Aswan

Next stop, Aswan, home of the Aswan High Dam (which really didn't merit a picture). Behind it is Lake Nasser, the world's largest artificial lake (unless the Three Gorges Dam in China is going to beat it--I read somewhere that that lake will be 1/3 the size of the state of California and visible from space). It was heavily guarded as it supplies most of the electricity to the country. It's an interesting study--it has controlled flooding, increased farmable land, and provided electricity. On the other hand it has eliminated the flow of silt that has been essential to renewing the nutrients in the soil. This has led to heavy uses of artificial fertilizers and the canals are now hotbeds of parasites that cause infections.

We had a day to wander around before our cruise left. We visited the souq (market) where we got our first introduction to the Middle Eastern version of the tourist pitch (ack!) and a carriage ride. These carriages were everywhere and horses are used frequently to pull carts as well (as are donkeys, longer legged and much quicker than their Tanzanian cousins!) Ava, of course, loved seeing the horses, but was bothered by how thin and worn so many of them seemed. We had a lot of talks about "Black Beauty" and how he and his friend Ginger were treated and how we can be good caretakers of God's creatures.

Feluccas are the traditional boat on the Nile. I pictured them to look more like the dhows we see in Dar and the coast but they look more like traditional sailboats. They are beautiful! The Nile really is a lifeline through the Sahara. There is a narrow band of green on both sides, then abruptly the desert begins and stretches for as far as you can see. And where there's desert, there is really absolutely nothing but sand and rocks. It seems impossible to live anywhere but that narrow band of green.

A lot of the granite that was used in monuments in and near Cairo (although not the pyramids) came from quarries in Aswan. In one of the quarries there is an unfinished obelisk that was smoothed and finished on 3 sides before it was abandoned. Apparently there was a flaw in the base that would have prevented the obelisk from being finished and displayed. If finished it would have been the largest monument made from a single piece of rock. You can see the holes drilled along the sides where they placed plugs of sycamore wood and then soaked them with water. As the wood expanded, it split the rock and allowed the workers to cut the obelisk out. You can also see the tracks where large blocks of granite were dragged and removed for building.

This was not one of the more interesting things to see for our group. I overheard someone wonder aloud why they made a monument out of something that they weren't able to do, when there are so many extraordinary monuments they did so well! After one of those "stand around and look a bit and go 'hmmmm', we decided that making shadow pictures proved to be a lot more entertaining! Imagine, hieroglyphics thousands of years old enhanced by 21st century sillouettes!

We had some time on the boat before heading to the temple of Philae so of course our fish had to go check out the pool. The cruise boats look a lot like the paddlewheel boats on the Mississippi. We even saw one with a faux wheel. There are about 250 cruise ships that move up and down between Aswan and Luxor (a distance that takes about 2 hours by car) so everywhere we looked we saw other boats. As it turned out, the weather was a bit cool and with the breeze generated by the boat's movement, the water proved too chilly for even Noah and Ava (although they diligently tried numerous times).