Day 3 Aswan

After a depressingly dry breakfast of croissant, cheese and moldy cake, our train pulled early into Aswan station. Aswan, on the Nile's East Bank and on the first cataract (bouldered interruptions in the Nile's flow), is a bustling tourist and commercial hub in Southern Egypt, also according to an encyclopedia, one of the driest inhabited places on earth -- it is solely from here and around here that all of ancient Egypt's granite was ever mined. Its 200,000 population gravitates loosely but uniformly about tourism-driven services. We walked out to our bus (the hotel had expected us a day later, but Meleka made up for the crisis with quiet efficiency).

Driven at wonderful speed by our driver Phantom, we shredded through pristine, almost European streets past a new Coptic church and edged upward to Hotel Basma, a resort hotel -- we couldn't have hoped for a better place to stay. We waited around at the reception with its overpowering poster of President Hosni Mubarak before finally getting our rooms. From the hotel's foyer, Aswan rolled down to the Nile like one section of an amphitheatre (see photo). We were all deeply pleased to be in such a nice hotel. I would later learn that the place was actually running at a huge loss because the opulent construction and facilities had severely underestimated tourist footfalls, which is why occupation levels are ludicrously low. When we were there, about a third of the hotel was occupied, and this is high season. Our rooms were superb, but there were things to do, so after a quick wash, we were all downstairs again in our bus heading to the river. There we hired a motorboat that took us, its kerosene engine spluttering and coughing and threatening to die, to the Philae Temple. In 1960, the Temple of Isis on the Philae Island was dismantled (it was threatenened by a flooding Nile after the low dam was built) and reconstructed on the nearby Agilkai Island where it stands today. 90 minutes later, my mother confirmed to me that she had never seen anything as beautiful in her entire life as the Temple of Isis.

Built by the Ptolemeic dynasty to honour Isis (in Greece, Isis was Aphrodite), the temple was systematically vandalised by subsequent rulers and then permanently shut down under Roman rule. Singularly serene and stark, the Philae temple was a cradle first of ancient faith and then, interestingly, of Christianity itself before it was again shut down by the Ottoman rulers. The legend is, of course, that the Virgin Mary herself, was a Christian concept put forward specifically to ease the passage of worship from Isis to the then new Christian faith. It worked. The temple's East wing looks out over the Nile through lotus pillars, all around it, the river laps at its stone. The Nilometre that was built to check rising water levels seems to have been lost during the reconstruction.

We got back into our boat shortly after, though many of us felt a full day could be well-spent on this island alone. I had to agree. The boat took us back ashore and we were driven then through very European Aswan over the High Dam, though we couldn't see very much except for the vast spread of the Nile, silver with the sun from where we stood 111 metres above its surface. A little disappointed (I mean, everyone's heard of the Aswan dam!) we made our way to the Makka restaurant in the dusty commercial zone that straddles the railway station from which we emerged in the morning. Here, we consumed filets of excellent Aswan fried fish and brown rice, while the vegetarians got something new, which I understand they welcomed. Next to the restaurant was a spices store, with the clinging smell of cinnamon on the insides.

We then drove to the Nile promenade for an idyllic ride in a fellucca, a traditional Egyptian sail boat operated by two quietly affable Nubians, who sang for us when asked and took us on a lazy cruise around the beautiful Elephantine Island ("we have rocks in India, so what's the big deal?" someone said). The water was still, and despite repeated warnings that some of the Nile was infested with minute ringworm flukes that gave you a painful and sometimes deadly condition known as schisosomiasis (or bilharzia, named for Theodor Bilharz, the German physician who first discovered its effects on the urinary tract), we trailed our hands in the water. When one of us pointed to a structure on a hill and asked our guide what it was, he said a little uncertainly that it was a Coptic church -- it turned out to be a police outpost, sparking one of us to say, a little cruelly I thought, "When in doubt, say it's a Coptic church". Our boatman then spread out some trinkets for sale right there in the boat and manouevered us back to the dock. We then drove back to our hotel.

At the hotel, after a brief chat with our clearly exhausted guide, I took him off and bought him a sheesha and myself some coffee on a restaurant verandah lined by date-palms. The sky was purple before dinner. In my hotel room, I let English cable television wash over me -- a viewer called Milan Antonjevic from Serbia & Montenegro had requested a music channel to play Believe by Cher, and had dedicated it to his parents. After another scotch evening (these were becoming more enjoyable with every passing day) in one of our rooms, dinner was at the Lotus Restaurant, though I couldn't imagine why it wasn't outside. It was a cool brilliant evening. I had a long lazy smoke on the verandah before we went back to our rooms for the night.