Trapped in the Doldrums: A Felucca Ride on the Nile Gone Hysterically Wrong
- Rand Blimes
- Jun 4
- 4 min read
Dear Diary,
I have finally learned the true meaning of desperation. And frustration. And also “defenestration,” which has absolutely nothing to do with my current predicament—it’s just a fun word I picked up and thought I’d mention.
No ... I am not merely caught in the doldrums. I am marooned in them. The dreaded Doldrums—capital D—the windless hell where hope goes to die. That dreadful patch of water, feared by sailors of yore, where the breeze forgets to blow and boats sit helplessly, inching neither forward nor back. Days. Weeks. Months. Decades. Millennia. (Probably not more than millennia—what would be the point? Everyone would have just disintegrated.)
And here I am. Trapped. Slowly withering in this floating purgatory.
Alas.
Sigh.
Dear Diary,
It all began so innocently. A friend of a driver we met in Luxor had a boat. “Take a sail,” he said. “It’ll be fun,” he said. “What could go wrong?” he said. “You will absolutely not get stuck in the doldrums,” he said.
Having googled “doldrums,” I was reassured. After all, our boatman surely understood the Nile winds—their gentle southerly drift—and the northward pull of the current. I placed my trust in him as I might a wise river guide or moderately competent tour operator.
So we met the boatman. We followed him to his felucca. We set sail on the mighty Nile—the giver of life, the ribbon of time, the beating heart of Egypt for over 5,000 years.
Foolishly cheerful in our ignorance of the doom to come, we dangled our feet into the river. Well... I did. If I stretched just right, I could get a toe wet. The wife tried. Couldn’t reach.
Dear Diary,
The breeze caught our sail, and we pushed upstream. We moved with the breathtaking velocity of a gopher suffering a mild back spasm digging through wet concrete. After twenty minutes, we had perhaps covered 50 meters.
And then... the breeze died. Or rather, it found perfect equilibrium with the Nile’s northbound current. Our forward momentum was exactly canceled. We stood still. Perfectly still.
In the Doldrums.
Dear Diary,
We hovered.
Would we ever again sit in the air-conditioned glow of Luxor McDonald’s, sipping milkshakes while gazing out at the ancient temple? A strange pilgrimage to a place where the fries taste exactly like they do back home, but the view includes obelisks.
Other boats passed us by—those proud vessels with engines that roared like underperforming lawnmowers from the Carter administration. And yet, I envied them. The freedom! The propulsion! The ability to steer and move and go wherever one pleased! A thing of dreams.
Dear Diary,
At long last, salvation!
From the northern horizon came a whisper—a breeze! Our sail stirred. Billowed. And yes! YES! We moved!
The felucca inched forward, now traveling at the blistering pace of a semi-moderately determined goat. We surged (relatively speaking) into the current, boldly declaring to the heavens, “Not today, cruel river! You shall not claim us in your torpid coils!”
A passing pontoon boat sputtered lazily past.
I shook my fist.
We sailed on.
Dear Diary,
A miracle! We are still moving. Not fast—nothing about this journey had earned that adjective—but undeniably, unquestionably moving. The shoreline began to creep past. Ripples formed behind the hull. I believe I may have seen a single reed bow politely as we went by. Glorious.
And then, as if sensing my spirits begin to lift, the boat captain turned to me with the solemn dignity of a man offering a sacred rite.
“Would you like to steer?” he asked.
Would I like to steer? Would I like to become—if only briefly—the captain of my own Nile adventure? To take the reins (well, rope) of this ancient vessel as it glided across waters that once bore pharaohs? Would I like to be able to tell stories for years to come about the time I captained a felucca through the legendary Doldrums?
Yes. Yes, I would.
And so, with no training and far too much enthusiasm, I took hold of the sacred rope. Steering, as it turns out, is a subtle art. One must pull... and then perhaps pull slightly less. Or—daringly—pull slightly more. That’s the whole thing. The entire skillset.
Still, I did it. I pulled the rope just so, and the boat nodded in agreement.
Our captain nodded too—perhaps with pride, more likely with amusement—and quietly let me believe that I was doing something. He knew, of course, what I did not: by offering me this illusory control, he had instantly tripled his tip.
Well played, noble felucca master.
Well played
Dear Diary,
And so, we returned to the dock—slightly sunburned, slightly dehydrated, having traveled only marginally upstream from where we began. But richer, somehow, in the currency of ridiculous stories and imagined near-death experiences.
Was it everything I hoped for?
No.
It was more ridiculous.
Which is, arguably, better.
Because travel stories don’t come from things going the way you thought they would. They come from the absurd, the unplanned, the absolutely still—and from the moment someone hands you a rope and says, “Here, steer.”
.
Commentaires