Our flight took off around 6:00 am from Cairo to Aswan. It was a pretty quick flight – scheduled to be about an hour and 15 minutes (give or take a few). We didn’t run into any issues at the airport, and we got to watch the sun come up! AND we could see the pyramids as we flew out of the area.

Once we landed we boarded our tour buses and head to the Philae Essences Palace. The Aswan area is known for their essential oils (in fact, many of the hieroglyphics displayed the oils). We never really got into the whole essential oils thing back in the US – but did pick up a few items as we thought they could make good souvenirs for us.

This shop also did a glass blowing demonstration which was cool to see.

We were also served hibiscus tea, which was really tasty!

From the Essences Palace – we moved on to the Unfinished Obelisk. In my opinion, it sounded way cooler than it was. Essentially, the ancient Egyptians were working on carving this out of granite and it cracked. It was so massive so it’s still there in the granite quarry today.

From here, we were able to board our Nile cruise ship – The Chateau Laffayette.

It had turned in to a beautiful day, but we were dead on our feet from the early morning wake up. AND we had another 2:00 am wake up call on Saturday! Thankfully we had a big lunch once we got onto the ship, but found out dinner didn’t start until 7:30.

Others in the group opted to go on a traditional Egyptian felucca sailboat. (Sorry Mark!) And even more decided to go to a Nubian village in the evening.

We opted to go to sleep instead.

Upcoming activities:

Abu Simbel
Kom Ombo – Temples of Haroeris and Sobek
Crocodile Mummy
Spice market