Travel: Life afloat on the Nile

New Zealand Herald

There is an old saying in Egypt: "He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience."

No Egyptian told me this; William Golding, hilariously irascible as he chronicles his Nile trip in An Egyptian Journal, records none too happily that he was offered the proverb on his second day when he complained that they had travelled only a few hundred metres on the first.

Golding headed upstream in a substantial motorboat. My course is north, with the flow, though that will be no help. In winter, the river level is low and the current sluggish; not until the summer rains fill Lake Victoria far to the south will there be enough water to carry a boat downstream.

Worse, the breeze is out of the north so the sailors must tack hard, close to the wind.

At this rate - the bank is slipping past at walking pace - it takes several hours until the roaring power plants of the cruise-boats are out of earshot.

But almost instantly I am entranced by the rhythm of the journey.

A few cans of the local Stella are cooling in a bucket of Nile water, which is crisp and cold in late January, and the felucca zigzags across the stream in a silence broken only by the flap of the sails and water lapping against the hull.

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