Air Treks

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Friday Aug 6th: Aswan

Today we arrived in Aswan by train. Our Egyptologist picked us up at the train station and drove us to our cruise ship. And by cruise ship, I don’t mean Carnival cruise ship. The cruise ship has maybe 300 rooms on four totals floors. After waiting on the top deck of the four story boat, we met the other couple that would be with us during all of our excursions. Lucas and Sarah are from Australia and are stopping in Egypt for about three weeks in between their move to Ghana. Sarah works for the Australian Embassy and took a three year posts. Lucas is a lawyer who will find a job once they are there. How crazy would it be to move from a very civilized country and living to living in Ghana. I could not even imagine. I am sure it would pay great and the government would set everything up including free housing. But I just am not sure that would ever be for me. They are pretty much guaranteed to get malaria! Their travel physician actually told them that.

Anyways, we discussed our itinerary and got into our room. We were so excited to finally have a space to ourselves with a toilet and shower!! After two nights of no showering and living out of a suitcase, literally, only being able to open and close our suitcase, we had one of the best showers in months. What is weird is that we showered and got dressed to start our excursions for the day. It was somewhere between 100-120 degrees outside! We were sweating before we reached our air conditioned vehicle. This was the way to go. I could not imagine trying to find public transportation in the heat and with a huge language barrier.

It rained!!! We heard thundering in the distance and asked the Egyptologist about it. He said that it often thunders without raining. It is fairly common. Who knew? The wind picked up and it actually started to rain! Sprinkles of course. But he said that it rains 3-4 times during the whole dry season and we were here for one of those days! Kind of cool. The wind was so bad that it damaged some of the property in Nimbia (pictures in the link below). The downside to this was that there was so much sand in the air. It literally was all over us and I had to wear my sunglasses at some points. It made the sky look like a light brown color in the sky. The other upside was that it was much cooler as I guess sand is a pretty good sun barrier!

Pictures and descriptions of our excursions are posted: Vacation Pictures

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