Journey 02 · Egypt
The River That Invented Patience
Cairo to Abu Simbel, mostly by water
Published 19 Dec 2025 · Travelled 8–22 Nov 2025
- 9 moments
- 15 days
- 1675 km
- Autumn
- Egypt
- 23mm · f/2.8 · 1/500
- 30.0472° N, 31.2620° E
- Islamic Cairo
- 16:50
- 26°C, warm haze
In the old city you look up because everyone else is looking level. The minaret leaned into the last light while three boys argued about a football score with real scholarship. It smelled like Old Delhi with different spices, which is the highest compliment I have.
- 23mm · f/5.6 · 1/1000
- 24.0889° N, 32.8998° E
- Aswan corniche
- 10:15
- 28°C, clear, light north wind
Feluccas don't sail so much as lean on the wind and think about it. From the corniche at Aswan you watch them cut between the islands where the Nile is at its most sure of itself. The captain who took me out was seventy and barefoot and made one adjustment in two hours.
Overheard · On the Nile, off Elephantine Island · 11:30
"You take many photos." — "Too many?" — "The river has been here five thousand years. It is not going anywhere. Sit down." I sat down. Best editorial advice I've ever been given.
- 23mm · f/8 · 1/250
- 25.7188° N, 32.6573° E
- 23mm · f/8 · 1/250
- 25.7188° N, 32.6573° E
- Karnak Temple, Luxor
- 08:40
- 29°C, already hot
The columns in the hypostyle hall are wider than my first flat in Dhaka. You photograph them, then you photograph the people photographing them, because without a human in the frame the place refuses to translate. A man walked the processional way like he had an appointment in 1300 BC.
05 · Bought on Luxor station platform
- 23mm · f/8 · 1/320
- 22.3372° N, 31.6258° E
- Abu Simbel
- 07:20
- 24°C, clear, dry
You come around the walkway at Abu Simbel and the scale hits you before the history does. Ramses sits there four times over, looking at Sudan. What gets me is that they moved the whole thing uphill in the sixties, cut into blocks like a wedding cake, and it still out-stares you.
- 23mm · f/2 · 1/30 · ISO 3200
- 22.3370° N, 31.6255° E
- Great Temple, Abu Simbel
- 08:00
- 22°C
The hall behind the facade is cool and dim and smells faintly of other people's sunscreen. Eight standing figures hold the ceiling with their shoulders. A guard with a torch showed me the alignment for the price of a smile and then, gently, for twenty pounds.
twenty pounds well spent
- 23mm · f/2.8 · 1/250
- 24.1010° N, 32.8950° E
- Nile at Aswan
- 17:35
- 25°C, clear, still
Last evening in Aswan I stopped negotiating and just stood on the bank. A single felucca came down with the current, sail loose, in no hurry, the water doing that thing where it holds the sunset longer than the sky does. Somewhere behind me a kitchen radio and frying onions.
- West bank, Luxor
- 06:05
- 17°C, dead calm
- Last frame
I spent money I had mentally labelled 'emergencies' on the balloon, and the emergency turned out to be beauty. Below us the green ran up to the desert and stopped like a border drawn with a ruler, balloons inflating in the fields between palms. The pilot cut the burner and let us hang there in the quiet.
- 23mm · f/4 · 1/500
- 25.7270° N, 32.6100° E
The route
9 stops
Journey completed
Fifteen days, nine stories
- Frames exposed
- 2100
- Glasses of tea accepted
- 31
- Glasses of tea refused
- 0
- Times called 'Amitabh Bachchan'
- 4
- Favourite moment
- The felucca captain letting the sail out at Elephantine and the boat going quiet
- Best food
- Ta'ameya from a cart behind Luxor station, still too hot to hold
