Aswan & Philae Island, Egypt
/Samantha and I decided we would stay in a really nice hotel while we were in Aswan. We knew it would be hot, and it doesn't have the same tourist draw that it used to, so the hotels were all very reasonably priced. We chose the Movenpick hotel, which was on its own little island in the middle of the Nile. They have their own ferry service which was nice, it meant that when we would leave and come back, we would get a nice little boat ride. As you can see in some of the photos we were totally spoiled for our three days here. While we did spend quite a bit of time just relaxing and enjoying the pool, we did manage to squeeze a little bit of sightseeing in too.
The three main sights we visited were the Aswan High Dam, the Philae temple, and the Unfinished obelisk. They weren't as impressive as the incredible temples we saw in Abu Simbel, but they were definitely worth seeing, though the High Dam was a little underwhelming. The Philae temple is unique for Egyptian temples because it was constructed on a small island in the middle of the Nile. After the construction of the High Dam the temple had to be relocated to a different island, which took about 10 years. Despite being completely submerged for several years, in addition to the thousands of years since its construction, it is in remarkably good shape. We still had Mena with us, and he was able to tell us all about the different stories and legends affiliated with it. We've been back and forth on whether we like having guides or if we prefer doing the research on our own or using a guide book, but in Egypt its really helpful to have someone with a lot of background. The temples are literally covered in different stories and scenes, and even with a guide book its hard to get all of the significance. The unfinished obelisk is so named because it was never completed (Surprise!). It is a really cool sight nonetheless because it gives some insight into how the ancient Egyptians used to quarry the granite for their temples and monuments. This particular obelisk would have stood over 100 ft if it hadn't cracked. I didn't know before coming here that all of the obelisks around Egypt are formed from just one piece of stone. This is impressive by today's standards, but removing a piece of granite 100ft long without any modern tools is absurd.
There were a few more sights we could have seen in Aswan, but we knew that we were going to see a whole bunch more on our way up to Luxor and then in Luxor itself, so we spent the rest of our time enjoying the hotel and our room. Samantha planned visits to three temples on our drive north, so expect a post on that soon!
