Edfu was our first stop as we made our way south towards Aswan. Here was where we met our new guide. He spoke English better than our first guide, but overall was not much more competent then the first guide. The temple is located at some distance from the port, so row after row of caleche drivers (horse and carriage) line up to ferry the tourists to the temple.

When Wendy wanted to take photos of the temple in the setting sun before she lost the light, guide#2 got upset “You give me your time first, then I give you my time”. In other words, I want to do my piece, say my spiel, then go off and have a coffee with my buddies in town while you wander around”. So, we lost our light and good photos because we were too Canadian about it and didn’t want to make a fuss.

The temple is very impressive and very well preserved. He did have lots of interesting stories to tell us – we’re not sure how many of them were accurate, but at least they were entertaining. Frequently, both our guide books disagreed with what he was saying – and we heard many other tour guides with different explanations for the same thing…

The next stop was Kom Ombo. Kom Ombo is located on a bend in the river Nile about 50 km north of Aswan. The temple is dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and the falcon god Haroeris (Horus the Elder).  This temple is not in as good condition as Edfu, but it’s also very different and beautiful in its own way.

It’s a double temple built during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.   The temple was started by Ptolemy VI Philometor (180-145 B.C) at the beginning of his reign and added to by other Ptolemys, most notably Ptolemy XIII (47-44 B.C.), who built the inner and outer hypostyle halls.  Sadly much of the temple has been destroyed by the Nile, earthquakes, and later builders who used the stones for other projects. Some of the reliefs inside were defaced by Copts who once used the temple as a church.

The big negative, however, is that everyone arrives to visit this temple at once, so it’s crawling with people – a photographer’s nightmare. I’m sure the cruise boats come and go in batches (according to the schedule of the locks), so visiting Kom Ombo from Aswan by bus, or on a felucca, would be a much better choice and would let you more truly enjoy it. In addition, since it’s only tour groups they’re moving as one big mass.  As a couple, it was very difficult to maneuver around them. There are a couple of sights (the calendar, the medical instruments) that everyone must see, so it sort of forms a line up of tour groups to see the friezes.

Part of the explanation we got of the medical instruments was that one of the things we were looking at was a bag of ice on someone’s head. We thought he was joking at first, but actually he was completely serious. He just had no clue.

Early the next morning, we left for Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel borders Sudan, and there is heavy security. Tourists from Aswan are forced to join an early morning motor convoy to the site, several sleepy hours away. All manner of tour buses jostle for position as they race to the site. Once there, we only had an hour and a half to enjoy the site.

Since all the tourists from Aswan arrive at the same time, it’s a zoo. There are long lines to get into the tombs, and security guards shouting at you if you dawdle. It’s very difficult to get any good photos since the site is crawling with people. It’s still beautiful, however, and we did enjoy it.  The other way to get there is to take a cruise boat and make a couple of days of it. I’m sure these lucky people have the site to themselves and can enjoy it at a much less hurried pace.

There wasn’t really enough time to see the sites, but we had to rush back before our mini-van left. On the way back, we first stopped at the High Dam, which is definitely not worth visiting. It’s a not-very-impressive dam in a not-very-impressive location. However, it was still a lot more impressive than the next site, the Unfinished Obelisk, which as far as we could tell, was just a hunk of big rock lying on the ground with streams of tourists paying $6 US apiece to see it!

Finally, we headed to Philae Temple, the only side-trip that was worthwhile. Our mini-bus group joined together to get a good price on the ferry to the island ($1 apiece). The temple is very well preserved, and there are lots of good photo opportunities. (including an interesting sign outside the cafe!)

The mini-bus dropped us off at the hotel where Hamis Travel had arranged to leave our stuff for the day (finally, something that worked well!). We spent some more time exploring Aswan, and then got the evening train back up north to Luxor.

We arrived in Luxor exhausted. Hamis Travel had set us up at the Arabesque Hotel, and it was pretty bad. Purportedly 3 stars, those were the worst stars we’ve ever seen. If we had not been as tired as we were, we would have switched. We didn’t pay for it (Hamis Travel gave us the voucher for free, but they originally tried to charge us US $30) and it was still too expensive. It was nasty. The linens had holes and dirt marks; the shower was explicitly constructed to inflict maximum head injuries on anyone above 5 feet tall, the street noise was very bad, etc. Fortunately it was only one night and we travel with our own towels.

Kom Ombo to Aswan isn’t a very long trip. At this point, we’d had it with our tour guide. We were supposed to be taken to the Unfinished Obelisk, the High Dam, and Philae Temple. However, these three things could be easily combined with a trip to Abu Simbel which we knew we were doing the next day.  We unfortunately had already pre-arranged a trip to Abu Simbel with Hamis Travel (which didn’t include these 3 side-trips). We took a flier on being able to re-arrange things, and fired our second tour guide and were out on our own once again. 

We called Hamis Travel, and fortunately we were able to re-arrange our day trip to Abu Simbel to include these 3 side trips. So, we had the rest of the day to ourselves. We wandered down the Corniche and took a local ferry (where finally we were the only tourists) across to the Tombs of the Nobles, up on a hill overlooking the town. Although nowhere near as impressive as the tombs that we saw on the West Bank in Luxor, we were the only ones (apart from a not pushy guard).  Ian climbed the hill for a beautiful look over the town and surrounding countryside.

Back down on the island, we wandered through the Nubian Village. There are two different Nubian Villages that can be visited around Aswan. It sounds like the main one has been turned into a tourist trap. This one was a little more ‘genuine’. Apart from one small tour group we saw ahead of us, we were only with the locals. Although most of our encounters with locals were friendly, at one point some women were shouting something at us and we decided to clear out and head back to Aswan.

We spent the rest of the day shopping in the market, and headed back to the cruise boat for our final night/dinner on board.

Vaguely re-assured, we headed out that evening by ourselves to the Karnak Temple sound and light show. There are various shows throughout the evening in various languages – although to be honest, the language was sort of irrelevant. As is typical for sound and light shows, the narration was over the top and vaguely annoying.

During the first part of the show, the group moves en masse together through the temple, while they light up various parts, overly dramatic music plays, and voices drone on in stuffy English accents about stuff that doesn’t make sense. After about 30 minutes of this, they herded us past some snack stands to some bleachers overlooking the ’sacred’ lake, where we could get an overview of the Temple complex. The rest of the show would take place there.

They lit up various parts of the temple, and the overly dramatic music and narration went on. And on. Finally after about 30 minutes of this (We pity the poor family of the guy in front of us who would have to watch his home video of the *whole thing*) people started getting fed up and leaving, us included. The first part of the show (walking through the temple at night) was interesting, but they really could have ended it there.

Upon returning to the boat, we were happy to see other passengers on board. It was mostly older Europeans, but we found some younger people to hang out with. The meals (buffet style) were good, but there was not much in the way of vegetarian food. In addition, despite the lightly filled boat, there was often not enough food to go around. We learned quickly to load up on deserts as soon as we got there, or there wouldn’t be anything left. For some reason, the Europeans ate quickly. There goes that stereotype.

Returning to our room, we heard a knock at the door. What happened next was a very uncomfortable moment. It was our tour guide, asking us why he’d been fired. He tried to blame it on *our* lack of English – because we often switched into French so he couldn’t understand us!  English is our first language, so usually we don’t have too much trouble speaking it! He told us he’d be getting off the boat, and didn’t know if there’d be a replacement. So for the next day, we had no clue if we’d even have a tour guide. We arranged to tag along with other people’s groups if nothing happened.

Getting through the locks at Esna was like watching grass grow – all the boats leave Luxor heading south on Monday, and so there’s inevitably a huge bottleneck at the locks. So in a 4 day cruise, it’s not unusual to spend a quarter of it sitting in an industrial area waiting to get through the locks.  We sat around in an industrial area for almost 24 hours waiting for our "turn" to pass through the locks. Not really how we’d imagined spending our vacation.  Apparently it’s been as bad as having to wait 48 hours to get through.

The weather on the boat in December was brisk. There was a couple of times where it warmed up enough that we could have swum in the micro-sized swimming pool on the top sun-deck, but we passed. We didn’t see anyone else in the pool either. Otherwise, it was just a lot of playing cards, reading books, and watching the scenery go by – some of it pretty, some not so much so.

The interesting thing about watching the Nile go by is the realization of just how much life the river gives. There is always a strip of land on either side where there is life, towns, fields, but beyond that.. nothing. Desert, mountains, nothing.

The next day the horror of our cruise began. We were surprised that the guide was supposed to pick us up only at 10 – quite late, considering that this was to be our only day to actually see Luxor. He took us to the boat, which was moored not alongside all the other beautiful boats we had seen on our previous evening walk, but in a deserted area just outside the main strip of the Corniche, with trash strewn about everywhere.

The boat was deserted except for a guy manning the reception. We were getting more and more apprehensive of what we were in for. We asked to see the room, and it was acceptable (although on the first floor, so our window was only a porthole). The reception staff wanted to hold our passports – alarm bells immediately went off. Every guidebook we’ve read told us that under no circumstance should you let your passport out of your sight. They showed us the pile of passports from other passengers (where were they?), and with a big leap of faith we handed ours over.

Next we were passed off from the guy who met us on the boat to our real tour guide, who barely spoke English. We established (mostly through gestures) that the other passengers had left at 7:30am from the boat, as we should have, but we were late. Explaining to him that we were told to only be ready to go at 10am didn’t help. We told him that we did NOT want to miss out on any of our guided tours because of Hamis Travel’s mistake, and that he was to skip the lunch and go on with the tour. We kept asking him when we’d join the other tour group – we thought he was just our temporary guide until we caught up with the rest of the group. He wasn’t able to answer that question.

Our guided tours of the sites we were seeing was a sad joke. He had very, very little information, and what he did have was mostly wrong. So typically he would give us his spiel for 5 minutes, then tell us "ok, free time now, meet in 30 minutes at car". Our supposed tour of Karnak Temple was a little longer – 10 minutes – but all other tour guides were at least 1 hour. He refused to walk out of the shade, and kept complaining about how hot it was, while still wearing an enormous sweater… Fortunately, we had our Lonely Planet and Let’s Go guidebooks with us, so we ended up self-guiding. Then he would complain when we were back that we took too long, and that it was so hot. Unbelievable. He would complain every time Wendy tried to take a picture because she wasn’t listening to him. Not that there was much to listen to – either seriously every Pharaoh who ever made a statue of himself in Egypt was Ramses II, or our guide was sadly misinformed.

We finally established that we were never to join another group – he was our tour guide for the entire cruise. When we got back to the boat, we called Hamis Travel to complain. Their Luxor rep of course wanted to meet us in person to discuss (this seems to be a cultural difference – all discussions must take place in person, and not on the phone!). So we met him on a street corner, and he told us he would take care of it.

The bus to Luxor was half an hour late. We were lucky to get seats. You can’t buy seats in advance (as it’s not an originating point), so there’s just a mad scramble to get seats as the bus pulls in. A family we met on the bus told us that they hadn’t been able to get on the bus the previous day as it was full. Take *that*, schedule!  The bus was in pretty rough shape. Ian’s seat had no back spring, so if he leaned back it would fall over on the person behind him. The front door was broken, and the back door had to be forced closed with an iron bar while the bus was moving.

The scenery to Luxor is more desert, but still pretty. When we booked our hotel in Luxor, the hotel owner had warned us that when we step off the bus, hotel touts will swarm us, try to tell us his hotel is full, or closed, or burned down last night, etc. It wasn’t that bad, we shook them off fairly easily. Rather than deal with more dishonest cabbies, we walked the half hour to the Happy Land Hotel.

We were disappointed to hear that the rate he had quoted us was "per person" – so double what we thought it was. Our guess is that he doubled our rate because A) We looked tired and didn’t look like we were going to change hotels B) We had told him we were going to go on a cruise the next day (not booked through him). A lot of the budget hotels make most of their money off arranging tours for their guests, and sell them pretty hard. He was right, we couldn’t be bothered to fight. He tried to also charge us for the free breakfast, but we stood our ground on this one and got our crappy free breakfast.

However, the room was immaculate – the cleanest room we stayed in in Egypt (apart from the Sheraton). Make sure if you stay here though to ask for a room on the upper floors – our room was right beside reception and there was lots of reception and street noise. We headed outside and walked down the Corniche (the road that straddles the Nile) to Luxor Temple. We took some good evening photos, and met Gord from www.waywardtraveller.org. Always good to meet another traveler on the road, especially a fellow Canuck!

We ate at the Amoun Restaurant, which is a tourist restaurant 5 minutes away from the Luxor Temple. It’s an outdoor restaurant, service was fast, and the food was good.

The Sheraton had arranged a taxi for us to get to the fast shuttle boat to Hurghada. We had to go through security as if we were getting on a plane. The boat, run by International Fast Ferries(http://www.internationalfastferries.com/html/index.htmll) was modern and nice, but it rocked a fair bit. Ian was feeling pretty green by the end of the trip, and several other people on the boat were sick.

Our hotel in Hurghada, the 4-room Sunshine Hotel, was back to our usual fare. (I.e. a complete dive). If we’d been staying more than one night, we would have switched. The guy who ran it was nice, but it just wasn’t clean, the beds were literally falling apart, and the bathrooms were scary (we don’t take showers in bathrooms where there is bare wiring exposed). Our guidebook described the hotel as "homey". We don’t want to see the author’s home.

There are no direct buses to Sharm-el-Sheikh from Mount Sinai- it’s necessary to go through Dahab. The one bus for Dahab leaves at 1pm. We took a taxi down from the Monastery (which doesn’t accept credit cards by the way, but does accept US$), and instead of taking 2 buses to Sharm, we arrived at a price of $40 US for him to take us directly. It’s about a 3.5 hour drive.

He dropped us off in downtown Sharm-el-Sheikh, where we picked up the most expensive groceries we bought in Egypt, got more cash (dispensed in 100 LE notes, the first time we’d seen them. Tourists in Sharm have MONEY), and headed for the Sheraton. We’d managed to arrange a price of $50 US a night on the net (which turned into $80 unfortunately, Ian had missed that the $50 was a ‘one person’ price for a ‘double’ room) .

The taxi driver (actually a ‘mini-bus’ driver) told us it would be 10 LE to get to the hotel, direct. Then he started picking up other people on the way. A huge shouting fight ensued, and finally we won (screaming at people always seemed to work in Egypt – we heard plenty of screaming matches between Egyptians), and he continued directly with no other passengers.

The Sheraton Sharm-el-Sheikh is a beautiful hotel. We were staying in the hotel, not the resort, so we can’t comment on that. The building, the grounds, everything is beautiful. There is a constant parade of cleaning staff. The pool is beautiful, complete with a swim-up bar. The beach isn’t really soft sand, but there are lots of umbrellas to go around. It’s not really a swimming beach, as there’s lots of coral.

The following day, we headed out on a somewhat badly organized snorkeling trip to Ras Muhammad National Park. Although the Sheraton gave the impression it was their own trip, in fact they were selling it for the Hilton, who was selling it for "Sun and Fun". After we were passed between the different parties, we were able to rent snorkels, masks, fins, and a wetsuit for Wendy. The boat was clean, big, and modern. Lunch was delicious. The instructors/snorkel leaders were organised, and we felt very safe in the water. Ironically, one of the other Sheraton guests told us that the coral right off the Sheraton’s beach was just as nice as what we saw on the boat. But hey – how could we have known?  By the time we got back to the Sheraton, the sun was setting.

Dinner that night was room service.   Because of the holiday, the only vegetarian friendly restaurant was serving a special "fixed price" $110 US menu. Uh, no thanks. Room service was very good though, and cost $25 US for both of us to eat!

The following day was our only day to enjoy the hotel’s amenities. Unfortunately, it clouded over around noon and didn’t clear up till we had to leave.

We took the Upper Egypt Company direct bus to St Catherine’s. It’s a 9 hour trip. It took us about 2 hours to get out of Cairo, owing in large part to a 1 hour stop at another bus station on the edge of the city. No one seemed to be in a hurry.

Heavily distorted Islamic prayers blasted down on us from the bus’ sound system for about half the trip. The bus was in pretty shoddy shape – very dirty and cramped. On another bus we took, the front door was busted so everyone had to go through the back door. However, the motor to open that door was busted too, so they’d rigged up some metal stick to hold it closed that they had to keep replacing every time someone got off. On the same trip, Ian’s seat was busted and he couldn’t lean back without reclining all the way and crushing the guy behind him.

The trip to St. Catherine’s is pretty, especially at the end when getting into the Sinai desert. We watched the sun set over the Suez River. (Unfortunately, crossing the Suez is rather boring, as it’s just an underground tunnel). When we finally got to St Katherine’s, the fight began with taxi drivers to get a reasonable price to be taken up to the Monastery, a couple of miles away. There were two other backpackers, and, fortunately, one of the employees of the monastery was also looking for a ride. With his help we managed to pay 50 cents apiece to take us up to the Monastery.

The Monastery is the closest hotel to the trails up Mount Sinai, and is a comfortable good option. It cost us $60 US a night, but that included dinner and breakfast. Dinner was very good, although the meat (as everywhere in Egypt) wasn’t that great. The vegetarian option was the same meal minus the meat.

The rooms at monastery were very clean, and come with a portable electric heater, and hot water that takes half an hour to warm up. Pretty good amenities considering the location! Even with our heater working all night, the room never got above 15 degrees C (about 60 F).

The popular option to see the mountain is to climb up at 3am/4am to watch the sunrise. Not for us – we’re on vacation! The crowds marching past our room woke us up, but we woke up at a leisurely 8am to meet them as they were coming down for breakfast.

We visited the Monastery first, as it closes at 11am. We saw the descendant of the burning bush, and the Church of St. Catherine. It was the only tourist site we saw in all of Egypt which didn’t charge admission. There’s also a little museum on site, which is worth visiting, but there was a small admission fee for this.

Afterwards, we took all day to climb the mountain and back. There are two routes: the steps of redemption, and the camel path. The steps are a better option when going down. The camel route up can be a little confusing at times, but if you always follow the path of garbage cans and path-side vendor stalls (which are open all day, not just for the sunrise hikers) you’ll be in good shape.  Don’t get confused by an early path off to the left up another mountain. Mount Sinai actually can’t be seen until almost the end of the hike.

The path-side vendors sell water at a not too ridiculous price – $2US for a large bottle of water at the top actually seemed pretty reasonable. Camels ply the path almost all the way to the top, for those feeling lazy. The remaining 30-45 minute hike up to the top is what would have concerned us during a sunrise hike. It’s a pretty steep scramble up the trail, and we can only imagine it wouldn’t be too fun with a huge convoy of tourists jockeying for position to see the sunrise. At the top, there is a locked Greek Orthodox Chapel and a great panorama. During the day, we had the top to ourselves – very peaceful.

The steps down aren’t really steps in most places, more of a series of strategically placed rocks. It’s certainly not something that we would want to hike in the dark, or with small children. By the time we got back, we decided to stay another night instead of continuing to Sharm-el-Sheikh.

We arranged a 4 night cruise through Hamis Travel in Cairo. They came recommended by the Lonely Planet. It was a planning disaster. After several email exchanges (with long periods of silence from them), we had arranged a price of $500 US for a 4 night cruise (per person). We were told the name of the boat and a very sketchy itinerary. We also had them arrange a trip to Abu Simbel (a day trip from Aswan), and a sleeper train from Luxor back to Cairo. When it came to payment, they wanted a bank draft or cash US$ payable on arrival. Not wanting to carry $1000US on us or pay exorbitant bank draft fees, we asked about credit card payment – 5% surcharge, which was manageable, but we’d have to do it in person when we arrived.

So, we found the office right by the main train station (Ramses). It turns out, NOTHING had been booked. We had thought that we would spend 10 minutes paying by credit card, everything would be ready, and we’d be on our way. It took 3 hours. The Dutch owner Anny Abou Shaady was incredibly slow doing anything (owing to her inability to do anything herself, she had to keep calling the room next door and getting her employees to do all the work). The train had not been arranged – and in fact she didn’t even know the train times. She had no further information on the cruise (we wanted to nail down exactly what we’d be seeing). In fact, the cruise voucher she finally produced was for a different boat altogether – and in fact, wasn’t even the one we ended up on! The whole thing was a nightmare. At that point, we should have walked away from it, but I really wanted to do a Nile Cruise. I had no idea how much of a mistake it would end up being.

For more information on how this cruise turned out, please see our other blog posts:

Aswan Tour

Karnak Tour

Nile Cruise