No hassle!

A night train took us comfortably to Upper Egypt. Two hundred kilometres from Sudan we stayed in a beautiful spot along the Nile in Aswan. Even though it is a city of one million inhabitants it feels small and after Cairo especially relaxing. However, it didn’t take us long to make some unpleasant acquaintances – mainly too eager felucca captains – that we had to avoid for the rest of our stay in Aswan.

Sunset in Aswan is beautiful. This is the rush hour of feluccas that take the tourists to admire the view from the river.

And there are tourists around: around 200 ships travel along the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and counting from our hotel terrace there were about 30 in Aswan every day.

Aswan is a nice and pleasant city if you just manage to ignore the captains along the Nile trying to sell you tours around Elephantine island or all the way to Kom Ombo. Even worse are the horse carriage drivers with their extremely thin horses that make you want to call the animal rights inspectors (if there were any in Egypt). “Hey miss, twenty pounds, only twenty pounds…” “Calash, calash?” “Hey mister, remember me?” “Hey my friend…” And eventually, when you do the felucca tour it lasts more than you negotiated for and you are obliged to pay the double price even if you wanted to get off the boat during the extra hour. Like the experienced captain didn’t know about the strong current that starts every evening as the barrage is opened… But after all, the 70 pounds (around 10 euros) we paid for a 2-hour sailing trip were definately not waste of money as the views are great and the little breeze on the river nice after a hot day.

Aswan could be named as the capital of haggling – ironically the vendors invite you to their shop: “No hassle here, just look!” We had so many nasty experiences with the Egyptians there that for the rest of our trip we couldn’t trust any local – sad but true. However, after the souq (market) in Aswan we were well prepared for any kind of bargaining and also very surprised if someone didn’t try to rip us off and make us pay ten times the real value. But the Egyptians are extremely good actors, when you’re finally bargaining in a professional way for a cheap scarf the vendor makes his “you’re breaking my heart with your price” look and you feel bad because you’re obviously a rich bastard who is just exploiting the country as the foreigners have done for centuries. However, as we got more experienced and more aware of the prices, we realised that we had been paying too much before and that one tenth of the offered price would be closer to the reality and what we should really pay.

Aswan souq is full of great spices produced in Upper Egypt or coming from Southern Africa. But be aware what you pay! Shop keepers try to get you in basically by lying: "T-shirts, only 5 pounds", and when you ask which one is 5 pounds they answer: "Well, at the moment no 5-pound t-shirts, but this one is 30 pounds..." And when they think you don't have any sense of humour it's just because you are getting tired of smiling to the constantly repeated phrases like "It's all free here!" or "Lucky man!"