Please excuse the extreme lateness of this post, apparently a few hours means a few days in my head.
In any case, The Nile Cruise. No we didn't sail out from Cairo, in fact the trip itself started with getting on the mini-bus at our hotel at 3:30 in the morning for a 5:45am flight from Cairo International down to Aswan...so the cruise started 25000 feet up in the air on an Airbus A320-200. As I said in the previous post from "a few hours ago", Air Egypt domestic was surprisingly comfortable and I would gladly make that hop of an hour and 15 minute flight again.
We were met outside the airport by our tour guide for the 3 day trip Marwa and we proceeded to the great dam in Aswan. We all were a little tired from having to get up so early and then proceeding to tour right after landing, so we probably made a bad impression at first of being slow and uninterested when in fact, at least for me, I was very interested in the dam having been to the Hoover Dam in Nevada/Arizona a few years before. After the dam we went to the Friendship Building that President Nasar built to show thanks to the USSR for helping to fund the dam project. It was an impressive building, hollowed out in the center with four arms being linked together at the top by a ring...at least I think it was joined by a ring. I could be wrong, my camera ran dead and I left my spare batteries in the car so I don't have pictures of it. I do however have pictures of the last place we toured that day, the unfinished obelisk of Hatshepsut. What an impressive sight to see because as it is unfinished, one gets to see the process of making those gargantuan in progress...sort of. The fact that they could "cut" those things out of the side of granite mountains and somehow manage to roll them down to the Nile, which was about 3-4 kilometers away (or in American 1.8-2.5 miles), and then manage to sail them down (which is north towards the Mediterranean) the Nile to their destinations, and then install them...it is just absolutely mind-boggling. I might begin to subscribe to the theory that extra-terrestrials played a part in all this...just kidding.
After the obelisk we headed to our home away from home, which of course at the moment is Cairo, the MS Esadora II...or as we called her, the boat. The first visit to the boat was to see if we could check in of yet and have access to our rooms. As we got to the boat around 10:00am and they weren't ready yet, we decided to do all the paperwork and leave our bags there and then go to a garden island in the middle of the Nile. I have a soft spot for gardens because I practically grew up in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden back home, and even participated in their gardening classes for kids for a year or two. The garden we saw in the middle of the Nile didn't disappoint, and in fact was a pleasant surprise. So, if you would like an escape from the heat while you visit Aswan, I would highly recommend the garden in the middle of the Nile...if I actually remember the name of the place and bother to edit this post so that it is here as well, then be sure to tell your boat driver that name and not the garden in the middle of the Nile...although that might actually work :)
Our day consisted of two stops, the city of Edfu's eponymous temple, and the temple of Kom Ombo. Kom Ombo was first and is the only temple in Egypt built to honor two of the Ancient Egyptian gods. The level of detail that was still abundantly clear after 5000 years was incredible, and its Nileometer (the ancient way of measuring the Nile and therefore floods) was still intact as well. Conversely, the temple in Edfu was a massively facaded building that is truely a wonder to behold, and causes one to wonder how the ancients managed to build such huge structures without the aid of modern technology. The Ancient Egyptians were some truly smart and ambitious people.
Again, thank you for reading!
-Diggs
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