Wednesday morning's tour was the temple dedicated to Horus at Edfu.
During the afternoon we cruised on to Kom Ombo, where we were due to make a flying evening visit to the temple there, and that's when it all went pear shaped.
Our guide wasn't terribly specific about what time we needed to assemble (chaos, confusion and a total lack of organisation appear to be Egyptian specialities!). The Nile is a very, very busy river, with upwards of 300 boats on the stretch between Aswan and Luxor (or Esna when the lock is closed), and they moor alongside each other, often over a dozen deep, which means to get on and off you may have to cross through lots of other boats, and of course, if one in the middle needs to leave, they all have to break up so it can get out.
As our group started to cross the adjacent boats on our way to the temple, they started to break up. I was right at the back, with two other lads in front of me, Steve and Graham, whose wife Rebecca was the last person to make it onto the next boat (and who was amusingly unconcerned about her husband's welfare, shouting "give me the camera!" as they got seperated).
So the three of us were now stuck on the MS Nile Symphony, just a few meters from the Serenade. None of us had any money, and questions to the boat's manager about how long we might be stuck there were met with a non-committal "might be a while". After 'a while' it became clear that he wasn't teasing us about being stuck on the silt in the low Nile waters, but we did persuade him to allow us to have a couple of beers in their bar (sadly the draft taps weren't working so we had to settle for bottled beer), with the promise that we would pass some money back to them via our boat the next day (which we did, before you ask!). Our guide managed to contact another guide on the Nile Symphony, so we at least knew that they were all stuck on another boat as well.
We watched from the bar on the top deck as the Serenade was nudged free from its sandy prison by its sister ship, the MS Caprice. After a couple of hours the amusement factor was starting to wear off, so when we asked again when we would be able to leave the ship, we were led through the bridge, down a crew ladder, across a narrow gangplank placed between the forecastle of the Nile Symphony and another boat, which weren't moored together in the normal fashion, then up another crew ladder, through the other boat's bridge, and finally back to shore. During which time we had, of course, completely lost track of the Serenade.
We spent nearly another hour trying to find the Serenade, with no success. In the UK, you would ask a policeman. Not in Egypt. They just say "next one", so you traipse across another 15 boats, only to find that the Serenade isn't among them, and have to trek back to shore again. Eventually our guide found us wandering along the quayside, looking for the boy from the ship with the Serenade sign. The temple trip was postponed for the return part of the cruise and we were left wondering if this was all perfectly normal, perhaps even part of the entertainment...
Just for some added humiliation, the evening was taken up with a Galabeya party, which basically involves putting on a dress for the evening. Good job I'd had a couple of beers already!
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