Qala un Mosque

We visited the Citadel which is a high profile tourist stop on the eastern side of Cairo.  The Citadel was built between AD 1176 and 1183.  It was built as a royal residence and a military barracks.  Egypt was ruled from the Citadel for 700 years.  It was a fortress and built as such to protect the sultans from the Crusaders.  It never ended up being defended because the sultans took to the offensive and attacked the Crusaders before they got to the Citadel.  You can see a picture of the Citadel in the first photo.

The Citadel has long ago ceased functioning in its original capacity.  It houses quite a few other structures within its walls however.  The other structures include three mosques, museums, a hall of justice, and many other buildings.

The Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala un Mosque is one of the mosques within the Citadel walls.  It was built in 1318 as the royal mosque of the citadel.  It’s a freestanding rectangular courtyard with a sanctuary on one side and galleries on the other three sides.  It has marble columns and two minarets.  One minaret has a green garlic shaped bulb on top of it.  Its builder, Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad was a high ranking guy.  He married a Mongol princess who was the great great granddaughter of Genghis Khan.

The next two photos were taken in the Qala un Mosque courtyard.  You can see the marble columns.  You can also see the green tiled dome in the first photo and the top of the green garlic minaret in the second photo.  Since this mosque is within the Citadel, it was kept relatively plain, but I really liked it.

These photos are inside looking at the galleries and sanctuary.  This mosque incorporated lots of marble, other stone, wood, and metals – all mixed in together.  It was simple but elegant in its design and construction.  I don’t know how many people it would hold but it was a very large place. 

Mohammed Ali Mosque

We are still inside the Citadel.  This visit was to the Mohammed Ali Mosque.  (yea – who knew what he did before he became heavyweight champ?)  The Ali Mosque was built between 1828 and 1848, so it’s relatively new compared to most of what we have seen so far.  The Ali Mosque was built in the Ottoman Baroque style of architecture, like the great mosques of Istanbul, Turkey.  It was built by the Ottoman Mohammed Ali Pasha.

The Citadel is on a high hilltop in Cairo and the Ali Mosque is the dominant structure in the Citadel, so the Ali Mosque is really a dominant structure in the skyline of Cairo.  You can see it in the first photo though I couldn’t fit the whole mosque in the picture.

The second photo is just to give you an idea of the richness of some of the stone work.   The third photo is taken in the courtyard which was a really large area.  I think the whole courtyard and the area around it was all marble.  It was very impressive.

We have now gone inside the mosque.  The next photo is just a general shot of the inside area.  You can see that it was very richly done in terms of materials, workmanship, and design.  The inside area is also very large and could fit several thousand people.

The next photo is one that I took looking up at the roof from inside the mosque.  It was designed to look much like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

The last photo, I just couldn’t pass up.  On all our trips to this part of the world, people are always trying to sell us rugs.  They always tell us how great the rugs are and that they last forever and you can leave them to your kids.  I’ve always had my doubts about that.  But our guide told us that the rug in this mosque has been here since the 1800s.  So I took a picture of it, and I have to admit, it looks pretty good.   Of course, we had to take our shoes off – the same as whenever we entered a mosque. 

Aswan

We are now in Aswan.  The first thing I should mention was our flight from Cairo to Aswan.  The flight left after sunset.  I was lucky enough to get a window seat on this flight.  We flew almost straight up the River Nile, since both cities are on the Nile though about 400 miles apart.  As I looked down through the darkness, I could see a ribbon of black (which was the River Nile at night) with a narrow band of lights right along both sides of the river, and then not even one single other light for as far as the eye could see.  In other words, Egypt is like one long oasis – right along the River Nile.  The rest of Egypt (93%) is desert.  

Our hotel in Aswan was another great hotel.  It was right on the Nile.  It was also in the movie “Death on the Nile”, just like the Mena House Hotel in Cairo.  This hotel was called the Cataract Hotel.  It’s an old and famous top notch hotel with many famous guests.  There is an “old Cataract” and a “new Cataract” hotel.  They are parts of the same hotel.  We stayed in the new cataract which is relatively new.  But we got a much higher (and better) view and we got to look at the lovely old Cataract hotel.

I should also say that the Nile was not what I expected.  I have boated on the Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, and others and that was what I expected.  The Nile between Aswan and Luxor was beautiful.  The water was blue and clear.  It was delightful.  The Nile is the world’s longest river at some 4,160 miles from source to sea.  The Nile basin includes land from nine or ten countries.

These photographs were all taken from our hotel room balcony.  They are all of the River Nile.  One interesting thing to look for in all of the pictures is what describes all of what we saw in Egypt: The River Nile, a band of green along both sides of the River, and then desert.

The first picture is looking up-river, which is south.  The corner of the old Cataract Hotel is visible in the lower right hand corner.  Aswan is at a big bend in the river, which you can see in the first photo.  The second photo is looking more easterly.  The ruins just across the river are an old fort of some sort.  None of it has been excavated yet.  Probably more than 80% of the ancient sites have not been excavated yet.  The third picture is looking down-river or more northerly.

The Nile is the only major river in the world (we were told) that runs from south to north.  So sailing down river is going up (northerly) and sailing up river is going down (southerly).  It took a little getting used to – to have clear thoughts on that one.

Nile Islands

The River Nile surprised me on several counts.  First, as I said, it is clear and blue and beautiful.  The second big surprise was that there were hundreds – or maybe thousands – of islands in the Nile.  This was especially true around Aswan.  Most of the islands were granite rock, but some were swampy reeds that looked like out in the Stockton Delta where I grew up.

In the first photo, you can see some of the islands.  This type of setting was common for the Nile around Aswan.  You can also see the mist rising from the Nile.  Today was the first of eight straight days where the temperature was over 100 degrees.  The pictures of the Nile frequently look cool and refreshing, but it was really hot.  It was, however, usually much cooler and more pleasant when we were on the Nile.

The second photo was just a small island that we were passing in the river.  We saw many islands like it.  It was mostly granite rock and looked like it belonged in Lake Tahoe or in the Yosemite Valley.  It also gives you a clue about where they got some of the rock for all the temples and tombs.  In fact, the red granite in the Great Pyramid came from Aswan and we saw some just like it here (but not in this picture).

In the third photo, you are looking at parts of three islands, though it’s hard to tell in the photo.  These islands were covered with lots of vegetation, reeds and so forth, in addition to rocks. This photo is also typical of how there was the Nile and vegetation, and then there was the sand dunes and the desert.

Aswan Dams

Aswan is famous for its two dams which dam the Nile.  The Nile had flooded for thousands of years.  Those floods landed millions of tons of sediment and nutrients on the land making it very fertile as well as soaking the ground with water for crops.  The same floods also killed many people.  Egypt needed more water for irrigation for food and also needed more electrical power. 

The first dam was built by the British during their tenure in Egypt.  It was built between 1898 and 1902.  It was made almost entirely of local Aswan granite rock.  The dam was subsequently raised twice in later years (1912 and 1933) to maintain and supply even more water and power.  It’s quite a nice dam and it was the largest in the world when it was built.  You can see the “Old Dam” as it’s called in the first photo.  It’s actually quite nice to drive over and has nice landscaping.

The second dam or “High Dam” as it’s called was built between 1960 and 1971.  It’s only four miles up river from the Old Dam.  You can see each of them from the other one.  The High Dam used 18 times as much material as was used in the Great Pyramid.  The High Dam is about 2.3 miles long, about .6 of a mile wide at the base, and about 122 yards high.  They say that 451 people died while constructing the High Dam.  Lake Nasser forms behind the High Dam and it’s the biggest reservoir in the world.  You can see Lake Nasser in the second photo. 

The road goes over the High Dam as well, but it’s not really much to see.  Also, armed guards will only let people stand in certain places.  We really couldn’t get to any place to take a nice picture of the dam itself.  The whole area was also very bland with not much vegetation and it was extremely hot.  The third photo is looking at the Nile as it flows out of the High Dam.

Philae

We took a small boat out to Philae Island to see the Temple of Isis.  Egypt has two kinds of temples: funerary and cult.  This is a cult temple built about 2000 years ago.  Isis was at one time the greatest of all Egyptian gods.  Isis worship at Philae dates to about 690 BC but the oldest parts of the temple only date to about 380 BC.  During the Roman Empire, Isis worship in Egypt rivaled Christianity and was practiced as far away as Britain.  Isis worship was still being practiced at Philae as late as AD 550. 

One of the most interesting things about this temple is that the whole temple was moved.  After the Old Dam was completed in 1902, Philae Island was completely covered with water for half the year.  Tourists still flocked here on boat tours and looked at the temple down below in the clear blue Nile waters.  As the new High Dam was nearing completion, UNESCO organized and managed to disassemble, move, and reassemble the entire temple complex.  It took from 1972 to 1980 to do this.  So this is the real and original Temple of Isis, but it is really on nearby Agilkia Island, which was higher than Philae Island.

The temple is really a temple complex.  Cult temples were built somewhat like a house in that they had an entrance way, reception area, many rooms, and rooms got more important as you went further into the temple. 

The first photo is from our boat as we approached Philae Island.  The second photo is from the other side of the temple which was where I could get the best shot of the entire main temple. 

The third photo is of the outer temple court with the columns that the Romans added in the later years. I found this interesting as I’m not sure that I knew the Romans had been in Egypt.

Again, this is a temple complex which includes pylons, other temples, courtyards, chapels, halls, gates, and more. The next photo is the Kiosk of Trajan or “Pharaoh’s Bed”.  It’s a famous monument which was frequently painted by Victorian artists.

The next photo is the second pylon which was smaller than the first pylon, but still quite large. You can see some of the reliefs carved into the stone which were also quite large.  The carvings are usually of gods or pharaohs and tell about famous deeds or battles or stories etc.

The last photo is more reliefs carved on the inside of the temple.  The walls, columns, and even the ceiling had carvings covering much of the surfaces.  This might be a good time to point out the Egyptian style of bas relief carvings.  Egyptians almost exclusively show figures in profile.  The Egyptians felt that the “profile” of the body and particularly the face was the best way to show people or gods or pharaohs or animals.  If you notice, they did distort the face and body somewhat in order to show figures – so while it is almost always in profile, it’s not really entirely accurate profiles.    

P.S.  We went back to the Temple of Isis the next night for a sound and light show.  It was pretty good.  A woman sitting right in front of us passed out from heat stroke.  She was laying prone with her husband comforting her and their guide fanning her for the whole show and she was still lying prone when we left, which was probably about 9:00 pm.  It was still that hot – even at night.

Aswan Lunch

Much of what we did in Aswan involved a boat trip on the Nile.  We were glad for that since it was much cooler on the river.  On this day, we went to an island in the Nile for lunch.  The first two photos are us on our way to lunch. In the third photo, you can see the restaurant’s “landing crew”.  The island didn’t have a boat dock, just a spot near shore.  So these guys put out a gangplank (at top of steps) and helped people off the boat.

We ate most of our meals indoors, but a few were outside.  You might think it would be awful to eat outside since it was so hot, but it was frequently more pleasant outside than inside – with all the cigarette smoke, noise, and stuffiness.  The couple sitting with Vicky in the second photo are our good friends and long-time travel companions Patty and Ron Weber. It was a very exotic setting for lunch.

Most lunches and dinners included fresh baked pita bread (or occasionally another fresh made bread) served first with three ‘sauces’: hummus, baba ghanoug, and a cucumber dip.  I could have made a meal out of the fresh bread every time.  We always had fresh veggies like carrots, ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, okra, beets, potatoes, eggplant, green beans, celery, onions, etc.  We also had more prepared dishes like chicken salad, tabbouleh or musaka.  Main dishes included lots of falafel, roasted chicken, kabobs, kafka, beef, lamb, and goat.  Desserts included lots of baklava (any baked good made of filo dough, honey and nuts), fresh fruit like mango, watermelon, cantaloupe, bananas, plus flan, dates, rice pudding, and peanut pie.  Drinks included beer, tea (hot or cold), mango, orange or guava juice, a lemon-mint drink (excellent), ginger tea, mint tea, and Turkish coffee.

The last picture is the chef and BBQ for lunch. BBQ included barbecued fish, beef and goat – and all were very tasty.

Abu Simbel

We had to get up on this morning at 4:30 am for a 7:15 flight south to Abu Simbel.  The flight was only about 25 minutes from Aswan to Abu Simbel which is a small village – on the Nile of course.  Abu Simbel is also only about 25 miles from the Sudan border.

There are two temples at Abu Simbel.  Most people go to Abu Simbel to visit these two temples, but the town is actually Abu Simbel, not the temples.  First, we will see the main temple which is the Great Temple of Ramses II (an important pharaoh).  This temple was carved out of the mountain on the west bank of the Nile between 1274 and 1244 B.C.  The temple is dedicated to three gods and the great pharaoh, Ramses II.  The initial view is of four massive statues – all of Ramses II.  The whole carving is about 100 feet high and 120 feet wide.  The four main statues themselves are about 66 feet high.  The temple itself is inside the mountain.  You can see the entrance in the center of the carving.  The carving and temple entrance can be seen in the first two photographs. 

The third photo is zoomed in on just one of the Ramses statues and you can see other smaller statues carved around the base. 

No one knows why this temple was built.  This entire temple was covered up with sand and was rediscovered by a Swiss explorer in 1813.  It took a team of workers four years to dig away enough sand and reach the temple entrance.  Even today, no one knows why this temple was made at this location.  Speculation is that the Egyptian pharaohs didn’t want the Nubians (the people who lived in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan) invading them, so they built this large temple right on the Nile.  The theory is that when the Nubians came floating down the river bent on attacking the Egyptians, they would see the large statues and get scared and go back to Sudan.

Inside the temple were many rooms.  It had halls, storerooms, and a sacred sanctuary to the four gods (Ramses II was eventually made a god, in addition to a pharaoh).  The temple was also covered with relief carvings from floor to ceiling.  Much of it looked repetitive to me.  Ramses II wanted everyone to know about his great battles and his closeness to the gods (so it was all carved into the stones).  Also, on the solstices, the sun shines through the temple entrance and directly into the back and most important sanctuary.

This is still the Great Temple of Ramses II.  The next photo is just a lot closer to one of the large statues of Ramses II.  You can also see one of the smaller statues much better and some of the many hieroglyphs carved all over the temple, both inside and out. 

The next photo is a close-up of one of the statue faces.  It helps to see how much detail was carved into these large statues.  On Ramses right arm (left side of photo), you can see a cartouche.  A cartouche is like an official name/symbol.  It’s the oval shaped figure with the hieroglyphs inside it.  Cartouches (French word for cartridge) were only used for gods and pharaohs. 

The last photo is an odd one.  The longer we stood and observed this carving, the more we saw.  If you go back to the first photo in this post, you can see this row of monkeys on the very top of the carving.  You can see a close-up of a few of them in this next photo.  You might notice that the monkeys are sort of fully carved, including full genitals.  That’s because, according to our guide, monkeys urinate once every hour.  So there were twenty-four monkeys carved on top representing a whole day.  Now there’s something you don’t see every day.

This temple’s history was maybe more interesting than the temple itself.  As I said, no one knows why it was built in the first place.  In more recent times, the completion of the High Dam above Aswan covered this temple over with water.  A huge multinational project was developed and moved the whole temple and façade 200 feet higher up on the mountain to preserve it.  The whole façade and temple was cut into 1,036 two-ton blocks and it took 25,000 workers three years to move it to where we saw it here today. We were glad they did.

Temple of Hathor

We are still in Abu Simbel and right next to the Great Temple of Ramses II is the Temple of Hathor.  It was dedicated to Queen Nefertari who was Ramses wife.  You can see both temples in the first photo. The Temple of Hathor is on the right.

The front of the Temple of Hathor has six large statues carved which are about 33 feet high.  There are also many smaller statues carved into the rock.  The inside of this temple was also covered with reliefs on every wall and pillar.

The next picture is a closer photo of one of the large statues.  The god in this photo is Hathor.

I’m just including one photo of a closer-up view of some of the relief work here.

Mount Up

We had an early wake-up call on this morning and we were on the Nile in a small boat by 7:30 am. I think that we were trying to beat the heat.  We crossed the Nile and then rented some camels.  We picked out a couple of one-humpers (the only kind they had) and headed out across the desert sands for the St Simeon monastery.  I was riding Leon and Vicky was riding Lulu. 

In the last photo, if you look just above me and slightly to the left, you can see the monastery in the distance.

St Simeon

St Simeon was a Coptic Christian monastery built in the 7th century.  It looked more like a fortress than a monastery with high straight walls.  I guess they knew what they were doing because the monastery came under attack which led to its abandonment in 1173.  It housed some 300 monks and 100 pilgrims.  It had all the requirements for life, most of which were still obvious.  The one thing that was missing and that we could not find was a source of water.  The monastery is about a 25 minute walk from the Nile. 

The first picture is the best one that I got of the whole monastery.  As you can see, the monastery was two stories.

The second picture is the church with the sanctuary in the back center of the picture.  I took the second picture from the upper story. 

The third picture is the courtyard just inside the entrance.

St Simeon was pretty much self contained.  It had a church, shops, a bakery, offices, a kitchen, a wine-making area, dormitories, a stable, and workshops.  It was pretty much all adobe or mud-brick buildings. 

The next photo is the long vault on the upper story.  The rooms off this hallway were where the monks and pilgrims slept.  They had benches built along the wall that were used as beds as well. 

The next photo is the mill where they ground the wheat for flour.  They had a kitchen nearby with a fire oven for baking bread and other things.

The last photo is one of the rooms off the vaulted hallway in the fourth photo.  It was dark and a bit eerie being inside some of the rooms.  I kept thinking that I wasn’t quite alone – though I knew we were.  We were the only tourists at the monastery.  At any rate, I finally determined what was making me nervous.  It was the bats flying around.  In the third photo, you can see a couple of them in the left center of the picture.  I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me.

Mount Up Again

After visiting the St Simeon Monastery, it was time to mount up again and this time, cross a much larger expanse of desert.  The camel ride was actually pretty nice.  The walk was a bit like riding an accordion (according to my wife).  There was a lot of movement.  The trot or run, on the other hand, was really great.  It was like riding along on a magic pillow ride.  It was very soft and smooth. 

You can see Vicky heading off in the first photo.  The second photo is just a shot looking off to the side of the trail.  I suppose that you could equate the second photo to 93% of Egypt.

We rode from the monastery to a Nubian village.  The village was either Siou or Koti, I never did get which village we rode to.  At any rate, the third photo is me arriving at the Nubian village.  In all, we rode the camels for about an hour.

Nubian Village

This was our destination after leaving St Simeon’s monastery.  It took us about 45 minutes to cross some desert sands to get to here.  This is a Nubian village.  I can’t remember if the name of it was Siou or Koti.  Those are two neighboring villages and this is one of them, I just never got straight which one it was.

The Nubians are an ancient people.  They lived in the southern Egypt (below Aswan) and the northern Sudan area.  Many of the modern day Nubians had to move when the dams were built at Aswan because it flooded their homeland.  They lived right on the Nile of course.

We saw many of their villages and they were always easy to identify because of their colorful buildings.  The colors in these photos were very typical colors for the Nubian villages.  I don’t know why these colors, but I suppose they needed some color to keep their spirits up living in the desert.

We got invited into a couple of homes in this Nubian village.  They were also very colorful on the insides as you will see in these pictures.

In the first photo, what I found interesting was that most of the rooms had tile floors (like under the far table).  But in the main area of the homes that we were in, they had sand floors.  I asked what it was for, but never got a good answer.  Maybe it was homage to the desert sands.

They gave us a snack in one of the homes we visited. Our snack was fresh pita bread, falafels, and French fries.  It was pretty crowded in the small room with our large group, so it isn’t a great photo, but at least you can see what I’m talking about. 

Vicky got a Henna tattoo.  Henna is a natural dye that the women use to dye their hair and for temporary tattoos.  The practice goes back thousands of years.

I thought about getting a Henna tattoo myself on my shoulder that said “Mom”, but they said it would wear off before I got home to show my mom, so I passed on the idea.

Felucca Ride

After our visit to the Nubian village, we walked back to the River Nile.  Once there, we got picked up by some Feluccas for some touring on the Nile.  A “Felucca” is a traditional broad sail boat used for thousands of years on the Nile.  They were designed to ferry stones from shore to shore.  I suppose that means that the feluccas carried the large granite stones from Aswan to Giza and to other places downstream where they built tombs, temples, and pyramids.  Feluccas don’t look like stone-carrying boats to me, but what do I know.

You can see a felucca on the Nile in the first photo.  You can see the helmsman of our felucca in the second photo.  What I found perhaps most interesting was the rudder and the oars (when we lost wind) were made of lumber that looked like simple pieces of 4 x 4 lumber.  They didn’t have much taper or anything, except at the very end, and even then, it wasn’t much.  It just seemed to me that after several thousand years of sailing, they would have developed better oars and rudders than that.

The third photo was one that I took from our felucca ride that I thought you might find interesting, since I did.  This is a very wealthy Egyptian’s home which is right on the Nile in Aswan.  The home looks to be quite modern and very nice.  It also has very nice landscaping around it.  The owner has prepared for his death, much like the ancient pharaohs did.  The owner has built a funerary complex up the hill from his home on his property.  So indeed, there are some Egyptians carrying on the ancient traditions.

Egypt is just full of antiquities.  You don’t need to go to a museum or tomb or temple to see them.  As evidence of this, I have included some more pictures taken during some of our felucca rides around Aswan.

The next photo is an Aswan landmark.  These are some tombs right next to the Nile.  The two tombs with long runways from the Nile to the tombs were, as I remember, tombs of a couple of the former “mayor’s” of Aswan.  Obviously, a few others were buried along side them as well.

The next photo is an old water wheel and mill that are right on the Nile.  They have not been used in a long time, but still sit in place.

The last photo is some cartouches carved into the granite right on the Nile.  Cartouches were only used for gods or pharaohs, so there must have been a temple or something here long ago.  At any rate, it was fun just boating around Aswan to see these sights, some of which are thousands of years old.

 Aswan is a very beautiful city and we had a great time there.

Nubian Museum

Our first stop on this day was the Nubian Museum.  This museum covers Nubian history, art, and culture from 4500 B.C. through today.  Most items in the museum are from places that are now underwater from the Aswan dams which covered most of the Nubian living areas.  It was one of my favorite museums that we visited.  It wasn’t so full of things to see that I got overwhelmed, tired, and bored.  It was arranged well with many fewer items to see.  Almost every item had an explanation so we just walked around and read the pieces that we found interesting.

The first three pictures were ones that I took in an area on the outside of the museum proper.  They took a bunch of “cave drawings” from the actual caves, cut out the whole pieces of rock with the cave drawings, and transplanted them here.  In the back of the museum, they built a cave and inserted the ancient artifacts onto the walls, making them look very original.  There were dozens of them on the walls in this replica cave.  I could not, however, understand what most of the cave etchings were – based on the explanations that were given…SO, I only took pictures of the cave drawings that made sense to me and that I could figure out what they were before reading the explanation. 

You can look at these next three photos and, like me, you should be able to figure out what the ancients were drawing.

Now we are inside the Nubian Museum.  We were allowed to take pictures inside this museum as well, as long as we didn’t use a flash.  I have included three photos for you that I found interesting, for one reason or another.

The first picture I included because it was so typical.  It also interested me because it was so much like the Egyptian pharaoh statues.  You can notice the wig and beard, which most pharaohs had in carvings and statues.  This statue was about 12 feet tall and had a lot of detail to it.  You can see the detail in fingers, toes, eyes, and so on.  You can also see a bit of color here and there and I’m sure that originally, it was an extremely colorful statue.

This next photo I included because our guide made such a big deal over it.  It is a statue of a woman and our guide went on and on about how it was practically only a set of boobs and nothing else – which she said pointed out how little women were thought of back then.  I actually didn’t think that at all.  As I looked at it, I thought what seemed odd was how big the head and feet were considering that it is such a small statue.  You can decide for yourselves.

The last photo I included because it was a real interesting one to me.  It has some obvious flaws such as the right hand is missing, but that’s pretty typical on these old statues.  Many of them have seen floods and invaders galore and are thousands of years old, so some damage is to be expected.  It also has two colors of granite: black and white, but we saw that in a few other statues as well.  This is King Chephran, but you will notice that he does not have on the typical wig and beard, like on the first statue.  But aside from these points, there is something hauntingly familiar, intriguing, and delightful about this statue – sort of a regal quality.

Market Shopping

We are on our river boat (M/S River Hathor) now, and this afternoon, we had a cooking class scheduled to make a dish for our supper.  We had to go shopping in the market on our own to buy some of the groceries to be used in preparing our dish for tonight.  These are just a few photos of us buying some vegetable for cooking class and dinner.   As you will see, this was a very local market, not a tourist market.

In the first photo, Vicky is buying some garlic.  I told our friend and fellow traveler to see if we could get a discount with his Costco card.  That was before I saw the guy with the big knife.  Oops.

In the second photo, I’m picking out some onions.

 In the third photo, Vicky just purchased some limes.

P.S.  The dish and dinner were fabulous.

M/S River Hathor

We ended our felucca ride on the Nile by getting off onto the M/S River Hathor, a Nile river cruise boat.  This was our home away from home for the next five days and nights.  It turned out that Vicky and I didn’t get much in the way of pictures of this boat.  It wasn’t usually easy to see it, even when we docked, as we were usually docked by tying on to other boats that were already docked.  The boat slept about 30 people and was quite a nice place to stay. 

The first photo is just Vicky and I sitting on the sun deck watching Egypt float by.  We spent most of our time up on deck.  The temperature was almost always over 100 degrees, but we went to see Egypt, so we stayed up on deck.

Vicky is sitting in our room in the second photo and as you can see, we weren’t suffering with our accommodations.

In the third photo, I’m up on the bridge with the Captain, Ramdan Mohammed.  From my extensive experience in house boating on Lakes Shasta and Trinity, I thought it would be good to share some of my vast knowledge.  I think when Vicky took this photo, I was telling Ramdan to watch out for a sandbar in the river.

Nile Cruise

This will be the first, but definitely not the last of my posts showing Egypt as we cruised down the River Nile from Aswan to Luxor.  The distance between these two cities was, I believe, something like 125 miles.  There were several constants as we rode along.  We could always see sand.  We could always see palm trees.  The Nile remained clear and beautiful.  There was never very much boat traffic.  It was always green along the river.

The first picture is not a very good picture, but it was a view that we saw plenty of times – the beautiful Nile, palm trees and desert sands. 

The second picture was also very typical.  We saw many areas along the Nile where the water was so low that grass was growing making it look like a green field.  In these areas, we frequently saw people fishing, farm animals, people gathering the grass for something – maybe to feed their animals.  Other times, the land was barely above the water level and people were farming those lowlands.  In these latter cases, it didn’t look much different from this picture.

The third picture was one we also saw quite a few times, and hopefully you remember what it is – another Nubian village.  As I said on our first visit to one, they seem to stick to the same colors like yellows and blues.  In the case of the Nubians, their villages always seemed to be in back of the vegetation and in the desert sands. 

Stone Work

A lot of people have asked me questions about where did all the stones come from to build the pyramids and temples and tombs.  I’m sure that the pharaohs mined as much of the rock locally as they could, but Egyptologists know that many of the stones were hauled down the river.  All the red granite in the Giza pyramids for instance came from Aswan which is some 400 miles up river.

These photos are not in sequence.  I took them at different times on our river trip and have put them together here for this post.

The first photo is just a place that we saw along the river.  We saw many such places where we could see people mining stones.  Many of them were very near the river, but others (like this one) were a ways back from the river.

In the second photo, these guys were loading the piles of rocks along the bank onto this river barge.  It was all being done by hand, one stone at a time.

In the third photo, you can see just such a river barge at the bottom of the picture that is loaded with rocks.  It’s delivering this load of rocks to the Hilton in Edfu which appears to have a major renovation under way.

Temple of Kom Ombo

Kom Ombo is about thirty miles north of Aswan.  The Temple of Kom Ombo was overlooking the Nile on a sand bluff.  It was a very interesting temple and much of it was in good shape.  It was not nearly as ancient as many others which is perhaps why it was in such good shape.  The Temple of Kom Ombo was built during the Greco-Roman period and between the years 332 B.C. to AD 395 (a long building process).  It was finally completed by Cleopatra VII’s father.  This temple is unusual in that it’s a Double Temple.  It is dedicated to two gods and each side of the temple is a duplicate of the other side.  The eastern side of the temple is dedicated to the crocodile god, Sobek.  The western side of the temple is dedicated to the falcon god, Horus.

In the first picture, you can see the main entrance with its duplicate entry doors.  In the picture, the left side door and temple is dedicated to Horus and the right side door and temple is dedicated to Sobek.

The second photo is looking at some of the columns in the Hypostyle Hall of the temple.

The third photo is inside the temple.  It gives you some idea of the many rooms and the size of the temple.

In all three of these photos, if you look closely, you can see bas relief carvings on most surfaces.  They carved reliefs on the pillars, walls, doors, ceilings, etc.