A Day Croc Full of Activity

Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

Modes of transportation: 🚢 👟🐎

It was a regular morning—we got up, ate breakfast, and were ready for our tour at 8:00 o’clock. We immediately got into a horse-drawn carriage (we finally got our carriage ride) and went to Edfu, the best preserved temple in ancient Egypt.

This one was a baby by Egyptian standards—only 2300 years old (built by Ptolemy III at the time of the Greeks and Romans, but still the same style as the more ancient ones).

It was amazing looking at the bas relief of the hieroglyphics in this temple and seeing the sheer scale and intricacy of the whole thing.

This one was cool because it provides details of the construction of the temple (how many workers, how long, etc).

It’s also fascinating because it has the Egyptian calendar—365 days, with 12 months of 30 days each (the 5 left over were festival days) split into 3 seasons.

It also lists the festivals on each day, so it’s an amazing resource for understanding the ancient culture.

Our guide let us explore the temples alone. We wished we could understand the hieroglyphics and Sarah reached into her pocket for her phone and instead found a business card with the Egyptian alphabet on it – spooky!

After a while there, we went back to the boat to have lunch. We found another surprise in our room!

It was a normal (delicious) buffet, and Sarah and I went up a few times. The waiter came over and told us to save our appetite because we were having “Oriental” for dinner (we were both like: “ok a little dated terminology, and why are they so into asian food”). Turns out, “Oriental” refers to traditional Egyptian cuisine (which made more sense) and there was going to be a big party on the boat. Either way, we think he was calling us fatties, but we were excited for the party.

After lunch, we made our way to Kom Ombo, a uniquely “dual” temple in Egypt.

Unlike any other temple, it has two of everything: two entrances, two inner sanctums, etc. It was dedicated to Horace, the hawk-headed god of protection, and Sobek, the crocodile god. They used to pray to Sobek because getting eaten by crocodiles in the Nile was a pretty big ancient problem.

People wonder why there are two gods here, and our guide informed us that recent work suggests they be the same god in different forms (cutting edge stuff)!

Also interestingly, there is a room of medical device drawings—all the instruments used by ancient doctors. They had scissors, foreceps, etc. Or at least they said that’s there. We never found it.

They also had a small pond where they used to keep a single crocodile that they would feed and make offerings to (more on that later). It must have been no bigger than 20ft by 15 ft, which seems cramped for a 20 foot crocodile, but I guess they made it work.

When the crocodiles died, it was a big deal, and they would fully embalm, mummify, and bury the crocodile.

Next we went to the museum next door which housed many of the the crocodiles, which was awesome. Sarah was amazed at how well preserved they were. Eric, being used to alligators, was amazed at just how big the crocodiles were in comparison.

It was back to the hotel from there to relax and get ready for dinner. They promised us a party, so we dressed up (well, Sarah wore her sari and looked amazing). A guy with a professional camera took photos of us, and wanted $30 for them, which we sort of laughed at and moved on (Sarah wanted the photos though).

Dinner was a full Egyptian buffet, which was amazing. We tried a little bit of everything, and it was all delicious. Middle Eastern/Mediterranean is still undefeated in Sarah’s book.

After dinner, the party started. They sold everyone the traditional garment of Egypt, the galibea, so everyone was all dressed up in desert clothes (except us). They had the bartender DJ on the lounge deck, and they were playing all the Egyptian party hits (which, many of them sounded exactly like American hits with Egyptian lyrics). We played a couple of Egyptian party games, like one where we passed an empty water bottle until the music stopped (kind of like hot potato). Eric was the first one out, but Sarah made it pretty far!

Then came the dancing, and it got rowdy. It may not have been mentioned, but we were the youngest people on the cruise by about 30 years. It was fun though! We knew some of the songs, so we just had a good time.

That didn’t go for too long since it was already lateish. Ashraf had been with us this whole time (just sitting by the side and enjoying watching), so we went up to the top deck to have a drink and chill.

We ended up talking to Ashraf for a while about all kinds of stuff. He had many stories about bar tour groups and Egyptian culture (we even got a link for some Egyptian ancient language classes he teaches). He also told us that he wanted to move to the US since he loved the culture, so we were having a good time talking about that. It was pretty chill.

Honestly, we felt bad that we were keeping him up, since he probably felt obligated to hang out with us.

So we ended the night and headed back, and surprisingly, he seemed sort of disappointed. Ah well, we needed to catch back up on all our missed sleep.