After four hours of flight from Taipei to Bangkok, waiting and transferring, and another nine hours of flying, when I arrived in Cairo, it was 5 in the morning.
Sounds easy! If you think flying shouldn’t be too hard for me since I am a frequent traveler, then there’s a big misunderstanding here. I do have a problem that I don’t want to whine about since there’s not much you can do. And that is I have always suffered from jet lag. It always takes 10 days or 2 weeks for me to be over the pain. This time when I arrived in Cairo, the tiredness from the travel plus jet lag, I supposed I would be exhausted so I made a reservation of an airport pickup and 3-day hotel stay. And that was the only preparation I did for the 2-month trip. Other than that, I was counting on Lonely Planet: Middle East in my backpack.
Anyways. Ever since I got into the budget hotel, the weird hotel owner had kept staring at me. (I was new so I didn’t realize how much attention a single female traveler would get in the Middle East. Of course, later on I learned.)He made me very uncomfortable. In the meanwhile, I noticed that there was another guy sitting on the couch beside. Due to the dark lighting, I couldn’t tell whether this guy was a local or guest.
Just as the owner was keeping his eyes on me and I was feeling creepy, the guy in the couch asked me if I wanted to buy a 5-day-4-night package to go down south to Aswan with him. (Right now I knew he was a guest for his North American accent.), leaving 10pm the same night.
(Camille thought: Holly smokes. That’s tonight 10pm. But I just arrived.)
I asked him to give me some moment that I would get back to him after taking a shower. So during the shower, I thought about how Lonely Planet said. From Luxor to Aswan, there was no way you could travel independently. It is compulsory for all travelers to join the convoy. While I couldn’t travel alone, I might as well join this guy’s invitation and go straight down to the south.
OK. I said to him, a Californian.
I couldn’t believe that I was leaving Cairo the same day I arrived. What should I do from 7am to 10pm?
My future travel partner A asked me if I would like to go to Giza with him and another traveler from Germany. The private taxi was 165 Egyptian pounds so that we could share.
(Come on. Give me a break! As a middle-aged woman, I am so tired that I am not going to do anything too physically demanding. OK?)
I said I just wanted to do something simple for the day. (Oh well, I have two months. Why rush?) So I would just meet him that night.
So that was the story. The same day I arrived in Cairo, I took off to Aswan. And the train we took was a slow train but we didn’t know that.
(Kids playing on the train.)
(Cute little girl.Sorry for the blurriness. The train was moving. So did the kids.)
The stateroom was for six and there were exact six of us there. I couldn’t lean to my left, nor could I tilt to the right. All suddenly I remembered that last time I was in such a difficult situation was on the train from Agra to Varanasi, India, which lasted for 17 hours. As the time passed, it was 12 and all the others were gone. Finally A and I had the whole room for ourselves so I got up to stretch and then laid down on the couch. (See the first photo. I was just pretending that I was asleep. Actually the whole body of mine ached so much.)
Weird enough. The owner of our hotel, also the guy we bought the package from, told us that we would be there at 8 the next morning, but we kept wondering. We tried to ask around. But people either didn’t speak English or told us different stories. By now we had figured that Middle Eastern people are just like Indians. Their conception toward time is so different from us. When they say the time, it doesn’t really mean anything. By the time we got to Aswan (Congratualtions!!!), it was 2pm instead of 8am, which we were told. And the train ride was 16 hours.
Someone holding a sign with A’s name on it rushed us to start the sightseeing tour right from the platform. I felt like puking. Alas! I had never been able to sleep well for the past 48 hours. Right now I couldn’t tell whether the weariness was due to the travel or jet lag. Somehow, I thought it was kind of a smart way to deal with jet lag.
Note: About convoy. Ever since the 1997 massacre at the temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor which caused 69 deaths, Egyptian government decided this convoy system to protect their tourists.
