Travel – Page 28 – David and Yanmei

May 25, 2015May 25, 2015

Temple of Abu Simbel

The whole purpose of coming to Aswan was not to see the dam, but to visit the Temple of Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel is 280km further south of Aswan, near the Sudan border. To get there you need to take a car. There are two tourist convoys across the desert per day from Aswan to Abu Simbel, and they have police escort for safety. The first convoy leaves at 4am to beat the heat of the day. The second convoy leaves at 11am. I wanted to take the first convoy so we'd be back by 1pm or so, but Yanmei didn't want to wake up that early, so we scheduled for the second convoy.

The second convoy is less popular, and was low season, so they didn't want to send a police car. Instead they asked us if the police officer could ride in our car. I'd read about this possibility online so I agreed, although I'm not sure what would have happened if I said no. I felt like they were asking as a courtesy. The policeman rode in the front seat with Yanmei and I in the back. He had a compact sub machine gun, after googling it later I think it was a Heckler & Koch UMP with folding stock. Most of the police seem to have AK-47s, but this was much easier to travel with in a car.

We left Aswan through a checkpoint and headed towards Abu Simbel. Our driver Usama told us we were the lead car in a three car convoy. The road goes away from Lake Nasser so we were surrounded by desert. I've read that Aswan is the third driest town in the world with less than 1 millimeter of rain per year, but at least they have the Nile. Out in the desert there is nothing. It isn't like the Arizona desert where there are scattered cactuses and hardy plants. In the Egyptian Sahara there is nothing but sand and stone, not one single weed or anything.

Finally we arrived at Abu Simbel. We let the policeman out at a checkpoint. At this point Yanmei finally noticed he had a gun and became nervous. We continued to the Temple. I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the convoy because we were the only car to arrive there.

The driver told us to be back by 3:45pm. After three hours in the car we wanted to use the bathroom. Yanmei rushed off ahead to use it. After using it, of course there was a guy who wanted to be tipped. Unfortunately I had no small change. After arguing for a while I asked if he had change, he only had chinese money so I assumed Yanmei had tipped him, I said I'd come back later. I started looking around for Yanmei. Suddenly she came running downtown the path shouting “David! David!”. I could see she was frightened. She'd gone back up to the car, and it was gone, so she started thinking I was kidnapped and she was abandoned. So she was pretty glad to see me. 😉

Once again we had the place to ourselves. There were not even many vendors to bother us. The Temple itself is pretty spectacular. It was build by the pharaoh Ramses II as a temple to himself in about 1264 BC. There is also a smaller one built for his wife Nefertari.

Temple to Nefertari with 4 statues of Ramses and 2 of Nefertari

No pictures allowed inside, but you can see a bit of the interior

Inside are various inscriptions depicting Ramses II winning battles and being treated as an equal by the gods. The ceilings are high and it is very spacious. There were no photos inside and they were pretty strict because they wanted to sell us pictures of the inside.

The temples were completely buried in sand and lost until rediscovered in 1817. Unfortunately some explorers or travelers carved graffiti into the stone, you can see some dates in the 1800s.

The other interesting thing is both temples were actually moved in the 1960s. Originally they were on the bank of the Nile and they would have been flooded by Lake Nasser when the Aswan dam was built, so they moved them back and up 200m from the original location. That must have been a massive project. The broken statue occurred from an earthquake in 27BC, not the relocation effort.

Finally we returned to our car for the trip back to Aswan. No policeman ride with us this time, instead we seemed to be giving a ride to some random guy. Anyway the trip was uneventful. We did get to see sunset in the desert, but it was remarkably dull with no real colors.

-David

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May 24, 2015May 24, 2015

To Aswan

Friday we had a flight to Aswan for the next leg of our journey. Egypt is going to be busy for us, lots of stuff to see and not much time to rest. We got to the domestic terminal at the airport, but we couldn't figure out where to get our boarding passes. Finally we asked someone and they told us we had to go through security first, then we could get our boarding passes. Strange, but turned out to be correct. Anyway it was only a one hour twenty minute flight to Aswan airport.

We needed to take a taxi to our hotel. We were booked at Sofitel Legend Old Cataract hotel. We went outside (much hotter in Aswan by the way) to look for a taxi, but there were no taxis, only guys with cars. Of course we were approached right away. I told the first guy Sofitel and he said “Sofitel Old Cataract?” so I knew he knew it. Then Yanmei asked “How much?” and he said “How much do you want to pay?”. We didn't like that so we moved on.

Eventually we settled on a guy who actually had the word “taxi” stenciled on the side of his car. The car was an old Peugeot with no meter, no AC, and the speedometer was broken too. He basically spoke no English but I told him Sofitel several times and he nodded. After driving for a while Yanmei started to get nervous. I was too, but tried not to show it. We were in the middle of nowhere at the mercy of some random guy who didn't speak English. Yanmei said I should have had someone from the hotel meet us at the airport. Good idea, too bad I didn't think of that ahead of time.

I took out my phone and searched for the hotel on Google maps. I found we were on the major road heading towards the hotel, so it looked good. Then we got to the intersection where he was supposed to turn left, and he turned right! We tried telling him he was going the wrong way, even showed him the map on my phone, but he didn't understand. He said “Sofitel downtown”. We passed the train station and I wanted to get out there and call the hotel to send someone, but he kept going. We ended up going down this little alleyway, weaving around donkey carts before stopping in front of a dilapidated building and he said “Sofitel”. I looked at the sign and it said “Safa Hotel”. Oh, sounds like Sofitel. Yanmei was freaking out a bit, saying “no, no, no, we are in a five star hotel!” Finally I told him “Sofitel Legend Old Cataract”, and he understood, he said “Oh, Old Cataract.” So he took us back out and to the correct place. Phew!

After that mini adventure we checked into the hotel and had a late lunch at the hotel cafe before relaxing in our room. The hotel is quite nice, and we had a suite overlooking the Nile. The bathroom was bigger than one of the rooms we stayed at in Taiwan.

We both ended up falling asleep. I woke up around 7:30pm, which is shortly after sunset, but it was still sweltering outside. We decided just to stay in the room and relax for the evening.

-David

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May 22, 2015May 22, 2015

Cairo, day 3

Thursday we decided to take a half day tour to Dashour, which has the bent pyramid and red pyramid. These are the pyramids of Cheops' father. This time we booked the tour through the travel agency in the hotel. Dashour is a little more remote, so we got to drive outside Cairo and through some smaller villages and farmland. Before we got out of the city I got a good picture of typical Cairo, garbage, dust and unfinished buildings with satellite dishes.

Nile basin farmland. Palm trees are date trees.

Soon we got to the red pyramid, so named because it was built with red limestone, although the color is not very distinct now.

We had the place to ourselves. Here is a picture of our tour car in the parking area.

We chose to go inside the red pyramid. We didn't go inside the great pyramid because we figured it would be too crowded and difficult. I'm not very claustrophobic, but being stuck in a hot narrow, passage with other people blocking your way isn't my idea of fun. Here we'd have the whole tomb to ourselves.

There were no pictures allowed inside, but I'm starting to learn how Egypt works, so I bribed the guard. Then I could take pictures and he even took some of us together. The entrance is about halfway up the side (where the wood steps and platform are), then you climb down a steep narrow passageway to the three burial chambers.

After that we went to the bent pyramid, which is visible in the distance from the red pyramid. The bent pyramid is called that because it was built too steep initially, and the architect realized it might collapse so the angle was changed halfway through. The pharaoh didn't like the result so he had the red pyramid built to replace it.

Queen's smaller pyramid next to bent pyramid

It actually wasn't that bad walking for a short while through the desert to look at these pyramids, the temperature was low 90s and there was a breeze. It is supposed to get up to the hundred and teens over the next several days.

For dinner we booked a Nile cruise. Unfortunately it didn't really live up to the billing. It was a buffet and the guests descended like locusts and all the food was gone after about 20 minutes. Meanwhile we did move away from the dock but other than that we barely moved. Row boats were passing us. Eventually after the meal was finished we started moving some more. There was also a belly dancing performance. Yanmei was pretty shocked. Not at the belly dancer, but at the reaction of the crowd, which seemed like mostly locals. The supposedly conservative, religious people were handing their babies to the belly dancer for photo ops. 🙂

-David

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