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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy VIII
Day Seven (cont, again)
(continued from ish 213 in which we also were hearing about day seven.)
The Nile is remarkable. As are most rivers, I have to say. This is especially apparent when sitting on a felucca on a river on your way out of a city like Aswan[1]. The combination of water, movement, and other river things are a delightful change from the normal pace of life, the pace in which you find yourself generally having to go to a job and do things and generally not just sit on a boat and float down the river. If you're afraid of water, or perhaps not good at swimming or afraid of boats I suppose it might not be a delightful change, but you'd have to agree it's a change, at any rate.
Now, maybe you're one of those people who have heard stories about the Nile. About killer snails shooting out streams of poisonous gunk that seeps through your skin and infects you with a disease so horrible you have no hope of living an hour out of the water once you decide you've had enough of swimming about in between crocodiles, deadly water snakes, and poison-shooting snails. About how you might die anyway, just from the pollution in the water touching your skin. And this is before you wonder if there are any species of scorpion that lives in the water.
Well, I wasn't one of them. Not until our guide helpfully began telling the aforementioned stories, leading in to them in much the same way I had above. The scorpions thoughts I added on my own.
Luckily, the snails that shoot poison live primarily in the stagnant water of the canals that are dug out alongside the Nile, she then followed up with, which relaxed the suddenly squeamish group she had sitting on her two feluccas, and the crocodiles and poisonous snakes are all stuck up above the Aswan High Dam.
"Scorpions?" I asked, diligent in my research.
"No."
"None in the water? No suspected deviations of the normal species that maybe mutated, evolved, even, and took to the water, where competition was less due to the construction of the High Dam? Nothing like the Loch Ness Monster, only smaller and with a stinging tail sort of thing?"
"No, there are no water-dwelling scorpions."
"What about that that little kid in the boat over there? What's he looking for? The Loch Ness Scorpion?" The little kid in question was paddling out towards another set of feluccas in a little boat that barely fit himself and the two pizza box-shaped wooden paddles he was using to propel himself around the river. He was singing Yankee Doodle Dandy in German when he managed to catch hold of the port side of one of the feluccas. No lie. He switched to Italian when it turned out the tourists on that boat were Italian.
"He's not looking for anything in the water. He's looking for money."
"Oh." I stared meaningfully at the water.
So apparently, the Nile is safe. In fact, you can drink from it, it turns out. Now, by "you" I don't mean you, yourself, I mean the abstract sort of you that's had your stomach acclimatised over years and years to the bacteria and things in the Nile water. Or the abstract you if you're a billy goat.
The tour guide proved this point by taking a drink out of it herself, with the caveat that she didn't recommend any of us do the same with the explanation involving the goats.
However, the fact that anyone could drink out of the Nile was fairly impressive. Trying the same trick with the Thames, even if you were just playing a joke on a tourist you happened to be taking out on your felucca by Chelsea Harbour, might result in a few fatalities -- 1) yourself, for attempting to drink (or even pretend to) water scooped out of the Thames and 2) your tourist, for being that close to the water and possibly being hit by a piece of shrapnel leaping out of the current as the water and the various things it carries with it flows by.
One area in which the Nile is lacking where the Thames excels, though, is that it is remarkably difficult to walk across the Nile. With the Thames, if you don't mind dodging shrapnel coming from the passing water as it occasionally rejects the odd bit of metal, corpse, or tree and have a sharp eye for the missiles, you can easily leap down from the promenade down by Cheyne Walk on to the river, walk out across the water, and to the peace pagoda in Battersea Park on the opposite side. Your shoes barely get wet, even. Which, I have to say, was the only disappointment, that first day out on the Nile.
We pulled into a small island, or maybe it was just a beach, and we made camp for the night, sleeping under the stars, on a felucca tied up to the shore, the occasional sound of a passing police boat or troupe the only sound as we drifted off to sleep...
[1] NB. You can only do this on the Nile. You can't, say, sit on a felucca on a river out of a city like Aswan on the Liffey, or the Thames, or the Charles, or the Hudson, or the LA river, especially not the LA river, as the LA river is just a ditch in the ground made out of concrete with no sign of the water you'd expect to find in something called a river. You could sit on a felucca out of cities on any of the following examples (except the LA river, where you could just sit on a felucca, and maybe get shot at by bored teenagers sick of shooting at cars), sure, but this is a travelogue about Egypt, so we're not going to talk much more about the other options.
disclaimer:
The gang is off to Ireland this week for various functions and surfing. We'll see you next week, when the travelogue probably continues (why not, it seems to be popular, anyway), and we all come back looking tanned.
Take care of yourself while we're gone. Don't eat too much fudge.
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