Trains and Boats, Egypt, By Kai

We were more than happy to be on the road after the sad poverty, and extreme heat of Giza. We headed for the train at 10:00, the day after our visit to the mosque, Sphinx, and pyramids. My parents had looked through options of travel to our next stop, Aswan, and had decided traveling by train was the most efficient, most affordable option. They looked at the price of the tourist train, glanced at the price of the Egyptian train, and booked four seats in the much cheaper Egyptian one. Ha! 100 dollars a person compared to not even 10 dollars for the entire family? What could be the catch? Note to anyone thinking about going to Egypt: if you need to take the train, TAKE THE TOURIST TRAIN! The extra money is more than worth it.

 

We rushed out of our hotel room, and frantically hailed a taxi, getting to the station late as per usual. We were traveling first class Egyptian, so we expected about economy class American. It wasn’t.

 

 I think I can count on one hand the number of times l’ve taken a train (not including the New York subway), so I didn’t have much to compare the ride to. I stepped on, not knowing what to expect, and nearly fell over. The train was rickety and unbalanced, and wavered slightly under the weight of our family of four stepping on. Once we recovered our balance, we walked all the way inside and found our seats. Sighing in relief that we hadn’t been kicked out for riding the wrong train, I started to sit. I paused, mid-squat, as I got a better look at the seat. The cushion was stained, filthy, looked like it was made in the 1600s, and probably hadn’t been replaced since then. I hopped back up as if I’d  been burned, and almost hit Zosia in the face with my abrupt rise. There was no way any of us were sitting on those, so we busted out the towels, blankets, scarfs, and shirts we didn’t care about and made a makeshift upholstery for our seats, sitting down just in time for the officer to come by and check our tickets. He gave our covered seats a look, shook his head, and continued down the aisle, laughing. Five minutes later, the train started, and we rocked forward and away from Giza.

 

The first hour was fine. We did our online math courses, blogged, and, in Zosia’s case, slept. The second hour started off the same; the train swaying dangerously along the uneven track, Zosia stretched across two seats sound asleep. Then a man in a stained white Egyptian robe stood. He shuffled toward the bathroom, staring blearily ahead through bloodshot eyes. He coughed his way to the back, then pulled out a cigarette. Did he bother to shut the door? Of course not. We pulled our shirts over our noses and tried to breath. When he pulled out a third cigarette, making it clear he wouldn’t be leaving, my dad walked to the back and shut the door to keep out the smoke. We suffered through three hours of this, a slow trickle of men heading to the back to light up, various annoyed passengers going back to shut the door after them. About five hours in to this 12-hour journey, somebody walked up the aisle and slammed the door on the smokers so hard the latch broke. After that, there was no hope of keeping the door shut. It would just slide back open with every sway of the train when you attempted to close it. Soon, the air was heavy with smoke. It slid out of the gaping door to the makeshift smoking room, as more and more men (not one woman) succumbed to the pull of nicotine.

 

As we tried to breathe through our sweatshirt gas-masks, my mom tried to lighten the mood by amusing us with stories of her own awful train trips.

“You think this is bad? In Manila, we were so crowded we couldn’t even move, the air conditioning broke, and the actual bus broke with it! You guys have it easy.” It was not to be. The next stop the train reached, a hoard of people crowded on, squeezing into the aisle and sitting on the arms of other people’s chairs, including ours, because they didn’t bother to buy their own seat. There were so many of them you couldn’t move without hitting someone. They took every available space, suffocating the train with their presence. We moved closer to the window that rattled in the frame when the train moved, in order to try and give ourselves a little space. We stayed pressed up to the rattling window for four hours. By this time, we were eight hours in to the supposedly 12-hour journey, and praying for the end. Nobody answered our prayers.

 

After an eternity, we thought we were perhaps getting close to our destination when the train started to click ominously, and we came to a shuttering stop at the next station. We didn’t move again for almost two hours. The people still smoking away at the back didn’t stop, and without the forward movement of the train to keep the smoke in the general vicinity of the back, it sat in the stale air around us without moving. The mob of people trapping us in our seats didn’t move or seemed bothered in the slightest. Finally, the train began to move, but at a pace I could have jogged easily. It didn’t pick up the pace until hours later. We finally arrived, tears in our eyes, 16 ½ hours after we left Giza. So much for a twelve-hour journey in 1stclass.

 

We stumbled out of the station to meet our Airbnb pick up person in Aswan. He greeted us in accented English and led us outside to a waiting taxi of sorts. The doors of the taxi were rusted and jammed, and the seats… they were barely seats they were so threadbare and filthy. I climbed in the back, looked at the rusted ceiling and tried to pretend I hadn’t seen the cracks running along it. I turned my gaze to the floor. Bad idea. There was a hole in the carpet, and I could see straight through to the potholed road beneath. I didn’t bother to try to look away this time. There wasn’t anything better to look at.

 

The car shuttered so hard I thought it would implode, then bumped forward. The driver slammed the car over the fractured asphalt, as I watched our progress through the hole in the floor. We stopped at a small homemade-looking dock, the sharp brake cueing the smell of burning rubber. The driver tried to bring the seat in front of me forward so I could get out, but it got stuck, so instead he just lifted the seat straight up from the floor until I passed through. Our Airbnb person headed to the dock, and I followed him over the tin-foil bridge connecting it to a tiny old boat. At this point, I just zoned out, unable to summon the energy to feel scared. I vaguely heard my sister tell us this was not going to end well. #facts. The boat driver picked up a frayed greasy rope from the floor, and wrapped it around the engine, pulling it like you would pull a lawnmower to get it started. The boat vibrated so violently I almost fell over. It jerked away from the dock, and somehow managed to make it across the Nile. After a short walk through streets of sand and dirt, we finally made it to the Airbnb on our Nile island. We got into the room, then crashed on the beds. My mom immediately sat up and asked where the air conditioning was, since it was sweltering at one in the morning, only to find there was only one, in my parents’ room. My sister immediately called the bed that could be rolled into the air-conditioned room, then complained about how it was musty. When offered my bed, she declined. Musty is better than baked alive.

 

The next day, we ate breakfast, felt sick (as was becoming an Egypt routine), slept, and barely made it to the mainland in the late afternoon for lunch, in 115º F weather. That lunch was the lowest part of our trip to Egypt. Our main topic of discussion was whether or not we would cancel SCUBA diving in the Red Sea, so we could get out of Egypt faster. None of us had high hopes for the cruise tomorrow. We headed back to the guest house after some food that simply filled our stomachs, aching for home.

 

When morning came, we had a quick breakfast, began taking Malaria pills (mosquitoes were widespread), and set out to meet our tour guide for the next few days. Someone named Karesh greeted us warmly and gave an incredible history of the Aswan Dam, which he brought us to in a nice, air conditioned, pre-hired van. Given what a great guide Karesh seemed to be, our hopes were raised slightly about the quality of the boat. We finished the tour at about midday and drove back to the dock we had left. To our surprise, we passed the dilapidated boats, and were lead into a beautiful cruise boat that blasted our low expectations into space. We had less than a second to enjoy it though before Karesh apologized and told us he got the wrong boat. We followed him out of the paradise on water to the next boat over. The inside was dimly lit, and the carpet was worn and dusty. The stench of stale cigarettes hung in the musty air. We sighed and tried hard to control the disappointment. Karesh didn’t even blink though. He continued straight through the ship to the one behind it.

 

It turned out, our boat was the Princess Sarah 2. Karesh had accidentally led us onto the Princess Sarah 1. Our boat was the exact same as the first, the blast of air conditioning blowing my hair back when I stepped on. The scent of fresh flowers enveloped me as I took in the sparkling marble floors and massive spiral staircase that led to a second floor of shops whose owners didn’t haggle you to death. A smartly dressed man in a spotless hotel uniform asked politely if he could take our bags to our rooms. Yes, rooms. Our parents found out at the gleaming wood reception desk that they had accidentally bought an entire separate room just for Zosia and me. We walked up the spiral staircase to the second floor, where tiny shops surrounded the railing that looked down over the lobby and a huge room with a bar at the far end and a dance floor in the middle. We were offered ice cold hibiscus tea at one of the small tables that circled the dance floor, and we sat back on recently cleanedcushions.

After we had confirmed pickup time for our tour the next day with our guide, we raced up a shining wood staircase to find our SEPARATE rooms. We rushed into them to find our bags neatly placed on a rack especially made for them. Large, un-stained curtains were pulled across the massive window that looked out onto the Nile when the boat was moving. A spacious closet, elegant desk, and wide drawers stacked on top of each other lined the left side of the room. The right side held two perfectly made beds with sheets so white they seemed to glow, and a fastidiously cleaned bathroom with a huge shower that had faucets that actually controlled the temperature of the water, rather than were merely there for decoration. On the far side of the room, a slightly raised wooden platform had a minifridge, TV, and small couch on it. The floor was blanketed in a soft carpet with designs spiraling across in gentle, muted colors. I collapsed on my bed (that I didn’t have to share with my sister!) and mentally sobbed for the second time that week, this time out of pure joy.

 

Unfortunately, we weren’t left to wonder at the room, jump on our beds, and race across the hall occasionally to share our joy with our parents in their room (it wasn’t as good as ours) all day. We were soon told to, “Get your butts out of your room and go downstairs” by our parents. It was time for dinner. We sadly dragged our feet down the hall, down the shining wood staircase that led to the second floor, down the massive marble spiral staircase that twisted into the lobby, and finally down another sparkling marble staircase, into the lowest floor of the boat. Over the time we had spent in Egypt, eating had become a chore for us, stressing over if it was clean or not so much we all had stomachaches after, regardless. We were expecting the average Egyptian meal, which we couldn’t eat any of because it was uncooked and prepared with tap water, which meant the bad bacteria hadn’t been cooked off. Again, the boat couldn’t have surprised us more. Stewed vegetables in a scrumptious sauce, steaming rice, an array of fresh hot bread, delicious soup, perfectly roasted chicken breast covered in sautéed onions and other cooked vegetables, the buffet seemed to go on forever, Italian pasta and sauce, the table practically bent in half under the weight of all the delicious food, almost all of which we could eat.

The four days passed in a blur of happiness. We had a disco party on the dance floor, watched exotic Egyptian dancers perform, toured ancient temples with Karesh, swam in the small pool on the roof, had incredible meals on the boat, relaxed in our luxurious quarters, and dressed up in ancient Egyptian garb in the shops. We were even driven to a temple in a horse drawn carriage once. Every day when we came back to the boat from touring, an animal made out of clean towels rested on one of our beds, a funny gift from the cleaning staff. Once we had an elephant, next a swan, a crocodile eating our TV remote, and last a baby made using a new toilet paper roll as a head!

At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we devoured

DCIM100GOPROGOPR0803.JPG

incredible food while entertained by a hilarious waiter who slid across the floor on his shoes to get places faster and made us a tiny T-shirt out of a 5 pound bill. Once, we even sang happy birthday to an adult on the boat in Arabic and were rewarded with a slice of cake. Every day after our tour, we cooled off in the pool on the roof of the boat. We were heartbroken when we were told we had to go. None of us were looking forward to leaving this heaven on Earth for the Sinai (we had decided to go SCUBA diving after all).

 

You have to have some bad times, so you can appreciate the good ones. The train and our day in Aswan were low points, but they made us truly grateful for our high point, the cruise. And what came next was another story altogether.

7 thoughts on “Trains and Boats, Egypt, By Kai

  1. Joan Gibbs says:

    I continue to be amazed at your writing! I could feel your fear, anxiety, surprise, excitement and joy. Will be awaiting each new episode!

    1. Kai HG says:

      Thank you so much! The experiences (i.e. that awful train ride) kind of write for themselves most of the time, they’re just so crazy.😄

  2. Milan says:

    Wowzas! I’m sorry for not seeing all of this earlier. I wish I’d been able to attend your birthday ‘party’! Its super sad that you’re not able to go on the Sappy love story anymore. It looks like you’re having the adventure of a lifetime. Like Katherine wasn’t enough for you. I can’t say i’m jealous though. Typhoons, storms, trains. I’ll get K-dawg to send you my email! Sadly I still don’t have a phone. 🙁

    1. Kai HG says:

      Haha, who would have thought that I would get a phone before you?? Don’t worry though. I don’t know the password, so I can’t open it without permission, and it’s gone as soon as we touch back down on US soil.

      Katherine gave me your e-mail. I wrote you one- see if it comes through. She also sent me fated through e-mail instead of through schoogle, so I might be able to come on that. We’ll see.

  3. Arika says:

    Amazing detail and perspective! In the end, it seems the calamities make the best stories. This trip and your memoirs are a timeless treasure. Thank you for sharing.

    1. Kai HG says:

      Haha, thanks so much for reading! It seemed awful in the moment, but you’re so right that it makes for a good story! 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept that my given data and my IP address is sent to a server in the USA only for the purpose of spam prevention through the Akismet program.More information on Akismet and GDPR.