men were working on farms and we did see a few women talking outside of their houses but not many. Our guide pointed out that every third house was empty. Young people leave the village for work and don’t come back.

A few of the houses had walls that were decorated with camels, buses, ships, airplanes and basically all different types of transportation. Abdullah explained that when the house owner has completed the Haj pilgrimage (the Muslim tradition to visit Mecca in Saudi Arabia), they illustrate their trip on the exterior walls of their houses and then everyone knows that they have done it. Saudi Arabia is not that far from their village. People go east through the desert and then it’s a couple of hours on a boat ride across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia.

We returned to the boat and sailed on to another sandy beach where a few people, including Chris, put their bathing suits on so that they could say that they went swimming in the Nile on Christmas Day.

The boat continued on to Aswan where we moored for our last night in the Dahabiya. Once again, our meal, duck, was excellent.

Aswan is about 500 miles south of Cairo and 200 miles north of Sudan.

We saw an interesting phenomenon. The bright new moon was within a pale full moon and it went DOWN in the sky and disappeared by 8 p.m. Hard to explain, but that’s what it did!

Tomorrow morning, we will say goodbye to our new friends and be picked up at 8 for our short journey by van and ferry to Elephantine Island across from Aswan.Weiterlesen