The magnificent Abu Simbel

Because of security reasons tourists were able to travel to Abu Simbel only in a police convoy a couple of years ago. Most tourists still visit the magnificent site in this way even if it allows only a short stay on the site (and you have to leave Aswan at 3 o'clock at night). We decided to avoid the tourist crowds and stayed the night in Abu Simbel. It was an excellent decision as we had the temple only for us during our visit. Even if the little city around was quite boring it was worth it as Abu Simbel was one of the best sites we visited in Egypt.

The second statue was damaged already during the reign of Ramses II due to an earthquake.

As the Temple of Philae, also this temple was relocated from its original site to avoid it being submerged by Lake Nasser. It is now built around an artificial hill 50 metres above its original location. It is amazingly beautiful and the decorations inside are absolutely magnificent. It was built by Ramses II, one of the big pharaos of Ancient Egypt. Next to his templs is the temple of his wife Nefertari.

Well well, is it Isis and Osiris again...

Temple of Nefertari, wife of Ramses II.

Temple of Philae

History of Ancient Egypt is full of soap opera. What do you think of this story: Isis is the wife and sister of Osiris. Their brother Seth is very jealous of the popularity of the couple. He decides to kill Osiris and chops him into small pieces that he scatters around Egypt. Isis naturally is devastated and tries to collect the pieces and reconstruct Osiris. She manages to do this and is able to have sex with the body one last time. She gets pregnant and gives birth to Horus, another god of Ancient Egypt traditionally depicted as a falcon. Temple of Philae is accounted as one of the burying-places of Osiris. All the family members, Isis, Osiris and Horus, are found however in every tomb and temple of Egypt.

We woke up early to get to the temple of Philae (a few kilometres south of Aswan) before the tourist crowds. At 7 o'clock only the French groups were there with us. The temple had been under water for half a century when the first dam in Nile was built. Finally in the 1960s UNESCO started a project in order to preserve the temple built originally around 380 BC. It was relocated in the island next to the original location. The change of colour in the stones indicate the level of water before this saving operation.

The stories behind the images are always about the same. At the end of our trip in Egypt, we knew pretty well the different gods in Ancient Egypt. Here, of course, an offering to Osiris.

Other tourists (loooong) before us had carved their names in the stones. The style is the same as nowadays: "B. Mure stultus est" (B. Mure is an idiot).

Around Aswan

The region around Aswan is called Nubia. The name derives from the pharaonic word for gold: the gold Pharaos used in their luxurious jewellery came from here. The Nubians have their own culture and traditions and they seemed a bit less business-oriented than the rest of the Egyptians. The Nubian fish food is excellent but I was quite disappointed with my henna tattoo that I took in a Nubian village in the Elephantine island. It wasn't delicate enough and the quality was bad, the price I paid, 40 pounds (5 euros), was too much as well. I could have done better job myself and even the opportunity to speak with a local woman was lost as she spoke no English.

Tens of thousands of Nubians were relocated in the 1960's when the high dam was built to create the Lake Nasser a few kilometres south of Aswan. Some of them live in these villages but the majority in the awful block buildings in the hills behind Aswan.

A few steps away from Nile, the endless desert starts. In the hills on the West bank, the nobles of Aswan had their tombs built thousands of years ago. The colours are still bright and there are no tourists in sight. As everywhere in Egypt, you pay for the ticket and in addition a few pounds to the guardian who opens you the gates to the tombs and tries to make himself necessary by saying a few words about the history.

Funny detail on the wall: Pharaoh's sandal carrier. This was often a noble person, he was high in hierarchy since he needed to follow Pharaoh closely. In Cairo's great Egyptian Museum we actually saw some ancient sandals, exactly like the modern flip flops.

No hassle!

A night train took us comfortably to Upper Egypt. Two hundred kilometres from Sudan we stayed in a beautiful spot along the Nile in Aswan. Even though it is a city of one million inhabitants it feels small and after Cairo especially relaxing. However, it didn’t take us long to make some unpleasant acquaintances – mainly too eager felucca captains – that we had to avoid for the rest of our stay in Aswan.

Sunset in Aswan is beautiful. This is the rush hour of feluccas that take the tourists to admire the view from the river.

And there are tourists around: around 200 ships travel along the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and counting from our hotel terrace there were about 30 in Aswan every day.

Aswan is a nice and pleasant city if you just manage to ignore the captains along the Nile trying to sell you tours around Elephantine island or all the way to Kom Ombo. Even worse are the horse carriage drivers with their extremely thin horses that make you want to call the animal rights inspectors (if there were any in Egypt). “Hey miss, twenty pounds, only twenty pounds…” “Calash, calash?” “Hey mister, remember me?” “Hey my friend…” And eventually, when you do the felucca tour it lasts more than you negotiated for and you are obliged to pay the double price even if you wanted to get off the boat during the extra hour. Like the experienced captain didn’t know about the strong current that starts every evening as the barrage is opened… But after all, the 70 pounds (around 10 euros) we paid for a 2-hour sailing trip were definately not waste of money as the views are great and the little breeze on the river nice after a hot day.

Aswan could be named as the capital of haggling – ironically the vendors invite you to their shop: “No hassle here, just look!” We had so many nasty experiences with the Egyptians there that for the rest of our trip we couldn’t trust any local – sad but true. However, after the souq (market) in Aswan we were well prepared for any kind of bargaining and also very surprised if someone didn’t try to rip us off and make us pay ten times the real value. But the Egyptians are extremely good actors, when you’re finally bargaining in a professional way for a cheap scarf the vendor makes his “you’re breaking my heart with your price” look and you feel bad because you’re obviously a rich bastard who is just exploiting the country as the foreigners have done for centuries. However, as we got more experienced and more aware of the prices, we realised that we had been paying too much before and that one tenth of the offered price would be closer to the reality and what we should really pay.

Aswan souq is full of great spices produced in Upper Egypt or coming from Southern Africa. But be aware what you pay! Shop keepers try to get you in basically by lying: "T-shirts, only 5 pounds", and when you ask which one is 5 pounds they answer: "Well, at the moment no 5-pound t-shirts, but this one is 30 pounds..." And when they think you don't have any sense of humour it's just because you are getting tired of smiling to the constantly repeated phrases like "It's all free here!" or "Lucky man!"

5000 years of history on New Year's Day

Our New Year’s Eve celebrations weren’t the most exciting ones as we fell asleep already around nine o’clock in the evening exhausted after a long day of discovering mosques and souqs. At midnight I woke up and heard people in the hotel counting: “nine, eight, seven…” I fell asleep again before the New Year. It would have been nice to experience an Egyptian party, but as we later noticed, night clubs were rare and alcohol hard to find (what is then an Egyptian party, I don’t know, tea and sheesha?). Therefore, we were full of energy at 8 o’clock in the morning next day when our driver picked us up. For 180 pound (around 20 euros) the hotel had organised us a driver for a daytrip to Saqqara, Dahshur and Giza pyramids.

Djoser’s Step Pyramid in Saqqara (behind the pile of rocks that is actually also a pyramid) was the first try to build a pyramid. It is not however a true pyramid, which were only built a bit later in Dahshur.

Going down inside a pyramid was a good thigh exercise. Inside there's basically no oxygen and it's hot and damp.

We started in the oldest site, Saqqara, which was the necropolis of Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt, and where they first built a pyramid. Our first touch to Ancient world was in a mastaba of Mereruka dating 6th Dynasty (2323-2150 BC) in the Old Kingdom period. The walls were carved in an amazing detailed, aesthetically perfect style, showing birds, fishes and hippopotamuses. In this beautiful tomb, the four thousand years of history suddenly moved me, and the symptoms of Stendhal syndrome could have described my emotional state. While the several tombs and temples we later saw in Egypt amazed and touched me as well, the first visit to an Ancient structure was the most moving one.

Inside the mastaba of Mereruka in Saqqara.

The ubiquitous tourism police, found next to all possible sites in Egypt, was probably employing half of the working age men. And most often they had nothing to do except for posing to tourists and then asking for baksheesh for this. I'm not exactly sure if they were there to protect the tourists or the ancient sites from tourists. The Egyptians are however quite strict about security after the tourist massacres in Cairo, Luxor and Sinai.

Bent pyramid in Dahshur: After a good start it was too hard for the engineers to finish this pyramid, the slope was too steep and they had to change the angle, thus the bent shape of the pyramid.

Of course, the real must site of the day was the pyramids of Giza, now surrounded by the densely populated suburb of Giza. The offers for a camel or horse ride were constant and you need to hush away the young post card sellers every two steps but seeing the Sphinx and pyramids was quite a wonderful way to spend the New Year’s day. After the heat and dust we finished the pyramid tour in a somewhat anti-climax way: late lunch at Pizza Hut, in front of the entrance to the site.

Napoleon calculated that the 2,5 million stone blocks used for the Great pyramid of Giza would be enough to build a one metre -high wall around the whole of France. It doesn't look that big but I wouldn't question Napoleon's expertise. By the way, seeing the Sphinx you cannot help thinking of the Asterix and Cleopatra comic book where Obelix climbs up on the Sphinx's head making the nose fall off...

Welcome to Cairo

Al-Azhar Mosque in Islamic Cairo was established in 972. It is supposed to be the oldest university in the world and it still functions as an Islamic university gathering Muslim students from all around the world. The mosque itself was beautiful but as the ultimate religious place in Egypt women need to wear a veil.

We thought we were well prepared for Egypt with our three guidebooks, a recent travel story “Down the Nile” by an American woman, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, “Sinuhe the Egyptian” set in the times of Akhenaton by Mika Waltari and another novel by Ahdaf Soueif “A Map of Love” using as its setting both Egypt’s colonial period and contemporary Egypt. However, one month in Egypt was full of cultural adventures and nothing could have prepared us for the ubiquitous bargaining and haggling. We made it though, sometimes annoyed or feeling cheated, a few times angry, but also every now and then positively surprised.

As for the Islamic society, I was very surprised of the enormous role Islam plays in Egypt. Our 10 years old guidebook for Cairo said that the majority of women do not wear veils in Egypt, this had however completely changed during this last decade as a woman without a veil was an exception and they could only be spotted in the richer areas of the city or in the Coptic (Egypt’s Christians) neighbourhood. The first day in Cairo, a hot day, I was wearing only a knee-long skirt, and the people were staring at me constantly, the next day I decided to wear trousers even if I was quite irritated that I was thus submitted to a culture so demeaning to women. When Florence Nightingale was travelling in Egypt in the 19th century she was also horrified by the status of women and wrote in her letters: "She is nothing but the servant of a man; the female elephant, the female eagle, has a higher idea of what she was put into the world to do, than the human female has here."

Rosemary Mahoney wrote about an Egyptian guy in her book "Down the Nile": "Foreign women who dressed in scanty clothing he did not respect. 'I would try to touch them and make sex with them', he said. 'When I see foreign men and women friends greeting each other with huggings and kissings here in the market, I think they are like animals making sex in the street. Egyptian people would never do this.'" The last sentance is partly true, you never saw people openly showing their affection. Only in a little park in Cairo we saw young couples holding hands. However, men were touching each other quite a lot, male friends walking even hand in hand in the streets. When the Egyptian men had the opportunity, they tried to touch my skin as well.

View from our Downtown hotel. The room was next to a mosque so at 5 o’clock in the morning we woke up with the muezzin calling the Muslims for a prayer. We, the infidels, were thus ready for tourism with the sunrise. The neon green lights illuminating the minaret seemed to be very fashionable, reminding of the past Christmas, they were all over Egypt.

Hundred years ago, Cairo must have looked like Paris, but now with 18 million inhabitants and millions of old Ladas and Peugeots on the streets, the beautiful facades were under a layer of black dust. It is said that Cairo is one of the most polluted cities in the world and I don’t doubt that for a second. It must be intolerable during the summer but even in January you have a feeling as if you were constantly smoking cigarettes. Outside the city centre, there are hundreds of unfinished buildings for the poor people moving from the countryside to the biggest city in Africa. It is chaotic, exhausting and dirty city but somehow it has its own charm.

Buildings next to Ibn Tulun Mosque in Southern Islamic Cairo. Morning haze or pollution makes the air grey. Buildings are half finished or half destroyed, rubbish everywhere but the minarets make the skyline beautiful.

The Islamic neighbourhood (well, it’s all Islamic but there is an old Islamic centre) is full of beautiful mosques more than thousand years old and if you continue a bit further from a touristy spot, you’ll find yourself in an unpaved road with chickens running around and you wonder if you are in Afghanistan. Here, the people are so unfamiliar with tourists that you actually pay the same for a cup of tea as the locals, around one pound (10 cents) – and I guess there are not many places in Egypt where they don’t know how to take advantage of the rich Westerns. Afterwards, in the big Khan-el-Khalili market, you really feel like robbed when you have to pay 15 times more. But this is Egypt, the tourisms is one of its greatest sources of revenue so they are trying to make everything out of it in the micro level as well. It is annoying but finally it is still cheap.

Our little café. Only men go to these places, you see women outside when they are shopping. Men smoke sheesha and drink tea all night long while women are taking care of children and housework. The two worlds of men and women are clearly separated in Egypt. It's very sad, also because the tourist has very few opportunities to meet and speak with women.