I’m combining these days because they really felt like a single (long) experience. We start the morning of August 1, waking up in Dahab. The plan: head down to Sharm El-Sheikh, catch the high speed ferry to Hurghada, take a taxi to Luxor, spend the night there, wake up, and take a taxi to Aswan, where we’d begin the journey up the Nile. And, while things went more or less according to plan, we had unfortunately neglected to factor in the “everything takes longer in Egypt” factor.
Saturday morning was relaxing enough; our transfer to Sharm was scheduled for 2:00pm, so we had plenty of time in the morning. I was up around 6 and enjoyed wandering around the absolutely deserted town. After the past couple of days of moderately aggressive barkers for restaurants and shops, it was nice to take in the sights in peace. Though, being a west coast guy, I’ll never get used to seeing the sun rise over the ocean. It’s just weird.
By 9 or so, we had our group together, and we headed back to Desesrt Divers, who graciously lent us some snorkeling equipment. Anna and Luke decided to sit it out, but Lars and I went out for a bit, and it was simply incredible. Having just few hours before leaving, we opted for the reef right in the middle of town… and it was still some of the best snorkeling I’ve ever done. A huge number of a wide variety of fish, fantastic corals and invertebrates, and even some scuba divers to watch.
After the snorkeling and a quick lunch, we headed back to Crazy Camel Camp, which really was a great place to stay, especially for the price. Our taxi arrived and we headed off to Sharm. So far so good.
The ride was a couple of hours and got us in to Sharm around 3pm, which was plenty of time for our 6pm ferry. We bought tickets and tried to stay in the shade while waiting for the terminal to open at 4pm. Eventually it did, and we headed in, doing the basic security thing and finding our seats on the ferry. And quite a modern and high tech ship it was, too – all airplane style seating, large LCD TV’s at the front of each cabin, and so on.
And then, around 5:15pm, our 6pm ferry headed off. I suppose it’s just as well that we hadn’t tried to cut it close. Presumably the schedule changed, but who knows?
The ferry ride itself was uneventful, though it was pretty darned fast. It was a catamaran style high speed ship, so the front lifted out of the water as we picked up speed, and the entire trip was spent in the attitude of an airplane just starting to take off. There was some chop in the middle of the Red Sea, but to her credit, Anna didn’t puke even once.
Arriving in Hurghada around 7:30pm, things got a little more interesting. Disembarking, Luke was pulled aside by the tourism police, but returned reporting that they were looking for some other Americans. We didn’t think much of it. Everyone collected their luggage and gathered at the exit of the terminal… and waited. And waited. And milled about for a bit. Finally, one of the tourism police types announced that they were looking for Americans. Well, they’d already talked to us, but sure, we wandered over.
It turns out that they had held up all of the passengers for a half hour or so while looking for us because, apparently, it wasn’t safe for us to leave the terminal. Or something like that. They finally released all of the other passengers, but kept us and one other group of three American college students behind, while collecting holding our passports to discourage our premature departure.
From there, it was about an hour of making arrangements for a taxi to Luxor, where the other Americans were going as well. At first the police and officials were going to set us up with taxis, but that apparently turned out to be problematic. They finally arranged a minibus to take us, and of course when the minibus arrived for its captive audience, the price quoted was about five times what our guidebook had given us to expect. Luke did an excellent job of haggling in the face of our fairly weak position and we ended up with a relatively fair price.
The ironic thing here is that this hour and a half delay and insistence that we couldn’t leave the port was purportedly for our safety, and with an eye towards bundling us into a taxi and off to Luxor without exposing us to the dangers of Hurghada. Or something like that. But, the punchline is that the road from Hurghada to Luxor is closed to tourists from 6pm to 6am, so once we were ensconced in our little bus and on our way, our driver had to pay baksheesh to several checkpoints to drive us on the putatively unsafe road after hours. The whole thing was kind of off-putting and crazy, and didn’t really inspire confidence in the honesty or competence of the Egyptian police.
Anyways, we found ourselves traveling in the dead of night, hurtling along deserted roads, stopping every now and then for a security checkpoint or brief rest stop. It was only about three, maybe three and a half hours, but it felt longer. By nature I’m not a terribly fearful traveler, and I’ve done and seen plenty of things that count as dangerous without qualm. But the whole security rigmarole had left me a little too on edge to sleep, and I was glad to have the Iridium satellite phone and the SPOT locator along.
We got in to Luxor around 1:30am, and our driver promptly had trouble finding out hotel. We had a map, but apparently maps are held in even lower regard by Egyptian taxi drivers than by stereotypical western males. The driver wanted nothing to do with our map and instead stopped frequently to ask directions from random people on various streets, which streets were crowded even at the late hour. Kids were playing in parks, shops were open, and traffic was cruising right along, honking and as lively as ever.
Finally, around 2am, we arrived at our hotel, the Emilio Inn. Knowing that we were moving right along to Aswan the next morning, we didn’t get too comfortable, but still it seemed to be a remarkably nice place. We wrapped up the day and crashed hard for a few hours.
My alarm went off at 9am, since we were planning to make what our guidebook told us was the second taxi convoy of the day, at 11am. We hit a tasty breakfast on the roof of the hotel and found that Lars and Luke had already spoken to the desk about arranging a taxi to Luxor, and had been told that we could go at any time. To this day, I’m not clear on whether the taxi convoys are an utter myth, a real arrangement that was no longer in place, or a real arrangement that everyone just ignored. One way or another, we eventually bundled into a taxi to continue our trip up the Nile to Aswan.
Now, Luke, Lars, Anna, and I have all seen a fair amount of the world. Anna and I had just been in Jordan, where we had rented a car and I’d learned to drive, Jordan style. So crazy traffic and the way drivers looked at traffic regulations, signs, and road markings as optional was nothing new. Still, this driver was something else. We bombed down roads going easily twice the speed of traffic. In the three hour trip he must have used the horn over, I don’t know, ten thousand times. If pedestrians looked like they might think there was room to cross in front of us, our driver would gun the car and lean on the horn. If our taxi had a motto, it was “we break for nobody.” The trip passed quickly, with only one stop, where everybody but me bought some bananas.
And then we were in Aswan, a bit tired and still very much out of our element after the week in the desert. We checked in to the Nile hotel around 2pm and spent the rest of the day wandering around the city before having a quick dinner at a fairly touristy but still pretty decent waterfront restaurant. We decided that we’d arrange a taxi to take us around to Aswan’s main sights the next day, and our hotel helped us do so… with only a little weirdness about wanting us to tip the hotel rather than the driver, or something like that. We were all starting to think wistfully of our time in the desert and on the Sinai peninsula. But maybe tomorrow would reverse that.