Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 🚢👟🚐🛥️
Our first stop of the day was the high dam, which was built in the 1960s and powers much of Egypt. It’s pretty massive, and created Lake Nassar, which is the largest man made lake in the world. It was pretty tight security because we were at the high point of Egypt, and if that dam broke, it would flood much of the population (Lake Nassar would drain down the Nile we assume, on top of the energy concerns).
Next, we drove and took a small boat to Philae Temple, also a Ptolemaic temple from around 220 BC.
In the ancient Egyptian religion, they, similarly to Cain and Abel, had two brothers where one murdered the other. Seth (which, interestingly, is the name of the third brother of Cain and Abel) killed Osiris and split his body into 14 parts, which he spread around Egypt. Apparently, his “manhood” ended up here in Philae, so there are a lot of menhood inscriptions around.
We also learned that the ancient inscribers used grids to draw the writings. For animals, they used 60 squares. So even today, you can call someone “son of 60” as an insult to mean “you’re an animal”. Son of 114 means: “you are perfect” since they used 114 squares to draw the gods. Pretty cool!
After that, we headed to an ancient stone quarry where they used to mine pink granite. We learned a lot about how they cut the rock (and even got to try it). We went to the quarry where many stones for the temples and pyramids we’d seen were mined, and we could imagine the labor involved in getting the stones all the way to Luxor and Giza (again, they said, not aliens).
What’s also notable about this quarry is that they found the unfinished obelisk of Queen Hatshepsut (from the temple the other day). When they were cutting it, they found a crack, so they just left it. It was pretty amazing seeing the half-finished work and the size of the operation.
We were exhausted, so we went back and napped for the whole afternoon (we had to wake up early to go to Abu Simbel the next day, so we knew sleep would be scarce). But we made plans to go see the Nubian village at 4.
Nubians are the Egyptian people from the southern part of the country. They’re more similar to the Sudanese in terms of looks, and they have a unique culture and language. As Ashraf was telling us, they still put crocodiles over the entryways to their house, which was a tradition from the ancient Egyptians and their worship of Sobek (though they don’t recognize it as such—it’s just a tradition for them).
We jumped onto a boat (that looked suspiciously like the “Jungle Cruise” boat) and headed up river to see the village. The ride itself was worth the price of admission. It involved navigating through narrow corridors and rocky, fast-moving waters with desert all around. We really felt like we were on the Nile.
At the village, we went to a tea shop and had hibiscus tea. The shop also bred and kept live crocodiles, which were just kind of randomly in a pit in the middle of the room. It was crazy.
We walked through the village through all the shops to a small language school.
Ashraf knew we were interested in language, so he organized a 30 minute lesson in the Arabic and Nubian alphabet and number system. We had a blast trying (and failing) to pronounce all the phonetics, and they even taught us to write our own name. We loved it.
From there, it was time for the “Nubian show”, so we headed back to the boat.
A group of performers did some traditional dances with music.
And of course Sarah got pulled into one of the dances (she mostly succeeded at balancing a stick on her head while dancing—impressive!).
Then Ashraf sold us out, and we both got volunteered for a part of the show where we tried to repeat Nubian phrases (and dances). We made utter fools of ourselves, but it was fun and we got big laughs; so it was successful.
After that, dinner. We ordered the shawarma as our main course, which was incredible. People told us that the food on this boat was one of the best, and we believe it. We also got really great service from our waiter, Peter. Sarah asked to take a photo with him, and he asked to take one of them too for himself. So nice!
The man who took our pictures from the day before was still trying to get us to buy the pictures, so Eric haggled him down to 5 bucks and bought them for Sarah (he even said: “please don’t tell anyone this price” which we agreed to. Except for this blog. Sorry!).
After that, it was off to pack and get to bed early. We had another pitch-black wake-up ahead, and we needed to be out of the room for this one.
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