I’m so glad you saw them! I think Nile Sailing must have been the company we met, because most of the felucca captains don’t know the spot. In prehistoric times, of course, that whole region was savannah, so it probably was an elephant.

http://www.nilesailing.com/

I have a yen for both Sudan and Ethiopia. If we hadn’t committed to meeting family in Greece, I’d have dragged us both southwards. It’s been five years since I visited Africa proper, and Nubia had me itchy, itchy, itchy!

Oooh! I recommend you do that. Love to read about that.

These ones here — the two I *didn’t* find, particularly — are 15,000 years old, or thereabouts, so earlier than the Eastern Desert, although there is plenty of stuff of a similar era.

One of them is open, or sort of open, BUT appears to be 4k out in the desert from the town of El-Hôsh (I think we got the right one, but aren’t clear): the other one sounds firmly shut.

As an Egyptian, you can microbus it easily — plenty of micros along that road. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt has some stuff on the Eastern Desert wadis, and the ones she might be talking about — Wadi Umm Salam?!

If I can hang onto my Egypt books long enough (weight issues!) I will bequeath the good ones to you when I hit Dahab again.

If you had mentioned this earlier to me, I have the google maps print outs of the Wadis she walked through! They are further north though than you were looking, she walked through a Wadi from Southern Cairo to Hurghada, and she told me there are LOADS of those drawings in caves all along the wadi, and left me the map so I’d go and check them out, which I will, next winter probably

Oooh! You’re in Ubud? An excellent choice.

I did have it in my head that we WERE going to find this 15,000 year old rock art. Which is, actually, if I’d put, say, four hours into Google researching it and printed some stuff off and compared to a decent scale print map — if such a thing exists in Egypt — and chatted about it in-depth with the felucca captain ahead of time, quite doable.

The weird thing is that even archaeologists lose the sites: one of them was found in the 1960s, then lost again. (And is, apparently, a hefty 4km from the town of El Hôsh, so we’d really have needed a full day, plus donkeys.)

The giraffes were good, though. I’m still very pleased about the giraffes.

Ah yes. But to return to the boat and have to renegotiate terms on the felucca — he was, actually, a very good captain by the standards of felucca captains — because one had been drinking mint tea would not have been popular.

I should add that by cafe I mean somewhere with chairs, rather than, say, tea at Fortnum’s…

Umm, yes, quite. And, thank you. I’m glad you can relate.

I still have a rather fond memory of an absolutely catastrophic childhood walk in Greece — heat of the day, plains, no water, my dad got lost (and, god bless him, ended up carrying BOTH me and my brother). I can’t remember what we were looking for. I do remember finding a house and being invited in for water and jam…

The complete other alternative is what we are doing today – hanging out in Ubud and off to do a little shopping.