I don't need a fucking felucca!

Since my hotel is on the main street of town, on the water.... there are FAR too many felucca captains that try to sell me felucca rides. Some of them go so far as to follow you for a block telling you how good their boat is.... until you get adamant. They all wonder why I don’t want a felucca trip lol. I have already been on a felucca and it was fun, well that and I wouldn’t trust most of these guys alone on a boat! It’s starting towards low season here so I think they are getting desperate. I have to say the people with stalls out at Abu Simbel sure acted desperate, but their souvenirs cost more then here in Aswan so I didn’t buy anything. One person offered me a thin glossy book on the area, and I asked how much. He said 200LE which is about $40, I laughed at him. Either some tourists are really stupid and have too much money, or this guy was just guessing at a price. Some other people said 35LE for similar books later on.The trip out to Abu Simbel was interesting. Since it was an area at one point where tourists were shot or some such, you can only go there by police convoy if you are driving now. So we got into the minivan (now why me, my guide and the travel agent needed an entire van I’m not sure, but I didn’t see any cars in the convoy, and the long seats all to ourselves were perfect for sleeping) at 3:30am and lined up with a few other minivans and far too many tour buses. As we were sitting there on the side of the road in line I noticed that the famous graveyard of this town just so happened to be sitting across the street (what luck!) so I of course went over and took quite a few photos. I only got one with an orb though. When you see the photos from the graveyard keep in mind that the squiggles in the background are the city lights in the background in this case. There were some beautiful monuments and tombs in that graveyard, and they all looked so pretty under the lighting that they had over the graveyard.The trip out was really pretty, and I got to watch sunrise over the desert, since once you get out of the city in this area, it’s nothing but sand on either side for about 100 km. I slept during most of the 3 hour trip. The temples at Abu Simbel were 2 of the many that they took from an island on the nile (the area which is now lake Nasser) and put them at a new location. The taking the temples from the one place and putting them in the other was pretty much the same as they did with Phillae. The amazing bit is that you can’t see the seams. In the original location they were carved into the side of the mountain, but in this location, they made a mountain to put them into; easier then moving an entire mountain I guess. So the temples are the real bits (one giant jigsaw puzzle they had to put together) but the background is all concrete. It is done quite well, and you can’t tell it’s a fake mountain until you are told. It’s pretty neat that they are taking the temples of the old Gods piece by piece very carefully and transplanting them to new areas so that they can once again stand in all of their glory. Makes one wonder if the old Gods has annnnnnnyyything to do with this? *g*The first time around the two temples was awesome but was packed with tourists, accept for the two times that I started a meditation and quite ritual, it was odd the room I was in would suddenly clear out for the 10-15 minutes I took to do it, and when I was done, a person or two would wander in. I found this to be a bit like when you are doing a ritual in the woods, and just seconds after you finish other hikers come by, but generally never during the ritual.This temple was built by Ramses II, and was dedicated to himself and Ra-Harakte. Out front of the temple you see 4 GIANT statues, 2 of him, two of his wife Queen Nefereti, and then there is a small one between them of the God Horus. Ramses considered himself a God and insisted he be worshipped as a God by the Egyptians. Ramses II definitely has more statues in all of Egypt then any other King/Pharaoh, giant statues at that. Inside the temple were the most beautiful pillars with the lotus/papyri flower tops as is standard for ancient Egypt. They of course also had scenes of the various Gods. Inside the temple were also several store rooms which had beautiful scenes and hieroglyphics carved into the walls that still maintained their original colouring. Unfortunately you are not allowed to take photos inside of the temples here, so I only got some of one of the rooms since I ended up in there alone for quite some time later on.In the main sacred chamber there are 3 giant statues, of Ramses (of course), Nefereti and Ra-Harakte.

The second temple was dedicated to the Goddess Hathor, and was a bit smaller, but still quite interesting. It had much the same layout but with less rooms. The pillars in this temple had the standard Hathor pillars which have her head with the ears of the cow. I found time to do some meditation and so on in this temple as well. After getting some more water and relaxing for a few minutes I figured that the rest of the tourists were likely finished looking at the temples and were all at the cafe having lunch, so I went back. It was much nicer this time, as I had most of the rooms to myself and could properly relax and meditate and do a little ritual in each. I also went around the back of the temples and up some stairs to take photos of the back door, and the police promptly asked me to come back down, fortunately after I had made it to the door and gotten my photos. The grounds of the temple were also quite beautiful, being on the waterfront and all.During the ride back I got another much needed nap (3am wakeup calls come early!)
Today I went to a small island which had 5 temples on it. There was the joint Horus/Osirus/Isis temples, the Hathor temple, the temple to an obscure God of perfumes, the Ra-Harakte temple, and the temple to Ramses II (remember the bits above about him being a Deity and all.Out of all of the temples I have seen before these were some of the best preserved! The colouring on the walls in the Ra-Harakte temple was still quite vivid and mostly perfectly intact. You could also take photos, likely because the area only sees a handful of tourists per day, so the photography isn’t ruining the walls (much). I think this Ra-Harakte temple is my favourite temple I have seen so far. The Horus/Isis/Osirus temple had nearly perfectly intact hieroglyphics and images on the walls of the inner sanctuary, which I thought was interesting that it was the best preserved area of the entire quite huge temple. The shrine area was much larger then most, since it was dedicated to three different Deities instead of the standard just one. The temple to the obscure perfume Deity was quite a bit smaller, and not as much of the temple remained (or not as much was built in the first place it was difficult to tell. The sad bit was that the inner sanctuary area was unfinished and smelled quite nastily of bat guano etc. I wish I had brought some incense to burn as an offering. Either the hieroglyphics on this one weren’t carved as deeply in the first place, or didn’t survive as well as the other temples. The temple of Ramses II was interesting, as it is thought to be pre-Dynasty even, and the statues are done in quite a different manner. The carving definitely wasn’t as professional looking (perhaps lack of tools back then), and were of a completely different design. The interesting bit is that this statue of Ramses II had the most presence out of all of his statues, and believe me I have seen a lot of them so far! I definitely felt like I was being watched as I walked around his temple! I asked him why this statue in particular had the most presence.. and he said something about the lack of thousands of tourists every single day.The Hathor temple of course had the pretty columns with her face on them with cow ears as is standard for her temples. Not as much remains of this temple, but they did at least bring quite a bit of it back. The problem is that the water eroded the sandstone on these temples, and some of them crumbled a bit when they tried to move them. There is still only one known temple under lake Nasser, and that is the rest of the temple of Ramses II with his own statues, mentioned above. At the end of the tour with my guide, I asked about going onto the roof of the temple, and he set it up where I would pay the guard a little baksheesh for this privilege. It was pretty neat up there, but perhaps not worth the money I paid (I didn’t have any small bills), but fun anyways :), and I can think of it as contributing to the wages of low paid workers lol. You could see the entire small island from the top of the temple, which was about 1km wide as most.After this my guide waited in the shade of the Hathor temple, then later had tea with the guards, while I wandered around to the five temples on my own. Since this area doesn’t get many tourists, I was the only person there for the first hour, and there were only 2 other people there after that. This gave me as much time as I wanted and complete privacy in each of the temples. I quite enjoyed doing a ritual in each of them, and felt the presence of the Gods quite strongly. Near the time I was to meet my guide back at the main entrance I was early, so I sat in the sacred room of the main temple, which was very cool compared with the heat on the rest of the island and just relaxed chatting with the Gods.Another interesting display on the island are several large pieces of stone with pictureglyphs on them. Most of them contain etchings of giraffes and other animals which used to be indigenous of this region. This area of Egypt in particular was known as Nubia long ago, before it was taken over by Ramses II. It has much older surviving history then the rest of Egypt, before any of the Dynasties or Pharaohs. The monuments and artefacts are also well preserved.