An evening on the Nile without an itinerary

Four o’clock

The heat starts to go. This is the hour to be near the water rather than in a temple, and the corniche fills up with people who are not tourists — families, students, men playing backgammon outside the tea houses.

Five o’clock, on the water

Negotiate a felucca on the corniche for an hour and do not ask it to take you anywhere in particular. This is the part visitors find hardest: the boat is not transport to a site, it is the thing itself, and an hour of it is the single best cheap decision available in this city.

The granite goes copper for about twenty minutes. The sail is white and enormous and very close to your head. Nothing is explained to you and nothing needs to be.

Six o’clock, ashore

The souq after six is a different street from the souq at noon: the shutters are up along its whole length, the vegetable end is busy, and the tourist stalls are no longer the majority. Walk past the first three hundred metres before you decide what kind of market this is.

Eat late, by the river if you can. Then take the public ferry across and back for no reason at all. It costs almost nothing, it takes five minutes each way, and it is the closest this city gets to explaining itself.

Why this is planning advice and not filler

Every itinerary on this site leaves at least one evening deliberately empty, and readers sometimes ask what to put in it. The answer is nothing, and the reason is that Aswan is a place whose point is difficult to see at speed. The temples will still be there tomorrow.

Written by — · Reviewed by — · We do not invent an author and we do not sign an editorial judgement “the Aswan101 team”. These stay empty until a real person is attached.