Gracy Bee

Egypt 9th April

Posted on February 8th, 2007 by GracyBee.
Categories: Places.

Flashback 9th April 2006

Our schedule today was Abu Simbel and the Temple of Philae. I woke up at 3am to prepare to go. Our bus would come at 6am, and the hotel has prepared take-away breakfast for us. Off we went finally at 6.30am. Why this early u might ask. Well, it took 3 hours drive there to Abu Simbel, and in order not to be scorched by the sun that is, when visiting the temples~

I was sitting on the left side of the bus, and I happened to see the sunrise over the desert. I have never seen sunrise over a desert sea. Quite an experience in the midst of the desert!

The Ramses II’s Sun Temple in Abu Simbel is the most extraordinary monument I have seen so far in Egypt. It was such a magnificent structure that no others can beat this. It is being moved to higher grounds after the newly built Lake Nasser threatened to drown the temple.

The Sun Temple. Isn’t it magnificent?

The cravings on the walls were very realistic and were so much nicer than the ones we saw in other temples. Also, the sun only shone through all the way into the temple only twice a year: 1st on Ramses’s birthday and the 2nd, on the Coronation day. Superb calculation! It was delayed by one day after the shift to higher grounds.

The only craving that I can take outside the temple

Really, I have to marvel at this. 1st, obviously is their skills and engineering feat that built such remarkable temple. 2nd, is the UNESCO’s dedicated efforts to move the temple to higher grounds. It is not even obvious to naked eyes that this is actually been moved b4!
wow! wow! wow! This is really two thumbs up.

Nearby is the Queen Hathor’s temple, the wife of Ramses II. A much smaller scale but no less magnificent.

The Temples. Queen Hathor’s Temple on the right

^^^^^^

It was nearly 11am, and we need to set off to another destination. We can see the desert sea on both sides of the road. Even we are in the comfort of siting inside the aircon bus, we can feel and see that IT IS HOT. Not just hot. EXTREMELY ULTRA HOT. Just a bland white sand all the way to the horizon, nothing else in sight. *sweat*

^^^^^^

Our next destination is the Temple of Philae which was also being moved to its new current site. It is on the island, so we need to catch a boat to go over. Bargaining time again. It can get annoying sometimes to argue about prices. *ARGH*

Temple of Philae

This temple is one of the few very well preserved temples. Hence based on this, we can easily imagine how Luxor and Karnak Temples would have looked like in the past, on a much greater scale. We don’t stay there for long since we only have 40 min.

^^^^^^

It is a very hot day that we really got restless. These few days our sunblock is working overtime. Our last stop is actually the unfinished obelisk, found among the bed of rocks that are also used to build temples in Luxor. Due to the hot day, nobody wanted to go down the bus. That end our journey in the late afternoon.

End of the day

A tiring day, due to not enough zzzz and a hot day to complement it. As a result, my housemate was not feeling well. Oh dear, hopefully after a nap, he would get better.

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