Aswan, southern Egypt

I took an overnight train last night from Cairo to the medium-sized city of Aswan, on the Nile in southern Egypt near Lake Nasser, which is the largest artifical lake in the world (a result of damming the Nile). The train ride was pretty nice, as I had a cabin on a sleeping car (I'd wanted to take a cheaper daytime train, but it had been cancelled). I knew I would be sharing the cabin with someone, and it turned out to be an Englishman roughly my age. So we had plenty to talk about recounting our travels and where we were headed next, although he was on a much more abbreviated trip, spending about ten days just in Egypt before flying back to the U.K.

I'd heard the trains here weren't too punctual, and the English guy had actually talked to someone who'd said their train had arrived ten hours late! The one we were on left at 8 pm and was supposed to arrive 12 hours later, at 8 in the morning. But the rumors were proved right as it ended up being 4 hours late, right about noon. This didn't bother me all that much, as it meant that we had some daytime traveling to actually see the desert landscape along the way, which was really beautiful.

So for the first time in my travels, I've actually booked a tour. The manager at my hotel back in Cairo also organized tours, and was fairly persistent about trying to sell me one, though not in an overly pushy way. I kept turning down his assorted offers, and eventually booked that train ticket to Aswan, which also gave me a good answer to any more offers, since my plans were already in place.

But when I told him that I was taking the overnight train to Aswan, it turned out he had a tour with several other people already planned, starting in Aswan the same day I was arriving. It entailed spending two nights in Aswan, then two nights on a feluca boat floating down the Nile towards Luxor, and two more nights in Luxor, with guides and transportation to a number of ancient sites along the way. It sounded like he had one more space left to fill, and plus he'd obviously gotten the message that I was traveling cheap, as he offered it at a great price, $160 for six nights and seven days. That includes all accomodation, breakfast while staying at 3 star hotels in Aswan and Luxor, and all 3 meals included for the two days going down the Nile on the feluca boat, plus transportation and guides to the various sites. And it's supposed to be a smallish group of 3-5 other foreign travelers.

So considering that this was right in my budget range and would cover almost all of my expenses, I decided to go for it. I won't get another chance to float down the Nile anytime soon, and besides figured it would be fun to travel with a small group of other people for a change. There was one little snafu though, when I got to the train station today, and nobody was there to meet me, as was supposed to be the case. I was wondering about that since the train was so late, but didn't get too stressed about it, since I had the phone number of the guy who I'd bought the tour from (and of course knew where he worked, in case there was anything wrong with the tour). But things were corrected with a phone call back to the hotel in Cairo, and he told me which hotel I was staying at for tonight.

I checked in there, and soon afterwards a couple of the tour guides showed up to give me the basic info. They were two young guys, roughly my age if not a couple years younger, super nice and not pushy about selling anything else. It turned out that today there was nothing planned, which was fine ith me as I wanted to just walk around Aswan a little on my own anyway, and then take a nap after sleeping (not very much) on the train. Although I had a bunk, the train moved around a lot and didn't give me much of a chance to actually get to sleep.

So, the actual touring starts tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 in the afternoon (just my sort of schedule!), when we'll go to the Aswan dam, as well as to a temple on an island in Lake Nasser, which I'd read about in my book and sounds amazing. Then on Monday after checking out of the hotel, we'll head for the boat and start floating down the river. We won't actually be floating all the way to Luxor however, but instead will float for a day, and I guess dock the boat for the night somewhere and sleep on the boat. Then we'll continue the next morning until mid-day, at which point we'll drive the rest of the way, visiting two other ancient sites on the way to Luxor, both of which are ones that I'd read about and was interested in seeing. Once we arrive in Luxor and check in to our hotel there, we'll figure out the schedule for the final two days there.

So, that's basically what I'll be up to for most of the next week. Once the tour wraps up, I'll still have about ten days or so on my own in Egypt before I fly back to Athens. At this point I'm thinking I'll probably stay in Luxor for a couple of extra days, since it sounds like there's a lot to see there; and then I'll head west to the Dhakla oasis, out in the desert a ways. There are a hanful of different oases that all sound quite interesting, but that one is the most convenient it seems to get to from Luxor, though at the same time it's supposed to be a little less touristy than some of the other ones such as Bahariya and Siwa. I guess I'll write more about what the oases are all about when I actually get there.

That wraps things up for now, not exactly sure when I'll get the chance to write next...if not from Aswan again tomorrow sometime, then probably in Luxor after the boat trip.

Images of the Pyramids and Sphinx, Egypt

More photos of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza, Egypt (click here)

I spent six hours today walking all around the pyramids and the Sphinx. Click the subject line above for photos.

Summing up Greece

I'm going to try real hard to sum up, briefly (for a change), the last week-and-a-half or so that I was hopping around the Greek islands with Dianna. Last I wrote, I was on the volcanic island of Nisyros, after camping for 6 days there. We planned next to go to Santorini, partly to see it and partly because we had to go there first anyway, in order to get to another island that we were more interested in, Milos.

Our plans got changed, however, due to another ferry snafu (the first one was when we tried to go from Patmos to Ikaria, but the connecting ferry to Samos was cancelled due to high winds, so instead we started heading south). We caught a ferry from Nisyros to Kos, where we were supposed to catch the next ferry to Santorini an hour later. But we missed that boat by a hair because of two separate delays: first because of high winds that slowed the ship down, and then at the port apparently the anchor got hung up somehow and delayed us another fifteen minutes. We could actually see the boat we were supposed to be on to Santorini, from the ferry that we were still on, and we watched it sail away, with a tear or two in our eyes.

So, we bought a ticket for a ferry leaving the next morning from Kos to Rhodes instead, where Dianna had a good friend. We spent that night at a hotel on Kos and then caught the ferry at 5 am, arriving at Rhodes a few hours later. There we spent just one night at a scruffy, quirky hotel in an interesting part of old town, and then another at Dianna's friend's house. But we had three full days to explore (although, the first day we spent sleeping much of it, after getting up at four o'clock that morning). In short, we weren't too impressed by Rhodes. The one good thing about it was that we were there well outside of tourist season, and the place was fairly empty. The old town of Rhodes was beautiful, but scarred simply by tourist shops lining every inch of it. We did find a couple of nice beaches to hang out on, but everywhere you went you felt the presence of the hoards of tourists that descend on it every summer.

From Rhodes we ended up taking a ferry back to Santorini, which retraced our steps first to Kos. But we ran into yet another snafu when our boat didn't arrive, and we ended up being shuffled onto another one that was also going to Santorini. But it was the slow boat going to every little island along the way, and would be arriving seven hours later, at seven in the morning instead of around midnight. We actually didn't find this out until we were already on the ferry. We were pretty annoyed, to say the least, at being stuck in a position where we had to spend the night unexpectedly sleeping on a ferry. So, we went to the reception desk there and demanded that they give us a cabin for the night for free, since it was their fault that the boat we were supposed to be on didn't show up at all (apparently it just broke down and never started the trip). And to our surpise, with a little pushing they relented and gave us the keys to a cabin.

We arrived on Santorini the next morning, and spent only one day there. Santorini was also extremely touristy, but I'd wanted to see it because I had been there once before, when I traveled Europe at the age of 18. And unlike Rhodes, there was reason for the crowds, as it was exquisitely beautiful. I made the most of the one day we had, rented a moped and went all over the island taking pictures (there's a link somewhere below, if you want to check them out).

The next morning we caught a ferry over to the nearby island of Milos. The weather forecast said it was supposed to rain. But fortunately it was wrong and we had two days of brilliant sunshine to explore the deserted island and its beautiful beaches. Finally we caught a ferry to the island of Serifos, and the bad weather hit along the way. We stayed just one night there, and spent the evening huddled in a tavern, playing scrabble and drinking wine. The next day I tried to go on a bike ride, but had to turn back because it started pouring down rain hard. Then Dianna and I hopped on another ferry back to Athens. I spent two nights and one day there doing last minute packing, etc., hopped on my flight to Cairo yesterday, and here I am...

Images of Cairo, Egypt

A few photos I took today here in Cairo:

More photos of Cairo, Egypt (click here)

Arrived in Cairo yesterday afternoon, and spent today just walking around the city. It's an extremely interesting city, great for just walking around. Very busy and bustling, a little scruffy in places with scattered garbage, etc., and a lot of towering and rather drab apartment buildings, but nothing like the overwhelming pollution, decrepit infrastructure and borderline chaos of most cities in, for example, India. More on par with Bangkok, although not quite as modern. Tomorrow I'll most likely visit the pyramids, and/or the Egyptian museum, and Friday I'm hopping on an overnight train to Aswan. Then from there I'll head back north to Luxor. After that I might go check out one of the oases in the desert west of Luxor. Anyhow I'll try to write more soon, I'm beat and badly in need of a shower...

Some images from Santorini and Milos islands

I didn't find the time to write another entry before hopping on the plane to Egypt in a few hours, so I'll try to write soon from Egypt. But here are a few pictures from the last few islands that I went to of Santorini and Milos, both of which were gorgeously brilliant. Much more photos at the link below, as well as tons of new videos from the past five weeks of Greek island hopping...

Tons of new videos of Greece (click here)

I just uploaded more than twenty new short videos of my past 5 weeks or so biking and traveling around the Greek islands. This link goes to facebook, so you'll need a facebook account to see them. However, you can see the photo album below without having a facebook account...

Click here for more Greece photos...

New photos of the islands of Santorini and Milos (click on the subject line above). I fly to Egypt on Tuesday. I'll be writing a new blog post soon, covering the past week or so, so check back here again in a day or two. (The link above goes to facebook, but you don't need an account to view these photos.)

Going to Santorini next...(click here for my Greece photos)

Hanging out on the island of Nisyros, Greece:







Dianna and I have had a great time here hanging out on the beautiful little island of Nisyros. Dianna had been here once before years ago, and camped for three weeks on a remote beach, Pahia Ammos, that requires a short fifteen minute hike to get to. She'd made it sound like a pretty nice place, without elaborating too much, so I was definitely curious to see it.

Last Saturday we took a brutally early 2:30 am ferry from Lipsi to the island of Kos, which is a much larger nearby island, where we had to go first in order to get here. We arrived around 7 in the morning, and then had just an hour or so to kill there before catching a much smaller boat over to Nisyros, arriving around 10 in the morning.

We'd thought of just getting a room first so that we could get some sleep after a grueling night on the ferry, then do the shopping and the hike to the beach, etc. the next day. But we decided we were too excited to get to the beach and set up camp, and not have anything to do the next day instead.

We rented a car, then headed into the small main town of Mandraki, where we had a delicious English breakfast (fried eggs, bacon, sausage and toast), for a change from the usual muesli. With that I realized that I'd actually eaten three different breakfasts, on three different islands all within a 12-hour period. We'd taken a nap the previous evening on Lipsi before catching the early morning ferry, then had gotten up at around midnight to catch the ferry, and I made omelettes. Then after arriving on Kos I had a bowl of Muesli; and breakfast for the third time on the island of Nisyros. I'm sure it must be a world record of some sort.

Anyway, after breakfast Dianna and I went shopping for food for several days, then drove to the trailhead, partway around the island at the end of the road. We packed up and did the short hike, which went up a hill a bit and then wrapped around a small point, from where we got the first view of Pahia Ammos beach. It was a spectacular sight, especially since I had no idea what to expect. It was a large crescent-moon-shaped black sand beach with big dunes behind it, and a small valley going inland, surrounded by weird sculpted rock cliffs. As we walked down the trail to the beach and then up onto the dunes, you could see back into the valley; and my first thought was that it looked exactly like the African savannah. It was basically dry grassland and sagebrush, spotted here and there with skinny little trees, with large rounded tops that had plenty of foliage on them for providing shade from the sun.

We searched around and found a great spot, that was still in the sand but had three or four trees all right next to each other, making a large shaded area. We set up camp, then I took a quick swim and promptly crawled into the tent for a much needed two-hour nap.

We spent five days altogether camped there, and only saw a few other people, that just came to the beach for the day. Apparently it's jam-packed with campers in the summer, but we had it entirely to ourselves. We kept the rental car for the whole time, though we didn't end up using it all that much. But it was handy for storing some of our things so that we didn't have to hike everything in. A couple of days out there we never went farther than to the beach, and then back to camp (roughly a two-minute walk). But we still kept pretty active, between lots of swimming around and yoga on the beach.

A couple of days ago we hiked out to the car and toured the island a bit, including checking out the active volcano that's at the center of the island. And by "checking it out" I mean walking right down to the bottom of the crater floor. There's no lava pouring out at this point, but there are steam vents that can be seen from the hiking trails, and you can hear assorted gurglings around you, plus it stinks like sulphur everywhere. It was a pretty impressive sight, especially for such a small island.

Today we hung out on the beach for most of the day, then packed up camp around four in the afternoon and hiked out to the car. We drove back to the main town, and rented a room for the night to get a much needed shower and a welcomed night's sleep on a mattress. Tomorrow we're planning to take another ferry, to the island of Santorini.

I first visited Santorini when I came to Europe in 1990, at the age of eighteen. I more or less ended up there by accident. I was traveling with a friend, and we'd bought a ferry ticket from the port at Athens to the first nearby island. But we didn't much like the look of it, so we decided to stay on the boat to the next one, and hope that they didn't check our tickets. At the next island, however, we decided it still didn't look like what we were searching for in an idyllic Greek island. We did this several more times, until we got to Santorini. It was the final destination of the ferry, so we got off there, and it turned out to be a gorgeous and indeed idyllic island. It's also one of the most touristy islands in Greece. So it will be both interesting to see it with a new pair of eyes, nineteen years later; and it's also the perfect time to be there, well outside of the tourist season when there should be hardly anyone else there.