Sailing the Nile and visiting Aswan
I mentioned how much I enjoyed sailing the Nile. It was lazy and leisurely, and there was always something to see. One thing I don't think I mentioned yet is how many ships there are sailing the Nile between Luxor and Aswan (though maybe I did)—there are about 350 ships of varying sizes sailing up and down the Nile here. Many or most were as large as our ship and maybe a few were even larger. (Above the dam, on Lake Nasser, there are only three ships operating.) There was always at least one other ship in sight, and they tended to honk at each other a lot. Maybe the horns meant, Hey, I'm passing you, or maybe they were just saying hello.
Sailing meant that we saw things that we wouldn't have seen otherwise, like the daily activities that take place on the Nile. There were fisherman and others gathering grasses. There was a lot of agriculture (I saw many banana plantations), and there were men washing their horses in the water. As I said, always something to see!
Just before dark, we arrived at he riverside town of Kom Ombo, home of the Temple of Kom Ombo. This was a later temple, built around 180 BC, with later additions by the Romans. I ignored the ruins for a while because of the sunset over the river.
The temple was interesting, but crowded, as about 20 other ships had also docked at sunset for their passengers to visit the temple. We had to walk through four other ships to get to the shore, as we were tied up in parallel to the dock.
The carvings were the same, yet different, from the others we had seen.
One difference was that part of the temple was dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek, so there were crocodiles in the art.
Also, this is apparently the only place where the cartouche for Cleopatra has been found.
One of the most interesting features was a well near the temple that was used to gauge the rise of the Nile.
There were hundreds of mummified crocodiles found not far from Kom Ombo, and some of them are on display at the Crocodile Museum, right near the temple. What can you say about blackened crocodiles? By the way, although they are called Nile crocodiles (and I saw many of them in Southern Africa), there are none remaining in the Nile north of the Aswan Dam.
Then it was back onto the ship for dinner and the remainder of the trip down the Nile to Aswan. We passed under a lovely bridge on the way.
As I looked back, another ship passed under the bridge. As you can see, there was not much clearance!
We approached Aswan at around 11 PM and the lights were lovely over the water .
We docked, and, alas, anther ship tied up on our side, so we had no more view from our room for our last two nights on board. But, we could always go to the top deck for the view.
Totally random insertion, but I mentioned the desserts on the ship, particularly on the Egyptian food night, and I just found this picture while I was looking for the crocodile picture. Actually, it was this night on the ship, as we left Kom Ombo, that was "Egyptian night" and we had these lovely pastries.
We were up early the next morning to visit the island Temple of Isis. The temple was originally on Philae Island and was moved to Agilkia Island after the Aswan Dam was built. There were vendors set up both on the mainland and on the island, and I was attracted to all the patterns and the bright colors!
The Temple of Isis was scenic and had lots of heiroglyphs and other art.
The high point to me was a bat that kept flying around and then hanging out on the ceiling.
The Temple was at one point repurposed as a Christian church, and there were crossed carved into the columns and reliefs.
After the boat ride back from the temple island, we loaded on the bus to go to the Aswan Dam. It's pretty impressive. Needless to say, security was pretty high for our bus to get onto the dam.
Since this is getting pretty long, I think I'll stop there. Tomorrow I'll finish up with some other stops in Aswan, our felucca ride and my swim in the Nile, and my trip the next day to Abu Simbel.
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