Ancient Egypt
Day 7
We visited a granite quarry and saw this obelisk whose extraction was abandoned when it developed a crack near the top. The technique used was to drill rectangular holes into the ground, insert blocks of wood and then soak the wood, causing it to expand and the rock to split.
Maybe it's just as well they abandoned this obelisk for it would have been the biggest obelisk ever with a mass of 1200 tonnes. Not easy to move!
Here we are on a boat ride to the Philae temple complex.
These temples were submerged when the lower Aswan dam was built but UNESCO moved them to another island that was still above water. Quite an achievement.
We didn't see much wildlife on our trip, but we did see this white heron. Apparently there are still some crocodiles in the Nile around Aswan - the fishermen sometimes catch on in their nets.
We took a trip on a felucca from Aswan to Kitchener Island to see the horticultural gardens there.
Catherine took this fine picture of the sail of a felucca. Must have been her lucky day.
Here's the helmsman of our boat...
An island in the Nile at Aswan was given to Lord Horatio Kitchener in the 1890s for his part in the Sudanese campaigns while he was the Egyptian Consul. Kitchener, who was a keen gardener turned his island home into a botanical garden, importing exotic plants and trees which flourished in the Aswan climate.
I was intrigued by this sign in the horticultural gardens. Can you guess what it means? No swimwear? No leaning allowed? No amputation of hands or feet? See the bottom of this page for the answer.
A felucca with its characteristic sail, and some other boats, making their lazy way up the Nile.
For Catherine, the highlight of our visit to the horticultural gardens was probably this cat. We've always associated cats with Egypt and were expecting to see there everywhere but in fact there are very few.
After Kitchener Island we took a motorboat further up river, past these reeds, to a Nubian village. 'Nubia' comes from a word meaning 'gold'. Since there has never been much work available locally, it's long been a characteristic of Nubian society that the man works far away, returning home only rarely. This gives women an especially powerful role in family and village life.
Oh, the meaning of the sign mentioned above is... no ball games.
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