It was quite nice to awaken to this as the view from our cabin window. Aswan is behind us and the Botanical Gardens to the left.
Not much time to enjoy the serenity though. Today was the big out of Aswan tour day.
First up was a bus and boat trip to Philae Temple
dedicated to Goddess Isis and constructed on the beautiful island of Philae. Philae the modern day name is Greek but the ancient Egyptians called the island P-aaleq which amongst other definitions has the dual meaning of "end" and "creation". It is believed that the various structures contained on Philae Island took 800 years to build (mostly during the roman period). In addition to the priests practicing daily rituals the island was the home of various stone masons, carpenters, and other crafts men continuously building and extending structures.
However the building of the Aswan Dam (see Nile page) almost wiped out the Island and its history. Fortunately an amazing rescue mission saved Philae. Flooded Philae was pumped dry by the Egyptian government and UNESCO through the use of a coffer dam. Philae temple itself was carefully dismantled, so that it could be relocated away from danger. Interestingly each block of the temple was labelled and its position carefully recorded, so that it could be reconstructed in exactly the same format. Even the site on which the main Philae temple rests, was landscaped so that it would look like the site on which the temple was originally standing. The rescue mission took 10 years to complete and involved the movement of blocks weighing 27000 tons in total. Or so it says in the blog page I looked up, thought you'd like to know that stuff.
Anyway the boat trip back to the bus was reasonably uneventful despite having to endure a bracelet and bead seller who had been allowed to join us.
Next stop, Aswan dams, the old dam down river is now pretty much defunct although creates a nice lake. This picture shows what was the Nile rapids before the New Dam was built. Because of this anomaly in the usual calm flow of the Nile ancient river trade had to off load and go inland then load onto a different boat to continue.
Now there are locks to lift ships up to the higher water but pretty much all trade goes by truck now, it seemed to us the major part of Nile trade was carting tourists in endless lines of cruise barges up and down the temple trail.
Aswan Lake makes for some nice photo oportuntities.
After hearing all about the scale and result of the engineering to build the Aswan dam we headed off to see a granite quarry where a huge obelisk was abandoned half way through excavation due to cracking. Given the fact the effort required to get it this far excavated would have taken thousands of man hours and endless stone age effort I can imagine the flood of Egyptian expletives that would have resulted from the fatal rock blow.
From the broken Obelisk we were taken to Kitchener's island legacy to Aswan, He bought a river island and it was later turned into a botanical garden with many tropical trees and plants. It remains a beautiful oasis of green lushness in an otherwise dusty environment,
No boat trip would be complete without the locals taking the opportunity to display their tat. Gail bought a camel bone letter opener out of pity I think.
I presume this sign means don't shoot birds at close range. Despite walking the 17 acre gardens end to endI don't recall seeing any birds so the sign is either redundant or widely ignored.
The Anga Kahn's mausoleum seen from the Botanical Gardens, a good contrast between the desert and the lushness.
Looking back towards Aswan from the Botanical Garden cafe, showing the river boats and the street merchants selling more tat and decending in heards on you before you can get on board. .
We returned to the cruise boat for lunch to find a small boat on the bed and had a delightful lunch with our cruise friends before the optional city tour later the same day.
