Aswan

After the profoundly distressing hire of the driver and car to go visit the pyramids, and then the much too high-priced trip to the White Desert, I was quite apprehensive about the 5 day trip to the southern archaeological areas in Aswan and Luxor. But having made the decisions first and having paid before going to the pyramids, it was money spent and I had to go with it hoping that it would turn out all right.

So at about 6:30 in the evening after arriving back in Cairo following the desert trip, I set out with another Mohammed to the train station to catch my sleeper train. I found out that the train ticket was 60 dollars. That was really high, in my humble opinion. I really wondered if there was a lower class ticket for a sleeper. But since it was done, I figured I would be experiencing a first-class train. I was right. I was in a cabin with two bunks. I had the top bunk. My roommate turned out to be a man from Tunisia. He was a travel agent and he was really interesting. He spoke French, so it was also a chance to practice my French. He told me about the tourism areas in Tunisia and about what it was like to be a part of the revolutionary time there. It sounded like a great place. He also seemed to understand that, although I may come from a “rich” country, that only means that I also have higher expenses and it does not make me “rich.” He lamented with me the supposition of these people from lower income countries that I am a wallet with virtually unlimited funds. That was nice. He left the train in Luxor, but gave me his contact information so I can get in touch when I decided to visit Tunisia. And I will. It sounds fascinating.

Although somewhat bumpy and jerky, I got a good night's sleep on the train and awoke refreshed and ready for the day. I was met at the station by Mahmoud, who took me to my hotel, again somewhat higher class than I would choose myself. But maybe not. I don't know what the room rate was, so maybe it would have been in my range. It is so hard to tell sometimes. He gave me the details of my itinerary for the next couple of days. I was to have a tour of the sights of Aswan in the afternoon. And bright and early the next morning at the ridiculous time of 3 am, I was going to have a wake-up call for the program of the next day, a trip out to see Abu Simbel. But I had until 2 pm to do on my own. I spent most of it in my room catching up on my journal. But then I took a short walk about noon along the waterfront. There were lots of touts there and it was a somewhat difficult walk.

I went back to the hotel and got ready for my tour. The group assembled and we got in the van and headed off. But one of the first things the guide mentioned was that at the end we could give some tips if we liked the tour. I really dislike that. When I worked in the casino, we were told never to do things like that. It's bad taste. I guess bad taste is an art form here. It automatically gets my back up when they do it.

We headed off and down the road. We passed a Coptic church on the right hand side, which our guide pointed out. But I guess it wasn't worthy of any more than that, certainly not a photo. We drove right on by. Perhaps there was no money in it, so it automatically became unworthy of more than passing mention.

The same went for the Muslim cemetery nearby. Mentioned, but no stops of time to take a photo.

Our first actual place of interest was the Old Dam of Aswan. Built in 1902, it created a reservoir that controlled flooding above the town. It looked quite interesting, but we didn't stop. Again. This was beginning to be somewhat annoying. And the guide didn't even pay attention when asked if we could stop for a look. No money in it I guess.

Following that, it was on to the High Dam, the one that created one of the first large man-made reservoirs in the world, Lake Aswan. It was built in the 1960's and was to both control flooding and to generate electricity. It is located 6 kilometers upriver from the Old Dam, which seemed silly to me. That pretty much made the Old Dam useless, I would have thought. So there were two reservoirs right next to each other. And the High Dam was apparently worth a stop for there was an entrance fee, which the guide virtually demanded from us, 20 pounds. It didn't look very interesting though. The Old Dam had character and had been built with what looked like red sandstone. The newer dam was built of earth and rocks and had almost no character. It didn't matter though, for we only stayed in one little area on the top of the dam. We didn't go to a viewing area off the dam. We didn't go past the visitor area where we stopped. And we didn't see much of the dam at all or its generating area. It was boring. I was getting less impressed.

We were told about the dam and how it had been built and its effect on the river down into Africa. But it wasn't very much information. The guide was not much of a guide. And what made matters a bit more annoying for me was that there was a man in a wheelchair on our tour. They made it exceedingly difficult for him to participate. He needed to put his wheelchair in the van, and he and his girlfriend knew how it would work, but the driver wasn't listening and didn't want to follow their directions. Then when we got to the dam, the guide told Daniel to stay in the van. I guess it was more trouble than he wanted to get Daniel and his wheelchair out of the van to be able to look around with the rest of us. It began to make me angry to see him treated like that. What was more was that he was so interesting. He came from South Sudan, the newest country in the world. He was there during the whole independence achievement. And he had travelled to all these different countries in the region. When I asked a question about the Nile, the guide couldn't answer, but Daniel spoke up and answered it for me. He had travelled along much of the length of the Nile and knew volumes about it and the political ramifications of what is happening to the river. I was very interested in talking with him more. In addition, Daniel actually knows where Calgary is. He even lived there. He might be back in a couple of months and I might be able to meet him when he is there.

After the boring High Dam visit, we headed back down the hill to a temple on an island in the lower reservoir. Philae Temple is a temple to the goddess Isis and sits on an island. It originally sat on another island in the river, but with the dam that were built, the temple was submerged. In order to save it from destruction by the waters, it was cut into pieces and pulled up onto the new island where it now sits. The only way to visit it is to take a boat from the entrance kiosk across to the island. (Although our own Isis, a Chinese girl on the tour who had taken to using the name, thought it would be fun to swim across to the island.) We took the boat across, and about halfway across, our guide mentioned that this was not part of the entrance fee and we should all contribute 5 pounds to pay him for the trip. I don't know if it was included or not, or if we were just being asked to give him a consideration for the trip, but I again considered it in extremely poor taste to be doing that. It is getting to be a fairly sickening part of my experience here in Egypt.

At the temple, the guide showed us the temple and its various parts. He showed us the number disks used to keep track of all the pieces while they moved the temple to its present location.

There was a public area. This area was outside the temple itself. It had lots of columns, in the Roman style. These were erected during the Roman rule. Even though the temple was Egyptian, it had a couple of different influences.

The next area was inside the temple itself. Beyond the entrance, only priests and the king and queen were allowed in there. Inside was a courtyard and some carvings and reliefs showing some scenes from the Egyptian mythology.

Then it was on to the inner sanctum of the temple, where only the high priest and the king and queen were allowed. The columns in here were highly decorated at one time, but time and religious change had taken their toll. When the Coptics came along, they eradicated many of the faces of the Egyptian gods, and they put Coptic crosses in many places. It was a sad bit of desecration. But it was all quite an interesting temple and I did enjoy walking it after the guide had finished his talk, in the first really useful bit of business that he had done, in my opinion.

This was the one piece of the day's tour that I really felt was worth the effort. I really wished we had been able to stop at the other couple of interesting spots, but that the guide had deemed to be uninteresting. I was already a bit suspicious of how this easy bit of touring was going to turn out. I really don't want to dislike my trip through Egypt, but I don't know that I will be able to avoid it. I may have to really do my own thing for the last few days and listen to absolutely nobody who tries to “help” me.

But as we prepared to leave the temple and head back to the shore, I did see the sun setting against some of the pillars of the temple. It was quite a nice way to end the visit and did leave me a bit more sanguine about the whole deal.