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After our Desert safari we took the ~12hour sleeping train from Cairo to Aswan. We chose the expensive option for the sleeping train which was a two person private cabin, with the rest of the train full of seats for people to sleep on. The train was ok, we had two fold out bunk beds in our room and a guy who came around and gave us our complimentary dinner and breakfast... not exactly premium food given the price we had paid. We arrived in Aswan at about 8am and called up our tour company to confirm our pickup time and location for our tour of Abu Simbel. After this we tried to book ourselves some train tickets to take us from Aswan to Luxor later that day; we approached the ticket counter and was told that the only trains available for us were from midday to around 6pm. We were therefore in a bit of a bind as we probably wouldn't be back from Abu Simbel by then. Next thing you know we were conveniently approached by a taxi guy offering to take us to Luxor that night for the same price as the train would have cost; we took his number as a last resort but hoped for better. Our journey from Aswan to Abu Simbel took a few hours by a private aircon coach and on the way our guide told us what to expect and a little bit of the history of Egypt. He explained that due to the construction of the dam, the Abu Simbel temples had to be moved to a greater height to prevent being flooded by the creation of Lake Nasser. The temples were cut up into a large number of blocks and then pieced together and a fake mountain created around them to resemble the original state. Due to security concerns in the area between Aswan and Abu Simbel all of the tour groups are sent in convoys through the desert and over the lower Aswan dam. Our driver went faster than all of the large tour busses so we managed to get to Abu Simbel and have the place nearly all to ourselves for a while. The outside of Abu Simbel is of the same scale at Petra, but the difference is that there are actually things inside of Abu Simbel. Inside of Abu Simbel are a series of caverns full of statues and drawings curved into the rock surface, yet unfortunately no cameras allowed inside through fear of damage to the colours by flash photography. On all of the walls were stories showing the gifts made by Ramesses II to the Egyptian Gods in an attempt to be protected on his journey to the afterlife. The second smaller temple was made for his queen Nefertari to help her on the same journey. After our short trip in Abu Simbel it was back to Aswan and we got our tour guide to ask about trains to Luxor. He managed to get us in the first class cabin of a local train at a cost of about 5GBP each for our 4 hour journey. The only problem we experienced was the lack of signs at the different train stations it stopped at, most were not in English and some didn't even have signs. Luckily we saw the Luxor sign and quickly jumped off. The train was pretty dirty and the toilets were laughable, cleanliness is not something they do well in Egypt it seems. |
