Egypt Part IV- Sailing down the Nile

This is Part 4 of probably 6 parts about Egypt. We'll see. Here are links to previous posts about this trip-of-a-lifetime.

Part I: Getting There
Part II: Cairo and Pyramids

Part III: Temples

Part V: The Red Sea (coming soonish)

Part VI: Jeff Climbs a Mountain (coming soonish)

Part IV: Sailing down the Nile

It’s now been almost 3 months since we were in Egypt, but Egypt has been on the minds of many across the world recently, and we’ve been glued to the updates that came out of Tahrir Square. I wrote this a month ago, on a plane, but was too busy to ever post it. Now that I'm on spring break, I actually have a minute to breathe and catch up. 

I hope the months and years ahead yield increased democracy and opportunity for our new friends in Egypt. But we didn’t fly to Egypt to see a revolution, so here is another installment of the other, timeless Egypt, the one that everyone should really try to see once in their lives.

The Nile

“Egypt is the gift of the Nile,” as the saying goes. The longest river on Earth, it brings waters from rainy mountains of Ethiopia and jungles of Uganda to one of the driest places on Earth. In Upper Egypt (southern Egypt, but the upper reaches of the Nile) town of Aswan it is usually several years between rainfall events.  The massive river rolling by the parched desert was really quite a difficult thing for my brain to reconcile. 

Despite being only about 3% of the land area, the Nile Valley and Nile Delta are home to nearly all the arable land and nearly all the people in Egypt, and this has been true for thousands of years, so that is also where the vast majority of the historic temples and ruins are.  This means that cruising the Nile is an essential way to connect with history and see the sights.

Nile cruise boats are the most popular way to see the sights,  with rooms for hundreds of guests are often luxury affairs (floating hotels, really), though I’ve been warned that some are much seedier than they travel brochures promise. No matter.  We wanted something more basic, more historic, more authentic, more…sailboat-y.

Our felucca, before we boarded in Aswan, with our faithful (and possibly not-yet-high) crew, Mustafa and Ramadan.

Rigging.

Glassy water reflecting the felucca and clouds along the Nile.

This is my favorite picture from the full-of-amazing pictures trip. It's now my computer desktop. You can see the Nile, feluccas, a tiny riverside oasis of green, then sandy sand forever.

The felucca is a traditional Nile boat. Broad abeam and with a huge lateen rig (only one sail, like a Sunfish, if you’ve sailed one, but about 3x the size), they are able to pull ashore easily (by pulling up the centerboard), move in the slightest of breezes, and are remarkably stable.  The Nile flows north to the Mediterranean, but the prevailing winds blow to the south, making the Nile a perfect river highway. Today the feluccas are nearly entirely used for recreation, but it’s not just foreign tourists that go. Residents of Cairo (“Cairenes”) and other cities often hire a felucca for a few hours to laze away a sunny afternoon.  Our boat was probably 14 feet wide and maybe 30 feet long. There was storage below deck but no cabins or bathrooms -- just an open deck boat with mattresses to lounge on and a canopy to keep off the sun. 

Chilling on the mattress-covered deck. Shannon had a hard time believing I would want to do an activity this chill.

Hanna and Pei Pei chill-axing.

Hanna, Jeff, Shannon, Pei Pei wading into the Nile.

Our Nubian captain and mate (Mustafa and Ramadan) sailed and cooked us simple but delicious meals on a camp stove, while our job was to enjoy the scenery.  The crew also stayed thoroughly glassy-eyed as they huffed on joints and listened to Bob Marley, but they seemed quite able to do their jobs adequately.

Captain at the helm.

In addition to our Nubian crew there were Hanna, Pei Pei, Shannon and I, our guide Ahmed, a doctor and lawyer from Columbia studying in the UK, and a Scottish retired couple that had lived in Tasmania for decades and this was their 92^nd country visited.   We watched the cruise boats steam up river in a hurry of black smoke while we lazily half-drifted downstream (not much wind, but we weren’t in a hurry). Shannon couldn’t believe that I would volunteer (even ask for) such a low-key component to the trip, but then again maybe she didn’t realize the medicinal effect that sailing has on the soul.

Shannon dangling her feet.

Feluccas tied up in the morning.

We sailed for 1.5 days, from the city of Aswan (by the big Aswan dam), but only made it maybe 50 km downriver (less than an hour’s drive).   We had two nights on the boat, where we beached next to a flotilla of other maybe 10 other feluccas enjoying the same slow travel. 

Doing Yoga in the desert.

The first night we tied up next to a Nubian village, so there were bathroom facilities (and a bar/restaurant if you wanted) on shore. The second night we were on an uninhabited beach, which meant that improvised latrine facilities were the order of the evening.

Or perhaps should have been the order. A few of the boats tied up nearby were full of 20-something singles on a party cruise, and they did what 20-something singles do. There was a fun (for a while…then this fuddy-duddy wanted to sleep) drum and dancing circle around the campfire, there was drinking, presumably there were trips to the bushes for some nookie.  What there certainly was not was any sort of outhouse or designated toilet area. Hanna discovered just how poorly trained in outdoor hygiene this group was.  After walking the wobbly gangplank from the boat to the beach, and heading out for a pre-bed pee, she came back to the boat understandably angered “Someone shat on the trail. It’s all over my pants.” Nice. Actually, in the morning I discovered the whole beach was littered in human shit-mines.  Hey all tour operators: please install an outhouse or three at your beach landing spots, and/or train your passengers how to dig a proper backcountry cathole.

Campfire with drinking and partying and such.  Us lame-o's left early, in time to find the shit on the trail.

But I digress from the point of this story…which was that just floating on the Nile (vaguely sailing, but mostly not going fast enough to qualify) was immensely satisfying. It was my favorite part of an overall unforgettable trip. “Roughing  it” with no bathrooms aboard might not be for everyone, but if you like camping, you need to try a felucca ride. I only wish we had gone for more nights.

It felt timeless.

This wasn’t much different than how people had traveled 5000 years ago on the Nile. 

We had time to read.

Time to Nap. 

Time to watch the ibises and egrets.

Time to watch the small-time farmers work their tiny plots of irrigated, amazingly fertile Nile valley land.

Time to chat about world politics with Ahmed, who was happily and ridiculously wrong about the odds of a revolution in Egypt happening anytime soon.

Time to wade or swim in the Nile. It is a silent river, but moving quite fast. I had to swim basically full speed to stay put when heading upriver.

Time to play cards, including teaching ourselves an Egyptian game called tarneeb.

Time for Hanna the science teacher to explain to Ahmed, the Columbians, and Scots about the cycles of the moon.

Time to just be.

Like the Nile.

See some more photos below.

Crew climbing the mast in the morning to set the sails.

Sunset.

The big mainsail.

Hanna explaining the phases of the moon to Pei Pei Maurizio, Jaime, and our guide Ahmed (I).

A few hundred meters from the river...on a sand dune that pretty much stretched across the continent.

Traditional farming next to the Nile, near Aswan.

Our National Television Debut

It only took 6 months of living in Bulgaria before we made it on national television! Our colleague and friend, Carolyn, has been writing an excellent and quite popular blog about her life here, and has managed to attract a regular audience of Bulgarian readers, including many she has never met. As part of a social experiment, Carolyn wanted to try, as best she could, to live within a typical budget of a Bulgarian for a month. She had a rather long online discussion on just what that meant exactly (her housing, like ours, is provided by the school, although maybe a 20-something single Bulgarian would still be living with parents, etc etc...you can read some of the posts on this here, here, and here), but she settled on a budget of 400 leva (about $280) for the month. That is almost double the minimum wage, but less than the roughly 600 leva she determined would be a normal salary for someone in her position. Carolyn recognized that there were definite limitations to the experiment, such as her already-purchased plane tickets for a weekend trip to Rome, her ability to put off major purchases for a month that she might not be able to do if this were her actual salary, and her lack of a true local's information network to save money, but she thought it would still be worthwhile. (My apologies Carolyn, if I'm butchering your experiment...it's my best attempt to summarize it.)

Apparently one of her regular readers was a producer at Zdravei, Bulgaria, an equivalent to the Today show on NBC or Good Morning America on ABC. He thought this was interesting, and asked Carolyn if he could record some of her regular life as she carried out this experiment. And so they did...they taped her making oatmeal, riding the bus, teaching class, ordering food in the cafeteria, and (this is where we come in) Balkan Dancing.

Shannon loves dancing. Shannon hates speaking in front of people. So you can imagine how excited she was to have Carolyn's film crew at our Balkan dancing lesson. Many of the Bulgarians there (mostly moms of our students, actually) also did not want to be on camera, and kept shoving me over to stand next to Carolyn. Things got more entertaining when after only about 10 minutes of the lesson the power went out on campus. No lights, no music. Whoops.
Luckily the light on a professional video camera is quite bright. We did the rest of the lesson with only the light from the camera. Stoyan (PE teacher and the Balkan dancing instructor) carried around his tiny netbook computer for barely-audible sound. It was all rather amusing. After the lesson, Shannon and I were slow to get out the door, and the camera crew cornered us.

"How much money do you spend in a month?"
"Er, I don't know really."
"C'mon, give us a number!"

Shannon and I tried to keep track of our expenses when we first got here, but the bookkeeping was inflated by lots of one-time moving-in type expenses (shoe rack, sheets, bookshelf, etc). We also found that we were spending a lot less than we were making, and found it hard to care enough to keep track of everything. I also was used to paying for most things in the US with a credit card, which gave me a quick and easy record of my expenses, so having to keep track of lots of little receipts for cash just seemed so, you know, annoyingly 20th century. :)

What I said on the video (I spend roughly 50 leva during the week, maybe another 70 leva on the weekend) is probably reasonably close, if I don't count weekends where we travel (and we haven't since New Year's) or do any major shopping (I had to replace some broken jackets last weekend, but I'm definitely not much of a shopper). I probably underestimated (I sort of forgot about the big weekly grocery shopping trips), so maybe my monthly average for day-to-day living is closer to 600 leva. I'm thankful that when your housing is provided and your utilities are cheap ($10 month for cable/internet, $15 a month for my cell phone), your salary goes a long way.

I didn't really mean to come off negative about Bulgaria, but when he asked me "What surprised you the most when you arrived here?" I had to answer with my first impressions. (Dogs and litter). Mostly I didn't really have any idea what to expect here, so the best answer is everything surprised me. I also was unprepared for how much harder teaching here would be than I remembered it being at Westridge, but I didn't feel like getting into that on camera.

At any rate, several of my friends found the video hilarious. Not so many of my students have seen the video (it airs at 7:30 am, when they are likely in transit to school), but they probably will soon with the magic of the internet. I really needed a haircut. Shannon really didn't want to be on camera. But my dancing could have been worse, and I think their stray dogs video clip was nice.

I'll try to get a Bulgarian to translate some of the audio for me, and I'll post it in the comments. You can turn off the YouTube "pop-up video" comments if you want. Go to the lower right corner of the video player, click the "up" arrow, and the top button says "Turn off annotations." The anchors of the show chit chat for a while on this clip, so you can skip ahead a minute or so if you want. This is video #4 of the 5 part series. Other clips can be seen here: Part 2, Part 3 (can't find part 1).

Enjoy!