Temples of Abu Simbel, Egypt
/We hired an Egyptologist guide and a driver to drive us the three hours south to Abu Simbel through the barren desert. It's about 40 kilometers from the Sudan border, and the town of Abu Simbel is quite small. A driver and guide might sound like quite a luxury, but again, since the exchange rate is in our favor this was quite affordable, and much more stress-free than having to worry about navigating military checkpoints alone.
The trip was HOT. It's been 104 degrees or hotter every day since we've come farther south, so our guide, Mena (pronounced MEE-nah) recommended we visit the temples of Abu Simbel at 4:00, staying a single night before making the drive back to Aswan the following morning.
It's impossible to overstate how incredible Abu Simbel actually is. As you probably know, when the High Dam was built at Aswan in the 1960s, Lake Nasser became one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, submerging many ancient temples as the water level rose. The Abu Simbel temples are amazing on their own, but made doubly fantastic when you realize that UNESCO literally moved an entire mountain out of the lake to save it.
Before that happened, these temples were actually lost under sand and excavated at two different points in history. Pictures don't do this site justice, but here they are anyway! Unfortunately, no photos are allowed inside either temple. However, both temples were quite large on the inside with multiple chambers, each one covered with hieroglyphs.
Just so you can imagine the scale, when standing in the doorway between the statues of the seated Ramses II, we are not even at the level of the bottom of Ramses' feet! It's huge and a truly stunning piece of history.
