Travel: Falling for Egypt

Guardian Unlimited - four page version
Guardian Unlimited Print version
(Lynn Barber)

After Cairo, which is hard work with all the fumes and traffic jams, Luxor and Aswan are pure pleasure. Aswan in the far south is where Egypt suddenly feels like Africa and you start seeing Nubians - tall, graceful people with long necks and almost blue-black skin. It is also where the Nile breaks up into 'cataracts' and becomes unnavigable except by felucca. Beyond it is the vast Nasser Lake, created by the Aswan Dam, and after that endless desert stretching into the Sudan.

We stayed at the Old Cataract Hotel, famous as the setting for Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, which is a charming old building with, alas, not so charming old food. But we took a blissful felucca trip across to the Botanical Garden (which used to be called Lord Kitchener's Garden) on an island and also a boat trip on Lake Nasser to visit the Temple of Philae, which was moved to higher ground when the lake was created. Near Aswan you can also see the Unfinished Obelisk, still half embedded in its granite quarry. It would have been the tallest obelisk in Egypt but it cracked before completion so they just left it there.

I'm allergic to cruises, so we did all our travelling by plane or road which, from Aswan, meant the much-reviled coach convoy back down the Nile to Luxor, visiting the temples of Kom Ombo and Edfu on the way. The convoy is supposed to be an anti-terrorist measure, whereby all tourist buses travel together, with police escorts front and back. It means in effect that if anyone wants to bomb tourists, they know exactly where to find them, and also that every time you stop at a checkpoint, dozens of touts come dashing out of shops shouting 'Welcome! We have toilets!'

Even so, the journey was well worth it, both for the temples, and for the glorious scenery along the Nile, brilliant green fields dotted with palm trees and occasional irrigation wheels still worked by cows or donkeys. Kom Ombo and Edfu are both Ptomelaic (late Egyptian) temples, with bits added by Roman emperors. Kom Ombo has the best preserved Nilometer - a shaft that was used to measure the height of the Nile's flood each year and determine taxes - the higher the flood, the higher the taxes.

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