Day 16

A (very) early start - up at 03.00 (but with very posh breakfast boxes for us all), to meet our guide and minibus in order to meet up with the convoy (with armed police escort) for the long journey to Abu Simbel. I had originally told myself that I was not going to join in this part of the trip as the last time I was here (on my 50th birthday so just a short while ago), we - our group of 12 - had the whole place to ourselves. Quite magical - we found that we were talking in whispers and almost walking on tiptoe to preserve the atmosphere. In the end, however, temptation got the better of me, so I joined the crowd - in fact the convoy had 30 or so vehicles of all shapes and sizes from large tourist coaches downwards. The road is something of a long long line of black tarmac that stretches on and on through a decidedly boring desert, (and they were laying a new surface here as well as in the Western Desert) but we got there in the end.

Yes, the site was rather crowded (but I am pleased to say not particularly noisy), and just as magnificent as of course it always was (although, similar to Edfu, it also was almost totally covered in sand and lost until some 200 years ago).

I could of course go on and on about it but perhaps just a couple of points:-

A). In the great temple of Rameses II, on just two days of each year - the anniversaries of his birth and of his coronation - the sun shines directly on to his statue at the far end of a 48m passageway. Can someone please explain to me - in words of preferably one syllable - the astronomy, geometry and sheer engineering logistics that allowed them to do this over 3000 years ago???

B). And from one extreme to the other, in the smaller temple to his wife, Queen Nefetari (not Nefertiti), there is a beautiful carving of the great Rameses himself presenting his wife with flowers - said to be the first such portrayal by a man to a woman in recorded history.

NB. strictly no photos inside. One chap tried to be clever - the guard soon sorted him out (and his phone camera as well).

Of course, both temples are no longer on their original site (now buried well below the waters of Lake Nasser) but the scale of the UNESCO rescue is pretty daunting in itself. As usual, water can make a dry site very attractive.

The journey back was hotter than ever - large "mirage" lakes - but we got home in the end, fortified by the usual large bottles of water that we seem habitually to carry with us.

Then it was on to the "unfinished obelisk". All the 29 obelisks in ancient Egypt came from this one site - the Egyptians gave one to France (where it stands magnificently at the centre of the Place de la Concorde) and one to us. We put ours on the Embankment where no one really sees it.

This unfinished one, at 40m, would have been by far the tallest ever quarried here but, not much before the end of the quarrying, it developed a fault (clearly seen) - I would hate to have been the worker who made the fatal chisel blow! You can easily from the site how the workers chiselled out these great blocks from the bedrock.

Ross made the brilliant comment that it is from this obelisk that the Egyptians developed their passion for leaving so many buildings seemingly uncompleted

PS photos from our balcony across the Corniche and the moored cruise boats to Elephantine island and the far west bank.