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Egypt
September 2003
A three week journey around Egypt. I wrote a full account of the trip, to record both the memories I want to keep and the historic facts I want to remember.

Part 5: Aswan and Abu Simbel
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Aswan
We woke up at 6am in Luxor and took a train to Aswan. In Middle and Southern Egypt, tourists may only travel with police protection (a result of the terrorist attacks on tourists in recent years), and in the case of trains this means tourists can only take certain trains; other trains are unprotected and therefore for Egyptians only.

Aswan lies in the southern region of Egypt known as Nubia, which also refers to the north of Sudan. Throughout the entire history of ancient Egypt, Nubia (then called Kosh) was the southern neighbour of Egypt, and its principal enemy. The great pharaohs all campaigned against the Nubians and occupied much of their land, but in the 7th century BC it was finally the other way around: Nubian rulers conquered and ruled Egypt for a while then.

In the 1960s the High Dam of Aswan was built, which turned the Nile valley south of Aswan into a huge lake, Lake Nasser, which stretches all the way to the Sudanese border. The Nubian population had to move away, and many of them moved to Aswan.

Right in front of Aswan's city center there are two big islands in the Nile. We arrived in our hotel around noon, had lunch and then immediately went out to visit these islands, renting a boat to get there.

Kitchener Island
In the 1880s this island was given to Lord Horatio Kitchener, who ruled Egypt for the English at the time but is mostly famous from his famous WW1 recruitment posters. His hobby was gardening and he turned the island into a botanical garden with palm trees from all around the world. It is pretty nice, but unfortunately the trees' origins are never indicated.

Elephantine Island
Elephantine Island was already inhabited in pharaonic days, but only ruins remind of that. It is named after the big granite rocks on its shore, which are said to resemble elephants bathing in the water. They didn't look like that at all to us, but they do on pictures I've seen so maybe we saw the wrong rocks.

On the south of the island there are some villages inhabited by Nubians who moved here when the High Dam was built. Our boat's captain, a Nubian himself, took us to his house for tea, and spent an hour whining to the group leader about the fact that she had rented a boat from another captain for the two-day felucca trip the group was going to do later.

Just like the day before in Luxor, we found ourselves wasting time in the house of a stranger whose hospitality was only motivated by the prospect of making money. I was pissed off by how easily we let ourselves be pushed around, and when the man's TV started airing prayers loudly I stood up and switched the channel. The group laughed nervously, but the man didn't seem to care.

When he'd finally given up trying to convince Eva, he took us on a tour of his Nubian village, which was very interesting; the village was poor but partly painted in fresh colours, very esthetic. And I always like to see how people with different lifes than mine live.


Preparing to split
I'd decided now that I was gonna split from the group and go my own way the day after the next, and informed Eva of that when we got back to the hotel. She took it very well, without any reproach, which I appreciated a lot. I certainly didn't have a problem with the people in the group, most of whom I considered very nice; I just didn't like this way of traveling.

Joker (the travel agency) says it organises adventurous trips with a free schedule, but in reality the schedule was entirely fixed, and in every place we went to the group was herded around like sheep by a guide, a driver, a boat captain or a donkey owner. For me adventurous traveling means exploring and checking out interesting places as you discover them, but there was rarely any time for that. I felt like I was being traveled instead of traveling myself.

To Sudan?
Once I'd made up my mind to go my own way, things got exciting immediately: I had no idea about where I was gonna go yet and had only one day to choose my first destination. Lovely! After being led around for so long, I wanted to do something really adventurous, so I set my mind on going to Sudan. This idea had been on my mind ever since I'd noticed that we'd get to within 50km of the Sudanese border when visiting Abu Simbel, and now I wanted to go for it.

It would be exciting to go to a country that is not on the touristic world map. I've read about how a small British regiment battled and lost in Khartoum in the 19th century, when Britain wanted Sudan as a part of its "Cape to Cairo" plan (to have continuous British territory all the way from the Cape in South Africa to Cairo in the north), so that was one point of interest. There are also plenty of pharaonic and ancient Nubian monuments in Sudan that I would want to see. There's also a civil war, but that's only in the south of the country so I'd be safe enough.

Unfortunately, after much asking around, I had to give up my beautiful plan. The only way I would be able to get into Sudan was to first get a visa at the Sudanese consulate in Aswan and then wait 3 days for the boat from Aswan to the Sudanese border which only departs once a week. There was no way for a tourist to get into Sudan over land. Waiting three more days in Aswan would be boring as hell though, and wouldn't leave me any time to do anything interesting in Sudan and still get back to Cairo in time for my plane home.

Nope
So I decided I'd just work my way up north through Egypt and visit some very interesting places in Middle Egypt, which has almost no tourism anymore due to the attacks on tourists a few years ago. I might also go snorkling in the Red Sea by myself. In any case my final destination would be Alexandria where I'd meet up with Salma.

I borrowed someone's Lonely Planet guide, marked all the places I might want to visit and went out to make photocopies. That was a lot of fun; I went to several places before I could negotiate a good price in a shop, and there the whole family came to watch because they'd never seen someone take so much copies I think. Only the daughter of the house spoke a little English and she wanted to know if I needed all those copies for work, but she didn't understand my English.

My own travel guides had no useful information about transport and hotels, while this Lonely Planet guide had everything. For each location, it lists all transport options to other locations, which was especially useful. I will certainly take a Lonely Planet guide with me wherever I go from now on.


Abu Simbel
On my last day with the group we had to wake up at 3 AM to go visit the temples in Abu Simbel. This is certainly the earliest I've ever woken up in all my life :) Because of the mandatory police protection, tourists visiting Abu Simbel have to gather at a certain location outside Aswan at 4 AM, and then drive south together in a protected convoy. This convoy was huge, when our minibus arrived there were about a 100 big busses waiting already. When the convoy departed, many of the busses raced to get in front, funny sight.

There are two temples at Abu Simbel. Both overlook the Nile and were built by Ramesses II in the 13th century BC to impress his southern enemies, i.e. the Nubians. Ramesses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1212 BC, was the greatest pharaoh and the most frantic builder in Egyptian history, and these temples are considered to be his most impressive work.

The bigger of the two temples is dedicated to Re-Harachte, Amun and Ptah but mostly glorifies the pharaoh himself. The smaller temple is dedicated to Hathor but was built in honour of Ramesses' wife Nefertari. She saw it completed just before her death.

A funny thing about these temples is that for thousands of years noone even knew they existed. In Greek times they were already buried in the sand. They were finally discovered in 1813, but wouldn't be dug out until 1909.

In the 1960s the building of the High Dam at Aswan meant that the temples would be flooded. There were several plans to save them, one of which was to wrap the whole thing in waterproof, see-through material and make it an underwater monument. In the end UNESCO, which financed the operation, picked a more practical Swedish plan: the temples were cut into 2000 pieces of 22 ton each and then rebuilt on higher ground at 200m from the original location. This took 4 years.


The High Dam
On the way back we visited Aswan's High Dam, which is 3830m wide on top, 980m at the bottom and 111m high. That doesn't make it the highest or widest in the world, but it does create the biggest artificial lake in the world: Lake Nasser, which is 480km long and up to 35km wide.

The dam was built in the 1960s and brought a lot of change to Egypt. It ended the yearly flooding of the Nile, which had so determined Egyptian society since pharaonic times, and increased the amount of cultivatable land by 30%. The evaporation of the lake brings rain to areas that had never known rain before, while the dam's power station doubled Egypt's electricity production.

There are also negative effects though. The dam blocks 98% of the fertile silt that the Nile used to spread, so now farmers need artificial fertilisers. The rising water table causes erosion of the foundations of the ancient monuments, and undiscovered mummies and artefacts that were preserved by the dry sand for thousands of years now get ruined in no time by the moisture .

The dam was built with help from the Soviet Union, and to commemorate that a huge monument for Russian-Egyptian friendship was erected near it. I just love Soviet style monuments (cfr. my list of favourite monuments) and was surprised to find such a beautiful example right here in the south of Egypt. The monument represents a lotus flower and is a whopping 136m high.


Philae Island
Still on our way back from Abu Simbel, we also visited Philae Island, which lies 8km south of Aswan. This island is actually called Aglika; after the High Dam was built the original Philae Island got flooded every year so all its monuments were brought here.
Philae Island was the center of worship of the godess Aset (Isis in Greek). Its current monuments were built during Ptolemaic times (3th-1st century BC) and Roman times. Of all the places of worship of the ancient gods, Philae survived christianity the longest. Its temple was finally closed in 550 AD, by order of the Byzantine emperor Justanianus.


Back in Aswan
Back in Aswan we spent the rest of the afternoon at another swimming pool by the Nile. Afterwards I walked to the station to make arrangements for the next day. I would take a train north, while the group would get on a felucca to sail down the Nile for two days.




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