Nubia to Sinai to Cairo

Abu Simbel from a distance

A three hour train ride from Luxor - first class, natch - is all you need to get to Aswan, Egypt's southernmost city.  It's set in a beautiful spot on the east bank of the Nile.  Islands of various size sit between the Nile's banks here, and the First Cataract, one of six between Aswan and Khartoum in Sudan, stymies boats and gurgles the waters.  The docks are crowded with white boats - one-masted feluccas, two-masted dhabiyas, and gleaming white engine boats, and some of the big Nile cruise ships.  It's not a booming year for tourism, so most of these boats aren't plying the water, but they still look beautiful floating on the blue Nile.

Aswan is in the area known as Nubia, in ancient times it was sometimes controlled by Lower Egypt's rulers, at other times a client state, and sometimes independent.  Without getting too deep into ethnic identity, I'd say Nubians see themselves as more African, less Arab, while Lower Egyptians see themselves as the reverse.  It's a mellow place, a relief after Luxor, and my personal favorite city in Egypt.

Philae Temple

First up on the sightseeing was Philae, a Ptolemy temple built about 2000 years ago.  The Ptolemies were Greeks who ruled Egypt after the Egyptian pharaohs lost power, and many, if not most, of the remaining well-preserved temples in Egypt today come from their reign.  Even our word "Egypt"  comes from their language, it being the Greek name for the country.  Egyptians refer to their country as Misr, which is pronounced somewhat like mass-rə.  Anyway, the Ptolemies built a beautiful temple on a dove-shaped Nile island just south of Aswan and all was good until the High Dam was built.  Remember all the times you've heard of the flooding of the Nile?  As the water source for Egypt and the longest river in the world, its annual flooding was critical, foundational even, to the development of Egyptian civilization.  But not everyone likes to let nature take its course because she is fickle - sometimes neglectful in her stinginess and sometimes destructive in her abundance.  The British were the first to tackle the problem, building the Low Dam, which was too low to control the Nile's annual spate, but today serves as a nice bridge between the East and West Banks in Aswan.  In the 60s, Egypt started building the High Dam, which would not be breeched by the October floods each year, but would create a huge lake behind it, necessitating the removal of thousands of Nubians from their homelands and the painstaking dismantling of monuments to relocate them out of newly-formed Lake Nasser's reach.  What does this have to do with Philae?  Philae is situated between these two dams.  Once the High Dam was complete and the Nile flooded, Philae spent some months of the year partially submerged in the Nile's waters.  A beautiful site, but terrible for the stone.  So some folks got involved, carved up a nearby, higher island to mimic Philae Island's original shape, moved the temple piece by piece, and now you go to a new Philae Island and there are no threatening river waters eating the stone, and I kinda wish there were.  It looks beautiful in the photographs, and it was unique, even if it was unsustainable.

Surprisingly, the Nile this far south is clear.  I could see the sandy river bottom from the boat, and our boat captain taking us back from Philae filled a Sprite can with the top cut off and passed it to Greg, who declared it quite sweet and fresh.  A sip wouldn't hurt, would it?  I can report it did not and that I agree with Greg - it tasted really good, much better than Cairo water, which is safe to drink because it's highly chlorinated.

Lake Nasser, or what Ramses II gets to look at

The next day I rose at 2:45am to join the convoy to Abu Simbel, which is so far south it's almost Sudan.  The convoy is a long line of buses and cars escorted by one police car for the three hour journey to Lake Nasser.  It's for my protection, I know, but the end result is just target clumping.  Doesn't it make it easier for any terrorists by collecting all the choice targets in the same place?  It also creates a real toilet issue.  It's 7am, you've been up for four hours and in a bus for three of them - where do you and the hundreds of sunburned sightseers want to go first?  Still, good old Abu Simbel and its partner temple dedicated to Ramses' II wife, Nefertiti, are splendid.  Like Philae, these were carefully dismantled and relocated due to the construction of the High Dam.  But these puppies were carved into rock cliffs, so the process was more involved.  They are a marvel of construction twice over - just to make them at all, and then to cut them up like a jigsaw puzzle and reconstruct them in a new location thousands of years later.

The Nile's First Cataract

Abu Simbel aside, Aswan's other highlights are river-related.  Greg and I took a sunset boat ride around Elephantine Island one evening.  Our Nubian captains were delightful and took us over the First Cataract, onto the west bank, where camels and trinket sellers congregated, to their village where we rode a Nubian taxi (a donkey cart), and back to Aswan at dusk.  The next day, we were all set for a two days and two nights on a felucca, which I was all kinds of ready for.  Aswan Individual is the company we used, and Waleed, the local partner, had made us feel we were in good hands already.  Waleed had taken us to local cafes and spent much time showing us around his city.  Should you ever find yourself in Aswan, I recommend he and Petra unreservedly.  

Not my felucca, but a close match

I was really just looking forward to lounging on a sailboat for a couple of days, watching the banks of the Nile float by.  It was perfect.  Crew outnumbered guests - 3 to 2.  Captain Minshawee kept making us tea, which wasn't always good for me because you had to go ashore to relieve yourself.  We went to the markets at Daraow, where we stocked up on camel meat for dinner and I got to buy more sand-roasted peanuts and dume juice, which is made from the fruit of a local tree, ground up, combined with milk, and has a delicious malty, butterscotchy flavor.  Minsahwee also took us to to his village where we met some of his family.  I swam in the Nile, which I expected to be muddy and warm, but was in fact, crystal clear and chilly.  At all other times, I lounged in the shade, watching the world go by, or reading, or napping.  After a week of nonstop temple and tomb viewing in the heat, felucca living, complete with getting my ass kicked at Uno by the crew, was just what I needed.

Temple of Horus, Edfu

Once those 46 hours of heaven drew to a close, I had to summon the energy for two more temples, one at Kom Ombo, dedicated to the crocodile god, Sobek, and one at Edfu, dedicated to Horus.  Future Egyptian visitors take note of my opinions:  Kom Ombo is not a requirement, but Edfu, even as over-templed as I was (and remain), gave me the best picture of how these temples fit into ancient Egyptian religious life.  This temple was completely buried in sand until the 1850s or so.  It took decades just to clear it all out, but that sand did us a favor; the temple at Edfu is the best preserved temple in Egypt.  It even has a roof!  You know how happy that makes Superhotbutterwoman because of my vampire tendencies, but it also clearly shows how the rooms flow into one another, which is something you can't always discern when there's no roof and the walls are falling down into piles of hewn rock.  I was also glad there was a roof because the screw dropped out of my sunglasses right as I entered the covered portion.  One of the guards insisted on trying to fix it while I meandered around.  His English and my Arabic were at about the same level, so my attempts to tell him not to worry about it because I had an eyeglass repair kit in my backpack were futile.  By the time I was ready to leave, he was still struggling to use the quill of a feather to screw it back in.  He earned his baksheesh, even if I ended up doing the repair myself.

Jumbo, sunset, Sinai

I was off to the Sinai the next day to meet up with my friend, Gary.  His plan is to drive from London to Cape Town,  and he'd just arrived from Jordan.  He graciously allowed me to join him on Jumbo, the utilitarian Land Rover that is both transport and home for his trip.  We camped on the Gulf of Aqaba in Dahab for one night, then headed inland near Mount Sinai for two more nights.  I visited St. Catherine's Monastery, home to a stunted tree that is believed by some to be THE burning bush.  I forgot to find the bush (this is what happens when you don't review the guide book beforehand!) but did enjoy the walk there and the chapel.  The desert here is beautiful, rocky and mountainous, with this gorgeous peachy, tan tint to the landscape.  The sky was blue during the day and black and starry at night.  Really a lovely place, even taking into account the nonstop police checkpoints on the roads.

A couple of days ago, we took down the roof tent and drove into Cairo.  Finding the campsite near the pyramids in rush hour took time, patience, many changes in direction, GPS, Lonely Planet maps, and superhuman bladder control on my part, but we made it.  I'm now back in Cairo, again enjoying the largesse of my pal Andrew (now I've got my own room!) and getting organized for the next country, Ethiopia.