I’m tempted to leave today’s entry with the title, because it feels like there’s not a lot else to say. So it’ll be a brief post, today. We woke up on our nice felucca after a mostly good night of sleep, and we headed down the Nile. The big event today was a stop at the Daraw market, since Lars had expressed excitement about trying camel meat, and Daraw is apparently one of the biggest camel markets in Egypt. But really, today was all about relaxation and drifting on the Nile.
| Note: If you’re reading this on Facebook, you’re not seeing the full size pictures. Hop over to the original on Tangentry.com if you want to be able to click-to-zoom. Also note that our Internet connections are infrequent and very slow, so we’re not checking blog or Facebook comments or email at this point. |
So, right, before we get to the heavy chilling, let’s talk about the market at Daraw. Per the driver who took us from Luxor to Aswan, Daraw is one of the biggest camel markets in Egypt, selling camels for both food and as pack and transport animals. It was only about an hour of sailing from where we’d spent the night to Daraw, and it was still bright and early in the morning, and not too warm.
Upon disembarking at Daraw, we were met by a tiny, motorcycle-based vehicle, called a . We piled in, six people in all including driver and Ali, our felucca captain, and headed off to the market. Like most driving we’ve experienced in Egypt, people rely on being alert more than they do on following any particular rules of the road. As we neared the market, we became just one of many , and the whole thing felt more like being part of a crowd on foot than it did like being in a vehicle; lots of stops and starts, and everyone kind of worming their way forward to fill in any open spaces.
Once we got to the market, Ali led us to a butcher shop where whole carcasses were pretty much just hanging there. He bought some camel meat and sent it off with our driver to be cooked (presumably not wanting to deal with the full cooking thing on the boat). We wandered around the market while waiting, and on the whole it was a hugely better experience than the tourist-centric market in Aswan. Daraw’s was a real market, where locals shopped for food and supplies, and there wasn’t a store in sight selling the otherwise ubiquitous tourist crap. Being obviously non-native, we stood out a lot more, but that was fine.
Eventually we piled back into the and headed back to the felucca. Ali dealt with storing food and generally getting ready to sail while the rest of us kicked back, enjoyed the sun, and had a beer (it was 10:30am by this point, after all). Before too long we cast off from the dock and started the second day of the felucca journey. The plan was to get relatively close to Edfu, our final destination, so we’d just have a few hours of sailing the next day.
The day passed lazily, with much reading, some swims in the Nile (if you’re going to brave it once, you might as well keep it up), and a few more beers. We all seem to have acclimated to the heat pretty well, so it’s hard to judge how hot it was, but certainly well over 35c / 100f. But when it got too warm, a quick dip served to cool off quickly, and the relatively light Egyptian beer kept us hydrated. As the day wore on, we saw more and more huge Nile cruise ships heading upriver; at one point, we could see more than 20 of them lined up one after another, sometimes side by side, all with the same tourists doing the same itineraries. Our felucca felt that much better by contrast (even when the considerable wakes from the continuous steam of ships caused us to bob quite a bit for an hour or so).
By late afternoon, it was becoming clear that the wind was not at all cooperating with our plans; we had been on the river for hours and hadn’t made much progress at all. I think we were actually moving slower than the current, a light upstream breeze slowing us but not providing enough power to tack against.
Eventually, the day ended and we tied up to a dock. Not knowing landmarks, it’s still hard to estimate where exactly it was, but certainly far short of where we’d planned to be. Since we had been planning on sailing for only a few hours the next morning, this probably meant we’d have to spend the entire day making our way to Edfu. But hey, we had no strict itinerary, and we were sailing on the Nile. That sounded like a fine plan.