Luckily, we were told at ten PM the day before that the balloons wouldn’t fly on Friday due to heavy winds. For us, that meant hoping for Saturday, our last day in Luxor. It also meant we could finally sleep in, which we happily did—we are on holiday, after all! Our alternate program sounded good as well.
At ten AM we made our way to the stables, which are right next door to Mohammads family home. We would help his mom make fresh Egyptian bread. We washed our hands and then proceeded to dive elbow deep into a large tin bowl where Mohammad mom Saida had put about five kg flour, water and a bit of yeast.
We were supposed to mix it all up and then she added another five kg of sourdough that had already risen to it. It was the stickiest dough we ever made. In order to make it airy and light you had to bat it with your own hands, making loud slapping sounds. The whole family watched in amusement how we tried our best.
The dough was barely clinging to Saida‘s hands, while ours clung to our entire forearms. The trickiest thing was to separate a blob of dough the size of a grapefruit from the rest, sling it so it became a ball and then squeeze it as a round shape on a board. We laughed a lot and Mohammads family as well at our pitiful tries. Finally with Saida‘s help we had produced twelve blobs on twelve boards and those were set to the sun to raise some more before being baked in an outside clay oven.
Our mouths were watering once we saw the fresh break being baked and we were looking forward eating some of that bread for lunch. Mohammeas family had done the cooking and we sat down and enjoyed a home cooked meal with self made Egyptian bread.
After lunch, we decided to have one final horse ride across the fields and along the Nile’s riverbanks. Esther chose Jazeera again, the little paint mare, with whom she had such a great connection. Chris, on the other hand, wanted something different and got to ride a stunning white Arabian stallion named Sahib. He was a bit of a character, though—only knowing three speeds: walk, trot, or full-on dance!
Mohammad got him two months ago from someone who had trained him as a dancing horse. This meant that as soon as he was outside and was asked to go a bit faster than a trot, instead of going forward into a canter, Sahib started hopping on the spot like a mad rocking horse. Mohammad has tried his best to teach him that it is OK to go forward, but clearly Sahib has not understood that yet.
So we were agreeing on it being only a walk/trot ride so that Sahib could also participate and Chris would not be thrown out of the saddle by the rocking motion. After a little while trying to find each others buttons it actually worked quite well. They cantered for about ten seconds, but it was obvious that it was hopeless to get him to canter any longer. Hopefully one day Sahib is learning that now it‘s Ok to go forward more.
We finished our ride and had a lovely and very good meal at the Wolf restaurant in walking distance to our hotel. The owner had worked in San Francisco for 23 years as a chef there but preferred to retire in his home country Egypt. He explained to us his philosophy of cooking and indeed the dishes were super tasty. We were glad we had a walk back to the hotel.
Later that evening we got the green light for the balloons on Saturday morning, so we retired early.
