Day 11 – A Not So Simble Day
I woke up to a rude, but very warranted, wake up call at
4am. Today is the day the cruise, sadly, ends, but for me, who booked a 7pm
flight back to Cairo (preceding a 1:20am flight back to Dubai – which precedes
yet another flight at 10am to Cape Town), the day begins early. I had very
little planned for the day. I knew I had the late flight back to Cape Town, so
I booked a similarly late flight back to Cairo, giving me a day to do whatever.
In the end, ‘whatever’ turned out to be a trip to the Abu Simbel temple, one
last temple.
The 4am start, and 4;30 departure from Aswan by air
conditioned mini-bus, was due to Abu Simbel being a good three hours south of
Aswan, coming thrillingly close to the Sudanese border. The goal was to reach
there around 8am, before the heat came, but in the end, it had more pleasant
weather being built right on the edge of the southern part of Lake Nasser.
The drive to Abu Simbel went quickly as I slept through most
of it. That is the point, of course, of the nice air-conditioned bus, and the
trade-off to the driver for a 4:30am start. We reached around 8am to Abu
Simbel. The temple is seemingly built into a hill, with a giant façade and then
a series of sanctuaries and halls inside the rock-face. This is very much true,
but the real magic is that these two temples, one honoring King Rameses II and
the other for Queen Nefertari, were built further down in the lake, and
pain-stakingly cut out and rebuilt above the new sea level post-rise of Lake
Nasser post-High Dam. There is a really nice visitors center that gives a lot
of detail of this whole engineering marvel, but the real magic is when you loop
around the man-made hill (the parking lot and entrance to the temple complex is
the back) and get a sight of the temple itself.
At this point, I’ve seen many temples honoring many Gods and
Kings and Queens, so it was hard to be truly surprised, but the Abu Simbel
temple did just that. First is the staggering size of the statues of Rameses on
the façade built right into the rock. The temple was first built around 1500
BC, the statues and façade are in great condition. Same with the second temple
for Queen Nefertari, which also has four statues of Rameses (the bread to a
Nefertari sandwhich). The insides of the temples were both stunning as well,
large columns supporting large halls, many various sanctuaries on all sides
with descriptive, intact paintings and carvings of Rameses great war victory
against the Hittites and various offerings Rameses and Nefertari gave to Horus
and Amun-Ra and Ises and others.
One amusing aspect of the temples, as I sweated through my
shirt in the heat even inside the temple, was the amount of people that gave
zero regard to the ‘no photos inside the temple’ signs. Like most other temples
in Egypt, they sell individual tickets if you want to take a photo, but few I
saw actually had that ticket, and still had free reign to hide behind a column
and take photos to their hearts content (me included). The best scene was
either one painting where Rameses was firing a bow on a horse drawn carriage,
and the horse had eight legs and there were two bows – it is purported this was
the Egyptians’ attempt to paint in motion, make a video essentially, or one
where Rameses was giving an offering to the God of Fertility (a
one-armed/one-legged man with a very graphic erect member) despite having at
that point roughly 120 kids (he would end up with 200, so problem solved?).
The setting of these two temples, in a remote stretch of
Egypt right off of Lake Nasser, was really astounding. It was also a nice help
to get the breeze coming off the lake – the one temple where it was a nicer
experience outdoors in the sun that inside in a shaded sanctuary with zero
ventilation.
After about two hours of touring the Abu Simbel temple, we
were back on the bus headed back to Aswan. If you do the math, this trip takes
about 6 hours roundtrip for about two hours of seeing the site, and while that
ratio may not seem great, there was nothing else for me to do today that would
bring so much value. It also gave me the drive back to Aswan, which for a
90-minute period was essentially a drive down the only road the eye could see,
with sand-swept Sahara on either side. Every now and then, the wind would pick
up and the sand would get thrown across the road. As I wasn’t driving and
didn’t need to deal with such annoyances, it was truly exhilarating.
We reached back to boat around 1:30pm. They arranged that I
could pay about ~$12 to have lunch on the boat, and they even let me use a room
that will be empty on the upcoming trip for the boat back to Luxor to shower
and rest. All in all, a great little cherry on the sundae that was this boat
trip.
