For some reason we seem to have got all our holiday’s failures grouped into a single day. In many ways that’s not so bad: we can write off today as a necessary expenditure to allow us to have a lovely rest of holiday (woooah, bad grammar - sorry all this Pidgin is getting to me. Actually a lot of it isn’t so much Pidgin but a kind of multilingual pidgin - we had a several kids running after us asking for a ’stylopen’ (stylo is French for pen)).

So today: it started with Lydia flooding the entire room when she had a shower this morning. I hasten to add that was through no fault of her own and judging by the colour of the carpet outside the bathroom it’s probably a regular occurrence. I should point out that while this is the first hotel we have stayed in with an en suite bathroom it is also by far the dirtiest. We then went to get our included breakfasts which consisted of two pieces of bread, some jam, some processed cheese and some butter. Not so bad really but we were not provided with any cutlery and there was no one around to ask.

OK, so far it’s really not much different from most days - bear with me it gets worse.

We then marched up to the train station to get our tickets for the night train to Cairo this evening. We were told there were no second class seats left so we had to go first (which costs a whopping GBP3 more). We were then told that the ‘computer full’ so the guy wrote us out some tickets by hand. Now this seemed dodgy to both of us. Everyone else was getting proper tickets (the train tickets here are pretty fancy and even include a little hologram sticker!) and the computer was obviously working so we were not too happy handing over our money for a little handwritten piece of paper. We both suspected that the train was full and that they were inventing new seats for us which we would be turfed out of at the first stop (memories of India flooding back…). However there are only three trains a day that foreigners are allowed on and as the others were properly full, the only other option was the coach.

To cut a long (bordering on an hour) story short(er) I eventually decided I didn’t want to spend another night on the coach and risk being subjected to Jean-Claude Van Damme again so I bought the ‘ticket’. We then went in search of bicycles to rent with which we could cycle up to the high dam (the one which created lake Nasser and has done so much for Egypt). As we walked I realised that Lydia really wasn’t happy with the train ticket situation so we decided to go back to the hotel and ask them what they thought of our ticket. They seemed to think it was OK though they didn’t know why the computer was ‘full’.

Sooooo, we set out to look for bikes again on some vague directions from the hotel people. However by this time it was noon which, on a friday, means everyone goes off to pray and the mosques start shouting angry-sounding arabic sermons at each other. To compound matters it’s also Coptic Christmas day today so after a bit more searching we gave up on the idea of bikes and decided to walk it to the Aswan dam: the high dam’s older, smaller and nearer cousin.

Armed with our fruit & biscuit picnic, we set off on what looked on the map like a pleasant ~6km walk along the Nile but rapidly turned into a hot, dusty trek through partially built and very ugly suburbs. Eventually we reached the dam (a reasonably tall brick wall with water on one side) but were told we weren’t allowed to do anything.

We were not allowed to go down to the water (though there were steps); we were not allowed to take any photographs; we were not even, it seemed, allowed to walk around or across the dam (which has a busy road running along the top of it). So we walked around through a neighbouring village down to a little harbour full of little boats. Finally somewhere to sit down and have our picnic.

Oh but no. Arabic police-type guard guy comes running over (doesn’t speak English) and explains that we are not allowed to be here.

Fine, we’ll walk along the lake a bit.

No! You are not allowed anywhere here.

But why?

Because there are people here.

Well yeah obviously there are people: it’s a village!

Then the guard goes all flirty and starts trying to solicit allah-knows-what from Lydia (all of which goes way over my head as it’s all in Arabic) so we walk off back the way we came and skirt around the guard trying to find another way down to the lake. We then get shouted at by four separate groups of guys all at the same time telling us to go in various different directions so we ignore everyone and head for what looks like the tourist launch point for boats to Philae Island (which houses a reconstructed temple saved from the rising waters of the dam by UNESCO).

At last, somewhere to sit and have our picnic. Well, maybe not. We’re not allowed down to the water’s edge without a ticket for the boat and the only cafe wants to charge us EGP10 for a bottle of water which should cost EGP1.5. Well then, let’s head back to Aswan!

On our short walk back to where we thought we could catch a pickup back to the city we heard a mewling coming out of the hedge and found a tiny puppy, all on its own. We tried to approach it but it got scared and tried to get away. It was either injured or very weak as it couldn’t walk properly and kept falling over and I think it might have been at least partially blind. We tried giving it some pieces of biscuit but it didn’t seem interested. We stood for quite a while considering what do to: no use asking an Egyptian as they wouldn’t understand what the problem was - "So? It’s a dying puppy…". There is a Brook Animal Hospital in Aswan but we didn’t know if they dealt with dogs or just with larger animals like donkeys and horses and in any case we couldn’t think of any way of getting it there without scaring it to death.

In the end we just had to leave it. That put a downer on the proceedings which up until now had been remarkably good hearted.

So now we’re waiting for our train and hoping the sky doesn’t fall on our heads.

Over and out.