In 1990 our holiday to Egypt was a real adventure; not for us the cosseted comfort and luxury of the paddle steamers that plied the Nile, we were on a  budget. Instead we’d travel in a relatively small group, about thirty, on board a flotilla of five feluccas, traditional Nile sailboats that had sailed the waterway for as long as people could remember. By day we’d tack back and forth across the huge river, travelling to Luxor and visiting the numerous ancient temples along the banks, like Kom Ombo and Edfu; we’d visited Philae for an evening of son et lumiere before boarding at Aswan. At sunset we’d pull in at the riverbank and make camp, our evening meal cooked over an open camp fire where we ate, drank, sang and chatted the evening away – eventually settling down to sleep on the open deck of the felucca. Curious locals would often drop by and watch us from the raised embankments. Several of us fell prey to ‘Pharaoh’s Revenge’, one being taken off to hospital and others needing to be coaxed to disembark to visit the temples; but were all recovered by Luxor. Something of a highlight was a donkey trek to the Valley of the Kings to see the sunrise, quite a magical, memorable moment. Yes, we were allowed to use the pool at one of the luxury hotels, a short walk from ours on the edge of the bazaar; but to reach it we walked past the local butcher’s, a trestle table set up on the roadside where he hacked away at the carcasses, spitting blood and entrails everywhere. It was educational to travel, eat and live with a mixed crew of Nubians and Egyptians whose culture and lives were so different to ours; their history and ancestry laid out around us in temples and monuments to a once powerful and wealthy dynasty, until relatively recently almost forgotten and buried in the sands of time. Exploring their mythology gives insight into what shapes us all, our sense of the Otherworld and how we understand our place in the cosmos.