February 11th

We made it from Luxor to Edfu over night. We went through the the only set of locks (at least that is what they tell us) on the Nile just north of Edfu at 1 a.m. I think. It was hard to know because there were antelope running up and down the hall outside of our state room all night making it difficult to know if I was conscious or not. Needless to say the continuous migration in the middle of the night did a fair job of preventing us (me at least) from sleeping. I do recall opening the window at about at about that time though, and seeing a concrete wall moving by slowly. I think that was the lock. I would have liked to have seen the locks, but we had a 7:00 a.m. start today, and given the sheer number of boats in line to go through them at 11 P.M. when we had arrived, I figured it was going to be 3:00 a.m. or later so we went to bed.
The antelope in this case were a half dozen children taking shifts running back and forth in the hall outside of our room. They had to be taking turns, because it was nearly a continuous rumble for several hours. Did I mention that they were also screaming like howler monkeys at over 110 decibels too? Apartently it is a culturally acceptable thing to be as annoying as possible between the ages of 5 and 10 in Egypt. It turns out that this two week period is a school break, so about half of our ship is native Egyptians. This troup of children (if it is fair to call them that) reminds me of the Lord of the Flies! They showed no respect for others as near as I can tell, and their parents have done nothing to restrain them.

For a time yesterday, I had feared that these monsters (if I had called them Antelope earlier, I stand corrected, what I meant to say was heyinas) had killed their own parents because the partents were nowhere to be seen while I was running on a treadmill in the small exersize room on the ship whilst the mob climbed on and abused the remaining exersize equipment around me. I imagined that I was next….. This especially seemed true when I realized that they had chased everyone else off. Only then had I realized that I had been thinned from the herd.
On the entertaining side, when we arrived to the locks (it was semi-dark with only lighting from the locks and surrounding city), venders came out in small boats and pelted us with stuff they wanted us to buy, and again asked me how many camels for my daughter. Our mistake was to open the large sliding glass door on our stateroom as this allowed the unsolicited (unless opening a window is a solicitation...) pelting to begin. By pelting I mean that there was an almost immediate hail of unwanted merchandise flying through our window. What makes this more remarkable is the fact that our window is probably 20 feet off of the water, and yet they never missed. Each of them had one arm that was twice as big as the other. This of course was their throwing arm. Anyway, it was entertaining for the first 5 minutes...

The barganing was feirce and our will weakened from the near head shots as the stuff hurtled into our room. We were finally able to ward off the artillery (by bocking the window and throwing stuff back faster than they could get in the window pleading "We don't want anything" "Please don't throw anymore!" and "no thank you" in rapid succesion. When the tide was turned in our favor we quickley closed our window. Whew!

The photo is of the woman who thinks Kelly is a rock star, and her children (and others?) who were the Antelope. Sorry I meant Heyinas. Looking at the picture now maybe they were all her children. Is it possible that some people can reproduce every 6 months? She was actually very nice so no malice intended. The other photo is one of the twin pylons at one of the many temple that we have visited. More to come....