We got up this morning for our quick trip to Abu Simbel at 6am. If you've seen 3 pictures of Egypt, one of them was probably Abu Simbel. It is a temple for Ramses II, built in 1300 BC. Outside are 4 huge statues of Ramses (his foot is about as long as I am tall; he's 21m tall)
and inside are 8 more huge statues,
carvings (with some paint still visible) of battles he won and offerings he made to the gods, many chambers for making more offerings, and deep inside, 4 statues of the most important gods (one of which is Ramses, of course). The place is just incredible. If you ever get to Cairo, get down to Abu Simbel. Next to Ramses' temple he built one for his (favorite) wife Nefertary (Nefertiti). This one is half the size of Ramses' (hey, at least she got a temple) and is mostly adorned with pictures and statues of Ramses, but to make it worth her while, Ramses put up a couple statues of Nefertary (beautiful) and in the battle scenes, he didn't depict himself killing quite so many guys. But he's still killing guys.
Nefertary's temple (two of the statues are actually Nefertary):
Beautiful goddess in this picture (and behind her are statues of Nefertary):
Like Philae Temple, Abu Simbel was close to the old level of the Nile and had to be relocated when they built the High Dam. At the visitors' center there is a neat pictoral history of the effort to build a new mountain and cliff above the old one, cut up the temples into a thousand pieces, and move the temple to higher ground. Even though we new about where to look on the statues for cut marks, you really can't tell that it has been moved. When you get to the site, you start out behind the monuments and have to walk around. Knowing that it is a man-made mountain, you can see that it isn't original. But from the front, everything looks incredible and you can't tell it was moved.
One funny / unfortunate thing that happened here was: outside, on the second Ramses from the left, his head fell off. There was an earthquake back in Ramses' time (he was pharaoh more than 60 years, until he died at 97, fyi) and his face fell off this statue. The architect of the place freaked a little bit but managed to reattach it. Wouldn't you know it, a thousand years later another earthquake knocked it off again.
Well, no one noticed or anything, so as the temple got buried under sand over the next 2000 years, the head laid at Ramses' feet. When they uncovered the temple back in 1817 or so, they found the head there. When they relocated the temple to higher ground they decided to leave his face right where they found it. So as you come up to the temple the 3 faces of Ramses on 4 statues greet you, and eventually you may notice an ear or something on the ground - that's on the other smiling face. I really hope everyone gets a chance to see this temple some day ... even if only on Wikipedia or my photos.
Here's one of Ramses' kids (he had about 100 of them), he's about as tall as Ramses' lower leg:
Now for the tricky part. After a 10 hour flight to Cairo and an overnight train to Aswan, you still have an hour and a half to get to Abu Simbel. And that is if you take a small plane from the tiny Aswan airport to the even-tinier Abu Simbel airport. (Hey, 12 years ago there was no Abu Simbel airport and you had to drive 3+ hours from Aswan)
Unfortuntately there is little A/C on buses around here as well as none on the plane. The plane was a prop plane with seats for ~40. The pilots are aware that their little plane handles better than a 787 and enjoy playing with you a bit. We tore around the corner to the runway, floored it and headed up. It is a pretty quick flight, 35-40 minutes (the other time is getting to and from airports), but on the way back the wind off the desert / rising from the heat started playing games with the tiny plane. Needless to say, a couple people passed out, 3 lost their breakfast, one girl had a really annoying panic attack (I wished for the nun in Airplane to help her get it together) and everyone was on edge. I just reminded myself that they fly this way every day, these guys are professionals (a la the parking attendant in Ferris Bueller), and they - probably - wouldn't have flown if it was dangerous. It worked, and we were on the ground in no time. Knowing then what I know now, I would have been MORE excited to go - getting there and back was bad, but the sites at Abu Simbel were even more amazing than I imagined.
When we finally got back to the ship around 3pm, we were all famished and tired. We ate a good lunch and went upstairs for a nap. Soon after, the boat finally pushed off. Now we're sailing for Kom Ombo a couple hours down the river. We'll hop out and see sites there and get back on to sail for Edfu where we start tomorrow.
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