Dissected and defaced temples

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Temples and early mornings not really being my thing I decided not to go to Abu Simbel. The Australians on the MS Melody were outraged, and convinced me that it was an absolute must see. So I did the tourist thing and got up at 3.30am to join a convoy through the desert to this monument. For those of you who (like me) have never heard of the Abu Simbel temple it was erected by Ramesses II and is dedicated to himself. However besides being a large monument it’s claim to fame is that when the Nasser damn was built it was going to be submerged, so UNICEF stepped in, chopped it up into little pieces and carted it up the hill thus bringing it into the spotlight this century.

The convoy out there was pretty exciting. It went at about 140kms per hour and involved a lot of passing, and being passed and then re-passing. I didn’t quite get it, but my Scottish tour guide said that apparently if you fall to the back of the convoy you end up being bunted and tooted by the police. Not that tooting is unusual in Egypt, in fact there is a ridiculous amount of tooting. There are even “no tooting” signs (which light up with disco lights at night), not that they are observed. As far as I can tell honking your car horn in Egypt means: “Hello”, “Goodbye”, “Get out of the way”, “Do you want a taxi?” “I’m about to run you over”, “How many camels?” - it can also be used when the driver is just generally hassling tourists, or is really getting into a song on the radio.

The temple was very impressive, however I was suffering from some sort of permanent indigestion and did question why exactly we needed to leave so early in the morning to get there. I took a ridiculously large amount of photo’s and hope that at some point when reading one of those 100+ things-that-you-should-see (but don’t have a chance in hell of making it even half way through) before-you-die and I will be able to say “I’ve been there! Here is a photo of me in front of it!”.

After that I decided to miss the afternoon temple and smoked shisha and ate ice-creams instead. I did manage to brave the temple the next morning through (a modest 7am departure) which was the temple of Horus and Edfu. Most of which has been defaced (literally, the faces are chipped off) by Christians. From there we continued on to Luxor for the evening.

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Photos

Desert sunrise
This is the view that you get when you rise at 3.30am

Edfu temple
Lara, Bettina, Gi and I.