Five star my ASS

us on christmas day on our balcony overlooking the Nile.
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MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!

Ok so for a Christmas treat, we booked two nights at a five star resort and spa on an island in the Nile in Aswan.  We were scheduled to arrive at 10am.  We took the train from Cairo which is usually 12 hours but turned into 16 hours.  Mind you it was an overnight train and we sat up the whole time in our very erect seats.

We got into Aswan at 2 in the afternoon and took the taxi to the ferry to our island resort.  We arrived and went to check in and they could not find our reservation that we booked online.  It took 30 minutes and us printing the info off from online to get our room.  They walked us 15 minutes from the main hotel to this nasty little room that looked like the Howard Johnsons and the sliding glass walk up door didn't lock.

Tilt to the left.
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I marched down to the front desk and gently explained we wanted a new room in the main hotel.  First I was told it was all booked but i just said, 'no its not' and then miraculously a room was available.  Nothing is ever booked here.  Our next room was very Howard Johnsons as well but at least it was centrally located, had a superb view of the Nile and the sliding door to the balcony worked.  It was now 5pm and we hadn't eaten since dinner the night before.

Merry Christmas!  Things were looking up though.  We spoke to our families and headed out to the Italian restaurant to eat dinner.  The Italian restaurant doesn't exist yet.  Grrr....so we went to have dinner 'a la carte'.  Boy these people like meat.  We had them make us a special xmas dinner of white rice, steamed cauliflaur and french fries!  MMMMMmmmmm....It was actually very tasty and we had soup/salad and mmmm CHOCOLATE MOUSSE for dessert.  Delicious.

The sculpture park
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We packed it in for the day.

The next day, we decided to just relax.  We had our free buffet breakfast..mmmm free food always taste better.  Then we were going to go spend the day at the spa.  I don't really know what to say about the spa except, we didn't spend more than a minute there.  We decided we should go check out the town and have some lunch.  We sat on the Nile on a restaurant boat and had lunch and walked around a bit...its a really cute town.  Then, back to the room for a movie and tv marathon.  Carrie needed to let her ankle rest...she rolled it while hiking the Draksenberg in S. Africa...We'll update you on the rest of S. Africa soon but we have fallen a bit behind again and though you should all know we are in Egypt now.

Philae Island
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Today, we hired a taxi to take us to the Philae island ferry boats.  We took a boat over to the island which is home to the Isis Cult Temple.  This is soooo cool.  Its a girl cult that grew so strong that the Christians invented the Mary Magdelene cult to counter-act the power of the Isis cult and all the women leaving Christianity to follow Isis.   Radical.  The island was stunning and the temple was gorgeous...you see by the pictures.

Then we went to the 'sculpture garden'.   This is crazy.  They have an annual contest where artists spend a month carving sculptures out of rock and the best ones are displayed around Aswan.  The losers are all sent to this obscure rock quarry with no signage that practically no one knows about...including our taxi driver.  Thankfully, our guide book had  a blurb about it and we found it.  It was sooo neat.  All of these beautiful and fun sculptures on the top of a hill overlooking the nile in the middle of a rock quarry.  We were the only ones there and spent some time exploring.

Philae Island
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We came back to our hotel, we have since left the 5 star resort and checked into a budget hotel/hostel.  They told us a friend of theirs could help us score a room on a cruise to make our way to Luxor.  After some seriously intense negotiations, led by the brilliant Carrie Kennedy, we ended up signing up for a 3 day/2 night Nile cruise to Luxor that departs in the morning.  This is a '5star' boat but this time we went to see it before we booked it.  Its pretty nice.  We ended up paying 1/2 what we budgeted...HA She's good.  So, wish us luck as we depart for our '5 star' Nile cruise.