Tourists or travellers?

The writer Paul Theroux had said the "tourists don't know where they've been and travellers don't know where they're going".

On this trip, I try not to fall into either of these traps, especially in this trip. Intent on understanding the places we have been to (aided by a learned if nationalistic guide and supplemented with a lot of our own observational scepticism) so we do know a little bit of what we have seen. And to have an itinerary well planned ahead, we are less at the mercy of logistical challenges that Africa has plenty of (like the one we just experienced to get from Cairo to Luxor). So, we know where we are going to.

For me, to travel is to be constantly on the go. It is not about rest and relaxation. There are holidays for that. 

D can see how busy I keep myself ... in between sight seeing, I would be cataloguing and chronicling (like what I am doing now). It is about action and exertion and any built in delays are merely longeurs necessitated by the problem solving that have to happen especially here in Africa.

That said, there is a tourist in me too. The one who finds the cruising is pleasant: a combination of gourmandising, sightseeing. On the Nile, we just glided gently upstream and stopping now and then to marvel at a resurrected ruin, like the Temple of Philae here that had drowned when they built the Aswan dam and was moved stone by stone to another island nearby. The dark rings one still sees on the pillars are where the waters had risen up to.

A number of these temples have survived all manners of tests through the millenia. The genius of the architects and engineers, the artistry of the sculptors meant the temple walls were fully adorned with raised reliefs of significant scenes and hieroglyphs still have the power to awe today as they did all those years ago.

However, many of the faces of Gods were chipped away (apparently by zealous Christians, though Muslims are the same too). Yet, defaced these walls may be, they are still beautiful, achingly so. What fascinated me most was the care that these vandals have taken. They had neither wrecked the temple nor gone at the wall with sledgehammers. Instead they poked away meticulously within the outline of the relief in an act almost bordering on respect.

Such are the thoughts that assault my mind the last few days. D and I may be two of the six guests on board a ship that could take 25 times more. But even in such an optimum circumstance on board, I feel that travel makes one modest where i see what a tiny place I occupy in this world.