Luxor and Aswan

               This weekend I went with friends on yet another amazing trip, but this time there is more in it for the amateur Egyptologists in the family. We went on a trip to Aswan and Luxor, which are situated in the south of Egypt. Here’s a map.

               First, let me say that while the trip was one of the more expensive subsidized trips offered through the school, it was definitely worth it. It included round trip airfare, and these were our accommodations:

That is a floating Nile River Hotel boat. Five stars. It was damn ritzy. Look at this bar/lounge area.

We started out in Aswan where we saw the largest man-made structure in Egypt, the High Aswan Dam. It was too big for me to figure out how, exactly, to get a picture encompassing its girth. But the lake shown in the picture below is the result of its construction.

Lake Nasser stretches hundreds of kilometers, and even encroaches into Sudan, which let me tell you the Sudanese are not too happy about.

This was a monument at the site commemorating the great friendship between the Soviet Union and Egypt from back when the dam had been completed. It was a pretty cool structure.

Anyway, after that it was time for lunch and sailing to Philae Temple. This was twice as exciting once I recognized it. I had actually seen this place on a National Geographic or History Channel show at some point years ago, but I always remembered the aesthetics of the area, and when I saw this specific scene, I thought “Oh, holy shit…” and snapped a picture.

Before getting to the temple, here are some other pictures of the dock we left to get out to the island the temple is on, as well as a very overexposed and thus awesome looking crane, and some very pretty water churning beside our boat.

When you enter the temple grounds you are greeted by this.

 This temple was built during the Greek dynasty in Egypt, which you can see in the kind of elaborate floral design used on the top of their columns (I know there is a technical name for those, but I can’t remember it.)

Inside were some amazing hieroglyphics and stone work. The craftsmanship was incredible. Here are some more pictures from inside, around this particular island.

After that it was time to get back on the boat and start heading to Kom Ombo to see yet another temple, but first it is time for sunset pictures. The sunsets in Aswan have a habit of coming out as this deep red, and with all the feluccas on the Nile if provided an amazing opportunity for photos.

Another feature of any trip through Egypt are the people who try and sell various Egypt-themed goods to tourists. Numerous times during our trip these intrepid people would line up at docks, or locks, or just attach themselves to our boat so they could fling towels and galabeyas and the like 2 or 3 stories onto the sun deck, and customers could put money into empty Pepsi bottles and throw them down to the boats so the intrepid boat-to-boat salesman could catch and/or swim to the money.

Kom Ombo was another big temple, and incidentally also the home of our tour guide. Here are some pictures of the temple. The coolest thing about Kom Ombo is probably the agricultural calendar there, inscribed in stone. This is one of the first known versions of what would become the calendar we use today. I know how it is supposed to work, but frankly I suck at reading it.

This is the calendar:

Another excellent piece of the tour on Kom Ombo was the Crocodile Museum. They had Croc Mummies. I would bet that a croc mummy would have totally eaten Brendan Fraser in the Mummy, but instead the writers chose Imhotep. Don’t know why, croc-mummy is so much better.

And once again, back on the boat.

After this I unfortunately came down with something and was unable to visit our next location, Edfu Temple. This was extremely depressing, because apparently it was amazing. I will steal pictures at some point, but for now no dice.

Luckily I was able to recover and rally before the kind of Grand Finale of the trip, which culminated in Luxor and The Valley of the Kings. Here are picture.

That’s it. That’s all you get. Tourism police said no pictures inside the valley or tombs. Egypt is bogarting the good stuff. You should be able to find pictures online.

The valley itself is impressive enough, and I can see why they chose the place. It is surrounded by tall hills, some of them sheer cliff-faces. It would be difficult to even know the place without prior knowledge of the location. I obviously don’t know the geography amazingly well, but it looks like the entrance above is the only easy footpath in.

The tombs are incredible. The first thing that strikes you is the size. The entrances are easily 20 feet high on some, and maybe 10 feet wide. I suck at judging distances, but that seems right. It wasn’t even close to a problem to fit 3 abreast in the hallway. And the tombs are deep. The idea of all that being cut out and smoothed and refined by hand is intimidating. Then the hieroglyphics are still, in many places, pristine, with the color still on them. In fact in some tombs there are bits that look like they could have been painted just a few years ago, just a couple chips here and there. The detail is incredible, and when you imagine what it must have been brand new you get a whole new appreciation for how vivid these tombs were.

After the Valley of the Kings we went to see the Statues of Memnon. The legend surrounding these statues says that one of them is of Agamemnon, the famous king from the Siege of Troy. The story goes that his mother lived in Luxor, and when the wind would blow through the hole in the chest of the statue the sound it would make sounded to her like her son, so she would sit there mourning him. The statues are pretty impressive. The scale is something that you have to experience in person.

Then it was on to Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple. This was another amazing structure, but unfortunately not much of the original remains. It was destroyed when her stepson Thutmose III took power and sought to stamp out her influence.

The final stop before flying home was Luxor Temple. This is the companion temple to Karnak, which unfortunately we did not get to see. However, I was not disappointed. Here is a shot from as far back as I could get in the Avenue of Sphinxes.

The inside of the temple complex was massive. The columns must have been 3 or 4 stories tall. Just the first block of stone, at the very base, was taller than me. And there were dozens and dozens of them.

At some point someone built a mosque in the middle of the temple. Which is in addition to an early Coptic Church which was kind of shoehorned into one section of the old temple.

Another feature that was really impressive to me was the depth of the carvings and hieroglyphs in the stone. Whereas the other carvings I had seen were impressive stylistically, these were impressive not just stylistically but also because they must have been more than an inch deep in places. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good shot of it – my camera is malfunctioning and I was arguing with it all day.

That was the last thing we saw. After that it was dinner and another short plane ride back to Cairo from Luxor International.

Seeing the ruins around Egypt is a powerful reminder of how young our own nation is. Makes one ponder permanence and the lives and legacies we will be leaving behind, and our place in the present as we imagine it. There have been social orders which stretched for millennia, not unchanged but seemingly eternal of which almost nothing remains now. Just a few scattered building and some cultural pride in the accomplishments of ancestors we find difficult to truly understand.

Three thousand years from now when people view these quaint little blog posts, or view pictures of landmarks long since demolished, I wonder what they’ll see. The ruins that remain are incredible, the writings are impressive and important. But in the end I look at history like this and I can’t help but feel like I am trying to talk to someone’s shadow.

Siwa Oasis

For the recent Eid holiday (it was only 2 weekends ago, still recent, kind of) some friends and I made a visit to a place called Siwa Oasis in Egypt's western desert. (The following picture doesn't show the full oasis, a lot is missing because the other pics for the panorama had issues.)

Siwa is a very large oasis located smack in the middle of what is otherwise very inhospitable terrain. The copious amount of water that Siwa provides means the area is fertile ground...for mosquitoes. So, so many mosquitoes. I ended this particular trip with upwards of 60 mosquito bites. There is no exaggeration in that number. I counted.

Besides the horrible bloodsucking cloud that followed my white, pasty, and apparently quite tasty ass everywhere I went, the trip was very worthwhile and Siwa and the desert were beautiful.

The travelling to and from was the second longest time I have ever spent in a car non-stop. The only time that was longer was the trip I took to California at 15 or some such age to visit relatives. The trip from Cairo to Siwa took 9 hours. I think we had two stops the entire way. To give you an idea of how out the the way this place is, here is a picture of stop number two, where we had lunch before the last leg of our journey.

That's some sky right there. And not a whole lot of anything else. 

When we got to Siwa we stayed here, I think the name was the Siwa Oasis Hotel. Pretty simple name. It was one of the cleanest, best maintained hotels I have stayed in on trips like this. The western chains are usually better, but that's because they charge ludicrous amounts of money for people who need European standards to feel comfortable. Frankly, this is okay with me.

We got in fairly late in the afternoon (despite leaving at six in the morning) so we didn't have much time to do sightseeing during the day. We did get to climb up on top of the ruins of Old Siwa in the middle of the night however, and while most of my pictures of that turned out really bad because of the lack of light, I was able to get one that is decent. This shows some of the ruins further down the hill next to the modern buildings that have sprung up around the old settlement.

The next day we made some trips to important sites in the area. Probably the coolest was the Mountain of the Dead. This is a mountain that was used as a giant burial mound and there may be upwards of a hundred graves cut into it.

After the Mountain of the Dead we moved on to another area. In the second picture you should be able to see the temple that is on the top left. Unfortunately not too much is left of the original decoration in the temple, so there wasn't much to take a picture of. However, the location provided a great spot to get some shots of the surroundings.

After this is was on to lunch. Mmm, food.

The proprietor of the shop we ate at used Egyptian Sign Language while I was there too, because one of his employees was deaf. It was pretty cool to watch. Completely indecipherable for me, but cool to see.

After that we headed out to some oases out in the desert a ways from Siwa. This one was a natural hot-spring, smelled like sulfur, and was surrounded by palm trees and reeds. The dragonfly you see in the second picture was massive, I wish I could have gotten a picture that shows scale better.

After this oasis it was a short drive to get to "the lake". By which the guide naturally meant the lake that has formed in the middle of a desert. A perfectly reasonable spot for a lake, the middle of a desert. Even more reasonable in the middle of a desert apparently? Fish.

Oh, and scantily clad Europeans. Couldn't throw a rock without hitting a scantily clad European.

This is a pretty popular swimming spot on the "show the white people Siwa" tour guide circuit, as well.

We then went to a place where there are lots of exposed fossils, mostly shells like this one.

And of course some amazing sand dunes and vistas. And, of course, handsome bearded Washingtonians.

Then it was on to setting up camp and watching the sun set.

After this is was way too dark to take pictures of anything, but the nighttime desert was beautiful. The funny thing about the desert under a full moon is it all tends to become kind of grey and featureless. You can make out the sand at your feet extremely well, but the further away from you you look the less distinct, the less detailed your surroundings get, and there is no telling where the line between detail and blank grey expanse is. It is all a smear, a blur into a gray nothingness on the horizon that loses all sense of height and depth of topography. I nearly fell once when I suddenly and inexplicably started moving downhill.

It was one of the oddest sensory experiences I've had, and one of the most beautiful.

Anyway, unfortunately cameras don't take picture well in that low of light, so you're out of luck. That's it for now folks. I will try and post more soon.

All the best,
Tim