ABU SIMBEL, EGYPT
Everyone I've talked to who has traveled to Egypt has told me not to miss the spectacular temples at Abu Simbel, so I arranged for a day-trip there today. Unfortunately, for some reason all tours to the site have to leave together in a police-escorted caravan from Aswan--at 4:00 am! Which of course meant getting picked up even earlier--at 3:30, in fact. Ugh. I joined a vanload of Chinese, Japanese, British, and South African tourists on the 290-km drive south, which took about two and a half hours. Watching the sun rise over the Egyptian desert was awesome, though, and when we got there it was still early enough to be pleasantly cool.
The two temples are built into the side of a mountain near the shore of Lake Nasser. The one on the left is the most famous and impressive, featuring four massive seated statues of Ramses II, and the smaller temple to the right is dedicated to Nefertari, his queen. They're really dramatic and imposing, but the most amazing thing about them is that these temples and the two mountains of rock that surround them were actually moved to this location in the 1960s due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which flooded their original location! It's hard to imagine the effort that must have gone into dismantling, moving, and reconstructing all the elements--much of the finer work was done by hand using saws, and it's a near-perfect job. Well, the facade of the mountain looks a little blocky, but the temples themselves look completely intact, both inside and out.
There was no photography allowed inside, but the interiors of the temples were filled with dramatically lit figures of kings and gods--by now I can recognize the major ones, like Horus, Hathor, and Thoth. We wandered around the site for a couple of hours, then returned to the van for the ride back to Aswan. By now in the heat of the day we could see mirages along the way that looked like lakes of water in the desert, but we knew better!
We were back at noon, which was pretty inconvenient timing for me, as I had already checked out of my hotel. I had no choice but to wander the city for six hours until had to catch the night train to Cairo. Thank god for internet cafes!
Book read in the past two weeks:
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia by Stephan Harding: Kind of a strange mixture of hard science and fuzzy New Age thinking, this book makes a lot of good points about mankind's destructive tendencies and the interconnectedness of systems in the natural world. My problem is that while Gaia theory offers an interesting way of thinking about ecology, it's still technically wrong in that the Earth is not actually a single living being by any accepted scientific definition. Still, I guess it's a useful metaphor when thinking about environmental issues , and maybe that's the whole point. Harding's descriptions of natural feedback loops and the earth's fragile self-correcting mechanisms are fascinating, and I'll bet we hear a lot more about these (for better or worse) in the near future.
Everyone I've talked to who has traveled to Egypt has told me not to miss the spectacular temples at Abu Simbel, so I arranged for a day-trip there today. Unfortunately, for some reason all tours to the site have to leave together in a police-escorted caravan from Aswan--at 4:00 am! Which of course meant getting picked up even earlier--at 3:30, in fact. Ugh. I joined a vanload of Chinese, Japanese, British, and South African tourists on the 290-km drive south, which took about two and a half hours. Watching the sun rise over the Egyptian desert was awesome, though, and when we got there it was still early enough to be pleasantly cool.
The two temples are built into the side of a mountain near the shore of Lake Nasser. The one on the left is the most famous and impressive, featuring four massive seated statues of Ramses II, and the smaller temple to the right is dedicated to Nefertari, his queen. They're really dramatic and imposing, but the most amazing thing about them is that these temples and the two mountains of rock that surround them were actually moved to this location in the 1960s due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which flooded their original location! It's hard to imagine the effort that must have gone into dismantling, moving, and reconstructing all the elements--much of the finer work was done by hand using saws, and it's a near-perfect job. Well, the facade of the mountain looks a little blocky, but the temples themselves look completely intact, both inside and out.
There was no photography allowed inside, but the interiors of the temples were filled with dramatically lit figures of kings and gods--by now I can recognize the major ones, like Horus, Hathor, and Thoth. We wandered around the site for a couple of hours, then returned to the van for the ride back to Aswan. By now in the heat of the day we could see mirages along the way that looked like lakes of water in the desert, but we knew better!
We were back at noon, which was pretty inconvenient timing for me, as I had already checked out of my hotel. I had no choice but to wander the city for six hours until had to catch the night train to Cairo. Thank god for internet cafes!
Book read in the past two weeks:
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia by Stephan Harding: Kind of a strange mixture of hard science and fuzzy New Age thinking, this book makes a lot of good points about mankind's destructive tendencies and the interconnectedness of systems in the natural world. My problem is that while Gaia theory offers an interesting way of thinking about ecology, it's still technically wrong in that the Earth is not actually a single living being by any accepted scientific definition. Still, I guess it's a useful metaphor when thinking about environmental issues , and maybe that's the whole point. Harding's descriptions of natural feedback loops and the earth's fragile self-correcting mechanisms are fascinating, and I'll bet we hear a lot more about these (for better or worse) in the near future.
posted by John Kuge at 2:45 PM
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