Aswan and the End of the Forty Days Road

As you push south along the highway, the strip of green which separates the Nile from the harsh desert becomes visibly thinner and thinner; in places barely a sliver before the beige of the desert begins and rolls onto the Sea of Sands and the true dunes. Donkeys suddenly start to be replaced by camels which have come up from the Sudan to the market just south of Aswan along the ancient Forty Days Road which is one of the oldest trade routes in history and still in existence. I love seeing the camels being moved around in pickup trucks since they tend to face forward into the wind on the highway and it makes them look like they are driving.

The Nile is stunning at Aswan’s first cataract. A dark, deep ribbon of blue criss-crossed by slow moving feluccas at full sail and split down the middle by Elephantine Island, which was home to ancient, almost primordial, Abu which was a trading post for ivory and elephants for millennia before more modern Aswan moved to this, the East bank of the Nile.

I’ve just gotten to the quaint little Nile Hotel on the East bank which has splendid rooms overlooking the Nile and island though appears to be having a bit of a problem with electricity at the moment with a temporary outage I’m hoping will be fixed soon as the lack of air conditioning in my room is now reaching uncomfortable levels (not to mention the lack of power for my laptop). Hotel options are a bit limited as most tourists stay on the cruise ships that regularly ply the Aswan to Luxor route.

But more so than Luxor, with its touts and in your face tourism, Aswan feels even after only an hour more like the exotic southern Egypt we stereotype in the West; desert, Nile, feluccas, camels and souks even if there are no immediate pyramids to be seen except much farther North.

From here the plan is to explore as much of Nubian culture as I can in a few days and make a trip to the great guardian temple of the Southern frontier Abu Simbel.