Aswan's West Bank

Salam ala khum!! That means hello in arabic (literally it means peace to you. which is very 70s of them to walk around saying peace to each other all the time). Today Alex and me visited the west bank side of Cairo in order to see the tombs and an old monastery. In order to get to the tombs we had to take a 'ferry' to the west bank and then hike up a forever long hill of sand to reach the tombs (I'm sure my legs and butt will be sore tomorrow, walking in sand is a lot more exhautsting then it looks). Most of the tombs were little caves in the mountain side with a lot of garbage in them (apparently the locals must consider people's graves as a dump site), occasionally there was a tomb full of bones and there were two tombs that we entered that were full of hieroglyphics and were deeply carved into the mountainside. They were definitely worth the hike. From there we caught a ferry to the Monastery. Well actually we caught it at the bottom of the monastery, so we had another very long walk up a mountain of sand. On the return walk back we visited a famous mausoleum before catching a ferry to the Nubian beach Restaurant which is by far my favorite place I've ate at so far. Its very secluded and only accessible by boat. the best part was that the boat will pick you up and drop you off for free (a rarity in Egypt, I thought they were going to rip us off hardcore, but they were great). The food was simple, but delicious and nicely priced. The restaurant over looks the Nile so we ate outside and enjoyed our last sunset in Aswan, before heading back to the east coast to have another cup of tea with Mohammad (as promised).

Tomorrow I leave for Luxor and Alex is going on a Felucca ride up the Nile, so I'll no longer have an escort, but I should be fine. I've learned how to deal with the aggressive sales people and Luxor only has 500,000 people and is full of tourist so I shouldn't be hassled to badly. I catch a bus tomorrow morning at 7:30am (another convoy) and we'll stop at a couple of temples on the way to Luxor, so I should have a very busy day. TTYL. LoveYa.