Sunday, March 25, 2007

Travel: Nile Cruise, Cairo, Philae and Abu Simbel

An account of a Nile cruise with visits to Cairo, Philae and Abu Simbel. It is coming to the end of the most popular time for tourism in Egypt, but there seem to be lots of travel accounts around: "In the Aswan area, where we saw the great dam that has enabled this mostly desert country to expand its cultivable area, we toured the magnificent Philae Temple, site of an especially beautiful shrine honoring the greatest of Egyptian goddesses, Isis, the wife of Osiris, god of life and death and fertility, and the mother of Horus, who, among other things, was said to unite Egypt and had the power to confer deity on Pharaohs. Like Abu Simbel, Philae, which also includes lesser temples, tells a great rescue story. Partially submerged most of the year following the building of the first Aswan Dam in the early 1900s, it was threatened with total immersion and certain ruin 60 years later when the much higher second Aswan Dam was built."
See the above for the entire two page-article .

No comments: