13 April 2018. The day I finished 'Walking the Nile'. It took me about two and a half months to read the whole book (yes, I'm a slow reader). The time I spent was incomparable to around nine months it took Levison to finish his walk from the source of the great Nile to the end of it. It was quite an easy read for me despite finding it a little bit challenging to imagine the kind of things he saw during his walk, the kind of people he met, the adrenaline rush he must have felt seeing his friend dying from the unforgiving heat of the desert. Of all these, to imagine the direction of the Nile that sometimes bends towards the north or any other directions and when the river divides itself into the Blue Nile and the White Nile pose an amazing challenge itself. The unfolding of various issues happening across Africa gave me new knowledge to the parts of the world that didn't really intrigue me to find out more about it before out of my sheer ignorance.
As some of the things written in this book were totally new to me and it was pretty natural for me to take it as the truth from the face value for the start, the political conflicts in Egypt were not something that were unheard of. When some locals gave a bad impression at the past President Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood, I wonder why I have an almost different and contradicting image for Morsi and his group; do the hatred between Egyptians themselves is largely because of the difference between religions or is it fired by anything else? Or maybe the fault is mainly on groups that do violence in the name of religion when instead they do it for their own gain? These questions certainly demand for more further reading about Egypt.
All in all, it was a pleasure read and deserves a few other visits in the future (though the bit towards the end was quite controversial and sensitive).
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