Day 4 Abu Simbil and Philae Temple

Wednesday March 23^rd

I was up at 3:30 for a 4:00am start. Picked up my boxed lunch and headed with the group to our minivan. We drove to a place where we met all the other buses and tour groups that were going on Abu Simbil. For some mysterious reason all the vehicles are grouped into a convoy for the three hour drive through the desert. I think it has something to do with safety because there are no services en route, but I didn't totally understand the rationale.

Anyway, we departed en mass at 4:30 and arrived about an hour after sunrise at 7:30. We walked to the site around a hill. The first view of the temple was from the side as the heads appeared, really amazing. Sam gave us a briefing of the site and its history.

Abu Simbil refers to two massive rock temples in Nubia on the west bank of Lake Nasser 230 km south of Aswan. They were ordered and built in the Thirteenth century BC as a lasting monument to Ramesses II and his queen Nefertari, by Ramesses.

When the Egyptians built the new High Dam to help control the Nile and provide electricity, Abu Simbil and other temples in the area were going to be flooded. The international community and UNESCO came to the rescue and cut the whole temple into pieces, thousands of blocks averaging twenty tons, moved it to higher ground and reassembled it! The temple was reconstructed 65 metres higher and 200 metres back from the river. Parts of the temples are rooms carved into the hill and after moving them they actually built a new hill on and around it to replicate the original.

We had a couple of hours of free time to wander around the site and explore the temples. They are absolutely amazing and massive. Inside Ramesses temple there are six more large statues lining the path to the interior chambers. At the back of the fourth and last chamber are four more seated statues, three are gods and the middle one is Ramesses (interesting that he has himself sitting with the gods). Three of these four statues are lit by the rising sun peaking through the four chambers on two mornings of the year. No one knows why those two days were special. All the walls are covered in Egyptian art telling stories of Ramesses II life, victories and conquests.

Ramesses temple has four large statues of himself on the outside. The temple he had built for his beloved Queen Nefertari has two large statues of her on the outside and four of him! Her temple also has interior chambers covered in beautiful Egyptian pictures.

There were more tourists here, but still way less than normal thankfully, as usually they have two or three convoys of buses arriving daily.

The Arab in the photo is one of the con men who try to pose for you or with you for you can take a photo but then charge you for it. I got this one from a distance.

We loaded back on our bus and did the return journey through the barren and beautiful desert. I think this is the driest desert I have yet seen, with nothing growing except in a couple of places where there was obviously water underground. We drove past a couple of mining sites. Eventually we crossed the top of the Aswan Dam as we headed to our optional tour of Philae Temple. It too was relocated because of the flooding caused by the new High Dam. It was relocated from an island where it was already half submerged to a nearby island that was enlarged in order to house the temple and reshaped to resemble the original island! There were only a handful of tourists here and we had the site more or less to ourselves.

Philae Temple has been used by Christians living in the area hundreds of years ago and they vandalized parts of it, defacing the carvings and building their own church inside the temple. When the Greeks discovered it they remodelled it and added a large number of beautiful columns in the courtyard. Nevertheless it still contains walls full of Egyptian art depicting offerings to the gods, and scenes from daily life.

After that we returned to our hotel for a couple of hours of free time. At 7:00 I met up with Sam and he took me to a local restaurant for dinner. The girls had gone and eaten somewhere else. He ordered the food and we had a variety of small dishes of meats, salads, veggies and dips. It was delicious. Having a guide to take you to a good local restaurant and explain the menu is another reason I like these trips.

Returned to the hotel and read and watched Aljazeera News (the local Arab news channel in the style of CNN) and all the news of the world, Libya, Japan, etc.