Egypt - The Train From Hell

I have no pictures for this post, so I’m just going to add random Pyramid and Sphinx pictures.

Upon leaving the pyramids, we went to a train station in Cairo and boarded an overnight train to Luxor. The train was an experience I won’t forget soon . . . no matter how hard I try.

The train was a sleeper train. I was in a cabin with another man who is around 75-years old. The cabin had two bunks to sleep in, one on top and one on bottom. Since there was no way he was climbing the ladder, I ended up in the top bunk. We’ll get back to this story later.

After the train arrived, we went into our cabin to await our “airplane-style dinner.” I’m not sure the exact nature of the food that they served us, but I can tell you that there is one member of our tour group that consumed it and hasn’t been seen since. I was hungry, though, so I ate it. Perhaps to my detriment, I have severe problems turning down free food.

After dinner, the beds were pulled down and I climbed on top. The bed was a wooden board with a thin mattress. All things considered, it wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, however, it was only about three feet wide. Now, I’m not the largest person in the world and have managed to sleep on twin beds plenty of times without falling off, but usually the twin bed in question isn’t in a vehicle making several abrupt stops throughout the evening. I had trouble getting to sleep, mainly because of the fear that I was going to be thrown violently from by bed and hurled mercilessly to the ground some six or seven feet below.

Somehow, at some point, I managed to fall asleep for a few hours when disaster struck. I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and I had to piss. I was laying in a three-foot-wide bed in complete darkness with only a vague memory of where the ladder was and a person sleeping six feet below me that I didn’t want to wake up at 3:30 in the morning and I had to piss. I tried to hold it. I held it for about fifteen minutes. Then, just when I though I wasn’t going to be able to hold it any longer, salvation struck. A light came upon me as if from an angel delivering me from my torture. The light, however, wasn’t heavenly in nature. Rather, it was from the door of my cabin that had just been opened by the 75-year old man in the bottom bunk who also had to piss. I found the ladder and, soon, all was right in the world again.

At 5:00 in the morning, somebody started pounding on our door. It was the wake-up call. We were arriving in Luxor a 6:00 am, so they were giving us breakfast and giving us a few minutes to get ready to go. The breakfast consisted of various breads, some edible while others were not, butter and fig jam, which I quite enjoyed. Our next place to sleep would be a cruise boat on the Nile, but it wasn’t ready yet, so we loaded our luggage on a bus, hopped on a horse-and-buggy and made off for the Karnak Temple. That’s where the high point of the trip (so far) begins . . .