Egypt 1990 - Part III - Nile

How I remember it, with some writer's licence. All photos from the trip.

As the second class train pulled out of Ramses Station, a Tom Selleck lookalike in a blue shirt strolled into the carriage and began shouting about six glass tumblers he was carrying on a tray. Apparently these were the must-have journey accessory, and he spent a couple of minutes walking up and down with his patter about them, waving them under my nose, before giving up and moving on.

The tumblers were the first of a series of items on offer, from food and drink to the day’s Qu’ran reading. What was not on offer was sleep. Until I was tired enough to sleep in my seat, I tried the vestibule floor. I had to keep moving for passing hawkers and watch I didn’t fall out of the flapping doors. When the night passed, I must have slept much of the day, not feeling much like eating the large supply of bread and greasy dough I had stocked up on from a bakery.

Aswan was like walking into an oven. It was 5pm when I arrived, hours late. Pleased to find the Bridge group again, I joined them in the street market. James was measured up for a suit by a cheerful tailor who called himself Clark Kent and Clark Gable. I had a pair of light cotton shorts made, and bought a straw hat for 50p. Both lasted me years. Aswan smelt cleaner than Cairo.

I never experienced the full midday heat of Aswan. There was a morning trip to the Nubian Elephantine Island, which looked properly postcard African with huts and everything. At 11am we sailed off to the south on a felucca, an ancient Egyptian boat hired by nine British backpackers with a crew of two.

Two days on a felucca with the Bridge group, on a slow cruise down the Nile. This is what I’d wanted: travelling companions, friends, after all those weeks on my own. But now I found I felt awkward, conscious of having too little to say, wondering what each of them thought of me. When we stopped to look at ancient ruins I mostly explored on my own. It was fun that way. I got to meet more Egyptians, the children who ran up to me for photos and the man in a jelebiya chatting with a friend while a falcon stood on his motorbike, in the town known for its a temple to the falcon god Horus.

But did I really fit in with this group, who had lived, worked, and travelled together for four months? Oh – and perhaps it didn’t help to recall (though it was mainly just something to say), during a sandstorm, that the last two times I’d sailed I had capsized the boat.

We were fine. One of the crew shimmied up the mast to bring the sail down.

And then there was the fact that I was ill.

Click for what happened next.

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