Ok, the package tour isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

The trip to Abu Simbal was a pain in the ass. First, it’s a wake-up call of 2:45 am, then it’s 8 1/2 hours of sitting on a packed mini bus, just for an hour of viewing a big temple along with hundreds of other tourists. It’s a pretty rough trade-off. The temple was indeed cool, but it was hard to enjoy with the punishing bus trip, the heat, the hunger, the touts everywhere trying to rip you off, and the throngs of grumpy tourists, all feeling the same way I did. Back in Aswan, I went straight to the pool and feel asleep. The next day, I started my felucca trip sailing down the Nile, hoping that I’d meet some cool travelers on the sailboat. I was delighted to find a nice nice Australian couple and a very cool British fellow were my only other companions for the 2 day trip. The boat is supposed to bring up to 8 people, so the 4 of us were going to have plenty of room on the boat to spread out. We ended up having a great time, but we definitely had our problems. We bought a case of beer for the 4 of us, and the captain, though completely lecherous, lazy and stoned the entire time, at least shared his ganja with us. We spent the next two days lazily floating down the Nile, reading books, drinking beer, smoking, eating and sleeping. The food was excellently prepared by our very nice 19 year old skipper, and there was plenty to go around, which was a relief to all of us. We had heard horror stories of bad food and under-feeding on these trips, so we all came with extra food just in case. Our captain is a real piece of work. He’s constantly stoned, and just getting going in the morning or after a lunch break seems to be a real hassle for him. We didn’t even push off from the shore until 2 pm on the second day, and then we only sailed for about 4 hours in all. We were a bit annoyed when our captain hadn’t even gotten us 1/3 of the way to our destination by the second morning, and we had a bit of an argument when he announced that he would be dropping us off far short of our agreed upon destination of Edfu. He claimed it wasn’t his fault, but we were rather dubious. We ended up getting off the boat to go to a village to call our tour agents to see what the deal was. The tour agents backed up the captain, stating that the boats can only go to Kom Ombu, and that a police escort would take us the rest of the way to Edfu. This was news to all of us. We decided that our tour operators are a bunch of lying, cheating asses and that we feel a bit cheated as the details of our itineraries keep changing as we go. We all agreed that we would probably do it ourselves if we could do it again. The entire reason for getting the tour package was so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the hassles of arranging things, but we find that we are still having to arrange a lot of things, that things aren’t quite as promised, and that we are all stressing out just about as much as if we had planned things ourselves, but now we don’t have the control to change things because we paid for someone else to do it for us. Nothing’s gone quite as promised. For example, I am always supposed to have someone waiting for me to take me to the next hotel when I get off a train or bus. When I got back from the white desert, the bus dropped everyone off miles away from downtown. Every tourist on the bus had someone waiting for them, except me. Nobody was there to pick me up. I had to track down a phone and call my tour guy several times before I finally got him on the line. He had some lame excuse about how when he said “see you back at the hotel” before I returned from the desert, that was supposed to indicate to me that I was to take a cab from the bus station and that he would pay me back. Yeah right. After this, I became dubious of the whole deal. When I got to Aswan after the overnight train, I once again found that nobody was there to pick me up. I had to track someone down once again. Again, I thought I was paying extra money so I wouldn’t have to deal with this sort of thing. So, the tour package is really sort of bogus and I wouldn’t recommend it. The other people are coming from other agencies, and we all paid different amounts, but we all are getting the same shitty service. That’s not all. On the first night, our captain took the liberty of groping Lucy, the only woman on the boat, as she slept next to her boyfriend. She awoke to find the captain asleep with one of his hands holding her hand, and his other hand holding her breast. NOT COOL. A confrontation with him in the morning lead nowhere. It’s like he just DIDN’T GET IT. We all tried to explain that it’s absolutely not ok what he did. He wouldn’t even outright admit that he touched her. He never apologized or anything. He was either playing stupid or his brain has seen too much THC to function properly. He only seemed to understand that Lucy was Steve’s girlfriend. Like she is Steve’s property and so is off limits to him. Ugh. I’ve heard countless stories already of women getting harassed, being called whores, of men asking their boyfriends “how much” for their girlfriend. Thow some Egyptian men are constantly trying to feel up the western women, never understanding the words NO or NOT INTERESTED or GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME! It’s completely disrespectful and offensive. The Lonely Planet even recommends that women NOT travel to Egypt alone. I can’t say Egyptian men are my favorite guys so far on my trip. I couldn’t tell you about Egyptian women. I’ve not spoken to a single one. They are as aloof and distant as any women I’ve ever met. Perhaps they fear they will be judged as whores if they are seen even talking to a western guy. I don’t know. I just know that this sexually repressive culture of Egypt, and I am assuming other Islamic countries as well, is breeding sexually psychotic men who think that all women are property and all Western women are whores. Oh, and needless to say, our felucca captain didn’t get a tip, but our nice skipper did.

I am now in a hotel in Luxor. My felucca friends are also in rooms in the same hotel. They are only staying one night here before getting on the 16 hour bus to Dahab. I’ve opted to avoid that bus ride by taking a 48 dollar ferry ride across the red sea, making my bus time only about 6 hours. I’ve also spread out my temple visits here in Luxor to two full days, and I’m not doing anything today but chilling out. There’s only so many ancient Egyptian temples one can take in a day, and my limit is two.
Even two is pushing it. I’m sorry to say this, because the temples are each incredible achievements, but they all start to look the same after a while. It’s pretty much the same architecture, figures and petriglyphs on every temple. Since I can’t decipher what the glyphs are saying, it’s all just lotus lotus crocodile snake snake ankh beetle beetle lotus ankh. Slave slave king warrior ship king slave slave ship. It gets a little dry after a while. It’s also very sad to see that many of these magnificent carvings have been total defaced by later Christian and Islamic groups that found the figures of gods, kings and queens blasphemous, and so chiseled them all off. Fucking morons, pardon my French. So going to these sites can sometime trigger a bit of anger towards intolerant religions – Islam and Christianity obviously being included in this category. There’s also a fair amount of names of westerners carved into the temple murals – from the 1800’s mostly. Again, what kind of egotistical morons would carve their names on artwork THOUSANDS of years old? It bothers me that their names have not been removed or covered up. It seems to me that it just encourages the next generation to get their names up there too. Clearly I’m still working on some anger issues here. My tolerance for bullshit is low, as I find it MUST be, because I find that letting any bullshit get by you can result in getting cheated or duped in some way. Being a tall white westerner here in Egypt, I find there’s a constant barrage of bullshit being thrown at me from every direction. “The shops are closed that direction, come with me I’ll take you to a good market, only open today…” The cab drivers, the horse carriage drivers, the shop keepers, every guy standing on a street corner, they all want your attention, they all want to know 4 things:
1) “Where are you from?”
This is so they can size up how rich you are. They assume that if you are from Japan or America, then you are filthy rich, and everything will be priced 5-6x the normal Egyptian price. If you are from Western Europe, then prices drop to 4-5x, Eastern Europe 3-4x, Other countries, 2-3x or so. I’m going to start announcing that I’m from Bulgaria.
2) “What do you need?/What are you looking for?”
Clearly you need something, because you are walking down the street. Whatever it is, they have it, or can get it for you at the “very best Egyptian” price.
3) “Come, why don’t you just look? looking is free!”
Looking is in fact not free. It costs time. Time is expensive. Look, given that most people come to Egypt for two weeks or less, and pay well over a thousand dollars just for the plane ticket, you could estimate that each waking hour is costing them something like 10-20 dollars an hour. So that half hour or so that you will inevitably waste by allowing them to drag you into their shops is in fact costing you money, “just for looking”. Explaining this to them would be yet another exercise in futility, so I usually just shrug my shoulders and keep walking.
4)”Are you Christian?”
I was told that Egyptians often ask about your religion. This is another way for them to size you up. I don’t like the connotations, so I usually ignore them. Sometimes I’ll tell them I’m Buddhist, and it usually confuses them. I think many Egyptians have never even heard of Buddhism before. If it’s not Islam, Christian or Jewish, I don’t know if they understand much else.
It’s really kind of sad that I have to be so on guard with every Egyptian guy I meet. Perhaps one in 20 really wants to just be friendly. I’ve met a few like this. Sure they want you to visit their shop. Everyone has a frikin’ shop. But after a while, if you have the patience, they sometimes get past the “buy something” attitude with you and you can just sit and have a laugh with them. Not surprisingly, they hate George Bush, and they tell me that every American they have met has told them the same. Either some of these Americans are lying, or it just that any American who has the patience and trust to actually sit down and talk with an Egyptian about politics is usually a democrat. Call me crazy.