Egypt and Jordan 2025

This morning I woke up to a busy harbour scene with little passenger ferry boats going in all directions.  We are in Aswan, the final destination of our Nile cruise.  It turns out we will be taking one of these ferry boats to get to the Philae Temple.   These little boats cris-cross the Nile River ferrying tourists and locals across the river.   They can be party boats as people can get up on the top level.  They look too precarious to me with the music is blaring,  people dancing on the top deck, the boat is riding low in the water, and ferrying around a top heavy load.   After breakfast we disembark with our guide Osama who has come to meet us at the boat.  There is a Nile egret near the boat ramp.   I take a picture of the front end of our boat as the sun starts to peak over the buildings. Our cabin is close to the middle of the ship on the top cabin level. We only walk past one other room once we exit the elevator or the central stairwell...

I woke up around 1:00am.  There was a lot of noise going on outside the boat, some sounding like it was docking, a bit of engine reving and even some heavy metal creaking and groaning.  I looked out the window and saw a wall of metal as we floated by.  I thought we were passing by big bridge footings but since then I learned we went through the locks at Esna.   The Nile river locks at Esna were built to control the water flowing through the Nile, preserve and store the water for agricultural purposes and to provide safer navigation for boat traffic.  The locks are a popular destination for tourists who come to see the massive structure and watch boats pass through it.  This is totally lost on cruise tourists who are on a boat that comes through during the early morning hours.   Since I didn’t know we were traveling through a lock, I just went back to sleep.  When I woke, we were moored at Edfu about 110 km downstream from Luxor.  We had a lei...