EGYPTIAN EXPERIENCE - DAY Five
Day Five Abu Simbel The grand temple at Abu Simbel, and not the Pyramids, was what I had been most excitedly looking forward to on this trip. My fascination with Abu Simbel began in my teens in the late 1960s, when I read a long feature in Readers Digest about its spectacular disassembly and reconstruction at a higher elevation to prevent it from being submerged by Lake Nasser. A fascination that had endured for more than 5 decades. And now I was on the verge of realising my dream. Most of my homework before the trip had been devoted to the Abu Simbel Temple. I had invested considerable time in reading and watching YouTube videos about the temple. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. We rose very early and stepped out of the cruise clutching packed breakfast bags at the unearthly hour of 3.30. Abu Simbel lies just 20 km shy of the Sudanese border, and the journey was a gruelling four-and-a-half-hour ride across 280 km of desert. The first target was to be the first to arri...
