Egypt Part The Third 2022 - Noises In The Night, Brits Abroad, and Some Thoughts On Egyptians..

It really is quite difficult to get away from noise and light pollution these days and being here in Luxor I have noticed that quite a lot of the noise is just ''nature''. 

Where I was staying down in Ramla there was noise at night from the river, if you have stayed here on the East or West Bank near the Nile then you will have noticed that there is noise from engines on the Nile cruise ships, this is due to the generators on board which provide power to the boat, and of course drive the pumps to keep the bilges clear.

But even away from the river I can still here the sirens from the trains during the night, but not so much during the day when it is masked by the occasional scooter or vehicle passing in the street, much more likely is the sound of horses/donkeys hooves!

Where I have moved to inland I was expecting to hear more 'people' noise but surprisingly there is little.... An amusing feature is that I am just across the road from the stables, so in the morning when they put the horses in the pens outside I get the sound of horses neighing not much more than about 3 metres from my head! 

They also have a donkey and I don't know if you knew this but donkeys, like cockerels, never seem to sleep, what upsets this one I do not know but it frequently lets forth with a very bad tempered sounding braying in the middle of the night.

Add to this the cats which fight a night and our three neighbourhood watch dogs who take objection when certain people walk past and you can imagine that the wee small hours can be quite lively, but you get used to it...

There is no very late night venues on the West Bank, but I have discovered a bar that caters to northern Europeans of a certain age, and here again the Bob Marley influence is clear insinuating itself into the gent's toilet with the red, green, and yellow stripes... The other night when I visited the bar I entered to the sound of 'Hawkwind' from the 70s! Music is provided by a couple that used to live on Hayling Island...

I still haven't found a way of moving video clips to the right or left, the classic Smokie song... And next the gent's toilet decorations..

And this is something that I have never heard here before but it happens everywhere I guess... Two of the children playing in the street suddenly decided to fall out over something so one child hit the other child, the next minute both families were attacking each other with pieces of wood and throwing rocks whereupon the entire street joined in!!

And some thoughts on Egyptians......
In many ways Egyptians are like Greeks, or maybe that should be the other way around??

It is hardly surprising really when you consider that the Minoan and Egyptians civilisations were flourishing at around the same time and there was a fair amount of commerce around the Eastern Mediterranean, and then add in that Alexander conquered Egypt a couple of hundred years before the birth of Christ, there are bound to be similarities.

One of the notable ones is that they seem to be hypochondriacs just like Greeks are, during my stay here I have begun to lose count of the number of people that have suddenly become gravely ill.... Taking an example of the brother of a friend who is at Death's door, and urgently needs 1500 EGP (about 75  quid) for medical attention and medication, and no I certainly didn't chip in..  A couple of days later i saw him looking quite chipper and he proudly showed me the pictures on his phone of the medication he had to take..... Thoughtfully I got a copy of them from him..

Of course I am not his doctor but I think this is a bit over the top for an upset stomach with diarrhrea and throwing up! I asked him how long he had had the symptoms and they only started in the morning....

And I never knew they gave TOPRO to humans, I thought it was for farm animals....

The usual instruction for this type of complaint is drink plenty of water and eat boiled chicken and rice, or a nice bowl of chicken soup, or perhaps a couple of scrambled eggs... And if the symptoms perisist for more thn a couple of days.... etc., etc., And then we have to contend with the people with high blood pressure who have to go to the hospital on a daily basis for an injection, except they don't go on Sunday because the doctor isn't there on Sunday, so presumably their blood pressure is OK on Sunday... Generally by the way there seem to be quite a lot of people who are unwell in older age because of the hard life they have lived working in the fields....

And if it is of any interest, a new knee here costs 60,000 EGP, about £3,000 if you go private....

This explains the number of pharmacies here of course.....

And there are the business aspects of the Egyptian Economy which I will move on to in my next blog... There's something to look forward to...

And I will leave you with the Neighbourhood Dog Watch on patrol...

Egypt Part The Third 2022 - A Trip To The Market.

I have given u trying to catch up on the blogs that were missed for now, so on with the current stuff and then the rest will follow out of chronological order and you will never know!

When i said i wanted to go to the market everybody thought I just wanted to get the ferry cross the River to the souk to buy a bit of fruit and veg and maybe some spices...

No I want to go to a proper market where they sell camels and horses and animals..

Really??      Yes really.

I don't know why anybody should think it strange that I can milk a cow, or that I want to know how much a camel costs.

Or why I should even be interested in farm animals, but surely I am not the only person who has lived on a farm for a few years, or indeed there must be many that own farms in other countries who might be interested.

After a bit of discussion it seems that the best/nearest livestock market to go to is at Armant about 20kms south of Luxor. For a really big camel market you need to go down to Aswan which is a bit too far... In fact the market is not in Armant at all but to the west almost in the hills and right on the edge of the agricultural belt.

Armant is about centre in the map with the little blue marker..

Map courtesy of Google of course...

So I am up bright an early to leave at 6 am, I should have known that not a lot was going to happen going to happen at that time of day except breakfast...

A couple of wrong turns later and we finally got there, and the easiest way to show you is with a bit of video
.

And it was just what I expected... In a lot of ways it was just like an English livestock market with lots of farmers sitting around drinking tea, (instead of beer), and more than likely discussing the weather and the price of oats and note the almost total lack of 'western' clothing, out here not a lot has changed for a thousand years, except of course they now have a lot more water for crops....

Exceptionally though there was not an auctioneer, everything is sold by battering for it....

And how strange the breeds are compared to the ones we see in Europe... Some might say the cattle are underfed but you see them chomping their way through food and realise they are not underfed it is just the way they are.

Donkeys there are aplenty, at a price...

Camels are worth a lot more than donkeys and indeed horses so a man's wealth can genuinely be calculated by the number of camels he has!

Junior here wanted to demonstrate that he can milk a cow..... But as it was a heifer I don't think he would get a lot out of it.

And in aisle 3, we have these... And I don't think these are donkeys... I think they are either mules or hinnies.

In the absence of any form of pens except a low row of rocks to keep the animals off the carpets nearly everything is 'hobbled' which looks a bit cruel but they don't use rope and it does solve the problem of the animals wandering off!

Goats and sheep are in aisle 1...

Titch on the right has just been sold along with one of his siblings for a total of 3200 EGP about £80 each, which I thought was quite expensive... The 'boy' tells me this is a sheep but it isn't, it's a goat...

And some very cute goats here as well, quite ornamental in fact. Oh dear admiring goats means I have lived on Crete for too long....

Get a camera out in Egypt and you are never short of a subject, this one on the right should go far, he seemed to think his picture was worth 10EGP, but all he got for his trouble was a clip around the ear from his father for pestering the tourist.

       

And some people, below, do not look too thrilled by the idea of market day...

And finally the ''tea tent''.. An important place for meeting friends and chewing the fat over a cup of tea and a shisha...

A Day in Luxor, and Boarding The Good Ship MS Mayfair....

I have a day to spare in Luxor until I board my cruise ship late in the afternoon so I have plenty of time for a wander around and stick my nose into places it really shouldn't go..... 

Did I say somewhere you don't get hassled?? Well in Luxor you will, by boatman and carriage drivers. Indeed until you get the hang of getting rid of them it does quite spoil the walk along the Corniche on the Nile Bank,

especially in the stretch from the Museum to just down past The Winter Palace.

It seems to be a common misconception with a lot of Egyptians that because somebody is there on holiday it means they have got a lot of money. Well I am there because it is cheap, and so are a lot of other people..... I found that the best thing to do was engage them in a bit of conversation completely avoiding the fact that they are trying to get you on to their felucca or into their horse drawn carriage. Some of the carriages are genuine antiques by the way held together with ''Pop rivets'' and bits of rope... Having passed the time of day you can then happily walk off leaving them wondering what has happened.

This was the day I met Abdul.

Abdul has a felucca, and unless you like sailing in small boats you don't really want to go on one, but Abdul is not that keen on doing much. He quoted me a ridiculous price of US$300 for an hour. I had already asked them in the hotel how much it should be, GBP20 or maybe US$30 at most.... if you really want to take a sail on a felucca then by all means do, it is part of the Egyptian experience, and you will be sailing in a vessel the design of which has not changed much in a 1000 years. Indeed some of them look as though they have been around that long! Just don't pay too much!

Continuing my walk I realised that what actually happens is that as soon as you have got rid of one boatman another one will appear so it takes a while for them all to realise that you are just not doing it!

The carriage drivers are even more persistent. Returning back towards my hotel I come across Abdul again, so I ask him where is a good place to get coffee.... He shows me, but for that information I have to buy him a coffee, and breakfast as it turns out. Food is cheap so don't worry about it.....

There is a market in Luxor... 
I love markets! 

And I have to buy saffron....

Abdul knows just the the right shop, (it probably belongs to a cousin so he gets a cut out of the sale, but who cares?)
Lead on Adbul, there he is looking to see that I am following....

This is still the ''touristy'' end of the market, you can go further and find all the fruit and veg and so on, and it gets cheaper as well!!

There is also the famous camel market.... Another day.... I get my saffron EGP 25.00 per gram (about GB£1), and I have bought 20 grams, buying it by the gram makes it sound like some sort of drug, but it is one of the most expensive spices in the world, and you don't need a lot of it.

And it is time for coffee again, and Abdul needs feeding again.... I think I mentioned that donkeys are a common sight in Egypt? Well the same goes for horses, even in the middle of towns you will find horses still used as transport, and they have diggers as well.... 

And you see a lot of these Chinese motor bikes. But it is getting towards the time when I have to go back to my hotel and collect my luggage and wait for somebody to pick me up to take me to my Nile cruise ship, a lot of the Nile fleet are ''laid up'' and it is a fair bet that this one will not be going anywhere in the near future....

I don't know why..... But for some reason boarding a ship always seems to be chaotic. Coming to Greece by ferry from Italy seems to involve driving down backstreets in the dodgy parts of town, (Piraeus is even worse), and there doesn't seem to be any system to it all. I found the same in Punta Arenas in Chile, I was told to wait at a certain dock gate, and an hour after we were due to sale somebody arrived and let us in the the docks... 

Here is it the same, and because they moor the ships side by side out into the Nile you have to walk through two other ships to get to yours, minus luggage of course because that has already disappeared... But finally I am on board the MS Mayfair, a relatively new vessel. I have already asked if there is a passenger called Poirot on board and got a blank look. It i a lot smarter than the ship boarded by Peter Ustinov in the film of ''Murder on the Nile''....

And I get to see my first Nile sunset...

I did wonder how they were going to organise us into groups allowing for several different languages, but at dinner it became clear that we were divided up by language each with its own guide, so in my group there are 6 of us, all English, two couples and 2 singles.

The two couples are travelling together and already I am a bit jealous because they started their trip off by staying at Mena House in Cairo, part of the Agatha Christie route that I didn't follow, but copious amounts of wine, (there are some very good Egyptian reds), thawed us out and got us away from the '''first day at school'' atmosphere. WE also found out that not all passengers are created equal, as one of the couples is not on the drinks included package. This didn't stop the waiter pouring them glasses of wine!! The food at dinner is distinctly ''western'' and I am a great one for cooking my veggies ''al dente'', but the green beans were positively rock hard.... Heigh ho, luckily we didn't get green beans every day!

And tomorrow morning we are off on our Nile Cruise....