As sweet as Aswan

Walking Treasures: town of Aswan

I made my way down to Aswan in a sun-set train ride through the North African country-side, along busy highways and through dimly lit villages. It was surprisingly comfortable in second class – aircon, huge seats, and attendants serving bread and drinks at breakfasting time.

Aswan is a bigger city than Luxor, and more intimately green. Its main pedestrianised souq (market) stretches some 3 kilometres across the city, and is pumping with local shoppers at 10pm at night. I wonder if the same level of activities during the evenings remain outside of Ramadan. The punters here seemed absolutely energised in the night, many drinking, eating and smoking sheesha at the cafes and juice bars, and others, especially well (but conservatively) dressed and groomed younger men and women, vied through all sorts of items of clothing and accessories, while others were simply doing daily household shopping. Shopping seemed like a big family even here. A big number of children were out and about, even that late in the evening, there were a good number of toy stalls dedicated to them. Lacking in the toxic-looking confessionary that my German kids liked, the youngsters here are the main consumers at the happy-healthy-tropical themed fresh juice bars. There were quite a few junky looking tourist stores selling papyrus paper and badly produced pyramid statues and what not, but the locals certainly out-number the tourists.













Floating Treasures: Mini Felucca trip

To the generations of people that lived and prospered along the Nile Valley, the felucca is an inseparable companion to their lives. Thousands of these basic, small but graceful and elegant sailing vessels line the towns on the Nile in Upper Egypt, traditionally the most important and only mode of transport for both people and goods up and down the Nile and towards the capital Cairo and the delta to the Mediterranean, and these days, they are the backbone of the most important economic source of the region – tourism.

In the morning I hired a felucca captained by Abdula, a very down-to-earth young Nubian guy to take me around the spots near Aswan. Apart from the fact that he was always trying to sneakily get more money out of me by sailing as slow as possible, taking the longest routes (he charges by the hour) and convincing me to stay as long as possible on shore, he’s actually quite likable. He seemed quite chuffed when I told him “You’re a much better sailor than my husband”. In turn, he entertained me with a recommendation of his favourite Nubian cuisine, a lot of reggae humming (the felucca captains here all seem to be obsessed with Bob Marley…) and a political analysis of the lyrics of ‘Buffalo Soldier’.

The African sun seems to be getting friendlier all the time, and this stretch of the Nile is truly stunning. The banks are lined with palms and greenery, framing off the dry desert on the two sides, kids and men of all ages taking a quick refreshing dip here and there, women washing clothes, feluccas, larger motor cruise boats, and occasionally a rare beautiful double-sail dahabiyya blowing in and out. In the middle of the river at this stretch lie several islets, one being a large island called Elephantine, with a few hotels, museums and a little Nubian village. Across the bank is an entire stretch of desert mountain range, where a number of tombs and temples sit at the top. But it was extremely hot and I was over temples, so I asked Abdula to take me straight to where I wanted to go – somewhere green, shady, and full of birds and flowers.

Next to Elephantine is Kitchener’s Island, entirely dedicated as Aswan’s Botanical Garden, initiated by Lord Kitchener in the 1890s. The island reminded me of the majestic treasure island in a Warner Brother’s movie length cartoon I used to love watching when I was a kid, kind of a natural sanctuary that magically grew out of barren brown land, a sort of sumptuous hide away that can take you away from your troubles temporarily and grant you any wish you liked. For me, it was the heat, the beeping of the taxis and the relentless touts of the city that I needed to be freed from . It was a very simple botanical garden, with the main collection being palms, but of the various flowers and climbers were in fact a brilliant minimalist combination, and I absolutely loved the slow pace of strolling and wood pecker watching on this islet environment, being able to see every side of my vision surrounded by a sheen of water.

The best thing of all to round up the day? A dip in my budget hotel’s rooftop swimming pool that had the most sensational panoramic view of the Nile with an ‘illegal beer’ I managed to barter. In the evening, I joined a local family in the souq at sunset time to observe breakfast – tables would be lined up out in the streets, and masses of food would be ready, as soon as the call from the mosque began, the elder men would start drinking and eating, and the younger men would fuss about swapping big plates of food from their shops with other shops food, until each ‘family’ pretty much have a big of everything from other families. I eventually settled down with a Nubian dinner of stuffed pigeon, orzo soup, bean stew, rice, salad and moist baked flat bread.







Sinking Treasures: Abu Simbel and Philae Temple

Due to the series of terrorist bombings in Egypt in the last 20 years, most foreigner traveling between the popular tourist trail from Aswan to Abu Simbel must do so as part of an official convoy – ie. armed police guarded processions of vehicles that leaves and returns at specific times of the day. Unfortunately, the one which my bus is on leaves at 4am… The mini buses drove around the Aswan hotels picking up individual tourists, then congregated at a square in town, and descend upon the desert with the armed police vehicles, like a line of ant eggs in the sand - looking bulk and invincible, but quite honestly, just ostentatiously out of its environment.

Abu Simbel is the southernmost main town of Egypt (just 40km from Sudan) and is famous for the magnificent and glorious Great Temple of Ramses II, and marks the geo-political territory of the pharaoh’s territory at the time (the temple was built 1274 – 1244 BC). It was lost to the world for many centuries after the fall of the ancient Egyptian empire, and only discovered in 1810s, with its façade almost all caked in sand, and took another several decades for the sand to be cleared off.
Fate also had it residing upon the volatile Nile, which determined the entirety of Egypt’s water supply. In the 1950s when it was decided that a great dam was to be made in Nubia to conserve water and control Nile’s annual flooding to support Egypt’s growing population, the Great Temple, along with hundreds of other ancient Egyptian ruins, Nubian historical sites and buildings, and not to mention hundreds of Nubian villages and their agricultural land were under threat of destruction. There were no other options for the Egyptian government but to go ahead with the dam, so a huge international architectural effort was made to conserve as much of the historical heritage of the area as possible. The giant statues of the temple was cut up and reassembled into an artificial cliff face some 65 meters above its original height, and the interior of the temple reconstructed and transferred to pretty much the exact appearance as it was found. As a total amateur, it was very hard to tell that such a great manuvour had occurred. The pure size, grandeur and awe of the temple was enough to drop one’s jaw.

Philae Temple, one of the monuments near Aswan where we visited later in the afternoon, was an example of another rescue attempt – stone by stone it was moved up to the island Agilkia where it now rests, otherwise, it would have been completely flooded by Lake Nasser (The name of the dammed catchment after Egypt’s first President). But where these monuments once were, and millions of people once called home, one of the oldest, richest, lushest regions of human civilization is now completely under water. No photographs, memories or laments could ever selvage them. The Nubian Museum in Aswan provides an account of that lost world, and the rescue effort that preserved a very small, but significant enough part of it.