Nile cruises advertised as being the most luxurious and very nice experience. There are few options for those with the variation of days you spent on a boat and whether you sail upstream or downstream. All boats operate between Aswan and Luxor. That’s about 200 km only. But the cruises offer few stops for the tours to the few temples on its way as well. So…all sounds too good to miss, isn’t it? So after two days in Aswan, we’ve embarked our 5* boat to sail the Nile to Luxor…
"Never Again" – I said to myself in the end of the cruise. And it wasn’t because of the quality of the boat or unprofessional staff...But you should only take cruise, if you look for the really relaxing time wasting somewhere in the middle of the river, while watching all the most interesting places slip away unvisited. If your idea of sightseeing – when you’ve been taken to the ancient Temple for an hour and 3 minute, run around it following a guide who tells you the same things that you already read in a guide book, then – get delivered to your boat along with hundred others from your own ship and thousand more from other cruises, that happened to be at the same Temple at the same time. If you fancy parties on board, tailored for the tourist masses –"Galabeya party" – where everyone dressed up in Nubian costumes and they entertained you with some stupid party games that have absolutely nothing to do with Nubia in particular and Egypt in general…then you just get drunk, because
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE TO DO ON THIS BLOODY SHIP!
So, as you can guess, I consider 3 days of our cruise totally wasted. The boat was OK. Claimed 5*, but when you are in the middle of the river, pinned to same sail-ware, you can’t really check out if others are better, can you? However I do not have any complains about the facilities of the boat – they were OK. I just don’t fancy sitting in captivity of the river, doing nothing when I could’ve seen so much!
Oh, yes, the Nile views were fantastic. And the sun deck with the swimming pool – inviting. But after one day the view palls and after the first half-day on a sun deck the skin becomes charred and after the first high-speed tour on shore my mood becomes irritated. If I to plan such holiday again, I will never choose Nile Cruise. Not because it was a bad experience, but because it was the least Egyptian experience I had in my Egyptian trip.
Oh, still some funny story happened to us on the cruise that definitely worth telling. It happened on the second day of our sailing. We supposed to visit an ancient Temple of Horus in Edfu. Start early in the morning. I’ve been late to disembark and so when was going out, asked the receptionist, what time do I need to be back on a boat (as the last thing you want – to be left behind when your boat sails off) So I’ve been told that the boat will be off to the next port at 10 am. Fine – I had about 2 hours for the Temple, which was great.
To cut the story short - I was given the wrong time, of course. And when we came back to the ship after PROPER exploring the temple, sure we were the last ones, and they’ve been waiting for us for about an hour already! Naturally, feeling guilty, we decided to apologies to the captain for delaying departure. And we asked reception if we can see the captain…Little we knew, that the 5* Nile Cruise boats are operated by Nubian boatmen, who never did study navigation, probably never been in school either and has been selected to sail the ship purely based on his previous experience to sail the same river on his felucca or fish boat.
I’m not questioning if it is safe to sail on 5* Nile cruise boats when they have such captains. But with all this in mind, it becomes clear that any apologies would’ve been useless, since the boatmen couldn’t speak no language apart from Nubian (which is, apparently, a dialect, that Egyptians themselves don’t understand). And even I have my doubts that he did realised that the ship was an hour late for departure anyway. He seemed too relaxed sitting there...
However, our request to "see the captain" was fulfilled. We’ve been escorted …to his "captain’s bridge" only to see how someone in Nubian dress busily presses the selection of three buttons and one knob. These fools took our request literally – they took us to SEE HOW CAPTAIN SAIL THE BOAT! I think that if we’d offer him few pounds, he’d let us drive the thing!