Recollections and writings on four holidays in Egypt in 2017, 2019, 2022, 2023. Exploring the ancient sites, and a doing a bit of meeting the locals, with my views on a few things.
I really should be doing more than I am but Egyptians are so chatty and on my morning walks they do like to stop me and show me around their gardens which of course does interest me and they always want to know what I grow in my garden..
This is a very elderly vine planted by Imad's grandfather... At the moment all the leaves on it are dead because it's winter, during the summer it will provide shade but I can't help feeling that it could do with a prune.
I will try and get a photo of Imad because when you look at him you see an Egyptian as depicted on the many carvings and wall paintings in the ancient temples.
Elsewhere in his garden he has citrus trees, avocado's, tomatoes, onions, and a henna tree which is much prized for its scent as well as the colour!
And he grows gardenias too... Except he doesn't know the name of them...
During the course of an hour he lets drop that he also owns the hotel next door, and that he has two feluccas on the Nile, and he cannot leave because, like many others, ''The Nile is in my blood''
Not so far away and nearer into 'town' we find today's bread being made using a method that probably has not changed for thousands of years in a traditional oven plonked on the side of the road.
And on the main road a car accessory shop selling fluffy dice..... And flashing lights that no motorbike or took took can be seen without.
And I am pleased to see the bridal shop has changed its display... I think I might go for the Guinevere look in the middle,
Returning to the banks of The Nile for the all important morning coffee we notice that the buffalo has finally been moved from its island because of the new height of the water level...
AS usual there are a couple of cats in attendance. Don't bother trying to make friends with them because Egyptian cats are even more up themselves than normal cats and they are bad enough.
Clearly modern cats have not forgotten that they were once revered in ancient Egypt.
AS you can see everything went completely wrong with the alignment there but i will soldier on..
So walking back to my apartment through the back streets gives a chance for a bit more local architecture..
I am not sure of the significance of the writing or pictures on the outside of the houses...
Aircraft seem to be a popular theme on many buildings...
The pink building is one of the many hotels tucked away in the back streets... I have had a look at some of these and they are actually quite nice once you get inside, don't be put off by the surroundings!
And I am going to leave you here with one of my little videos that was taken in the El Gezira Gardens hotel in Ramla, bearing in mind I have been here three times I had never been in here until the other night, and I must say I was impressed with the garden.
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...
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....
