Egypt, March 2008

3-5th March - Aswan, Abu Simbel And Nubian Village

At the end of the first day, after dinner, we boarded a train for the 11 hour journey south to Aswan. The train probably hadn't been cleaned in the fifty years it had been in service. Or maintained. At least one breakdown and 17 hour later, we arrived in Aswan, fully refreshed to go and look at some temples.

The next day we visited Abu Simbel to see the Great Temple and Temple of Hathor and Nefertari. The Great Temple is one of the billions of monuments in Egypt featuring Ramses II, who appears to have been a bit full of himself. The temples were actually moved to higher ground in the 60s to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, created when the High Dam was built at Aswan. If you look carefully you can see the joins.

On returning from Abu Simbel in the laughable police convoy (there were often no vehicles visible at all!), we took a boat across to a Nubian village and had dinner in a traditional mud brick house. They even had a bread baking oven fired by dried camel dung - which gives me some ideas...