Day 24 - Abu Simbel and Cairo
Today is the penultimate day of our holiday and our last morning on the River Nile. It has been such an awesome time, and if I had to choose a highlight I would plumb for the unexpected towel origami we came home to each night.
Last night at dinner I noticed a whole lot of exhausted, hot and bothered fellow passengers staggering into the dining room. When I asked a couple of them how their day was, they burst into tears and explained that they had just been to Abu Simbel. Apparently every man and his dog was there, and along with the sweltering heat (it is located on the western edge of the Sahara Desert about 20 kilometres from The Sudan border), and the eight hour round trip, it had been rather a long day. When I fed this back to Shenouda, he just smiled and said “today is always the busiest day. Every tour group goes there.” So having just been ourselves I can tell you Shenouda really “knocked one out of the park” when he rearranged things so that we could spend today there before heading off to Cairo tonight.
So we got up, breakfasted, checked out of our cabin, met Shenouda and Wim in the foyer and headed to our transport (Egyptian law requires two drivers for the long trip (three hours each way), to Abu Simbel from Aswan), which today was provided by the interchangeable Magdi 1 and Magdi 2. For the next three hours we drove along part of the Sahara Desert while Shenouda pointed out some of the interesting projects underway in Egypt to turn the place into an oasis. We saw a couple of massive canals recently constructed and some successful irrigation projects resulting in plant growth.
Then we reached Abu Simbel…the most impressive and unique temple I have ever seen.
Commissioned around 1244 BC (during the reign of Ramses II), the temple took about twenty years to build and was constructed as a place for people to worship the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty, and Ptah, as well as the Great King himself, following his death.
The Abu Simbel Temple is actually two individual temples (both having been carved out of a mountainside), with the biggest temple (the one with the four colossal statues of “you know who” (no not Voldemort) carved into the entrance façade), dedicated to the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty, Ptah and the man himself, while the second smaller and slightly less impressive temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor, personified by his beloved wife, Queen Nefertari.
With the passage of time, the temples fell into disuse with the Great Temple being eventually covered by a sand dune. The temple was forgotten by Europeans until March 1813, when Swiss researcher Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (having been led to the site by a young boy named Abu Simbel), found the small temple and top frieze of the main temple and (jumping for joy), promptly named the site after his little friend.
By the late 1950’s Abu Simbel (after the Aswan Low Dam was completed in 1902), was repeatedly hit by floods seriously compromising the site’s future. In desperation Egypt asked the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), for help with rescuing this ancient treasure (the rising waters were now so bad they threatened to permanently submerge the whole site). UNESCO came to the party and in 1964, one of the world's largest and most spectacular dismantling and reassembly projects began. By 1968, the entire site had been carefully cut into large blocks, dismantled, lifted, and reassembled (an artificial hill was made from a domed structure to house the Abu Simbel Temples), at a new location 65 metres higher and 200 metres further back from the river.
The façades of both temples are just spell binding. Wim, Maria and I just walked around in a daze and couldn’t thank Shenouda enough for rearranging our itinerary so that when we got there, we virtually had the whole place to ourselves. This was so worth the eight hour round trip.
As for our return flight to Cairo, the less said about that the better. Let’s just say I am not a fan of either Italians nor Spaniards (or as I like to call them collectively, the “no one else matters but me gang”), when it comes to common courtesy’s like waiting your turn, knowing who was here first and being patient while queuing for the check-in counters as well as getting on and off a plane!!! Our flight was a late one (11:45pm) but was delayed half an hour. By the time we landed, collected our luggage (ours were among the last on the carousel), were collected and transported to our hotel (The Hilton), checked in and finally climbed into bed, it was 3:30am.
