Come on and Shine!

The sun is bright, and I’m in Aswan!

Aswan is a city in Upper Egypt, which is bafflingly in the south of the country, at the top of the Nile. It’s so much nicer than Cairo! The river is clean and blue and you can walk a short distance down the street without being stopped and offered a taxi. You do get offered horse-carriages, but they are less frequent. Judging by the frames of most of this horses around, this is probably because the rest have starved to death.

We went to see some more temples, like Philae which is on an island and Ramses II at Abu Simbel. We got to ride a boat to the former! At the latter, we got to go in a great big convoy with all the other buses of tourists for the 3hr journey, accompanied by armed police to make sure that bandits did not come and attack us on the road. More exciting than that, the hostel gave up breakfast-in-a-box to eat on the journey, which had an egg in it.

It also contained the ubiquitous Egyptian cheese, which is very similar to Dairylea but seems not to need refrigeration. That was also tasty. Oh, and I had my photo taken in front of the temple, but that is less fun. It turns out that it is remarkably hard to make a camera focus both on me in the foreground and the enormous monument filling up the background, so there are many blurry pictures of me now.