Egypt, day 4: Aswan

We had one more full day in Luxor before we boarded the sleeper train back up to Cairo, but we had pretty much seen everything we wanted to see.  So instead of hanging around the city we booked a car and driver through our hostel and went south to Aswan and worked our way back up, hitting some of the sites along the way. The area south of Luxor is much safer than that between Luxor and Cairo, and so we had no problems venturing out on our own with our driver. Since it seems that so many people who visit Egypt do so as part of a major tour group, there weren't as many people at these sites because they aren't part of the big 3 (Giza, Luxor, and Abu Simbel). The relative emptiness of these areas was fabulous and made our experience that much more enjoyable. Sometimes it pays to do your own thing, although I think by the end of our trip we all agreed that there was definitely an appeal to the major tour groups in Egypt, although we would never think so anywhere else. When you have to haggle for everything from a taxi cab to a simple bottle of water to a postcard it becomes exhausting and it would have been nice to have been able to avoid some of these things. But then we wouldn't have seen some of these sights, and more importantly I don't think we really would have gotten a feel for Egypt if we were simply bused around from our hotel or cruise ship to the sights and back again. While we were at the major sites we saw plenty of tourists, but when we were walking around the city we were often the only foreigners around. It was also interesting that the majority of the tourists we did see were older, many likely retired; in fact there were very few travelers that we encountered that were of our age group. Again, I think this is largely due to the fact that many travel in the big groups and I think these cater to an older demographic.

Downtown Aswan. We didn't see much of the city itself, but stopped in what appeared to be a central piazza for coffee and breakfast. We left our hostel at 6am to make it to Aswan by 9am so we could have the whole day before we caught our train back in Luxor at 7pm.


A common sight throughout Egypt: groups of men gathered around a hookah with coffee or a drink


Before we stocked up on our gallons of bottled water for the day Katie succumbed to thirst and drank some of the local water. She lived to tell the tale!