Abu Simbel

There was little to do on the first day of the Contiki Nile Tour. The official arrival day, the others were slipping in at all hours. Those of us already there hung out at the pool, catching some rays and sleeping off our night of excess. We discovered that drinking was apt to be an expensive proposition while in Egypt: Officially a Muslim nation, alcohol was frowned upon and most Muslims didn’t actually ouch the stuff, those who did, did so sparingly, so, the only people really buying it with any regularity were tourists; need I say that it was taxed heavily. Beer was what one might call reasonably priced, wine somewhat more; but hard liquor apparently had no redeeming qualities in the eyes of the law, so a rum and coke or a gin and tonic could run you up about twenty-five American dollars, when you could expect to pay about three bucks for a beer. Ouch.

We had our meet and greet, dinner, and then we were off to take the sleeper train from Cairo to Aswan to see the dam. More introductions were had in the dining/bar car. We were the only ones in attendance. Every Egyptian who entered bought whatever they came in for and promptly disappeared back up-train to their berths. That was sensible of them, desiring sleep while we silly tourists stayed up drinking extortionary priced drinks.

Oddly, there were only Canadians and Americans on the trip, and one Kiwi Contiki host. We Canadians huddled together amid so many Americans. It’s not that we didn’t like the Americans, it was that they’d arrived in two large groups, already friends, already bonded. Derik and Jackie were from Saskatchewan. They drank. They smoked. They cursed. They were clever, and spoke in a way that declared a level of education and interests that exceeded most of the Americans. They knew some Egyptian history, something most of the Americans seemed clueless about (I ask you, who decides on an ancient Egypt vacation when clueless about ancient Egypt?). Derik and Jackie and I were of a sort, so we got on great.
But I wasn’t berthed with Derik. I was berthed with an American who asked that I not smoke in our cabin. It was a reasonable request, and as I had it in my mind to quit smoking as soon as this trip was over, I readily agreed. He had other requests, too, but I ignored most of them; they were just alpha-male bullshit that stopped when I told him that if he had any more “requests,” we were going to have a problem. I also asked him how willing he was to back up so many requests. I could have asked him to refrain snoring like a jackhammer, but that might not have been realistic. No matter, I’d prepared for the possibility. I’d packed plenty of earplugs. I was learning.

We woke to our Contiki host pounding on our berth doors as we pulled into Aswan. “Everybody up!” he demanded to some grumbling. We’d been up late. We’d had more than a few drinks. We were a little tired. We’ll call it that, tired. Few of us enjoyed the Aswan Dam. The Egyptians may have been proud of it, it was an engineering feat freeing them from their annual cycle of flooding that had both blessed and plagued them since the dawn of civilization. There was a cost, though: their soil was depleting without that annual rejuvenation, and the cost of dredging the silt before the dam must have been astronomical. Engineering feat aside, it was just a dam. I walked out on it like a good little tourist, took my pictures, and showed my appreciation by squinting into the distance and dutifully oohing and ahhing, biting my tongue, not mentioning that the dam was filling up with silt as we spoke and might be rendered useless as a power generator and flood regulator before too long. Neither has happened to my knowledge. It’s still plugging along, despite my opinion otherwise. What do I know? Nothing about dams and silt and dredging, apparently.

The second leg of the day was better. We boarded a plane for a short flight to Abu Simbel. That was an engineering feat I could wrap my head around. The two temples had been carved out of the rocks they had originally inhabited and painstakingly transported and recreated on higher ground to save them from the Aswan flooding, residing now in hollow rock hills—the interior of which I’d seen in a Lonely Planet Guide episode. None of us were allowed to see their hollow, domed innards, the Egyptians believing that we should suffice with the three-thousand-three-hundred year old temples displayed out front; go figure. I was. They were spectacular, a dire warning to the Nubians to beware, that they were entering Ramesses’ domains, the most technically advanced and powerful nation on the face of the Earth. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it best, and none have better since:

I met a traveller from an antique land 

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: 

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 

The lone and level sands stretch far away." 

The two enormous reliefs of Ramesses and Nefertari towered and loomed over the approach, more spectacular than anything within.

That’s not fair. The temple is as spectacular (am I using that word too often?), complex, with many side chambers. There’s a hypostyle hall within, eighteen meters long and seventeen meters wide, supported by eight huge Osirid pillars depicting the deified Ramses, linked to the god Osiris, lord of the Underworld. The colossal statues along the left-hand wall bear the white crown of Upper Egypt, while those on the opposite side are wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. There are beautiful bas-reliefs on the walls of the pronaos (the hypostyle hall) depicting battle scenes of the military campaigns the ruler waged, mostly given over to the Battle of Kadesh, where the Egyptian king fought against the Hittites, but showing Egyptian victories in Libya and Nubia, too; it was erected on their southern border, after all. The most famous relief shows the king on his chariot shooting arrows against his fleeing enemies, who are being taken prisoner. The Pharaohs were all about boasts and bluster. They were powerful, after all. They were gods, after all. They wanted the world to know it, too.

There’s a second pillared hall, right after the pronaos, which has four pillars decorated with scenes of offerings to the gods. There are depictions of Ramesses and Nefertari with the sacred boats of Amun and Ra-Harakhti. This hall gives access to a transverse vestibule in the middle of which is the entrance to the sanctuary. Here, on a back wall, are rock-cut sculptures of four seated figures: Ra-Horakhty, the deified king Ramesses, and the gods Amun Ra and Ptah, the main divinities in that period. It was a spectacular start to the tour, if a little tiring.

It was brutally hot out there in the desert. I could not drink enough water. I had the ghost of a headache haunting me. You get the picture.

It was here, in Aswan and Abu Simbel, where we met Ahmed, our official guide while in Egypt. Our guide had to be Egyptian. Egyptian Law decreed it. Our Contiki representative could be our host, our organizer, our mother hen, but he could not speak on Egyptian history whilst in Egypt; to do so risked criminal charges. Only an Egyptian could lecture us on Egyptian history. Ahmed was well suited to the task. He was a university graduate, in—you guessed it—Egyptology! I was his pet. Why? I’d taken Classical History in university, a third of which was Egyptian. I was always already looking at whatever he was set to lecture us on before he began.

I discovered that first tour day that Mohammad is the most popular name for boys in Egypt, indeed, in all Muslim nations. Mohammad, Ahmad, there were rather more variations on the name; it was like being in a nation of Davids. There were a number of Davids too, by the way, there being a number of Coptic Christians there.

A few hours later, we were back on the plane, on our way back to Aswan, boarding the riverboat cruise ship that would be our home for the next few days. It was beautiful, it was luxurious, it was an elaborate mixture of colonial opulence and Muslim geometric art.

We ate, we congregated in the lounge to continue getting to know one another, we slept. It was an altogether exhausting day. Waiting does that; it exhausts me. And there was a fair bit of waiting to do that day, waiting for the bus to take us to the airport, waiting while on the Aswan Dam, which was in itself an exercise in waiting, waiting to board the plane, waiting to reboard the plane, waiting to book into the cruise.

Luckily, I had my own cabin.

I loved having my own cabin.

Not that I used it for anything other than sleep.