Elephantine Island. A Guard Tries to Extort Money

On Friday morning after breakfast, I strike up a conversation at our accommodation with a 28-year-old local who has come alone from Cairo to vacation in Aswan and plans to travel to Luxor the next day for a hot air balloon ride. He works as a graphic designer at a small creative agency in Cairo. He is self-taught and constantly improving his skills. He says that this job pays quite well, even by Egyptian standards. He doesn’t like Cairo very much because it is dirty and noisy. He prefers the peace and beautiful nature of the small village atmosphere in Aswan. He has never traveled abroad but dreams of doing so—especially of seeing snow in Europe.

Later, we take a taxi and then a ferry to Elephantine Island in Aswan. It is a small island in the Nile densely populated by Nubians, car-free, with very narrow streets. In the evening, we walk almost the entire island.

A tense situation arises when we decide not to buy tickets to visit the local temple and pyramid ruins (there is no official price list displayed, but we are asked for 200 EGP—about €6—in cash per person). Instead, we approach the site from another side and take a few photos in that direction. From a distance, a guard starts shouting angrily. We begin to walk away, but he orders us to stop. When he reaches us, he demands the ticket fee because the ruins appeared in our photos. I tell him I can delete the pictures. He agrees. I delete them, and he leaves us alone.

After the trip, I read recent Google Maps reviews of the Temple of Khnum. Visitors who came later were reportedly asked to pay 160 EGP (about €5) in cash per person. One reviewer wrote that if you don’t have the exact amount, they claim they cannot give change—a common practice in Egypt. Another reviewer described a similar situation: entering from the other side, they were also asked to pay 160 EGP. They paid, even though they felt something about the whole situation wasn’t quite right.