After s 20 hours cruise over Lake Nasser and a train ride from the port into town, we finally Aswan. Reaching Aswan was then a real culture shock. In the 500 meters we walked from the train station to the hotel, we saw more tourists then in total over the previous 3 months!!! … okay, maybe not as many but nearly, and they were ‘real’ tourists with reddish-sunbathing-skin, wearing short skirts or shorts and were accompanied by a open-bottom-down-shirt-beer-belly-man …. yak!!! And the whole street with all the venders selling spices, cigarettes and I-ride-a-camel-to-the-pyramids-shirt seemed to be set up for tourist. Well, Egypt is sure more of a tourist palace than any other country I had been to in Africa!

The next morning was even ‘better’ as we joint a tour to see the temples of Abu Simbel. Since those are around 250 km out of Aswan – nearly back at the Sudanese border – and there is no public transport going there, a tour is about the only way to see them. I had to laugh and found it sort of funny, as the driver said, “Sometime I drive on the right, sometime I drive on the left and sometime in the middle, don’t be scared I know what I’m doing. Sometime we have sand on the road and sometimes there are potholes – was probably the best road I had been traveling on the last three months though – and sometimes I drive 100 and sometimes 130 km/h but don’t be scared I know what I’m doing.” – we were definitely on a tourist bus!

After about 2 1/2 hours we reached the temple, together with 100 other buses – as someone told me are 100 buses not that many, in high season there are 300-500 buses!!!! … damn – and all those people were squeezing them self trough the narrow passageways in the temple inside and rushing from one room to the next – not really my thing at all – but, because I was on this tour, I had to rush as well … :-(.

The whole thing was a BIG culture shock and I did feel totally displaced and was at that moment not sure whether I would not leave Egypt within a few days. We stayed another day in Aswan and started to make fun of the whole situation – we were really sarcastic at some stages – and got so slowly used to it. We also had good times with people in cafes just because we took the time to talk to them and drink a tee. Once more I had to realize that there is tourism and tourism, and that they existed on the same time at the same place and it is mostly up to your self whether you having a good time and get something from the place and people you are at or not.

Well I did not leave Egypt right away but went to Marsa Alam on the Red See. As my sister told me is Marsa Alam supposed to be very good for diving and so I thought I would give it a try. Reaching Marsa Alam we realized that there was not that much of the village on the Red See coast we had in our heads. Asking around about accommodation and places to dive, we were told that there different hotels along the coast with dive centers. We took a taxi to on of the apparently cheaper hotels but as we approached to place we realized that the whole area was not relay our league – 100 US$ per night!!!.

We tried on more place but the prices were about the same and so decided to give it a miss and to move on. Not actually planed that way, we ended up in Hurghada, one of the main tourist places on the Red See with more reddish-skin and open-bottom-down-shirt-beer-belly-man. Because I liked to see how diving in the Red See is, I went diving the next day and there were nearly as many boots on the same coral reef as there had been buses in Abu Simbel.

The diving was then okay but not great and big parts of the reef are dead – I knew that beforehand. But while you dive over a not very interesting part, all of a sudden you see one coral stock which is full of live with beautiful corals and hundreds of fishes. As so often in life, the real beauty is not in the big but the small things to find :-).

After Hurghada we went to Luxor to see more piles of stone. The temples, hieroglyphs and the whole Egyptian history is really fascinating but, it is somehow sad to say, I’m not totally taken aback by it. I don’t know why that is. Joost once meant that, because the buildings, pyramids, hieroglyphs and actually the history of the pharaohs is so well known to us from the time at school or out of books or TV reports, it is not like ‘discovering’ something new but sheer conformation that the whole thing is real. I think he has something with his point and this, in combination of saturation and needing a change – the very reasons why I’m heading for Switzerland, probably prevent me of being totally fascinated by Egypt – though I still like it and I had good times with the locals :-).