My Travel Adventures

We started our last full day on the Nile with a three o’clock departure for Abu Simbel. After the quick transfer from ship to bus, I nodded off and awoke again as day began to break over the desert. The ride took three and a half hours, towards the tail end of which we were properly in the desert; even the hardy round clumps of grey grass gave way to a uniform barrenness overseen by the occasional stern cliff. On the way back, we saw these cliffs more clearly. The shorter ones were beige with splashes of black, while the taller ones had warmer colours, and a few were shaped like pyramids.

We left our ship at half past seven to board the tour bus to the nearby temple of Edfu. While the site’s history dates to the third millennium BCE, the famous ruins visited today were built under the Ptolemies: The work began in 237 BCE and was only completed one hundred and eighty years later. As pointed out by the introduction of Cavafy’s Collected Poems, the Ptolemies were in fact the longest-reigning dynasty of Egypt, which I find quite remarkable. This dating makes the temple comparatively young but in no way detracts from its splendour. Buried in the sand for centuries, Edfu retains its hieroglyphs, Horus statues, and some of its colour as well as the ceiling atop its massive pillars.

We began our itinerary at a leisurely eight o’clock in the morning. While the ship remained moored by the pier under Luxor Temple, a small boat took our group to the opposite bank. Imbued with symbolic importance, the western bank of the Nile is home to the Theban Necropolis, a vast collection of royal mortuary temples and necropoleis. This is where, especially during the New Kingdom, pharaohs were laid to rest in ornate tombs covered in carvings and paintings of scenes from sacred funerary texts. Many of the tombs were looted, some of them by subsequent pharaohs looking for extra funds to line their coffers, and their long exposure to the outside atmosphere is why most paintings appear heavily bleached.

I have always wanted to go to Egypt. Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, the Nile – I’ve known these names for as long as I can remember. In fourth or fifth grade, our history curriculum focussed on Ancient Egypt: one day we dressed up as Ancient Egyptians and baked what the teachers believed to be the closest approximation of Ancient Egyptian bread. I do not remember what I wore, but I distinctly remember some children arriving wrapped in toilet paper and claiming they were mummies. In the years when we studied Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, my bedsheets made for a splendid toga.