Frankly my dear tour guide, I don't give A(swan) Dam...

Early this morning we left our moorings outside of Kom Ombo and sailed down the Nile to Aswan. It was only a 3 hour trip, but there was a few things to fit in here....firstly we caught a boat over to Philae Temple. This was a temple that until recently (please note "recently" in Egyptian terms is within the last 50 years!!) subject to flooding from the rising seasonal Nile waters. Therefore during the rainy season the temple would be half submerged underwater.

The approach to the Island of Philae

The tour guides specialises in talking about this temple

I suppose you could call him a Philae minion ;)

With the building of the Aswan Dam the raised water levels would have lost this temple to the lake, all in the name of progress (the Dam is a massive hydroelectrical generator providing a massive amount of electricity to Cairo, Luxor and other cities along the Nile). Therefore, instead of losing it to the lake, it was decided to move it, brick-by-brick, to another island that would not be submerged. So the temple looks like it has done for all antiquity, but is now 100 metres or so away from the original site. This was a nice temple, reminiscent of Edfu, only on a smaller scale.

The Romans also added to Philae with this, honouring the Egyptian gods
and keeping the Nubians happy - typical smooth Mediterranean charmers!!

Once we returned from the island, we moved on to the Aswan Dam itself. Now, I don’t mind engineering feats and all that, but a dam is a dam, and it was not anywhere near as impressive as the Hoover Dam (which is my yardstick for such things), so I took a couple of token snaps, but my heart was not really in it.

On the Aswan Dam, with Russio-Egyptian lotus flower monument in the background

I did get to see Lake Nasser though, and Lake Nasser is the most northerly point where you can see Crocodiles in the Nile - they are all refused entry north of the dam by the stringent military checkpoints. However, sadly I did not see any - I guess that people and crocodiles do not mix...

This is Lake Nasser, on the other side of the Dam. No Crocs though.

Following on from the dam, the tour guide seemed to redirect us to some strange Nubian shop which specialised in aromatherapy oils. He gave some spiel about the Nubians are very honest and trustworthy people and this is interesting, so the whole tour group piled in. 30 minutes later we were bored to tears with rubbing exotic plant oils on various appendages and just wanted to leave. No one bought anything, which made me wonder why on earth we bothered going to that. It was similar to the alabaster village experience, obviously the guide gets a cut of the sales bought by the customers he brought in, but it annoyed me a bit as we were wasting temple
hopping time for wiping this crap on our wrists.

True enough, one of our trips was to the unfinished obelisk, a massive 1200 tonne piece of stone that was 3/4 carved when the stone masons discovered some cracks in the granite, and abandoned it. It was going to be 40 metres in length, and very impressive, but all I got to see of it was from the bus as we drove past it to get to the boat! What a rip off! The guide probably did himself no favours sending us to the aromatherapy place, as he got no commission, and has now lost his bumper baksheesh payday from me (I was going to give him E£50, but after this, all he got was E£20).

Back at the boat I got freshened up and went to my room to relax for an hour or so. It is worth pointing out that while in Cambodia, I was on three or four showers a day, here I am getting by with only two. The heat is more intense here, but it is a dry heat, so you sweat, but you are not saturated every 30 minutes.

After a bit of rest and lunch back on the boat, our afternoon excursion was to take a Felucca out on the Nile and around Kitchener’s island (named after Lord “your country needs you” Kitchener) and Elephantine Island (named because of the large ivory trade that used to go on at the island – sort of like the Cambridge corn exchange, only with tusks!)

What is a felucca you may ask? Well it is a tradition one-sail fishing boat, the Mahmud delighted in telling us had been sailing the Nile for thousands of years. The Nubians run the ships, but obviously with the building of the dam, the fishing opportunities are limited, and so they have switched over to the tourist industry.

A felucca heading straight for us!! In the background is Kitchener's
Island, a sort of botanical garden set up in our empire days....

I have to say the whole sailing experience was good fun and relaxing, and halfway through the Nubian sailors burst into a tradition song, which had strains of “frère Jacques”, “She’ll be coming round the mountain” and “Macarena” all cunningly woven in to the fabric.

Another way to help tourists part with their cash...sing a bit and then
park in the middle of the lake until sufficient sales have been made.....

It was good fun though, until I discovered there was a new way to make us part with our money. The music stopped and then they started setting up a stall in the middle of the boat with all manner of hand crafted objects on. We were a captive audience and could not escape by walking off, as they just kept on circling in the middle of the lake so we handed over cash like nobody’s business. That said, I did get a couple of nice souvenirs!

One of the strangest sights I saw today was a young lad on what can only be describes as a bit of Styrofoam and a couple of hand held panels bombing it over to our boat to get some baksheesh for saying the alphabet . He left disappointed though, as no one has any change smaller than E£50, and cute and doe-eyed as he might have been, he was not worth that sort of money.....

If Egypt trained this kid to row, i am sure he would win
Olympic gold, such was his speed at crossing the Nile!

Tomorrow is a day at leisure, where we can do what we want in Aswan. I am not entirely sure what I want to do here – I could pop to Elephantine Island and see the Nubian villages, and then skip over to Kitchener’s Island, which has a botanical gardens on it. Decisions, Decisions.....