Abu Simbel

I went to Egypt and Turkey when I was in college.   It was a trip I will never forget.   There are dozens of stories I could tell from the two-weeks time I was traveling but I was reminded of Abu Simbel the other day and the memories of being there in person came back like it was yesterday.

Our travels the week we were in Egypt took us to some key locations, but the visit to Abu Simbel required a quick airplane flight to get to the location.   It was a small plan and a fast up and down in the air and then a tour guide shepherded us to the entrance of the temple.   You can tell from the size of the people in the image below how large it is.  

We walked into the eerily quiet inside, lit mostly from sunlight entering from the outer door with supplemental light in the side chambers.   It was large and yet warm and solid.   It felt like you could look into the corner or crevice and possibly find a treasure no one had seen before.   It was a beautiful structure, carved out of the side of the cliff above the Nile river.

After we had been through the temple the guide had us walk around the side and up an embankment to a metal door.   From the back, the temple was sort of dome like it seemed.   He opened the door and we walked into the back side of the temple.   And I was doubly impressed.

When the Aswan dam was built back in the 1960’s the temples at Abu Simbel would be covered in water and lost forever—so a plan was made to save them.   The temples (there are two) in their entirety were cut into pieces and relocated higher and further back.   The area we’d been escorted in was to the false back of the temple.   You could see a dome shape of concrete (that was covered in rock and rubble from above) and the outline of the temple’s rooms in front.  

You couldn’t see the rock cuts they were done so expertly and were it not that I’d seen it for myself, it was almost too much to believe.   I’ve looked on the internet for pictures of the inside of the back of the temple and I can see some drawings, but very little in the way of pictures.   I went there in 1989, perhaps they stopped letting tourists into that area some time after that.

I’m not sure which part impressed me more, the historical engineering or the modern one.   Either way, it was one of the most impressive sights I saw in Egypt.

The Big Boy Update:   We dropped my son off in the big park across from our neighborhood this morning for a three-day camping trip with his class.   It’s a big park and by that I mean it extends from the edge of our neighborhood to the borders of the airport, which is a twenty minute drive from our house.   It’s also a twenty minute drive to get him into the camp location in a car as we have to drive on small, gravel roads for a good while to get him to a spot that’s not that far from where our house is proximally.   He was happy when I left, although he had some anxiety about going this morning.   It rained a lot last night but was sunny today.   I think he’s going to come home with a lot of very dirty clothes though.  We’ll find out when we pick him up on Wednesday.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband has been working on selling our car.   He was talking to me about two people who were both interested and my daughter was listening in.   She offered up, “if those guys both wanted the car at the same time, they would have to fight over it.   Or maybe eeny meeny miny moe.”