Felucca Sail on the Nile

Trip Start Aug 11, 2005
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Trip End May 22, 2006


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Flag of Egypt  ,
Monday, August 22, 2005

After arising earlier this morning to alert the hotel that we were not going on the trip, I hopped back into bed. Later that morning, I rearranged our day (tried to cancel our bus tickets back to Luxor). Gerald made it out of bed at around 1pm and we headed off for our felucca ride.

We were lucky to have some wind (yesterday's felucca rides turned into motorboat rides due to no wind) and sailed along the Nile. The breeze in our faces was extremely welcomed. At one point, a little boy paddled a tiny dugout boat from behind a boulder in the river up to our felucca. When I say paddled, I mean that he had a piece of plastic the size of a large novel in each hand. He asked us where we were from and what language we spoke. Upon hearing that we spoke French, he burst into Alouette. He had the melody perfect and his words were pretty close (probably better than us English kids were) Alouette
Alouette
 . He continued with "Petit Navire" and finished with a song we didn't recognize. We congratulated him and clapped for him and gave him a little money. Such a cutie.

As we were leaving, Gerald passed the captain a tip. A tip that our tour agent said would be more than fair. The captain got quite upset and asked for double. We said no and then he started screaming at us saying that he didn't get a wage and only worked on tips. Yeah right. No matter what we said, he kept at it. We finally just walked away, but he followed us up the dock. Yikes. We walked pretty fast and yet he passed us and went to sit with his other captain friends along the cornice. We were more than a little nervous walking by these 5 guys who are extremely persistent usually. Luckily, we walked right past them. Hey, at least they didn't bug us to go on a felucca ride!

We hit an internet café and were in the process of emailing to everyone when the power went out. It could be worse. We could have been the group of English girls who had their bank card stuck in the bank machine outside!

We grabbed takeout Koshary and headed up to our room. Gerald ate for the first time that day (about 6 spoonfuls). Again, it was an early night as we had to get up at 2:30am! Just like Groundhog Day? Luckily not. We slept peacefully until 2:30.
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