An early start for those of us making the trip to Abu Simbel. It’s an added extra that less than half of us decided to take.
We were on the bus to Aswan airport at 6:45, ready for our 8:05 flight. It’s a small airport with high security because it’s half an air force base. We saw (and heard) several fighter jets zooming in low while we were there.
The flight was delayed by half an hour for reasons that weren’t explained to us, but as it only took 45 minutes we were on the bus to our destination by 10:30. The town was slightly cooler than Aswan but because the humidity was higher, possibly due to the adjacent lake, it felt hotter, and the sweat stuck to you instead of evaporating instantly.
Abu Simbel is the name of a couple of temples built by our old friend Ramesses/Ramses/Rameses the second, one to himself and one to the favourite of his many wives. I thought the guide said it was Nefertiti, so I duly took an enormous amount of photos of her to show my daughter, for whom I’ve paid an extortionate amount of money to buy a pair of gold Nefertiti earrings. Alas, it turns out to be a completely different woman. Nefertiti was the principal wife of Amenhotep IV, and had been dead for a couple of centuries before Ramesses’ wife Nefertari was having her heyday. Hey ho.
I will try to show you a photo but TBH it’s very difficult to make head or tail of what is going on in the scenes displayed on the walls of the temples. Is that a god, a pharaoh, or a pharaoh depicted as a god? The same god can be represented by several different animals too, seemingly at the whim of the architect and/or priest.
The Nile was dammed in 1903, and then again with the high dam in the 1960’s. This has had several effects. It has helped Egypt control the Nile to prevent both droughts and flooding, but the latter used to provide fertility to the soil which now has to be supplied by chemical fertilizers. The river is now also more polluted than it was. There are probably enormous amounts of ecological effects that I’m not aware of, but the most dramatic effect has been the formation of Nassar Lake, an enormous inland sea. It’s 500 kilometres long and reaches almost to Sudan. They’ve built cruise ships on it that you can sail around it on, although I don’t know why you would? It’s pretty barren.
Of course, the rising water was also going to claim a number of ancient Egyptian sites, including Phillae Temple and Abu Simbel. They had no plan to save them until the water was already starting to rise after the completion of the dam. No pressure! Luckily UNESCO stepped in and in a very impressive display of international cooperation, a hugely complex engineering project with a budget of 50 million USD was undertaken, and these temples at least were saved. They were moved up and several hundred metres away to their current site, and they did such a good job you’d never know it had happened.
The second temple was dedicated to Nefertari, and it is renowned for having statues of both she and Ramesses II of the same height out front, in a rare show of equality for this or any other society, I think it’s fair to say.
It’s known as her house of fashion, for the lovely outfits she’s depicted wearing inside, and explains the enormous numbers of Asian ladies having their pictures taken for their instagram pages by adoring and patient boyfriends. I have no idea how they always look so neat and tidy, I was just a ball of sweat by then. At one point I poured a bottle of water over my head to cool me down, much to the consternation of the airport security worker who had to pat me down at one of the checkpoints. “Water?” She asked, looking at her hands in disgust, and I said no, thinking she was asking if I had a bottle of water on me. I thought she was going to be sick, poor thing.
We flew back around midday and were on the boat in time for lunch, and a long well deserved afternoon nap. I felt extremely pleased with myself for surviving the day’s heat and humidity like a pro. Electrolyte drinks and wet cloths seemed to do the trick, useful knowledge for any future hot climate adventures. It may not have been pretty, but I’d rather be disheveled and upright than glamorous and supine.
From then on right up until the following morning we were cruising, with intermittent short stops. We reached Kom Ombo early evening, it was chaos with ships all over the place, and there were thick choking plumes of smoke everywhere. I don’t know how you could live there, the lungs of the locals must be black.