A Cruise on the Nile

Last week we flew to Upper Egypt, which, confusingly, is located in Southern Egypt.  It is called 'upper' because the southern part of Egypt is at a higher elevation than the northern part.  There are two major cities in Upper Egypt, Luxor and Aswan.  The land between the two cities is mostly farmland, with a few small towns interspersed along the way.  People in Upper Egypt tend to be more conservative, more traditional, and much darker skinned.  They are admired by the people in Lower Egypt for maintaining a high moral standard and a simple way of life.

Our cruise took us from Luxor to Aswan over a period of five days.  We saw many sights from the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom time periods of ancient Egypt and we could not recommend them more!  The sights in Cairo date mostly from the Old Kingdom, and as such they are not nearly as well preserved.  In Luxor, Aswan, and several towns in between there are extremely well preserved tombs and temples. This post consists of pictures related to the cruise itself, and the next few posts will be about the historical sights we saw.

As soon as we arrived in Luxor we could tell that we were in a significantly different part of Egypt from Cairo.  The contrast may not be as clear to you all at home, but the picture below is still startling to us- the clear sky, the blue water, the greenery, and the calm atmosphere are all things that are sorely lacking in the big city. 

On the other hand, the salesmen are much more aggressive and rarely take a simple 'no' for an answer.  One night we tried walking around the town outside our hotel but only lasted about five minutes.  Everyone up and down the street started calling to us to take a taxi, take a carriage ride, or buy their stuff.  We nearly ran back to the hotel to escape!

We spent two nights in Luxor before we got on our boat.  We were in a five star hotel (by Egyptian standards) which was quite nice, but nothing compared to the Pottery-Barn-Catalog of a boat that we sailed on.  The boat had 30 cabins, but only eight passengers.  We're still not sure why the company chose to run the boat with fifty crew members having so few passengers, but we are grateful they did.  The other six people were great- a middle aged doctor and his wife who were U.S. citizens of Egyptian heritage, and a family of four with 11 year old twins.  The kids were a year and a half into a two year tour of the world that their parents were taking them on. 

After touring Luxor we set sail down the Nile.  For the most part all we saw were small mud houses,

farms,

fishing villages (you can see the small fishing boats in the river below),

and pastures.

Every once in a while we were shocked back into realizing we were actually in the middle of the Sahara Desert:

But for the most part we spend four days seeing (apart from the stops at historical sights) not much more than this:

Life in Cairo can get rather stressful at times- the constant noise, pollution, protests, and dirt are all wearing on the nerves.  We were grateful to see another part of Egypt that was so peaceful.