Day Eighteen started around 5am, when the mosque next to the dock we had tied up at started its Adhans for the day, and the goats and sheep that people had brought down to the dock the night before started their bleating. It was, maybe, a little earlier than we wanted to wake, but not all that much earlier than we’d been seeing in Sinai. And the sunrise over the Nile was really something special. Coupled with the sounds from the mosque and the animals, it really felt like morning in a foreign place. In the best possible way.
Ali, our felucca captain, served us a breakfast of eggs, bread, and cheese, and then we set about laying about for a while while he cleaned and prepared to sail. We thought. After an hour and a half of laying around reading, he told us that our taxi was here.
| 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. |
Now, we were fairly well educated about this. Our trusty Rough Guide book had warned us that captains sometimes dumped travelers as much as 30km from Edfu. But we were clearly nowhere near 30km; a good guess would be maybe 80km. And we’d bought a trip to Edfu. Flashback here to Iman, our original “captain” who had turned out to just be a reseller for other boats, who had expressed his dislike of transactions where either party starts changing the rules or price. Yeah, right.
Anyways, most of us were kind of ready to be off the felucca anyway, and I don’t think any of us were prepared to endure that same Bob Marley tape all day, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was some haggling about who would pay for the long taxi ride, but eventually we settled it to where we’d get to Edfu at about the time we’d originally planned, spending about the money we’d originally planned, so whatever, it worked.
We parted ways with Ali and Mohammed and the Queen Landa. Like so much else of what we’d seen in the Nile valley, the actual arrangements were perfectly fine, and it was only the pervasive dishonesty and sneakiness that left a bad taste in our mouths. So we piled into a minibus with mixed feelings, which gradually turned happier as it became clear that we were going to drive to Edfu on the west bank of the Nile, where tourists aren’t allowed. Nothing like a little rule breaking to brighten one’s day, eh?
The ride took about an hour, maybe a little more, and it was interesting to see the farmland and numerous small villages along the way. It’s all right across the Nile from the main road and bigger villages, but the total absence of bridges between Aswan and Edfu makes the west side feel very isolated. Once, our driver had to drive through the back roads of a village to bypass a security checkpoint that would presumably not have been happy to see him carrying four Americans. Good stuff. But apparently none of took pictures.
We finally arrived in Edfu and had our driver drop us at the Temple of Horus, the one major archaeological site in the city. We walked through it and were, sadly, underwhelmed. I think it speaks well of our small group’s compatibility, if not our erudition, that we all more or less said “yeah, its ancient and impressive like everything else, let’s move on.” It seems that we’re all more interested in doing things than seeing things, and we all seem to have a fairly low tolerance for huge crowded sites with tourists arriving by busloads and the constant danger of locals doing something nice and then demanding money for it.
So we left the Temple of Horus after 30 minutes or so and decided to head into town to get a taxi to Luxor. The drivers of the small horse drawn carriages (“caliches”) were super aggressive about selling us a ride into town, but one of them made the mistake of using the selling point that it was a whole kilometer away. We’d spent a week in Sinai, and had walked 20 miles in a day in the blazing desert heat. A kilometer on paved streets before noon was going to be a pleasant walk. Once again we encountered that Egyptian incredulity that there were tourists who refused to pay for a service, no matter how cheaply it was offered. Over the course of five minutes, with us walking away the entire time, rates fell from 20 pounds for each of two caliches to 5 pounds for a single one we could all fit in. If you ever come to Egypt, the one Arabic phrase you absolutely must learn is “I don’t want it at any price, because I don’t want it.” I wish we knew how to say that.
While walking out on the caliche drivers, we were propositioned by a taxi driver. 400 pounds to Luxor, he offered. Seeing as how we’d paid 300 pounds to get from Luxor to Aswan, paying 100 pounds more for half the distance wasn’t that compelling. We walked off, and the unfortunate driver was left on the other side of a fence, shouting gradually decreasing figures. The last one I heard was 260 pounds, which we might have taken if he had opened with it. But after you say “no” to someone fifty or sixty times, I think it’s harder to say “yes”, even if it’s in your best interest. He probably could have said 100 pounds and we all would have said no, just out of stubbornness.
As we walked the kilometer into town, one of the caliche drivers passed us, mocking us with walking motions with his fingers and indicating that he had, in fact, found a fare willing to pay. Again, it was just totally outside of his worldview that tourists might decline to pay because they actually want to walk some. I have no doubt that he thought we were indicating that a ride wasn’t worth five pounds and were hoping to negotiate a lower price.
And then… and then we met a taxi driver. Or taxi owner. Or something like that. Just a hundred meters or so from a major intersection, we made the mistake of talking to a lone vendor who wanted to sell us a taxi ride. Never do that. This turned into the must frustrating, albeit comical, negotiation yet. I won’t go into the gory details, but this guy was an expert at what we were coming to appreciate as the negotiating technique of seeming to agree on a price and service, and then changing it after both parties have said “yes.”
Five hundred pounds? Absolutely not. Three hundred? No, too much. Two fifty? No, two hundred and we’ll do it. But the minibus is two fifty. Ok, thanks, we’ll walk. No, no, wait, two hundred, ok. Two hundred? Yes, two hundred. For here to Luxor? Yes, two hundred fifty here to Luxor. No, wait, you said two hundred. Well, the taxi is two hundred, but the minibus is two fifty. Ok, we’ll take the taxi for two hundred. No, two fifty. You said two hundred. Ok, ok, two hundred. Two hundred? Yes, two fifty.
And around and around we went. We should have bailed on the guy, but he also had the good technique of telling us that he had called his driver, which (stupidly) created a feeling of obligation on our part. We finally, finally settled on two hundred for real (or so we thought) as the minibus drove up.
We climbed in, and the guy we’d been haggling/arguing with insisted that we pay him instead of the driver, since he apparently owned the minibus. This was weird. It took a bit to communicate with the driver to make sure this was ok, but it was. So I gave 200 pounds to our not-so-much-friend, who I was starting to think epitomized everything wrong with the Nile side of Egypt, the inefficient nature of corrupt markets, and humanity in general. He promptly demanded 10 pounds more as baksheesh. And a pen. While Lars got out a (thankfully, I learned later, non-working) pen to gift, I ponied up 10 more pounds, and the minibus owner promptly turned and gave the driver 30 pounds, apparently his cut for merely doing the actual work. As we escaped the owner, he was insisting that we pay baksheesh to the driver, and I think his grandmother and probably some of the local wildlife.
And we were off. A bit exhausted and somewhere between grumpy and amused by the half hour or so it had taken to actually settle on the terms of a transaction, but off nonetheless. The ride to Luxor was uneventful, and we made it back to the Emilio hotel around 1pm. We had decided to limit our touristy excursions in Luxor to just Karnak, which we’d do the next morning, so we set about wandering around the city some, shopping in the souk (touristy, but not as bad as Aswan), walking around the Avenue of the Sphinxes (just outside of our hotel, and featuring a mosque right in the middle of it) and swimming in the hotel’s pool. For dinner, we hit the King’s Head pub, which is just what it sounds like. And then it was an early night, since we were planning to head out to Karnak at 6am the next day.