The Land of no Top Floors, Wed, 02 Mar 2022 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon at a River, Ruins/Excavation, Temple, UNESCO site in Africa, Egypt

It’s Jemma’s birthday!!! How awesome we her to celebrate it in this way! In the morning, I snuck out to tell the crew, so they can prepare a surprise cake for the evening. Tsss, don’t tell her!

But despite the special occasion, sleep is not a thing on this trip. We were moored at Edfu and early in the morning we’re went to the Horus temple to beat the crowds and white for the fact that we are not the regular tourists and need a respectable amount of time.

The temple itself is very new, built by the Ptolemeys, so we’re well preserved. We took as long as we possibly could exploiting it, and our cart left without us! Ahmed caught us a tuk tuk though, and that was even better, because we got to ride through the party of town not normally visited by tourists. We worried we’ll barely make it for the 10am departure, but there were lots of people still behind us.

During the cruise to Kom Ombu, we started properly celebrating Jemma’s birthday with some rum and coke and the spiked cocktails from the bar. Lovely afternoon on the boat deck with pool, sunning and the beautiful landscape slowly disappearing into the distance.

The Crocodile half-temple was pretty amazing in the sunset, but very busy – I think all the ships stopped there at the same time.

At dinner, the ship crew did a really great job with the birthday – they came in with the cake singing and drumming in a whole procession! And later on when we got to the room, they decorated it all and did another drumming and singing show. And then when we got to the bar, they went with recorded music this time… We don’t think they know when to stop. We had to pay a hefty corkage on the prosecco we got, too. The evening was nice, with Jemma doing some awesome dancing, and more hangougs with Christina and Marco, though when we docked in Aswan, the city noise kind of killed the mood a bit.

  • We hate the Christians who defaced pretty much all the sculptures and reliefs they could reach.
  • We had more people commenting on how good we look and wanting to take pictures with us
  • Drinking before midday is great
  • The ship crew won’t just ask if you want a thing, which is pretty annoying. We don’t want photos, don’t want people to open bottles for us, don’t want most of this service, and certainly don’t want to be expected to pay for things we didn’t want.