Radio Australia Today Editorial

Phil Travel Blog – Part 3

28 September 2009

One of the first things we had to do today was to decide what to do with our free morning. Go to Abdul Nasser’s famous Aswan dam? Go to Abu Simble? A museum? No. Jac and I allow ourselves to be hijacked by a friendly enough man who takes us out on his felucca (Egyptian sailing boat) to an island that Lord Kitchener stole from some local Nubian people and turned into his garden plaything. It was relatively boring, even for gardenophiles such as us. A guard on the island insisted on showing us where the best flowers were, and we allowed ourselves to be shown, as you do when the guard carries a weapon that looks like something Al Capone’s right-hand man would have carried on Valentine’s Day. The felucca man then takes us to a secluded harbour and we swim, mostly naked in the pristine Nile. The river passes through nine countries before it hits Egypt, and it stays clean. It is the last few hundred kilometres to Cairo is where the factories spew the garbage into the river. The biggest joy of the day was working out payment with the felucca man. I actually thought we had agreed on a price, but of course (in the Egyptian way) these deals never stick, and he jacked up the price. It was an earnest bidding war, he saying with all the delivery of an Olivier in a Shakespearian play how we are sending him broke, we saying how he was not sticking to the deal. No need to worry though. It’s all a game and at the end of the negotiation, he laughed, we kissed and the felucca drivers around us cheered us up the steps. We weren’t ripped off, in fact what we got on this day was worth far more than we paid. That final kiss was the diamond on the ring. We will remember this moment forever. Tomorrow we move onto Luxor and the Valley of the Kings.