Sleeping on the boat wasn’t as bad as I expected. It helped that (1) I had unintentionally guilted the owner into a free upgrade (for which I felt slightly guilty for most of the trip) and (2) I had taken anti-anxiety medication the night before and (3) I sleep with podcasts on regularly so if there were any strange sounds, I wasn’t going to hear them anyway. The Nile is still and beautiful first thing in the morning. It felt like we had the river to ourselves for most of the trip, aside from a few of the larger boats (and the S.S. Sudan) passing us a handful of times over the course of five days, I didn’t feel like we were on the tourist track at all. I suspect Nour el Nil had done a good job timing our arrival places to make sure we avoided any other boats, which certainly helped.
Our first official cruise stop had actually happened the night before, when everyone from the two boats (about 15-16 of us total) walked into the village and visited a local’s house. I didn’t catch exactly what he did, but I think he was either the official or self-ordained leader of the village. While his home would be humble by American standards, it was fairly easy to see based on our surroundings that this guy was well-off. He had a pretty great set-up– a small goat pen near the front gate, and a big fenced-in front yard with plenty of room to smoke and joke. The house had a large kitchen (including at least two massive refrigerators) and two or three bedrooms. We didn’t linger too long, because it felt obtrusive. Though knowing a bit about Middle Eastern hospitality, I suspect our hosts would never have seen it that way. They served us mint tea and delicious beignet-like things. I ate three.
The next morning, we were greeted by some curious tweens/young teens and their donkeys. The donkeys were pretty tolerant of the boys scrambling on and off their backs…until they weren’t, and we all laughed when one decided he’d had enough and scrambled away from his boy.
At some point, we took a wrong turn and the group got all stopped up while we figured out what to do. Here is a shot of our entire group, with some of the boat crew and the donkey boys bringing up the rear. I love that this guy smiled for my photo, it’s so perfect. He was from Calabasas and was taking a year off to travel around the world with his wife and two sons. This was just the start of their trip! Not sure how they were going to top Egypt, but I’m sure they’re out there having fun somewhere. Lucky family! Anyway, after this shot was taken our group split in half since some people didn’t want to walk over a narrow log across a Nile canal of unknown depth. I went for the log, personally, but only because I am lazy AF.
Someone was clearly a little obsessed with the donkeys…they’re lucky I had my fill of riding in Cairo, otherwise I would have gotten on and challenged those boys to a race.
True story: the greatest danger I felt our whole trip in Egypt was when we had to walk fast this fella. He looks placid in still form but in real life he was none too pleased that a gaggle of tourists were walking on his path. I scurried by but not before shooting a picture for posterity.
After this informal visit to the Egyptian zoo, we arrived at our actual sightseeing destination:
