A glimpse of Egypt then homeward bound!

The phone rung at 3am with our chirpy wake up call. Ugh. We rolled out of bed and shortly after were on our way to Abu Simbel. Our first stop was at a hotel where all other tourist buses and minivans congregated so we could all leave in a convoy for safety. It took several hours to get there and luckily most of us managed to get some more sleep.

When we arrived, our guide, Romani, sat us down and told us all about the Egyptian culture and the history of these two temples. Ramses II had one temple built for himself and one for Nefertari his wife, dedicated to Hathor, the Goddess of Motherhood (taking 20 years to complete). Ramses was the greatest warrior but he was selfish as he asked people to worship him here – until then worshipping was only for the gods. Further, the temple he had built for Nefertari contains four statues of him and only two of her!

The two temples were carved into the mountain in the 13^th century BC though they were relocated from the lake edge below when they were working on the High Dam (between 1964-68) otherwise they would now be underwater. The temple relocation was incredible. The temples were cut into huge pieces weighing up to 30 tonnes each and the joints were only allowed to be a maximum of 6mm according to the contract but mostly they were only 4mm. You could barely notice the joins and the only real damage is to the 2^nd statue which was broken after an earthquake in the 6^th century AD.

Most of the other tourists had left after an hour or so, giving us the site almost to ourselves, which was incredible. It was low season too and perhaps tourism hadn’t yet picked back up in Egypt at that point in August 2012.

The next morning’s start was much more leisurely at 9am when we left for Aswan Dam. Turkey, our guide, told us the dam has 180 emergency gates. The high dam is 60km south of the low dam and has 12 turbines, each generating 175,000kw of power for electricity. The other benefits include keeping Egypt from flooding, keeping the crocs away from the Nile and saving temples, although there are still four underwater.

Our next stop was the Temple of Philae dedicated to Isis, the goddess of faith, entertainment and love, the Mistress of the Universe. Again this site was relocated and you can see the iron pylons in the nearby water where the old site used to be.

Finally we visited the unfinished obelisk – what would have been the biggest until they discovered a fault in it and abandoned it.

And thus ended my brief glimpse of Egypt as I had to come back and finish the last 3 subjects of my Masters and had already missed the first two weeks by that stage. We had a Nubian dinner farewell followed by drinks in one of our hotel rooms. The red and white wines we’d bought were so horrendous we couldn’t drink them so we had ‘Volga’ vodka instead – which was almost as foul. Dom mixed it with 7Up and thought it might taste better if we added Hibiscus crystals. No sooner had he put them in did it erupt and soft drink and vodka sprayed out everywhere – on the beds, walls, floors, etc. Everything got a tad sticky… but it was a night to remember nonetheless.

In the morning, we said our goodbyes – a particularly teary one to Princess – and I left the others to finish the last couple of weeks of the tour whilst I flew home to Sydney after nearly 11 months on the African continent.