Having spent much of this trip following one of either of the Blue or White Niles from their sources of Lake Tana, Ethiopia and Lake Victoria Uganda respectively, it has been with some excitement that we approached Egypt where civilisation as we know it, first emerged. Even in prehistoric (before the Egyptians invented writing) times it was the Nile that was the magnet for the first urban agglomeration. As the grassland of the Saharan savannah dried up due to the combination of climate change, overgrazing and the nomads gravitated to the Nile and here the world’s first nation-state emerged. So this river has played a vital role in the evolution of some of the world’s first urban societies during the Pharaonic period from 3100 BC and on its banks was Memphis, the world’s first city, built. But for us travelling along the both Niles and then through Khartoum where they merge and further on to Lake Nasser, the world’s second largest man-made lake (after Kariba on the Zambesi which we rode around earlier this trip) the stark reality has been just how much of this river complex travels through unforgiving desert. Apparently just the annual evaporation of Lake Nasser alone (a lake of volume just under three Lake Taupo’s) is equivalent to one-tenth of Lake Taupo’s total volume. For an area that suffers from acute water shortages that seems quite a bit to just let go up in steam! 
However one of the puzzles we’ve wondered about is how the White and Blue Niles got their names as both of them are a silt-laden brown colour. And that colouring continues when they merge in Khartoum although there is a slight difference in colour as they come together. But by far the most dramatic change in colour of the Nile occurs at the High Dam at Aswan, Egypt where above the dam Lake Nasser retains the silty brown colour but below the dam it is clear and blue. And this stark colour change has a sinister story behind it. The dam at Aswan prevents the nutrient-rich silt moving downstream and fertilising the lower Nile. As a consequence farmers in the Nile delta these days are having to resort to use of artificial fertilisers as the delta has lost much of its traditional fertility. Fish stocks in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean are also substantially depleted now as the supply of their food has decreased, salinity of the soil is rising as irrigation practices raise evaporation rates, coastal erosion has increased and finally silt is building up in the lake reducing its storage capacity and making the building of further dams upstream inevitable if the power generation and flood control capabilities are to be retained. The Nile isn’t just Egypt and Sudan’s plaything, it runs through a number of countries with the Ethiopian catchment being the largest source of its waters. Herein arises the inevitability of substantial escalation of political and social tensions. Within Sudan there have been a number of incidents of public unrest involving the Nubian people, original occupants of the middle Nile region. Police have tear-gased, fired upon and killed demonstrators involved earlier this year. 
The source of trouble has been government plans to construct two or three electricity-producing dams along the Nile in the Nubian heartland from 350 miles north of Khartoum, to 100 miles from the Egyptian border. Already the dispute is being labelled here as “Darfur II” and similarly it’s about water. There’s likely to be 300,000 Nubians who would have to relocate – the Aswan dam project of the 1960’s forced the relocation of 850,000 Nubians. Also at risk again will be some of the world's richest archaeological ruins, notably those around the ancient city of Kerma, the first Nubian capital, and where we spent a night on our ride to Wadi Haifa. Kerma was settled at least 8,000 years ago and is home to the oldest known man-made structure in sub-Saharan Africa: a 50-foot, 3,500-year-old mud-brick temple known as the Deffufa – pre-dating the structures of Pharonic Egypt, and testimony to the oldest known urbanised community of Black Africa. In addition the Kerma area hosts an abundance of yet-to-be excavated archaeological sites that hold the secrets of these ancient civilisations. So while the Nile provided a refuge for the Saharan nomadic pastoralists rendered destitute by the deterioration of the savannah, it looks inevitable that decades of desecration of its natural course for the competing demands of power-generation and irrigation will inevitably lead to its demise in much the same way we saw a couple of years ago when riding by the Aral Sea.
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