Cruisin'

I'm back from three days of cruising on the Nile, upriver from Luxor to Aswan. Three days of sleeping, eating, temple-looking, sleeping and eating again. In that time I also learned a new way of playing backgammon, played some gin rummy and ran, vampire-style, from any direct sunlight that might peek in my direction.

The eating was indeed intensive - what is it about buffets that bring on overeating? - and I managed to take in more than my share. The Maitre-d came around asking the wacky foreigners for their various food preferences, but he was quite professional and didn't blink when I said "Vegetarian, but no butter, no milk, no cheese, no fun, no games, no etc" and kindly brought me various vegetable dishes in place of the fish or beef or whatever the others got during table-service dinners. The buffet attendants were also very attentive, chirping "no butter!" whenever I approached a dish with an inquisitive look. They insisted that the "Buttered Zucchini" had no butter, but the spelling wasn't always ideal so I chose to believe them ("Pumpking," for instance, was some sort of squash).

My Guest Photographer came along on the cruise but she took her photos with her to Berlin (I'm jealous she gets to go there!) so I'll have to make do with the pictures I took myself. The difference between blog photographer and professional-style? Quantity. In the time of the cruise, I took about 30 photos that I didn't delete - basically all you see here save for a few more hieroglyphics. And the GP? I think the final count was around 675.

Not that I can blame her. We visited many a site, what with the ancient temples and various scenic inscriptions all over the place. Among the sites crammed in: Valley of the Workers, Madinet Habo, Valley of the Kings, Karnak, Luxor Temple, Edfu, High Aswan Dam, Philae, Nubian Museum, Nile Cataracts. Maybe there were more - tough to keep track, especially since many temple look highly similar to others, although our excellent guide pointed out the salient differences in each.




These are Madinet Habo on our first day - I was so tired from not having slept, I took many more pictures than I do usually. As you can see, the ancient Egyptians liked to decorate their walls from floor to ceiling, and they decorated the ceiling too. The reliefs were covered in bright colors, many of which amazingly are still in place. This kind of extreme, wild detail with no rest for the weary eye is right to my liking.




Here we have Karnak which claims (or, rather, guidebooks and tour guides claim) to be the largest temple ever built. Whether this is largest in Egypt or in the whole world I'm not sure, but it's certainly massive. As big as a city. And it contains other superlatives, such as the tallest obalesque (how is that spelled?) which, like all such wonders, was carved from a single block of granite and then carried to Luxor from some distant quarry in a mysterious fashion still debated by archaeologists today. They've ruled out aliens, however, so there goes the fun theory.


The last day, we capped off our tour of the Aswan High Dam, Philae temple (the coolest temple visited since it's on an island in the Nile - they had to move it to higher ground with the advent of the aforementioned dam - only reachable by boat) and the museum with a boat trip to a Nubian island in which an enclave of Nubian individuals live, speaking Nubian and peddling Nubian wares and doing other Nubian activities which induce extreme repetition of the word "Nubian." This was in what is called the Nile cataracts, a location having nothing to do with eyeballs in which granite formations make islands in the Nile, fertile in places because of their liquidy location.



My professors:






This is Philae, in which temple a charming kitty warmed himself on a light. By the last day of the cruise, the cat was more interesting to me than the high reliefs, although the river views were constantly spectacular.


The High Dam was built with a loan from the Russians after the US withdrew support because Nasser refused to sign an anti-Communist pact. Here we have GP, A and I on the dam by lake Nasser, and some soldiers climbing into the Russian-made monument at the location: the day we visited was, apparently, the Feast of the Dam, a modern celebration of this monstrous edifice for which soldiers wear their best and children run about in traditional costumes banging cymbals.



Housing on the boat was less than ideal, but thankfully I got some good roomies and plenty of sleep in a wee bed. See, we had an odd number of ladies on the cruise and my professor left it to the group to choose who would take the triple (this turned out to be a double with an extra bed shoved in, but for the same low-low-room rate). When everyone else (who had already chosen their roommates) stared at him in dumb silence, I volunteered and invited A to join GP and I because there was no one else with whom it made sense to room. I'm very glad A's in the class, I find it so hard to relate to midget 19 year-olds, as has been amply demonstrated by my encounters with them detailed in this blog. But we three had a jolly time, so over all the cruise was a success, although I could have done with a little less forced marching through (albeit beautiful and fascinating but overload-ey) ancient sites and would have appreciated a bit more free time. Aswan is a city I'd love to have had time to explore. I hear that there are spice markets and real, modern life there, but I had only one half hour free just before the flight home.

Not that I'm saying I want to re-cruise the area again any time soon. But if I were to do so, I know what I'd do differently.

And I'd pack more shoes.