The Beat of My Own Drum

Janelle and I standing around

We woke up in the morning to a breakfast of boiled eggs, sand bread (It’s supposed to be a flat bread but it tastes like there is sand in it), cheeses, coffee and tea. We stayed near the shore for several hours so that people could use the toilets and showers. There was a nearby field with cows in it and I wanted to get a picture with the cows but they were terrified of me and every time I tried to move closer to them they would back away from me as far as their tether would allow them. I decided that I didn’t want to press the issue and have the giant cow stampede me and I left them alone without getting the picture.

Once the felucca set out again we relaxed in the sun and I read Lovely Bones. I am such a cry baby that while reading several times I had to stop reading and look away from the others on the boat so that I could try and stop my tears. Normally I try and avoid the sun but I am still sick and I figured that a little sun would do me good so I applied lots of sunscreen and went into the sun in short intervals. When the boat anchored for lunch I quickly hopped off and ran into the bushes, something I had eaten had given me an upset stomach. At this point I have pretty much gotten used to always having an upset stomach when I travel.

I imagined when I heard that we were going to be sailing up the Nile that we would see people in remote villages washing their clothes along the banks and smiling and waving at us as we sailed by. However the main highway and the railway both parallel the river and most of the banks are under construction to reinforce their sides so that only the designated areas flood during the rainy season. Not to say that it wasn’t nice sailing up the river, because it was, it was just different scenery than what I had expected.

Since my old camera had a scratch on the lens and it sometimes smoked when I took a picture with it I decided to buy myself a new camera for the trip to Egypt. When I met up with my mom in San Francisco she had thought the same thing and bought me a new camera for Christmas. I had already thrown the box away for the camera I bought so I kept the one I bought and brought it with me to Egypt. The new camera has features that my old camera didn’t and while trying to take a picture of the large full moon I discovered that there is a slow develop feature on the camera and that I could make cool designs with the moon by moving the camera around as the picture was captured. Check out some of those in my picture section below.

At night the felucca pulled up to the shore but this time there weren’t any showers and toilets nearby, just a field and some tent toilets setup using the unbroken stools. At every meal the crew would always ask if we wanted more food and we would occasionally ask for an extra helping of an item or two. At dinner tonight however we had chicken wings and as soon as we were given our portions we immediately started asking for more. Our felucca ran out of them and we had the crew run around to the other boats to try and get some chicken wings from them. After dinner we all left the boats and went ashore where a fire had been built and the crew from several feluccas were playing drums and singing songs. After the crew was done playing they left their drums laying around and Janelle and I along with a couple of others grabbed them and started making our own songs. It was fun but hard to think of new rhythms to put together. The crew must have heard our awful banging because after a short while they returned to reclaim their drums and hide them safely away from us. We spent the rest of the night on the beach and then returned to our feluccas to sleep.

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12_27_09 Felucca small