Saturday 10th of March 2007: arriving at Luxor
Par bloucox le samedi, mars 24 2007, 13:06 - Egypte - Lien permanent
This morning we were allowed to have a lay-in, of which I did not deprive myself. Wake up at 9 am, breakfast at 10 and tidying up of the room which has to be empty at 10.30. Because we start our day at 11.30 am, we stayed near the swimming pool (too much cold to bathe). Christelle teached me how to play Rumicube, which is the same principle as Rami , but with pawns like domino or Scrabbles with figures. It's a cool game and I won the two games that we played (beginner luck!)
Then we left for the airport to make a one hour flight in direction of Luxor where our cruising boat waits for us.
Christelle admired the desert by the window. We weren't sat together, therefore I slept during all the flight.
Arrived at the airport, we have a guide who was waiting for us to go to the bus. Very good organization. We arrived on our boat, The Armada, which will be our house during one week. Mervat is waiting for us there and we decide to leave immediately for a walk on camel in a small village on the other side of the Nile.
In 5 minutes, we put our stuff in our bedroom, then we go on a small boat which will take us on the other side of the Nile. There, we climb on camels. The rise is brutal and we feel quite tall, but their step is absolutely not awkward. My camel's name is Casanova and its owner's Ali. While passing in the village, some children bare-foot ask us candies. They look poor, but they have chubby-checks and are happy to see us passing.
Later Mervat will explain to us why they ask for candies not because they are hungry, but because we are tourists. One should not absolutely give some to them because to catch them afterwards they are going under the camel's feet and are crushed.
On the way we go along fields of sugar cane and banana trees. We stop at the camel's boss place for a tea and taste some molasses or goat's milk cheese. Going down from the camel is much more frightening than all the rest and when we start to walk with our legs we fell very small !
On the way back, we went on a boat which is called “New Titanic”, and like points out one of the guy of our group, we should be safe because there isn't a lot of iceberg on the Nile. Returned on our boat, we had dinner with an enormous buffet. We sat with 10 other people of our group with who we start to get along really well. Then we played UNO with 7 other people of our group (Coralie, Carlos, Laurent, Marie-Jose, Laurent, Jean-Claude and Isabelle, I think!) We laughed a lot. These are real holidays.
And during this time in Wallingford, Marc has an incident with Arthur.

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