I’ve now hopped on the train once again to make my way about 4/5 of the way through Egypt, just north of the Sudanese border, where I spent the night in the town of Aswan. Aswan is an old trading crossroads with the rest of Africa, and you can feel the presence of the rest of the continent much more strongly here. It also happens to be the end of the train line from Cairo.
I spent most of the day yesterday wandering through street markets and visiting some Nubian villages on Elephantine Island in the middle of the Nile River. There is lots of rich colour and culture everywhere. The weather has been warm, dry, and sunny all day, but a bit chilly at night. The Egyptian people seem very warm and friendly towards tourists throughout the country.
I checked out the Nubian Museum in town this morning. It is probably the nicest museum I’ve come across in Egypt. It covers the history of the Nubian people who live from here south into Sudan. The museum was established to showcase a collection of saved relics from the beginning of civilisation through the Egyptian period and up through today, spanning thousands of years.
The British designed and built the huge Aswan Dam just south of here in the 1960s, hoping to control the annual Nile floods (which also used to fertilise the riverbanks for good farming). The dam created Lake Nasser, the world’s largest man-made lake, and flooded out many ancient ruins. The UN got a number of countries to donate money and expertise to salvage what they could from the area and to showcase it in the Nubian Museum (and probably others).
This afternoon I caught another cheap ferry across the Nile to the West Bank, where a number of old tombs were built into the side of a mountain. I spent a few hours exploring the various passageways and checking out the inside inscriptions and spectacular views back across the river.
Tonight I’m boarding the overnight train for Cairo again, for a few more days of exploring before flying off to Delhi.
