Welcome Wendy!

Sept 24/05 - I was pleased to welcome fellow MEDA employee Wendy Koch from the Waterloo office to Aswan a couple of weeks ago. Wendy was here gathering information and pictures for MEDA and EACID brochures and other materials. During her stay we took time on the weekend to visit Abu Simbel, a large temple site about three hours (driving) south of Aswan. When the tour guide at a local small hotel told us that we should be in the lobby at 3am we thought he was joking. . . Apparently, he wasn’t. At 2:50am I joined Wendy in a taxi we took downtown to the hotel we were leaving from. Sometime just before 4am, with a canister of Pringles and a few snacks we bought for breakfast from a small vendor on the street (apparently the boxed lunches were not for us!) we left the hotel and joined a convoy of vehicles (all travelers must travel in one of two convoys each day in order to reach Abu Simbel) heading south. The early departure time was worth it as we watched the sun rise in the desert and reached the temples before the sun was too high in the sky.
The temples themselves are HUGE!!! Absolutely massive, and stunning to think that they were moved from their original position as the rising waters of Lake Nasser, following the construction of the Aswan Dam, threatened to submerge them. Pictures were not allowed inside the temples, which were covered in hieroglyphics, but below are a couple of pictures of Wendy and me that hopefully show the scale of the temples. Ramses II who had the temples built for himself and one of his wives, Nefertari, appears to have had an ego to match the vastness of these feats of construction. His pic is plastered all over the walls in both temples – mingling with the gods, stepping on someone’s face, in battle, etc. This was my first visit to a temple site in Egypt, but I don’t think it will be my last.