What is Dahabiya and Why We Chose Dahabiya?
One of the main activities on most of travelers must to do lists is sailing on Nile, when visiting Egypt. Nile is the heart of the Egypt and 95% of Egyptian live on the Nile banks. Its natural beauty is breathtaking too and cannot be missed. So whether it’s just half an hour Felucca trip in the heart of Cairo to witness the sunset or maybe having dinner on a much bigger boats or a proper trip from one city to another on the Nile, it’s an experience that shouldn’t have been missed out.
The question is how to do it in the most enjoyable and authentic way. Well the answer is not easy and it depends on few factors. First of all how much money you want to spend, what level of comfort you are looking for and what do you expect to gain from your trip and of course, how much time you have. Based on all these items, I prepared the list of options that I found and what we picked at the end and why.
I will just focus on the options to travel between cities which involves overnight stay on the boat. Majority of the options are between Esna ( close to Luxor) and Aswan, Esna to Aswan direction is normally slower as it goes upstream. From Aswan to Esna it follows downstream and it’s faster. Generally for both directions, there are three options available: Cruise, Felucca and Dahabiya.
Cruise is probably the most common option. There are giant cruises moving on both directions and it’s easy to pick any departure date that suits your travel plans. Normally the charge is per person per day, including the meals and also entrance tickets to all the touristic attractions along the way. The cost varies quite a lot from 1 50 USD to 400 USD per day ( As far as I searched ), the trick is the same 100 USD deal can be sold even up to double the price depending on where you get it from. There are around couple of hundreds of people on board on each cruise. It wasn’t an option for us though. First of all getting on a a boat with too many people didn’t look much appealing, secondly, normally the pollution from the engine of these cruises are extremely high. It was easy to even visually see the pollution when they were passing our boat on the Nile. And the last reason was the fact that due to their size, they can not dock in shallow water and it makes it impossible to stop by small villages to go and have a look.
Then we started to think about getting a Felucca ride for 3-4 days, but after checking on travel situation on a Felucca on few Vlogs, we decided that it’s not the most convenient solution for us too. From number of people on board, it is quite nice to travel on a Felucca. normally they set up soft furnishing all over a Felucca where you can sit, eat and sleep on the same mattress/soft seating area. It was definitely a nice option if we were maybe in our twenties but with Amir’s knee situation, it didn’t look feasible option, the price was more reasonable but the bathroom situation was unclear as well.
That’s why we moved to the third option, Dahabiya. I’ll explain how a dahabiya works later but the good point of dahabiya is the fact, there’s not more 10 people on board, it is a wooden sailing boat bigger than a Felucca but way smaller than a cruise ship so it can dock in shallow waters and give you the option to have a more interesting itinerary including more local villages visits. The only problem is the cost. It’s quite expensive, we paid 200 USD per person per night which was the most expensive activity that we have done during our 6 weeks backpacking trip in the middle east. did it worth it? Yes definitely it worth it. Do we pay it again to do the same activity again? No, I think once was enough. We paid for it before leaving New Zealand and to adjust the overall cost of our trip, we stayed in reasonably cheap accommodation ( 10 USD on average ) through out our stay to save enough to cover this cost.
Vising Esna:
We picked a 4 day trip from Esna to Aswan. We picked this one in order to be in Daraw camel market on a right day. To do so, we picked Orient Dahabia from Nile Dahabia company. As I mentioned before, it’s not easy to arrange for activities independently in Egypt, there are agents, travel agencies and a lot more in between. This company had few dahabiyas with guaranteed departure even if the boat is not full. They have 3 nights and 4 nights tours in both directions between Esna and Aswan. The tour agency selling the package is Djed travels. I have send email to lots of Dahabiya companies and this one was the only one got back to us in couple of days.
We were picked around 8 am from our Luxor home stay and been transferred to somewhere out of Luxur and there we were transferred to another van with the rest of passengers on our Dahabiya trip. Nine of us plus Abdollah, our tour guide headed to Esna to get on board.
The plan was walking through the alleys of Esna and local markets to get to Esna temple and then continue walking to the river and get on board on the Orient, our dahabiya. Walking through streets of Esna we wished that we could have spent more time there, lively markets, amazing people and a lot to see in the limited time we had. It was there that the harsh reality of being part of the organized tour hit us. We haven’t done it before and it was a torture to follow Abdollah and not have enough time to walk in our own pace. Even buying pomegranate was a pain because he wanted us to buy it from the shop not the stalls by the road. The main problem is for 99% of the tourists, they are dealing with, they have to plan for everything and they think it is a good quality of service to take care of you and tell you what to do which was so bizarre and uncomfortable for us. But apart from this, we still enjoyed Esna a lot. We bought some fresh fruit and drinks for our 4 day trip as we didn’t know exactly what to expect. After visiting the Esna market for one to two hour and temple of Esna, we walked toward the Nile bank and the dahabiya stations.
There were few dahabiya docked next to ours in Esna, but I kinda liked ours the most, the Orient.
Getting on a Dahabiya:
We were greeted with the crew on the boat and they showed us around the boat. A dahabiya is a wooden sailing boat with two sails one in the front and one in the back. The lower deck is where the guest rooms, living area and the kitchen is and the upper deck is the siting and hanging area and where we spent most of our time there. We had internet on board all the time and electricity was available 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours at nights. Even though the Dahabiya is a sailing boat, for organized tours with limited number of days, relying on wind power is not advisable. If it was some wind, they were setting up the sails but for most of our trip, a boat with a proper engine was towing the dahabiya!!
What I loved about our experience on this particular dahabiya was the fact that first of all, it looked exactly how it was showed on the website. It was spotless clean and although it was comfortable, everything had it’s own original charm and showed the history of the boat. From the upper deck hardwood floors to all the furniture and even table cloth and napkins on dining tables.
For the first day, we chose not to stop anywhere. All we did was sailing slowly and enjoying the stunning views.
In the next post, we will visit Edfu and Kom Ombo temples together and have a look at the real life in Egyptian villages by the Nile along the way.
