In Aswan there is only one place where you don’t get hassled by Felucca captains trying to sell you a trip, and that’s on board a Felucca. With that in mind, we braced ourselves for haggling and entered the Corniche el Nil to run the gauntlet of boat hawkers. The hawkers were most proprietorial over “their” tourists. As soon as we agreed a price with one of them, a torrent of heated abuse was hurled at our man. My rough interpretation of the gestures and the Arabic was that Jude and I belonged to another hawker, and had been stolen by this unscrupulous competitor. Furthermore, the shouter had been intending to charge us more money, and this reckless gazundering threatened to destroy the very fabric of genteel Nile society and bring ruin on the families of the nation.
Jude is reading Death on The Nile, set in the 30’s, and Hercule Poirot has a very similar experience on the very same street.
Thankfully, once our captain put a few metres of river between us and the corniche, the sounds of shouting still radiating from the shore merged gently with the horns and engines of the city, before that sound too faded below the lapping of water against the hull.
Apart from the bit where I had to get out and pull the boat upstream because we ran out of wind, a very relaxing experience:
Glad to see you both keeping so fit. We have fond memories of Aswan – sizzling hot so we spent hours in the beautiful then-new, air-conditoned history museum! xx