Inshallah in Aswan

Everyone will be pleased to know that we are continuing to get ripped off left, right and centre, but Egypt is remaining quite a pearl. This posed an obvious problem about what to write. What do you say if there is nothing to complain about? Do we just bang on about delerious happiness or do we try to mangle a religious reference? No prizes for guessing which route we would take.

We are down near the Egyptian/Sudanese border in Aswan, and around these parts you need to include “Inshallah”, or “God willing”, in your travel plans and most sentences. You may think you are going somewhere, but someone upstairs often thinks that you are not.

Since the last post we have been to the Great Pyramids at Giza.

They are rather large.

And also extraordinarily close to the city.

Matt climbed inside the “Second Pyramid”, and Penny went wandering, still suffering from her earlier pyramid injury.

Next it was down to Aswan to stroll along the Nile ...

Stagger up and run down sand dunes ...

And eat and dance with some Nubians ...

We had planned to take the 3 hour convoy ride out to Abu Simbel yesterday, Inshallah, but a mighty sandstorm (which knocked out the hotel air conditioner) cancelled that, so we spent the afternoon at Philae temple, a Ptolemaic temple (300BC-ish) which was flooded by the 1902 dam. However, in a wonder of modern engineering, in the 1960’s they built a small dam around it, drained the water, and moved it to higher ground.

You can get there, Inshallah, at the convenience of the cartel which runs the extortionate boats out to the island (for the same price you can hire a taxi for 9 hours or a boat for 10 minutes).

We left our tour and trekked off to Abu Simbel early today. This entire area was also moved stone by stone from low-lying and now flooded land in the 1960’s, following the construction by the Soviets of the Aswan Dam. It took 4 years to dismantle and reconstruct the temple and statues only 200 metres away from their original location. Had this feat of engineering not occurred, the site would now be completely submerged and the ancient wonder lost forever. Amazing stuff.

You only notice when you get right up close that the legs of all of the statues are completely covered in 19th century graffiti, and inside thoughtful young gentlemen have scrawled their names right over hieroglyphs.

Inshallah also has a positive connotation, of course. We had to leave the tour to go to Abu Simbel today, but that allowed us to miss 24 hours on a felucca, and the digestive problems which seem to accompany small boats in these parts.

We will make one final call on Inshallah tomorrow when we try to rendezvous with the group at a police check point near a small town in the desert. Fingers crossed.

The overnight train down here, was, of course, brilliant. This is Egypt after all.