Felucca

The photo is of Ali Khan's tomb taken through the rigging of our felucca at Aswan.   The guide woke me up at 12.30 the night before to tell me to put my clock forward (I had already done it) and to get the 10.15 ferry from the hotel and he would meet me at 10.30 to take me on our felucca ride.  When I got on the ferry in good time, a young couple already on board looked familiar.  It turned out that Marcelle and Jez were also from Malta and were going on the same trip with me.  

The felucca we went on was one of the smaller, older boats and it was great to watch how the young man handled it.  At first there wasn't much wind, but once we cut across the river, we were heading down with the current and the wind behind so we went at quite a clip.  We passed the botanic gardens set up by Lord Kitchener and Elephantine Island where they used to have camel and elephant markets.  It was magic.  Lots of other feluccas to watch and people enjoying the Nile river.  Some people were swimming and I wondered about the increase in the snail-borne disease my brother had told me had increased in prevalence since the building of the high dam.

We rounded an island a little upstream from the hotel we had stayed at and then the boatman put the centre board down as we started to tack up river against the current.  The wind had come up nicely so it was still easy sailing.  We passed the Old Cataract hotel where Agatha Christie had stayed when she was writing Death on the Nile.

The boatman got out his cloth and spread out his necklaces and trinkets.  I didn't really want to buy anything but admired the way he kept sailing so competently whilst he was doing it, so I got a little necklace for 10 Egyptian pounds.  When we got back to the jetty, he deftly sorted the sail and guided the boat back between the other feluccas to a good spot to scramble off across other boats.  As I got up to leave, another 20 pounds fell out of my pocket so I decided that the god of the Nile was telling me the boatman deserved a tip and I tucked it under his cloth.  I love how the river is such a part of daily life here.