Aswan, Egypt

We came back to Egypt for a couple reasons: to see the new Grand Egypt Museum (GEM), and to see Abu Simbel. We decided to see GEM today before our late 10pm flight to Aswan, rather than Friday when we’re here for the full day, cause GEM is busier on the weekend (Fri-Sat).

We had the buffet breakfast at Le Meridien. Typically we prefer more boutique hotels, but every now and then we don’t mind the consistency of a business hotel.

The other guests here are a mix of tourists on package tours, business folks rerouted from the Gulf, and just a handful of independent tourists. We had a similar impression in 2019 too, there’s not many independent tourists.

Anyways, the hotel hosts were circulating around the breakfast tables, chatting with guests. We used the opportunity to ask about the best way to get to GEM (Uber), and nearest ATM (right in the lobby).

We had timed entry tickets to GEM at 11am, which I had purchased over the web. We grabbed an Uber and sped off to GEM, on a new-ish highway (it wasn’t here in 2019) for the whole distance. Took us about 40 minutes.

We were a few minutes early (10:55), and were able to enter the staging area, go through security and get to the entry gate proper. Here we had to line up until exactly 11am, when the scanners started allowing entry for the 11am ticket holders. My little 15L day pack was allowed in, as well as water bottles.

We scanned our tickets (most people just used the ticket from their phone, I had bothered to print ours out at home), and we were in!

The entrance to the museum is really cool, it’s a pyramid-shaped opening in the side. And that was just the start!

Once inside, the 11m tall statue of Pharaoh Ramesses II greets you. Most tour groups stop here for a spiel and it gets crowded. We kept walking to the Grand Stairs. This is also super impressive, with large statues and pillars and other antiquities on display.

We had visited the old museum in 2019, and hadn’t seen most of these artefacts. I suppose they just didn’t have the space to display them back then.

We wandered through the galleries, trying to avoid the groups tours, which wasn’t too hard.

We then went through the King Tutankhamen gallery. This was also amazing, with much more on display than the old museum.

The lighting was really well done throughout GEM, so as to not cause a glare, and to highlight hieroglyphics carved into the stone.

We spent over two hours in the galleries, and it didn’t feel like that at all. We were just browsing; you could easily spend a couple days here if you got into the details. Overall it’s an amazing museum, we were glad we made it here.

For lunch, we did the museum version of shortest lineup. (At work, if you go down to the food courts just after noon, there’s 15-20 minute lineups at most places, and if you’re short on time, you just get lunch from the place with the shortest lineup. Then if someone asks you what you had for lunch, you just answer ‘shortest lineup’). Anyways, we ate at Sandough’s which turned out to be really good.

After lunch we quickly toured through the Khufu Boats Museum. Then we caught an Uber back to the hotel.

Our flight to Aswan was at 10pm, and we had asked the hotel if we could get late checkout at 6pm, which they granted. So we were able to shower and pack up after visiting GEM.

We hung around the lobby area for a couple hours until 8pm, then walked over to the terminal (I’m liking this airport hotel thing!) We went through domestic security before checking our bags; we were allowed into bring water through. There’s supposedly a bunch of fast food places open 24x7 in the terminal, but I guess they’re all in international departures :(

So I got a Mr Noodles from a café for dinner, not terribly nutritious.

It’s only a 45 minute flight to Aswan. We got a shuttle bus from the tarmac to the terminal, and could feel the difference in temperature. It was about 20C, but it felt warm. We ditched our puffy jackets, at least for the next couple days.

It was just our plane load of passengers in an otherwise empty terminal at Aswan. Retrieved our bags, met with our driver (the agent handler also tagged along for the ride). 45 minutes later we were at the Mövenpick dock for the two-minute ferry ride to Elephantine Island. We were picked up in a golf cart to drive us up maybe 100m. So our transit here went walk-plane-car-boat-golf cart.

We had stayed at this same hotel in 2019, it’s the only midrange option in Aswan. It was showing its age back then, and they haven’t made any changes except to double the price. Oh well, we’re just here for the night.

All-in-all, today was a pretty good transit day, considering we started the day at GEM!