Egypt Day 4: sail like an Egyptian...

i'm lying out on the felucca that is to be our home for the next couple of days, my Eee in the middle of the boat and my legs hanging out over the side as the sun comes and goes from my feet. i've been in a cone of isolation with my PSD plugged in for the last 2 and a half hours while the tourists laze and play around me. the Nile flows from the south, but the wind blows from the north so we're tacking up the river. i didn't sleep well last night - my mind churning and fried and refusing to settle itself. i woke up at around 3AM and couldn't find my spectacles when i went to find a bush and i freaked the fuck out. i'm not particularly blind - lying here i can see the other felucca well enough 300metres south of ours (22 of us split evenly across 2 boats that will hold ~14 each well enough), but trying to look for too long without them hurts my brain. i can rely in sunnies in the day, but without my regular specs i'm blind at night or when we're in a darkened temple. after hopping off the boat to empty my bladder i spend half an hour scrabbling around with the light of my mobile phone, oscillating into an OCD-fit until finally i find them next to Soobie's torch... but only after losing one of my ear plugs. i hit a tailspin last night not long before bed and this is REALLY not helping, but once my specs are secured and i'm sure my camera hasn't fallen off the side i manage to pass out for another few hours.

2:30AM is not a time to be waking - it's a time to be getting to sleep. my body clock's not liking this one bit, but i'm up and i'm moving, out in the cold of the cusp of Aswan's late-night/early-morning. everyone's luggage is loaded up into 3 hotel rooms where we'll get a chance to repack, recharge and clean up later, and the corpus is loaded into the bus where everyone promptly passes out again. Soobie's pissed off - he got maybe an hour of sleep after the yanks took off into the night to buy a shisha-pipe and lost Jr. he had a happy hour haggling with the shopkeep and still got done on the price. everyone else expected him to have been kidnapped and the police were called, only to have him show up with a big shit-eating grin and two big boxes. the story goes that a couple of years ago the companies had to employ armed guards if they had any americans on the tour because of the "increased risk of terrorism". that's no longer the case, but the paranoia remains, and if a US-national happened to get kidnapped i can see it fucking things up for everyone else. Soobie passed out early and Jr partied into the night smoking shisha like the bottom had dropped out of the market.

i manage to get a couple of hours nap-time on the bus, waking at dawn to see the sun rise over the desert. it's pretty much what you expect - yellow sand, black rocky outcrops. it's freezing cold on the bus and freezing cold when we get out of it and i'm thanking Allah that i decided to bring my hoodie (the only piece of really warm clothing i brought on this trip) with me. there's no chicken-strips of lush greenery here. here the desert gets biblical-friendly with Lake Nasser and at night the desert is fucking cold.

the Temples of Abu Simbel were built as a monument to Ramses II and his favourite wife (he had 46 to choose from) Nefariti. the larger of the two was to be a demonstration of Ramses II's military prowess, his great wisdom and strength. he's colloquially referred to as Ramses the Builder because of the many works constructed during his reign. it's also theorised that he may be the pharoh from the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites which would explain why he got so much done. one way or another, he's much referred and Louise is bonkers for anything with his name on it. 4 statues of him sit out the front (although the second-left has been destroyed somewhere in the last 3000 years. these things happen you know. i lose things all the time), and the interior is incredibly well preserved. the carvings have been painted and where in many of the temples these have been exposed to the elements and faded or eroded away, Abu Simbel was buried in sand so much of it remains. the light through the doors of the temples shines through to 4 statues in the far end- designed so that the light will shine through several archways onto statues of Emon-Ra, Isis and Ramses II, but never on the god of the darkness who sits on the far-left. clever fucking Egyptians. Louise and i are flying around like usual grabbing photos (not inside though - for fear that the flashes will damage what remains of the paint photography is forbidden. it doesn't stop people touching the fucking paintings and i tell off a few different tourists who proceed to give me a look of "what do you mean don't touch the fucking monument?" we've teamed up with Mike again, as has become our habit, so no matter what's going on we always have someone to take a photo of ourselves.

Nefariti's Temple is smaller (male-dominated society and all), but no less beautiful. we don't have a lot of time. 3 hours there, 3 hours back? 20 minutes of historical explanation and 85 minutes of exploration. there's not enough time. not even close. you could spend 3 hours easily appreciating the decoration, fighting through the (we estimate) thousand or so tourists who are there at any given time with more arriving by bus and, i shit you not, aeroplane (there's an airport so that people can fly down here into the middle of fucking nowhere, 1200-odd-km south of Cairo and see this place before flying back again), beheading the occasional French or Italian pensioner who has no fucking respect. lack of respect seems to be common in these parts. there are carvings in the statues out the front with peoples names, dated back to the early 1800's. you can see the same in the pyramids... everywhere really. writing "Jonno waz ere" isn't limited to the last couple of decades. every forgettable motherfucker wants to chip a piece off to take with him, or leave his names so his rude countrymen can see it when they too come to destroy a piece of an ancient wonder. Berlisconi wasn't the first, and he won't be the last, and i manage to not break anyone's fingers however tempted i am. the last thing i really need right now is to cause an international incident and be dragged off at the business-end of an AK-47. in the Temple of Isis half of the gods carved into the walls have been taken to with chisels - the outlines remain, but the features have been rendered into chip-marks by (scum-sucking, donkey-fucking, child-raping, living-afterbirth) christians who, in order to convert the locals, showed that their gods had no power by defacing their temples, carving crosses into the walls over the face of Isis and Osiris and converting it into a monastery. when i break your nose and piss into the puncture wounds in your lungs i'll be asking you where's your fictional fucking figment of a god now, fucker??? while you drown in my urine and your own blood.

sorry - some things i feel a bit strongly about. anyway...

sitting on the felucca as it sets sail and starts its zig-zagging trip northwards i can hear the call to prayer, bidding us farewell. there was sleep had on the bus. not enough, but i'm feeling ok about it by the time we pull up back in Aswan and while people are showering and changing i'm set up in the restaurant hogging just about every power point in the place, charging cameras and mp3 players, copying photos and backing up data while i try to scribble some words on the page before we have to move on again. 2 hours after pulling in we're off again and loading up on the feluccas.. at first everyone's excited and want to run around the place as we do whenever we get anywhere new. then no one knows what to do and feels a bit lost. Greg's come down with something resembling food poisoning and really isn't liking the cold wind so he's wrapped in his sleeping bag. everyone blames the fish from the night before. i had the fish. i'm fine, thanks for asking. thankyou, cast-iron stomach. Mike's getting the sea-sickness going, but he's keeping a brave face. me, i'm lying around reading my book, constantly getting interrupted... but then that's OK. i don't want to finish it too quickly, and i keep getting up and rattling off more photos, trying to get in a few of them myself. after a couple of hours and 10km or so we pull up on the west bank near to the West Of Aswan village - a Nubian settlement where a family have thrown open their house to tourists.

sitting on a rug in the sandy courtyard while i drink my peppermint tea and take drags on a shisha-pipe i can hear the call to prayer. 22 tourists sitting around buying drinks, shisha, beads and cigarettes - the price of the Nubian's hospitality is one i pay gladly, with a smile on my face. we're smiles and guilty fascination. they're grins and satisfaction, sharing a couple of hours of their daily lives so that we can see how they live day-to-day, rather than having our only concept of them being the tourist-touts. it's a traditional Nubian house - mud brick and plaster, an open courtyard and domed roofs, an industrial-strength air conditioner in the courtyard and satellite dish on the roof. the Egyptian methodology of building seems to be more or less: build some walls in a squarish fashion, then forget to cover most of them with whatever's handy. while i was on the train to Aswan i kept seeing this sort of thing and couldn't quite tell whether anyone was living there or not. sometimes they make a roof out of wood and plaster, sometimes out of reeds, leaves and branches, sometimes they just don't. when it's 45degrees in the shade you don't want to be out of the wind, so you invite it in and give it a place at the table. it doesn't rain much here - a couple of days a year, so it's far more important to deal with the sun and the dust than what piddly water falls from the sky.

goodbyes made and thanks given, we're back on the feluccas to eat and from there everything gets a bit indistinct. i have a couple of drinks, although not enough to really make an impact, by my head's gone south chasing a plot i seem to have lost somewhere back in Aswan. whether it's just exhaustion and night-after-night of poor sleep or what, i don't know. one thing's for sure: i'm not in a happy place. by the time i climb into my sleeping bag and pull a blanket over me i'm shaking and trying to curl into a ball. eventually the rocking of the boat lulls me to sleep, but it's hours after waking before i feel any better.