Off to Aswan

A traveler's definition of bliss is an air-conditioned, private train compartment with no other passengers! An attendant even brings breakfast to me in the morning! I'm so happy, and I lie here and wonder why this train can't go all the way to Cape Town. About 14 hours later I arrive in Aswan, a very cool town, but only in the figurative sense cause it's over 110 degrees here. Yikes!!

Aswan

But who cares when for $16 I have a room with A/C, satellite TV, and breakfast? And in what other Egyptian city do they power wash the sidewalks? For less than $5/hour I spend the day sailing around the Nile on a felucca--down past the first cataract, lots of white ibises flying about.

I tell the Nubian captain that I have a thing for traditional Nubian architecture, and he takes me to a village that is more than I can ask for. Check it out...



But the main reason to come to Aswan is for Abu Simbel. It's just a few kilometers north of the Sudanese border and probably about as close as I'm going to make it to the Sudan, but more about that later. Anyway, I get up at 3:30am, because the only way down here, besides flying, is to join a police convoy. The drive is about three hours through a bunch of nothing, but this is so totally worth it:

Anyway, Egypt is just to figure out the plan for the bigger trip down south, and this is just some blog filler to pass the time. It's too hot to even think in this place, let alone put together complete sentences. So, sorry this is still kind of boring. Don't worry, the fun is yet to come.