It was a well-executed departure from the Mövenpick - we checked out at 9:45am, got a golf cart to the dock, immediately caught the ferry across, and our driver met us about a minute later exactly at 10am. Just like I planned it :)
We settled in for the three-hour drive to Abu Simbel. Our driver was very familiar with the route, he knew where every pothole was and most of the personnel at various security checkpoints along the way.
Years ago (pre-covid) it was a dangerous drive from Aswan to Abu Simbel, and buses travelled in convoys leaving at 4am. It’s no longer dangerous, but there’s still a couple checkpoints.
We passed through mostly a desert landscape. We were upstream of the Aswan High Dam, driving around Lake Nasser. There was the occasional cotton plantation, and some large industrial complex that our driver pointed out. I don’t catch what it was for, except that it employed a lot of people.
Around half way, we started seeing dozens of buses heading the other way; these were day-trippers to Abu Simbel who left Aswan very early, around 4am. It’s the most common way to visit Abu Simbel, which makes for a long day. It also results in almost all the 2,000-3,000 daily visitors trying to see Abu Simbel at the same time, just after sunrise.
There were also a few trucks on the road who were heading north from Sudan.
We arrived at our hotel, the New Abu Simbel hotel, around 1pm. The owners and staff were Nubian, and the hotel’s design and decor all reflected the Nubian culture.
We were lucky with the weather - it was only a high of 29C today. The week before and after it was reaching up to 38C. There was a wind storm peaking around 2am tonight, so we’d probably get dusty.
The owner was really helpful with planning when I booked back over the summer. We confirmed the itinerary - lunch at 2pm, Abu Simbel around 3:30, boat cruise at 5pm, light and sound show at 7pm, dinner at 8pm. Later we cancelled the boat cruise part cause of the winds.
Lunch was amazing. It was a multiple course meal - soup, tomato salad, bread, chickpea salad, labneh, and then the main we had ordered of beef kofta and rice. Dessert was a honey cake with an Arabic coffee. Mmm good.
We got ourselves together for Abu Simbel, having to dig out our hot weather clothing for the first time on this trip. The wind was picking up, so it was at this point we decided to cancel the boat cruise part.
We got a ride to the ruins in a tuktuk (which on our receipt was called a toktok, but maybe just a transliteration). It’s a flatbed attached to the back of a 3-wheel ATV, with a small bench facing backwards to sit on. It was just a three minute ride.
Bought our tickets at the gate, 750 EGP each (about 20 CAD). It’s then a five minute walk from around the back of the hill containing the temples, for the first view of Abu Simbel!
There’s actually two monuments at Abu Simbel: the Great Temple of Ramesses II, and the Small Temple of Hathor and Nefertari (not to be confused with Nefertiti, another Queen of Ancient Egypt who also has a famous ruin in Luxor).
We walked towards the Great Temple. It was a blue sky for pics, however in the afternoon, the sun is behind the temples. There’s good pics and lighting once you get in the shadow of the temple.
There were maybe 20 other people at the ruins when we arrived, and half of them were just leaving. So we had the ruins pretty much to ourselves. I found myself sometimes waiting for another tourist to show up in my pics to provide scale. Woe is me.
The four statues outside the Great Temple are huge, over 20m tall. Inside, (and I didn’t realize there was an interior until we got here) are eight more statues about 10m tall. There’s a number of rooms going deeper into the temple, with bas reliefs on all surfaces. It’s pretty cool to see.
Next up was the Small Temple, about 100m away. This seemed not as impressive cause we just came from the Great Temple, but it is pretty cool too. The statues in front are about 10m tall. By comparison, the statue of Pharaoh Ramesses II in the GEM entrance is 11m tall, and it seemed huge at the time. I guess it’s all relative.
We took a bunch more pics of the exterior of both from all possible angles, as the sun dropped in the sky. The park closed at 5pm and sunset was at 6:04pm so we didn’t get full sunset colours.
I WhatsApp’d our hotel and they came by to pick us up in a tuktuk. We relaxed for an hour in our room, feeling pretty dusty from being outside this afternoon. The wind storm wasn’t too bad, just the occasional gust that blew up the sand.
We browsed through our pics, and then went back to Abu Simbel at 6:30pm for the sound-and-light show. There were maybe a half dozen bus tours there as well, who looked like they were booting it back to Aswan after. There was still some colour in the sky so I took some more pics.
The show started at 7pm and was a bit disappointing for us. It used the side of hill as a screen to present the history of the temples and the international effort to save them. It hardly featured the actual temples themselves :( Compared to say the Petra by Night performance which we really enjoyed and highlighted the Treasury, the Abu Simbel show just wasn’t our thing. Most other folks seemed to like though.
The show itself lasted about 40 minutes. The audio was in French (I guess based on the majority of attendees that night); there’s headphones for other languages, but our French is good enough to understand (especially Heather’s) so we just listened to the French.
After our hotel picked us up. I really liked the drive back, with the town coming to life in the cool evening, men sipping tea and families gathered in fluorescent-bathed shops.
Our dinner was ready when we got back (we had pre-ordered when we arrived at 1pm). It was another multiple course meal, everything amazing. The chef here knows his stuff. For my main I tried the tilapia two ways, grilled & fried. The tilapia is fished from Lake Nasser and was super fresh.
We also browsed their collection of Nubian souvenirs, and bought a camel skin drum head, painted with Nubian symbols. Not sure how we’ll get it home, that’s for later to figure out.
We got back to our room, showered to get the dust out, and fell asleep pretty quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment