Notes from a Sandy Spot

It's fair to say that if we'd known the wake up call time for the Abu Simbel trip, we'd either have opted to pay the extra for the flight or possibly even given it a miss as we were both now rather tired and Anne had also fallen victim to the bug. This wasn't an early morning call - it was 2.45am - that's barely the middle of the night if you ask me!

The reason for the early call was that we had to travel in a police convoy across the western desert. Now I'm sure like me, that conjures up images of a row of coaches all neatly travelling along the road flanked by police ... but no, in Egypt a police convoy seems to equate to a formula 1 race with coach drivers overtaking each other at every opportunity and gradually spreading the convoy out so much that you couldn't see any vehicles ahead or behind on the narrow road that was visible all the way to the horizon. I'm not sure the army checkpoints we went through were so much for our safety, as to record our time!

The downside of travelling by convoy is of course that everyone tends to arrive at once - so inside the temples was actually pretty unplesantly crowded, but again, like every monument we saw in Egypt, the sheer scale of the architecture, the quantity and quality of the carvings and paintings and the realisation that while the Egyptians were constructing masterpieces like this, we in Europe were barely making mud huts, made it an impressive site to visit.

And as it turns out, those travelling by plane had a few problems with delays and so only had an hour and a bit on site compared to the two and a half hours we had - so maybe the 2 1/2 hour drive over the desert was not such a bad choice after all. Except of course that we then had another 2 1/2 hour journey back to the boat! And when I say the journey was across the desert - that's what I mean - over 2 hours on a single road stretching to the horizon with nothing but sand and rock to be seen. It was a real wake up to the fact that the country is largely uninhabitable and without irrigation from the Nile, there would be little here but camels and bedouins.

On the way back, the guide tried to persuade us to visit the High-Dam and stop off at the bank ... but we soon made our feelings clear and went straight back to the boat for a bit of a nap!

Suitably refreshed, we now had some free time to do some exploring of our own and to break away from the group.

First stop was the Egyptian market where we ran the gauntlet of traders insistent on trying to sell us something we didn't want. By now we were starting to get the hang of this a little bit, however it was still rather wearing and it was with some relief that we eventually emerged back on the corniche. Time for a bit of posh and so we found a calesh with a moderately fit looking horse and knocked the driver down from E£20 to E£5 for the journey to the Old Cataract Hotel of Agatha Christie fame.

To deter interlopers, getting past reception requires a minimum charge of E£85 (each), but once you realise that this is only £8.50, and it is deducted from your bill, it seems like a bargain for a slice of such luxury. We were escorted down to the Elephantine terrace overlooking the nile where we enjoyed an "oriental tea" of, er, tea and a triple stacked silver platter of pastries ... not many of which remained after we had finished with them!