The Bus
Instead of blogging about individual days from the tour I thought I would wrap up this travel blog by talking about of a few of the tour highlights, starting with THE BUS.
We were supposed to take an overnight train to Aswan from Cairo, do the Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor and then take another overnight train back to Cairo. Unfortunately the tour company was having problems with the Egyptian train system lately, they were doing double bookings of seats so I guess people weren’t getting their seats. They replaced the train with a bus, I figured it would be a comfortable bus with space enough to be able to sleep comfortably on… NOT SO MUCH.
They bundled us along with another tour group for our bus ride and they got on first so all the good seats were taken. Adrian and I ended up in the very back row where the seats don’t recline and there is little leg room. After spending the night trying to sleep in all sorts of weird and wonderful positions we made it to Luxor. While going through Luxor our bus had to stop since the president of Egypt’s wife might be passing by. We ended up having to wait on the side of the road for a good half an hour before the police were sure she wasn’t going to take the route that would bring her passed us. So back in the bus to complete our journey to Aswan… right? NOPE! The bus ended up breaking down about an hour into the ride! We were stranded on the side of the road again! Apparently the bus blow the hose for the radiator. We sat on the side of the road for an hour in a half while they tried to fix the problem and eventually called a mechanic. The tourist police came to guard us while all this was going on too!
We ended up getting to Aswan four hours late and our poor tour leader did his best to try to make it so we did a good portion of the activities we had scheduled, unfortunately we had to bump sailing in a felucca on the Nile, we still got to eat in it though!
Once our Nile cruise finished we had to get back in the %#$@*!-ing bus again for a 12 hour trip back to Cairo… YUCK! At least it didn’t break down this time!
