Felucca
After the train ride south to Aswan, we caught some more ancient Pharonic sites (I will write about them soon enough, perhaps). We started travelling north again, back up the Nile. From Aswan, we took a cruise on the Nile on a felucca, a very simple small yacht. There was a variable crew of two or three, and around eight of us punters.

I felt the last part of London leave me as we gently tacked north up the Nile, against the breeze but with the current. For three days, we gently rocked from side to side, looking absently downstream until we turned and upstream came into view. The Nile is an amazing deep blue and gentle, only disturbed by enormous and revolting floating hotels plowing straight ahead, while we nimbly skipped out of their path. On each bank of the Nile there was a thin strip of lush green, full of palms and grass, which quickly gave way to barren bone-coloured mountains and plains of the desert. The sky above this was pale too; dust from the desert stayed high like smog. The sunsets we saw on the felucca were white, not yellow. Somehow the desert dust bleached the sun from its canary brightness to a dull sheen. It looked like the moon was rising, not a sunset.