In Egypt, a job is for life. So the young man who works the café near my apartment, who is fresh and full of fun, jokes and energy, will stay there until he ceases to work. Perhaps he’ll move to another café owned by the same man, but most likely he’ll stay. “There’s not a lot of chance for changing jobs in Egypt,” says my friend Mido.

As we take tea in the café, another young, well-presented man hawks bags of Chinese goods to the café patrons – packets of screwdrivers, torches, and steel gadgets that have little meaning for me. He is followed by a shoe shiner, cigarette seller, a newspaper man.

A teenage boy on a pushbike flies past, balancing on his head a mountain of fresh bread stacked in an open crate made from date palm spines, weaving in and out of traffic, while another man balances a large metal flask on his hip, pouring cool drinks into a cup for customers.

Nearby, three young boys, brothers of about 7, 9 and 13 years, scrape a mountain of building sludge with pieces of cardboard from a petrol station driveway. A man sells six packets of tissues and five single cigarettes carefully laid out on a cardboard box in the street while the man beside him refills disposable lighters.

A man places a plastic whistle around his neck and directs traffic parking around a popular supermarket and every day, another man brings a chair and his bathroom scales to busy Talaat Harb street in the hope he can weigh a few patrons for less than a pound a pop. These are their jobs.

Short of a trick to get the party going? Hassan el Hilali, Egyptian actor, singer and man who does weddings, parties, anything with a variety show of dwarves and strongman antics. I ran into him in a 24-hour cafe in Mohandiseen.

Girls, he swears by Taft hairspray to keep his moustaches so fiercely erect.

Far from wanting to beat up complete, non-Arabic speaking strangers wanting his photograph, he sent a clip of his upcoming song and a walk-on part in an Egyptian movie and is ready for a party any time.

Ok, I have to give the credit for this headline to finance newsbreaker Pete. Thanks Pete. Dahab is indeed Rehab. The silence, the lapping water, the camels. The obession grows, people. Dahab is a night bus away from Cairo, which in itself is a fairly horrific experience as the bus loads at midnight, a video shrieks till 3am then the sun rises at 5ish over the mountain ranges of the Sinai.

Brigid and I spent a day recouping (me from the bus trip, Brig from a hacking cough that is threatening to become bronchitis) and lolling about on said low lounges in the sunshine, then it was action stations the next day. I bounced limply out of bed for sunrise, and at 1pm my new friend Said and I were galloping up the mountains above Dahab, me on Sultana (think sultan’s wife, not dried fruit), a beautiful, headstrong grey who knows where to go and wants to get there double-quick time.

Forget the idea that Egyptian animals are lame and riddled with sores, this is a tourist town and the animals’ owners know that we won’t ride maltreated beasts, but they truly do appear to adore their camels, horses and even sleek cats and dogs, who laze around on nearby cushions suggestively at meal times, seducing you into feeding them and then hanging around for a pat – unlike Cairo’s scared, mangy animals.

Because my inner thighs hadn’t had enough punishment on a galloping horse for 2.5 hours, Brig booked us in for a sunset camel trek – up different mountains, to watch the sun set the rocky hills on fire. So we entrusted our lives to two small boys who led the animals up to a collection of palm huts where we leapt off our bellyaching animals and walked up to the peak. The moon was full and creamy, the boys showed us their favourite games around the fire as we drank tea, then, when it was truly dark, we remounted our white camels and began the slow, peaceful trek back to the sea, to dinner under the stars and to plan our trip further into the Sinai.

At sunset sitting at a cafe on the shores of the Red Sea, the water laps at the sea wall on which the cafe is built. We sit at long lounges of cushions and low tables, watching the sun set and the moon rises over the skyline of Saudi Arabia, across the narrow Gulf of Aqaba.

Camels mosy on by, driven by young boys and an old Beduin man who lovingly adjusts his animal’s bridle. A young guy passes on a beautiful white horse, drumming up business for horseriding tomorrow morning. Restaurant touts arrange the fresh seafood catches on offer for tonight’s dinner.

Dahab seems to cater for the diving backpacker, with the usual accoutrements for said clientele – tie-dyed floppy pants, leather wrist thongs, henna tattoos. Despite or perhaps due to that, we offically love Dahab. Maybe not so much when it’s packed out, but in November, it’s well into low season and the vibe is laid back and sunny. It’s always sunny here.

The Old Sphinx Hotel (hello Mido and Ramy!) isn’t called old for nothing; the bathrooms are tired and emotional, with little hot water and salt (yes, salt) water coming out of the taps. “It’s like a Flower Power place of the 70s,” said our new travel mate, Lars, a Swedish icon painter. “But with internet,” I corrected. If the hotel was any more laid back, it’d be horizontal.

There’s old hippies, young hippies, chic nouveaus hippies with their laptops and eco principles, skimpies and maxi in their full Egyptian covering, divers and dreamers. Ther’s no rules but the rule is to chill. It’s a world from Cairo.

Son of the sun, king of eternal time, said the stentorian voice in the darkness. Clouds of light chased across the night sky to grow stronger until they illuminated the buildings before us, the temples of Abu Simbel. Whoever designed Egypt’s Sound and Light shows is a total drama queen.

The last stop before on our cruise from Aswan to Abu Simbel, there are two temples, the great temple of Ramses II and the smaller temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor, built in a fit of uxority by Ramses for his beloved wife Nefertari.

Ramses’ 20 meter high statues were buried by the desert until 1813, when a Swiss explorer stumbled upon them (they were later excavated by the Italian archaeologist, Belzoni, who consequently got all the glory). This is a rock-cut temple, carved into a mountainside, so when the temple was moved to higher ground as the Nile was flooded, engineers first built a buffer dam around the originals to protect the carvings from falling stone, then the massive statues were carefully cut into 830 blocks of stone. Only the faces remained uncut.

All throughout Aswan and Abu Simbel is the same 1960s video describing the rescue mission, which then cost USD$36 million, with nattily dressed paparazzi gathered to witness the cutting of the pharaoh’s face. You can’t see where the cuts were made, and if you were looking that hard, you’re just being picky.

Our ship sailed slowly back and forth while we had an Egyptian buffet lunch (how do the mortals do it?), then late in the afternoon, as the sun warmed the stone to a rich ochre, we climbed the stairs from our moored boat to the site.

This far south, just 40km from the Sudanese border, it seemed hotter, the desert stonier and the water bluer. The interior of the temples was cool and slightly musty, but in many places the colours have been preserved – we always see the statues with the blank eye, but they were painted in, and look far more human for it. Well, as human as a man with a falcon’s head or a woman with cow’s ears can appear.

Ramses had had carved a trilogy of scenes – going to war in his great chariot, lots of smiting (see earlier post) and treading on corpses, and returning home, his pet lion running alongside. In the depictions, he has long, lean limbs, broad shoulders, long eyes and is taller than any other man who walked the earth, as tall as the gods.

Officially, you can’t take photos inside the temple but for an idea of scale, thousands of tourists are snapped beside Ramses’ statues at the front of the temple – little ants, we barely reach the top of his toes.

I was taking photos then a couple of Japanese guys asked if they could have their photo taken with me. Um… whatever. So one took a photo of me and his mate, then they swapped, and so I asked them to take a photo with my camera. I didn’t get one on my own, so the only proof I have that I was at Abu Simbel is with some rogue Asian man…

I finally just found a shop that sells tonic. I forgive Cairo the black snot, the toilets like running sores and even the all-night industrial tailor whose workshop is above my bedroom. All for tonic water.

For four days, the Kasr Ibrim (and yours truly, ensconced in a Royal Suite) coasted over the still waters of Lake Nasser, the world’s largest artificial lake. Compared with the cruise up the narrow Nile from Luxor to Aswan, you can barely see the coastline – at times the lake stretches up to 30km wide.

Dotted along the coastline are tiny shacks for fishermen who live out here for six months at a time. Our boat buys their catch for the freshest fish.

Other signs of life are just weird: on the first night, we moored by a tiny rock of an island whose inhabitants included an egret, a handful of hunting kestrels and…seven cats. I don’t know how, but the staff all know there are seven. I saw one, a tri-coloured marmalade one. It was my first sign of land animals here. It was digging a hole to um, defecate in… it was slightly depressing.

There is no mobile phone reception, no tv and no other humans save the fishermen and the guards of the temples, shipped out here by Egypt’s antiquities department for their sins or serving out their compulsory National Service, the young men in grubby white uniforms with ‘police’ poorly embroidered in red spending their time staring vacantly and growing soft moustaches. They must have been very bad. There are no women, and they live in close quarters, huddled against the harsh, rocky desert.

These temples are remote now, in 2008. Imagine: they must have been considered the other side of the moon in 1390BC.

So why build here? Ramses II (and this whole cruise is about the man) used the far reaches of his kingdom to slap up some pretty heavy propaganda – the temples’ facades are covered in images of his greatness. Smiting a Nubian here. A Hittite there. He was one for the smiting, our Ramses II.

The ruins of the fortress Kasr Ibrim, after which our ship is named, once guarded a narrows of the Nile, extracting tolls and providing safe haven for villagers when under attack. The mud-brick fortress was 70 meters above the water, but today, thanks to the flooding of the countryside, the waters of the Nile and Lake Nasser lap at its skirts.

The Nubians, it has to be said, have been beaten by both ends of the stick – their heritage has been lost to the shifting desert sands, to be rediscovered in the early 1800s only to be lost once again to the rising waters of the Nile. It takes a whole new meaning to being between a rock and a hard place.

You lucky things, you get a triple hit of deathbyblog, as I’m about to head off into the great Lake Nasser, a phone and internet-free zone which spans 500km, 300km in Egypt, the rest in Sudan. The fabulous MV Antares had satellite internet the entire time we slowly schlepped the 215km south from Luxor to Aswan, but the Kasr Ibrim (www.kasribrim.com.eg )(named for a fortress on the edge of the lake, a site for fortifications since 1000BC) is old world, in the nicest possible way.

There are only seven or so boats cruising the lake, compared with 300+ on the strip between Luxor and Aswan, and Kasr Ibrim leads the pack with its sister, the pioneering Eugenie.

I thought I’d be squished into a single cabin with a porthole the size of a pigeon’s eye, but I’ve landed a suite. A suite. Up the back of the boat with my own wraparound sun deck complete with sun loungers, some awesome leather armchairs and the walls of the entire suite decked out in walnut veneer, which was weird at first, but I feel better now I’ve realised it matches my leatherbound laptop. It has a few old touches that make me giggle, like the built-in radio near the bed head (no plugging the ipod in here!) and the paper hygiene sash wrapped around the toilet, like the Miss Congeniality sash on a runner-up beauty queen.

While the Antares was 98% Spanish tourists (we were the 2%), the Qasr Ibrim is usually 60:40 French to Brits, though this time the French have won and there are but nine native English speakers on board, which suits us all to the ground. We’re a small, energetic group, the Brits all from down south – Surry, Kent and Essex, in their 50s and 60s and raring to go.

We took a little boat out to the Temple of Kalabsha, which is on a sometimes island in the lake. Our guide, Mustafa (or Safi to his mates), is hip and lanky, and pointed out many interesting carvings on the temples’ walls – not just Horus, Isis etc etc, but pics of the megalomaniacal Ramses II giving a few Nubian soldiers a good hiding, being breast fed by goddesses (as a full-grown man…hmmm…a few Oedipal complexes being played out here), and a procession of people bringing him offerings, including leopard skins, shields fox furs, monkeys, cheetahs and giraffes.

Interesting Egyptology facts to date:

All these carvings were once painted. Men were brown (because they worked in the fields) while women were yellow or white.

Men had their hearts weighed before being sent to heaven or hell. Women didn’t need to pass judgement, going directly past Go, straight into heaven.

Egyptians didn’t do human sacrifice.

Baboons, pigs and donkeys were considered an animal form of Seth, the bad, devil-like god.

When Egyptian kings married their sisters to become sister-wives, it didn’t mean they had sex with them. It was just to keep the throne in the family. Aaaaaah!

I am the first to admit that I used to fall asleep during Ancient History. So I am fully geared up for a dose of temple fatigue, which I confess was starting to kick in yesterday, despite a gorgeous guide, Mary, and the beautiful island setting of the Temple of Philae, just near the famous High Dam and Lake Nasser, built in the 1960s to reign in the excessive, damaging floods of the River Nile.

Built in Egypt’s Greco-Roman period by er, Greco-Romans who had a fetish for all things ancient Egyptian, the Temple of Philae and its surrounding temples (templettes?) were then admired in turn by romantic Victorians, who painted them in idyllic rustic settings – you know the types of paintings, where a lissom dark-eyed shepherd would be lounging suggestively by a rock in the foreground while his charges nibbled sweet herbs amongst the picturesque ruins.

The modern-day version of Philae was slightly out of kilter with the Victorian view. The shepherds were shepherds of tourists, umbrella-wielding clockwatchers, and their charges, instead of woolly lambs, were battalions of over-exposed tourists, including, frighteningly, a team of English Women Of A Certain Age wearing spaghetti-strap singlets with beige shorts that rode up at the crotch, revealing lumpy, veined legs and swinging tuck-shop arms.

“That’s the worst sight I’ve seen in Egypt yet,” muttered Mummy, whose seen a few horrific things in her few brief days in this country including (a) my apartment, (b) Cairo’s mildly rabid cat population and (c) the toilets on Egyptian trains.
Aswan is Nubian territory. Nubia is one of those ephemeral concepts of a country, sort of like the Basque region, where a distinct ethnic group’s traditional lands have been swallowed up by surrounding countries. So Nubians, which are scattered as far as Cairo to northern Sudan, on Egypt’s southern border, are concentrated around Aswan. The diaspora was further exacerbated by the former prime minister Nasser and his High Dam, which just happened to swallow 42 (or 47? the numbers keep changing) Nubian villages.

The government relocated the 800,000-odd villagers, paying them a small compensation, and when the global village realised the proposed dam would also immerse a swag of significant temples, they rushed in to save the temples, performed by heroic piece-by-piece removals. Interestingly, while the Czechs, Dutch etc slaved away to painstakingly restore the temples on higher ground, other countries (no names, but here’s a hint, New York) scraped up a few gems, thus saving them and to accept thanks instead of money, said oh, ok, we’ll take the temples to our own countries and they will be looked after very well in our museums that we charge a lot of money for people to enter… ‘Nuff said. Elgin’s Marbles (Now how did that slip in??)

So anyway, now the tat that’s foisted upon us tourists is all Nubian. Bright hats in colours not dissimilar to reggae colours (and I’ve seen at least one Bob Marley flag hoisted on one of the small local boats that sail between the islands), pretty weaves and, gruesomely, necklaces made from camel bones. Ok yes, I DID buy one. It is chic, in a faintly grotesque way, though you could never pick the pretty beads for being camel bones. Unless you’re Nubian. Perhaps they’re just cat bones…

Every day on the MS Antares, our receptionist, Haggag, gives us an itinerary. Some of the four days we are on board, it’s littered with temples and tombs. For a few brief periods, we have the morning or the afternoon free to watch life on the Nile – the white egrets on the wind, little fishing boats, lines of date palms, desert sands coming down to the river’s edge, cattle grazing happily on the skinniest sliver of land, taken out in small boats once the rainy season has finished and deposited there for the quiet life.

One day, there is nothing scheduled, so our itinerary reads: breakfast 8am, lunch 2pm, tea time 5pm, captain’s cocktails 7pm, dinner 8pm. The idea that cruise ships feed you like a battery hen is well and truly alive on this ship. The Spaniards don’t seem to mind, and plough through epic amounts of pastries, bread, potatoes and dessert at each sitting. We’re desperately trying to hold our end up.

For two sittings (Corby, this is for your benefit, so pay attention) we have Egyptian food, which is closely linked to Lebanese. The Egyptians, it has to be said, know their eggplant. On this lunchtime, the eggplant is done three ways – as a dip in babaganoush, fried and rolled into cigar shapes, dressed with pureed basil and oil, or with chunks snuck into a dreamy sauce for kebab. I’m also quite sure I saw it hiding in an okra dish.

There’s also lashings of tahina, tabouleh, and the ubiquitous foul (pronounced ‘fool’) fava beans mashed into a savoury porridgy thing (I’m not making this sound great, am I?) and dressed with cumin, oil and lemon juice, and I like it with pieces of tomato in it. The kitchen also made a special dish which they don’t serve guests, but the rest of Egypt lives on, koshary. It’s an uber-carbohydrate hit of macaroni, rice, lentils, chick peas and broken spaghetti cooked up and served with a garlicky tomato sauce and another sauce of chilli marinated in oil and water to make a thin pouring sauce that adds a little kickerooni.

I have tried koshary in various koshary halls, as they’re known, in Cairo. I’ve even tried it in what’s supposed to be the best places in the city. And I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like koshary. My mind is changed, it is divine. But you’ll have to go on the Antares to eat it.