Day 17 - Aswan - Meet the Nubians

We explored Aswan yesterday as planned, except we didn't get to do any filming at the dam because of time constraints. First stop was Philae Temple, an ancient temple found submerged in water and moved piece by piece onto dry land. We reached it by boat.

Temple on the water

Again, not much time to get photos of the interesting details

Back on the boat

After the temple we sailed up the Nile on a boat with a Nubian crew. The Nubians originally came from Sudan but have resided in Egypt for a long time, and nowadays consider themselves Egyptian but still maintain their own cultural traditions. These include music, food and language, so we got a great sound recording of some of their songs.

Nubian folk music on the boat

We sailed to a really high mountain with a panoramic view of Aswan and the Nile, complete with a crazy old geezer at the top who yelled at us and tried to prod our guide off the edge with a fence post.

I think he was annoyed he didn't get to show us around

That's the Nile, that is

Blue turning to green turning to yellow

Landscape with geek

We spent a lot of time on the mountain filming and talking to a couple of Dutch travellers, then got back on the boat and sailed on to the Aswan Botanical Gardens, which looked like this:

Totally botanical

From there we took the boat to a traditional Nubian restaurant and had bread, rice and chicken in a really tasty sauce similar to ratatouille (thanks spellcheck).

The restaurant was also a museum

The Nile was very calm that night and there wasn't much wind, so it took us quite a while to sail back to the Isis Hotel in almost complete darkness. It made me feel like an ancient Egyptian returning home after a hard day's work. Except I was going back to a hotel room with running water and electric lights.

It was about 10:30pm when we got back. We got up at 3:30 to get a plane to Cairo (feels like home now) which turned out to be delayed by 3 hours. I've had this afternoon off and tomorrow morning at 6 we're leaving in the car for Sharm El-Sheikh. After that it's Mount Sinai then back to Cairo for 8 days to interview people and visit the Pyramids, then that's it. We're just over half way through the trip now...