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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy VII
Day Seven (cont)
(continued from ish 212 in which things happened at ridiculous hours in the morning.)
There were two feluccas in our convoy, as some of us were calling it. Or, rather, I called it. And not out loud. It was just something I'd thought idly, then let pass. This was the sort of mind frame you were put in almost immediately after boarding the boat -- thoughts would pass into your mind's field of vision, wave half-heartedly, half-dazed, and you didn't wonder if your thoughts weren't doing some sort of illicit drugs behind your back, but before you had a chance to pull them over and ask them if they had been they'd be off along their way, ambling down whatever that alley-looking thing is at the edge of your mind's field of vision. That done, you'd lie back against the very low rail along the side of the deck and stare up at the sun. After a couple minutes of that you'd be rather blind, and have to flip over on your stomach for a bit to try and let your vision return, by which point you'd probably had a good half dozen thoughts amble past, each one stopping to wave in turn, some of them, the one about not staring into the sun, stopping for longer, maybe running up and poking you with a needle they happen to be carrying, then running off again.
For those of you who don't know, a felucca is a boat, a kind of sailing boat that's popular on the Nile, and makes very nice pictures when you get rows of them coming at you on the river. They had a sail, a rudder-type thing at the back that you'd move to get the boat to tack and jibe and all that craic, a deck covered with mattresses, which covered a very small storage space for all our bags, a little spot for cooking dinner, storing bottles of water, and the door to the captain's quarters, under the bow of the boat, also very low. As boats go, some of the feluccas can be quite large, others can be quite small. We got one slightly larger medium-sized one and one slightly smaller medium-sized one. It was the latter I found myself on as we sailed up the Nile, past the hordes of people quayside attempting to sell calesh rides, felucca trips, taxi rides; basically travel of any sort to people walking past. It was profoundly more satisfying to watch the quintessential Egyptian form of exercise (either running away from someone trying to sell something or running towards someone attempting to sell something, depending who you were and mood, I suppose) from the boat than it was from the pavement, as they don't suffer idle bystanders in their strict exercise regime.
This sense of contentment lasted about fifteen minutes, which is when we pulled in to the police station along the river to obtain our permits for travel up and down the Nile (or just up... or down, rather, as the Nile going towards Cairo is down, and that's the way we were going, though if you look at a traditional map, on which North is up and South is down, we were going up - this happens a lot in Egypt, apparently). It wasn't so much the unsettling thought that we'd be put back into the exercise regimen by the crowd of locals coming down to greet our boat while the captain handed numerous papers back and forth with the police chief when we pulled up along the shore at the station. In our case, with no where to run except into a not terribly deep part of the river, we were more likely going to have our weight removed from the area on our person in the region of our wallets, as we each purchased a ride in a calesh, which we then had to forego, as they wouldn't let the horse and buggy on the boat.
No, I was much more concerned with the possibility that the boat, which I'd scanned rigorously after boarding, would be boarded by little river-pirate scorpions, hell bent on... whatever it is scorpions get hell bent on... maybe they were annoyed that they'd not managed to kill one of us during the course of our stay in Aswan, I wasn't entirely sure how scorpions thought, really. At any rate, I spent the thirty minutes or so we waited at the police station while the two men handed papers and little bits of money back and forth diving from one side of the bow to the other, on the lookout for little gang planks or a suitable scorpion equivalent.
Not knowing what constituted a "scorpion equivalent," once we pushed off again into the river, I dove around the boat, checking once again for the little buggers. Work is never done, I tell you.
disclaimer:
Happy birthday to my baby this fine week.
We'll see you next week, bright and early.
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