Ziggy
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
199
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
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Aswan,
Nile River Valley,
Egypt
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Ziggy tells us the deal: his boat's leaving tomorrow on a two day, two night trip that will take us to Kom Ombo and then on to Luxor. It's really not a bad deal, especially at 120 pounds including sleeping arrangements and meals. We go to see the boat.
Well, at least there's a boat, I think to myself. Still, I can't help thinking that there's nothing stopping him from taking our deposit and running with it. Egypt has made me yet more untrusting than I was before. That is to say, I've gone from trusting no one to trusting absolutely no one. Travis says I need to have a little trust sometimes. We book the boat.
After a completely ridiculous morning involving breaking out of our hotel room, a three hour convoy, a tourist site swarming with tourists, another three hour convoy during which I realize we'll be late for the boat, and a change in travel plans, we arrive at the corniche.
da nile
Just about every guy with a felucca is waving us down to his boat. After a second we decide we can't find Ziggy and I'll go get us some lunch. We're early, so we're not too worried that Ziggy's not around. While I'm getting us lunch, Travis is accosted by a man who says that Ziggy's gone and we should go with him, even though we'd already paid Ziggy. Then Travis meets some old guy who gets Ziggy on the phone. Travis talks to Ziggy and is told to wait, Ziggy will come back. I come back with lunch and offer to go down to the corniche to see if I can see anything, since I still don't trust anyone and there's still some guy trying to talk Travis into going on his felucca. One of the boatmen points to a felucca coming from behind a cruise ship and says that's Ziggy. As I go to get Travis I find him letting some random old guy carry my bags. At first I am way not happy about this, but old guy goes, "Ziggy son." So I let Ziggy's dad carry my bags and wait for Ziggy to return. We climb on the felucca with our lunch and meet six other men. I will be the only female on the boat. What's new? Two of the guys are Aussie brothers, Josh and Alex. Three are Czech, two brothers, Charlie and Vladimir, with tagalong Lukas. The last is a solo German, Daniel, who has no problem getting high with the rest of the crew. All in all we get along famously and entertain ourselves quite admirably for the two days we're on the boat together.
Once Travis and I are on the boat we begin tacking back and forth up the Nile, taking in the peaceful scenery.
pretty water
Before long we're past sight of any town or buildings. It's just the river and the date palms and our little felucca. Before we moor for dinner and sleeping, Ziggy tells Josh and Alex that they can't be on the boat for one night, they'll have to stay for two. There's no bus, or something like that. This creates some tension for the rest of the trip that definitely gets to me. I don't know if it bothers Travis at all. We both agree, however, that Ziggy is skeezy, regardless of any possible dirty tricks, and this also bothers me, though I can generally avoid Ziggy's machismo.
For the night we're parked next to an open sandy area, and across the river are some date palms. It's very quiet and calm. Travis and I wake up freezing in the morning, only to find that somehow everyone else got blankets. I guess they thought that my sarongs would suffice to keep out the cold. They were mistaken. We vowed to get ourselves a blanket the next night.
In the morning we ferried a family across the river, where we met a donkey. I fed it some tea and some water, and then a little boy came down and started hitting it. I'll never understand why people are cruel to their animals and why little children aren't stopped from throwing rocks and sticks at animals. I turned my back on the little boy, thinking that he'd probably stop if there wasn't anyone to watch his antics. Everyone else looked back out to the river, too, and he did stop hitting the donkey.
After breakfast we made our way a little farther up the river.
tied up for the evening
We sailed for a couple hours until lunch, then sailed for an hour more up to a swimming hole, where we stayed nearly all day. Essentially we'd done a full day's sailing in two days and were wasting time. There wasn't quite enough shade on the boat, so we were all crammed into one corner or another. Card games filled the afternoon, especially Sevens, which Travis and I learned on the Inca Trail and which makes for an excellent game for a large group of people. There were about twenty kids and a few moms at the swimming hole, making noise and getting wet. Every now and then an old man would come in on his donkey and chat and then leave again. I think maybe he lived just up the way. A couple of the kids seemed to really like me, probably because I was a girl and the only white person to get off our boat. We had the usual, slightly stilted conversation that comes along with limited English. Our crew brought us wild mangoes, which were good but slightly odd tasting.
For the evening we went back down the river because Ziggy didn't have a license to dock right up at Kom Ombo. Travis was slightly disappointed about this. Dinner was spilled, so Ziggy went into a Nubian village to get us some fried chicken. While waiting pretty much everyone took a nap, and when he came back it was late, and we were supposed to have an early morning, but still we had to engage in the drumming and Nubian coffee experience Ziggy had planned for us. Except for the fact that we were all tired and I was on edge because of the Australians, the evening was pretty cool.
the banks
We had a little fire and drumming and dancing on the bank of the Nile. And we must not forget the thimble of Javana Nubian coffee prepared just for us to try, and which we were then asked to pay five pounds for. Travis gave them two and they seemed satisfied. I'd already crawled into bed. To maximize sleeping space I'd lain in a different place than I had the night before. Travis lay next to me and we shared a blanket but each had our own pillow. Then in the middle of the night I wind up with Ziggy laying next to me and asking for my pillow, which I give him. Then I don't have a pillow, so he's like, let's share. First off, I don't want to be next to a skeezy man at all. I don't trust men, and avoid like the plague anyone skeezy or otherwise undesirable. Ziggy put his hand on my arm. Forget this, I said to myself, and transferred myself to Travis's pillow. This made for a very grumpy Travis, because my transferring led him to be jammed up against the gunwhale with no pillow and to add insult to injury another of the crew had appropriated the bottom of our blanket and slept with his head jammed in Travis's butt. All in all it was not a good night and we were glad we'd be off the boat in the morning.
Travis and I always expect unexpected charges when we sign up for tours. In this case we had a taxi that drove us 16 km up to Kom Ombo where we would catch our tourist bus. Breakfast was slow in coming and Ziggy pretty much refused to wake up, so we didn't get to go to Kom Ombo temples at all. There was a revolt against paying the taxi driver, led by angry Australians and seconded by team German. The poor Czechs didn't know what to do, so I said Travis and I always expected hidden charges and we'd paid the driver, and Lukas felt better about that and paid the driver, too.
We climbed onto the bus and waited for the convoy to make its way to Edfu. At least we'd get to see ONE temple after all of this.
To be honest, without the tension of the Aussies and the skeeziness of Ziggy, the trip was an excellent deal. We'd paid about $40 for two nights accomodation and two days of meals, and it got us to Luxor.
Erin
