I'm back..after 48 hours in Upper (southern) Egypt

By the time you see this, it will be after our 48 hour no internet or cell service. The south of Egypt near Sudan is called Upper Egypt since it is higher elevation than the North, which is called Lower Egypt. The Aswan Dam - the new High Dam displaced hundreds of thousands of Egyptian Nubians and forced the government to call on Unesco and other countries to save the ancient temples constructed to show the people that upper and lower Egypt were one.

The temples were carefully dismantled after building moats around them and taken piece by piece to higher ground. (BTW the US and other European countries paid for the removal and reconstruction but absent from the list were the oil rich countries surrounding Egypt...this was the mid to late 60's and these countries were already reaping the rewards of a gas hungry world. My obervation. Not a word of course was said on the tours)

We took one of the two small lifeboats on the ship (remember the Titanic) as tenders to Wadi el Seboua, the valley of the Lions. The two temples are imposing and were used later by the coptic Xtians who painted St. Peter on one of the altars, and the paint is still visible. These temples were moved as the dam was filling 2.5 miles west of their original loacations. I believe there is a YouTube video of moving the Temples that we viewed...amazing engineering and ingenious use of what was available. Have to remember that all of the thousands of workers and equipment had to be brought by barge to the extraction sites. That alone made these artifacts even more impressive. Plane back to Cairo tomorrow and then one night there and finally Homeward Bound.

On one of the walls you can find a bumblebee, honey used in embalming and also as an antiseptic. Honey was found in some of the tombs, still fresh since a closed container will NEVER spoil. Nate and Raphie