We’re still rather new to the cruise ship experience. We spent two blissful nights sailing on the Vietnamese Mekong at the start of 2020, in a gorgeous wooden boat with ten or so cabins, but our first real attempt was 21 years ago when, coincidentally, we first visited Egypt.
We were on holiday in Cyprus and saw an advert for an overnight cruise from Limassol to Port Said, with a day trip to the Pyramids and Egyptian Museum, followed by an overnight cruise back, on a ship called The Princessa Marissa. The whirlwind itinerary was nuts - hence us now fulfilling our promise to revisit Egypt properly - but one thing that sticks in our mind was the cruising experience.
The Princess Marissa felt like a cross-channel ferry with terrible food, cramped cabins and a dubious Russian dance troupe for entertainment. Let’s just say, we weren’t screaming for more.
However we have been told many good things about the Nile cruising experience and have been assured that our vessel, the MS Hamees - part of the Movenpick chain - is one of the best. It certainly looks the part when Ishmail, the rep who collects us for our transfer, actually manages to find the correct dock. Like many other ships, it’s currently moored between two others and we have to pass through the first ship to enter the second; ours is definitely at the classier end of the scale.
We are given a welcome drink of cold hibiscus tea and then shown to our cabin on the upper deck, which is a lovely room with a marble lined bathroom. It has large windows affording gorgeous views of the Nile, or at least they will do when the ship next to us moves.
After unpacking we head down to the restaurant on the lower deck and are sat at a table next to Camila, Gracia and Madelina from Sao Paolo who are very smiley and charming, despite being Bolsonaro supporters and very upset that “that criminal” Lula is their new president. We skip politics with immediate effect. At another table are Terry and Becky from Kent, the first Brits we’ve met properly all week.
They’re salt of the earth types, love a drink and have already been on board for four days as they’re doing the seven night return trip from Luxor to Aswan. They confess they couldn’t face early morning excursions so have doubled the length of the trip to do everything in the afternoons, no doubt due to their quite-prodigious intake of Egyptian wine. “We’ve almost drunk them out of it,” jokes Becky, ordering her second bottle for lunch.
The buffet is extremely meat-heavy so we approach the salad bar with a degree of caution. The first rule of exotic travel is don’t eat salad at a buffet but there’s not much else for vegetarians on offer, so the chef points out to us the salads without any meat in them and we fill a small plate each, along with a bowl of vegetable soup. While we finish our food the chef returns and says he’ll prepare us special vegetarian dishes for every meal, and soon we are brought hot dishes of zucchini gratin and Egyptian peas both of which are delicious. If only we’d known before we ate the salad.
As we finish, we are introduced to Mo, our body-building and somewhat narcissistic guide, who is charming and extremely knowledgeable, yet determined to do things his way, which essentially means whizzing us around a site at breakneck speed as soon as we arrive, firing off as much information as possible in as short a time as he can and then announcing we have 45 minutes to wander around by ourselves taking photos. This allows him to then sit down with his other tour guide mates, drinking coffee and smoking while he waits for us.
Becky and Terry have already struck up a familiar rapport with him, flirtatious on Becky’s behalf and resigned on Terry’s, and as it’s the afternoon and their hangovers have abated the four of us will be heading out with Mo to explore some of Aswan’s most famous sites.
He explains that “aswan” means market and the town originally grew as a trading place between the Nubian tribes of the south and the Egyptian peoples of the north. It was also home to large quarries of granite from which the famous obelisks were cut and huge blocks ferried up the Nile for the construction of monuments in Lower Egypt. So our first visit is to the Unfinished Obelisk, left in situ in the old quarry during Hatshepsut’s reign as it developed cracks in it so it couldn’t be used.
We hurry our way around it, at Mo’s instruction, snapping a few photos before we drive on to stop number two; the High Dam. A massive piece of engineering prowess it stands 111 metres high, more than twice the height of the earlier British Dam, and 3.7km long and behind it was created Lake Nasser, the second biggest man-made lake in the world (after a gigantic one in China), to generate hydro-electricity.
The lake is 500kms long, 350 of which are in Egypt, with the remaining 150 in Sudan where they call it Lake Nubia. The whole protect took ten years to construct, starting in 1960 and opening on the 15th Jan, 1971. Becky remembers the news reports at the time as they learned all about it in school.
In a sign of the ever-changing geo-political allegiances of the region it was financed by the Soviet Union and at the entrance to the dam stands the concrete Monument of Egyptian and Soviet Friendship, which represents a mix of the lotus flower and an industrial axe. Russia still has many contacts with Egypt, and while tourist numbers from there have plunged around the world due to Putin’s war in Ukraine, there’s a party of 10 very jolly Russian tourists aboard the MS Hamees, and at Cairo airport we hear boarding announcements for Aeroflot flights to Moscow.
Behind the Friendship symbol lies the slightly more elegant Kalabsha Temple, one of the monuments of Nubia that like Abu Simbel, was moved to higher ground when the lake was created. But it’s to another of the raised temples that we are heading now, the spectacular Temple of Philae, which is unique in the remaining structures of Egyptian antiquity as it was surrounded by water on the now submerged island of Philae, and was moved piece by piece between 1972 and 1980 to its new location on Agilkia island, which remained above the rising waters.
Once through the entrance barriers we walk down the jetty to where hundreds of feluccas are moored. We join the stream of tourists and hop in a boat of our own that ferries us towards the Great Temple of Isis, which gets ever-more impressive as we approach and absolutely lives up to expectation when we disembark and start to explore.
Philae is so called from the word “philo”, meaning lovers and is dedicated to Horus’ mother Isis, who was the wife and lover of Osiris, Horus’ father. Philae was the main centre for the cult of Isis and the temple was mostly built during the Greco-Roman era of Egypt. The original building started during the Pharaonic 30th Dynasty around 380BC but it was the Greek ruler Ptolemy II who constructed and decorated most of the chambers during his reign (285-246BC) while his successor Ptolemy VIII went to town constructing and decorating the many columned Hypostyle Hall a hundred years later.
However it was Ptolemy XII (80-51BC) who erected the monumental edifice, or pylon as these structures are known, that dominates the skyline and through which we enter. It really is incredible, with huge carvings of himself smiting Egypt’s enemies on it. And inside all the chambers every wall and column is intricately decorated with frieze after frieze of embossed hieroglyphics. It truly is a sight to behold.
After wandering though the main temple we explore the elegant Kiosk Of Trajan, a second colonnaded temple built by Augustus, the first Roman emperor to rule Egypt (30BC-14AD) and decorated by Emperor Trajan (98-117AD) along with the Temple of Horus featuring friezes of fruit, vegetables and musical instruments.
However, all of a sudden Coman tells me he needs a loo and practically runs off to find one. He’s only back ten minutes when the same thing happens to me. Whatever was in that salad buffet has caused our stomachs to go into revolt and as we ferry back across the water with Mo, Terry and Becky, and the sun starting to set over the monuments of Philae, we’re far less chirpy than we were before.
By the time our people carrier arrives back at the boat at just after 5pm, it’s obvious something isn’t right and Coman and I make it to our cabin and collapse on our beds. We don’t move, other than taking it in turns to make repeated visits to the bathroom where the buffet forcefully erupts from every orifice, for the next 12 hours.
At some point in the early stages of our misery, Coman manages to inform reception that we’re unwell and won’t be making it to the welcome cocktail, the dinner service or indeed the Egyptian entertainment they’re laying on, and they send us up some tablets to help with our recovery, but finally we’ve succumbed to the dreaded Egyptian food poisoning. And not from some roadside local restaurant as we first feared, but from a five star international establishment’s damned salad buffet!
