Luxury Cruises Offer Egypt’s Treasures At A Leisurely Pace
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www.canada.com By Peter Wilson The winter night was soft and still with a slim cuticle of moon playing sentry over the star-dusted Egyptian sky, and just for a second I thought I'd spotted Hercule Poirot.Sadly, my Peter Ustinov look-alike turned out not to be the famous fictional Belgian detective, only an Argentine gynecologist, just another fellow passenger along on my Nile cruise.Ha well, that's the thing about evenings aboard the romantic Nile cruise ship MS Kasr Ibrim. It's so easy to imagine you're clinking tea cups with Agatha Christie, the shadows begin to play tricks after awhile.With only 55 cabins, the Kasr Ibrim is an intimate craft of burled-maple walls and art deco styling. It's small enough that your fellow passengers can become pals and confidantes during the three or four days you're plying the waters of Lake Nasser near the Egyptian/Sudanese border.Nile cruises have been a popular tourist attraction in Egypt for more than a century. In the early day, the most daring tourists left Cairo to journey south into the mysterious lands of Upper Egypt aboard feluccas, graceful Arab sailboats that are still common sights on the Nile.Nowadays, the modern traveller usually sails on cruise ships, three and four-storey air-conditioned floating palaces that offer sumptuous buffets and provide a relaxing way to reach the many ancient sites along the way.Most cruise ships steer a course between the towns of Luxor and Aswan.It is a leisurely excursion, enabling passengers to pace themselves around the buffet table before heading out for temple tours and tomb visits.With more than 300 cruise boats heading up and down stream at any given time, the tourist armada is an impressive sight, especially when the boats pull into shore for the night, parking three abreast along the quayside.For those wanting a quieter stretch of Nile cruising, a three- or four-night cruise on Lake Nasser is the perfect way to discover the wonders of ancient Egypt. The world's largest man-made lake, Lake Nasser was formed by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, near the popular tourist destination of Aswan. Spread out deep into what was the ancient Nubian kingdom in Upper Egypt, the lake is some 550 km long and 35 km across at its widest point near the Tropic of Cancer.The dam was an incredible 12-year construction project, but equally impressive was the major relocation program led by UNESCO teams that saw important archaeological sites dismantled block by block and moved to higher ground as the Nile waters began to rise.Abu Simbel was probably the most significant and certainly the most impressive site to be rescued. Part of a Lake Nasser cruise itinerary includes a visit to the fabulous spot, along with visits to other rescued projects that are more remote and less visited, such as the temples of Dakka and Meharakka at Wadi El Seboua and the Temples of Amada and Derr and the tomb of Penout, all at Amada.While a Lake Nasser cruise offers access to these important sites, the good news is that the massive lake has only a half dozen cruise ships working its waters. With those kind of numbers, it's not surprising that aboard the MS Kasr Ibrim you feel the lake and the surrounding desert landscape came straight out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.That brings me back to my Argentine doctor and the other shipmates. While perhaps not ideal candidates to include in a detective story, they were interesting cocktail companions. My new medical friend and I commiserated about the problems of getting sick in our respective countries as we scanned the moon-like desert landscape gliding by."I feel better already,'' the good doctor told me. "This is a vacation where you can leave all your problems at home. You can lose yourself out here,'' he sighed with satisfaction. I had to agree.Our other passengers included a foursome of French seniors, a few Germans, Italians and a group of a dozen Australian amateur Egyptologists. From the political and military astuteness of pharaohs such as Rameses and Cleopatra to lead-zinc production in Western Australia, on-board conversations, tempered by excellent chilled Egyptian beer, ran to the eclectic.Unquestionably, ours was a quiet, contemplative but mostly good-humoured group, with not a murderer or jewel thief amongst us. That awareness might have disappointed any budding detectives aboard, but for the rest of us it added an extra dash of security to the already stiff protection we were getting from the two armed soldiers aboard ship.Soldiers and policemen, many toting machine guns, are common sights at tourist sites in this country. With the sometimes volatile Middle-East situation, Egyptian authorities take no chances when it comes to protecting the nine million visitors they receive a year.Worth almost $8 billion annually, tourism is a crucial part of the economy.After the cash generated by traffic passing through the Suez Canal, it's one of the country's biggest industries. Visitors from the United Kingdom lead the pack, with more than a million visitors heading to Egypt in 2006. Russia, at almost a million and Germany at 966,000 were second and third.
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Partner country Egypt at ITB Berlin
Grand opening ceremony on 6 March 2012 – numerous cultural events with typical national attractions at the world’s largest travel trade show – interactive communication via Facebo (24/02/2012)
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Cairo Office / Agents
Mr. Mounir El- Fishawy
Apt No. 12, 36.
Shreif St. ( Down Town )
Cairo – Egypt
Mobile : +201 231 33236
Tel: +20 2 3939850
Fax: +20 2 3918989
E-mail: itmcairo@tcph.org |
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