Felucca on the Nile

By Adrian Cole

Since 1849, or thereabouts, Thomas Cooke has been cruising the Nile. Although the name today may evoke images of sunburned breasts on European beaches, or seventeen-year-olds making out in discotheques, the company was in the forefront of opening up what has since become one of the most outstanding tourist attractions of the world: the river Nile. Muhammad Ali’s Janissaries watched the early steam ships carrying European nobility up and down the waters of the Nile at the beginning of Egypt’s process of modernization. Back then Europeans went primarily to view the ruins of antiquity—both Roman and Ancient Egyptian. Scant attention was paid to the wonders of contemporary Egypt, with the possible exception of flora and fauna, and the contemporary Egyptians themselves featured as little more than picturesque scenery or servants.

One of the first customers in this adventure was an unknown nurse from London by the name of Florence Nightingale, who, en route to the Crimea to take up her legendary place in the history of that war, spent two months sailing between the Mediterranean and the borders of the Sudan. Being one of the earliest female travelers in that region, she was constantly chaperoned by Turkish soldiers while ashore, and they kept the curious, and occasionally threatening, crowds at bay. She would sit under her umbrella and contemplate the marvels of the Pharonic era. At sunset she took up her position on the deck of her steamer, her diary open on her lap, while her eyes feasted on the scenery, greedily devouring the morsels of past civilizations standing mute on the banks of the longest river on Earth, while Egrets flew low over the water.

Today this sort of experience is still very much available, although in somewhat degraded form. First of all, you will not be alone; hundreds of floating hotels now exist to transport tourists down the Nile, and are especially thick on the waters between Luxor and Aswan, the country’s two greatest tourist spots. The curious and occasionally threatening onlookers are still there, although they are probably less threatening, as many have realized that looking on is a waste of time when they can fashion cheap reproductions of Nefertiti and hawk them to you for a killing. Hence they are making a much better living off their heritage than their predecessors ever did. Having said this, what one encounters on the shores of the Nile is extreme poverty, for such is Egypt, especially outside of its great metropolis of Cairo. For locals, these glitzy riverboats transporting coddled Westerners with their gadgets represent incomprehensible wealth, which slides by, only the merest fraction of it rubbing off on the way.

Walking down the Corniche at Luxor we came across a Felucca captain sitting on the wall mending his sails. We asked him if he would take us up river, perhaps a night or two, toward the Roman remains at Kom Ombo, an imposing ruined temple. Ali was the man’s name, and he looked to be about fifty, although bearing in mind the exposure to sun and wind in his life he could well have been forty. We agreed to pay him around one hundred and fifty Egyptian pounds, an amount we arrived at after five minutes of good natured haggling. This was a price with which we felt comfortable: it was well below what a couple of nights on a floating hotel would cost, but there were to be no creature comforts: we were mostly paying for Ali’s time.

We met him early the next morning, and by seven we were installed in the twenty-five foot wooden vessel. The Felucca is traditionally a special kind of gaff rig, with a tall slightly raked-back mast, a large mainsail and smaller jib. Its hull is beamy and deep, designed as it is for cargo, which we were to experience first hand. The first day brought us a stiff breeze and we tacked from side to side, upriver, briskly, each tack bringing us within feet of women on the banks of the river washing heaps of clothes. Ali laughed at our drinking of bottled water, giving us the oft-heard line that he who drinks from the Nile will return to the Nile. I wanted to tell him that they’d be lucky if they ever left Egypt. He scooped up a glass full of river water and held it up to the light, exhibiting all kinds of detritus floating in it, and, extolling its purity, drained it in one, as if taking a shot of the best Russian Vodka, set the glass down and exclaimed in English: “Good!” We negotiated that for the duration of our time aboard we would not touch the water unless it was thoroughly boiled and used in tea.

By early afternoon we had reached what turned out to be Ali’s village (not by chance). He took down the sails, claiming it was too windy to go on, (judging by the age of the sails he was probably right), and beached the boat on a mud bank. For the rest of the afternoon he proceeded to pick watermelons in what we assumed were his fields. The village, perched on a slight rise on the edge of the river, looked over a few acres of farmland which produced onions and watermelons. There was also a small boat-building enterprise which created Feluccas in a small inlet between the fields.

We napped in the felucca for a while, finding enough room in it to stretch out on our sleeping bags. We rigged a small awning from the mast, which kept the sun off us. Then when the heat had diminished a little we set off into the village. We wandered for an hour or so among mud-brick houses, and into the hinterland around the village where we saw water buffalo working irrigation pumps: large wooden wheels mounted on top of pivots, and turned by the motion of the animal walking incessantly in circles. This motion brought water from the river up into small irrigation channels into the fields, which supported sugar cane. We were invited into someone’s house for tea, and found ourselves in a small courtyard of a mud brick house, populated by several small children, a couple of older women and a large number of chickens. We were given the traditional fare of strong black tea, heavily sugared, and a large plate of fresh dates. The children giggled at us, and examined our hats and dark glasses, while the women pounded some grain for bread.

They invited us for dinner, and we stayed, joined later by Ali (whose house it turned out to be) and his two sons who had finished their work in the fields. We ate chicken and beans, and Ali’s sons extracted an English lesson from us: “Is it: Would you like a ride on a Felucca? Or: Would you like to ride a Felucca?” I had briefly imagined the Felucca as an exotic water-creature, a Loch Ness Monsteresque anomaly splashing through the Nile. After dinner we bid them all goodnight, and went back to our floating hotel. We slept on the hard wooden floor of the boat, attacked by rapacious mosquitoes and inquisitive spiders. The next morning we were woken at four-thirty by ‘Ali and his sons who were carrying watermelons. At first we thought they wanted us to eat them, then we realized that they were loading the harvest into the Felucca. Only then did it become clear that our cruise had been hijacked by the watermelon harvest, and that we would have to share our quarters with the fruit. Over the next hour or so Ali and his sons loaded the boat with what must have been a hundred and fifty enormous melons. They insisted that we not get up, and soon the pile of melons towered above us. His sons pushed the boat into the water and Ali raised the sails and we set off across the river. We lay half-asleep, while the Felucca cut through the water heading upriver. Above us the Egyptian sky was filling with light, the sail full and smooth against it. An hour later we had pulled up on the opposite shore a little upstream, and we found ourselves, still semi-conscious, in the middle of a market, with Feluccas unloading goods and camels craning their necks into the boat to sniff at the produce, and us, and anything else of interest. From our beds in the bottom of the boat we observed as many hands unloaded the produce, the pile of melons rapidly diminishing, faces occasionally peering in to look at the Hawagas—foreigners, and grinning widely.

Later that afternoon we reached Kom Ombo. We had spent the day avoiding the floating hotels, racing other trading feluccas, and observing the comings and goings of the river at water level: local, overcrowded ferries transporting humans and animals and produce from one side to another; boys fishing and playing along the reeds at the river’s side who shouted greetings, women washing clothes who modestly turned away when we came too close. Arriving at our destination we had witnessed and experienced in 36 hours far more than we would have during a week on a commercial cruise (although we were ready to take a taxi back to Luxor and check into an air-conditioned hotel). The Roman ruins were one thing, but our experience of the human scale of the Nile overshadowed them completely.