1st October 2009 – Day 3 – Aswan, Egypt

Aswan street scene.

Rolling into Aswan only 2 hours late we discover a different world – a city of little hassle, less traffic, less aggressive salesmen, a slower pace all in all. The illusion is soon shattered as we are approached by people touting every hotel in the city, but the impression is still of a friendlier, less aggressive city than Cairo. We shack up in the Noorhan hotel, where we lay down our bags and are promptly jumped on by people advertising tours. We sign up for one tomorrow, going through Abu Simbel, Aswan High Dam, Philae island and the mysteriously named “the Obelisk”. We spend the rest of the day wandering through the city and going through the usual par-for.the-course Egypt things – buy this, buy that, get on my felluca, special price for you my friend, and so forth. I knew it would be like this from friends who have been to Egypt before but I’m getting a little tired of it. It seems that hardly anything is authentic any more – the souk in Aswan is half full of crafts and t-shirts for tourists, you can’t walk 50 metres along the corniche without being followed by a felluca captain/tout. You can’t walk past a shop without being yelled at, or having your hand pulled. It would be completely different if this treatment was dished out to everyone – in Senegal, for instance, locals and foreign visitors were jumped on with pretty similar regularity. Here though, Egyptians are largely left alone and foreigners are inevitably approached, like an adult walking past a group of beer-less teenagers on a Friday night in suburban Helsinki. As soon as you see them, you know they’ll notice you and come running. Only in Egypt they want you to buy something from them, instead of for them.

Aimless wandering continues, we visit the interesting Nubian museum (although our visit is cut short as the security guys want to go home and we have to skim through the end of it). There is precious little else to see in Aswan itself though, and I begin to have the feeling that Natalie is getting bored if there isn’t a “sight” to see, and isn’t really interested in just walking around streets and taking in the atmosphere for what it is. The evening sees a long game of Jungle Speed and many bottles of the Egyptian “Stella” beer. Ruben and I don’t make it to bed before departure to Abu Simbel at 3.30am.

T Deals as another heated game of Jungle Speed begins.