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Since the terrorist attacks in southern Egypt in the 1990s there has been a wide range additional security measures in place. There are armed police at all tourist attractions and foreigners can only officially travel in convoy between certain towns. This whole situation seemed pretty strange to me. Although it's fair to say every man woman and child in Egypt will try to scam money from any tourist who sets foot here, I haven’t really encountered any anti-western sentiment.
The restrictions mean there aren’t many options in heading south. So I took the last night train to Aswan (one of only a handful of trains tourists can take). It was mostly locals at the train station along with the usual herds of middle-aged tourists on package tours. I’m quickly realising when you travel on your own the hustlers tend to more or less leave you alone but you’re a magnet for random people. Already I’ve been given half a dozen email addresses and received one marriage proposal.
I ended up sharing the compartment with a real character, one of those people who you can never figure out what age they are, and they clearly never let the Hippie thing
die. This guy had been to over a 100 countries and gave me loads of useful advice for the rest of the trip.
Unfortunately I’m far too Irish for the weather in Aswan, so I spent most of the day hiding in my air-conditioned hotel room. Yes that’s right hotel not hostel. There are no anyway decent hostels in Aswan so I decided to splash out the 60LE (€10) a night for a hotel. It’s a really nice setting right on the Nile, which looks perfectly clean here unlike in Cairo! Once the heat faded a bit I decided to go to the nearby Nubian Museum. The Nubian people originate from the region between Aswan and Khartoum in Sudan. The museum was pretty empty but well worth a visit.
The next morning I was up at 3am to get on a bus to join a convoy to Abu Simbel. Hardly ideal but it's the best way to avoid the intense heat of mid-day.There was a group of people doing an African overland trip on the same bus as me. I have to admit it was a pretty weird being an outsider looking in having done one myself last
summer. There’s no way we were that much of an obnoxious, annoying clique!
The striking statues carved out of a mountain were dedicated as much to deify the Pharaoh himself as the gods. They also acted as a sentinel watching traffic from the south, demonstrating the strength of the Pharaoh.
After the Aswan High Dam was built the original location of the temple was flooded and a massive international effort was undertaken to relocate the monument and countless other artefacts. The Philae temple which we visited next was also moved. It’s a fantastic setting on an island right in the middle of the lake. The main parts of the temple were built during Roman times. The temple was dedicated to the god Isis who was worshipped across the empire. It was later converted into a Christian church with some of the pagan reliefs defaced. The Christian inscriptions were later vandalised by early Muslims!
We were only about 40km from Sudan at one stage and I spoke to a good few people who’d just travelled through there and Ethiopia. It really made me want to head further south! Hopefully I will on another trip. Unfortunately with the independence
referendum coming up in Southern Sudan a civil war is looking more likely than an easing of travel restrictions.
A lot of people travel by either cruise ship or Felucca to Luxor. However after the Okavango Delta in Botswana it will be some time before I voluntarily get in a boat again. I was a bit dubious about the minibus transfer I booked. Seeing a minivan taxi several years older than I am pull up in no way assuaged my fears. It actually worked out really well and we picked up some other backpackers along the way who’d done part of the trip by felucca. We stopped at Kom Ombo and Edfu. Not much to see at the former but the latter is really well preserved. Both pretty empty, well worth a stop on the way to Luxor.
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