Sami acts as figurehead on the motorboat out to Philae Island...
Our “fixer” Kamal collected us this morning and took us down to the traffic department where we paid for our Egyptian license plates and an Admin Fee. Kamal had decided that this would save us some time later, but as it turned out, it was a waste of time…
As we arrived back at the hotel, he received a call from Mazar in Wadi Halfa who advised that the barge with our vehicles on it had still not sailed!! Sam, Khalid and I looked at each other, and then back at Kamal, hoping that we had not heard correctly… Apparently the captain of the barge had taken ill, and was unable to sail up to Aswan until he felt better… Instead of getting our vehicles on Sunday as we had hoped and planned for, they would now only be arriving in Aswan Port on Monday, and we would be lucky to have them on Tuesday…
Sam pointed out that we had no proof that our vehicles even existed, because we had not received an official invoice from Mazar to confirm that we had paid for their transportation… Our keys were with the vehicles, and we imagined that they were being driven around Wadi Halfa, in preparation for an auction…!! You can imagine how helpless we felt…!! All we had was our passports and our Carnets… If our vehicles did not arrive soon, one of us might have to go back to Wadi Halfa to see what the heck was going on… I had read and heard about too many incidences where guys either sailed or flew on ahead of their bikes and then due to an administration error, had to wait weeks to get their bikes back… Often, this involved bribes and “baksheesh” as it is known in these parts…
The fact that the whole thing was beyond our control, eventually got us laughing and joking about the predicament we were in, and to take our minds off it all, we decided to visit the Temple of Philae on Agilkia Island, situated upstream from the town of Aswan…
The Temple of Isis dominates it's new home on Agilkia Island...
The Colonnades on either side of the entrance to the Temple of Isis...
The six of us piled into a taxi, and were driven to the parking area from where we had to take a motorboat out to the island… The original site of this temple was on Philae Island itself, but when the high dam was built, the island was flooded for the better part of each year, and the only way you could see the temple, was from the side of a small boat, which would work its way through those parts of the temple that were not underwater. It was eventually decided to move the entire temple, consisting of over 40 000 solid sandstone and granite blocks, to another island close by… Can you imagine the mammoth undertaking that this took…?? Work started in 1972 and was completed in 1980. Over 20 000 tons of carved stone was moved…
A coffer dam had to be built around Philae Island first, so that the area could be drained and the many temples on the site could be dismantled piece by piece… Then an area of almost 1 500 m2 had to be added to Agilkia Island, to fit the whole shebang on… Once this was completed, the coffer dam was removed, and Philae Island sank below the waters of the Nile for good… There is little evidence to back this up, but my estimation is that the UNESCO guys used about 485 litres of suntan lotion during the process…give or take a tube or two…
The massive portals at the entrance to the temple...
The scale of the temple is astounding, and looking back at the photographs I took, I realize that none of them do the Temple of Philae much justice… The original temple was built between 400 B.C. and 300 A.D., and was continually added to by successive Pharaohs’… It was dedicated to the goddess Isis and used extensively by the Greek and Romans, while they reigned over Egypt… Isis is depicted as the body of a woman with the head and horns of a cow. She represented Love, Fertility and Healing… She was seen to be the protector of the Pharaohs’, who frequently journeyed from their palaces in the north, to make offerings to their protector here in the south, on Philae Island…
It was amazing to think that I was standing on a spot where Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar once stood… Legend has it that Julius and Cleopatra honeymooned here… Pilgrims from all over the ancient world once flocked here, much as the tourists of today do… The Roman Emperor Justinian closed the temple in 535 A.D., when the empire converted to Christianity… A Christian Coptic sect moved into it and began defacing all the statues and faces of the Pharaohs’ that lined the walls… They did this by the simple method of chiseling the faces off the carvings, even those that stand high above ground level… Many of the temples we visited showed the same signs of “defacement”…
The Hypostyle Hall, built by Ptolemy ll, when the Greeks ruled Egypt...
I wandered around on my own, while my French and German friends went exploring the ruins for themselves. I found a shady spot under one of the massive columns on the Western Colonnade, and sat down to try and take this all in… I let my imagination loose, and “felt”, and “saw”, the hustle and bustle of an ancient civilization, as they went about their worship… I imagined those ancient artists decorating this huge structure, taking centuries to complete their work, and the silly buggers who did their best to erase it all…
I was awakened from my state of torpor by the arrival of Sam and Friede, and a few minutes later, Khalid and Marie… The sun had drained the energy we had all felt earlier that morning, and I had drunk all the water I had brought with me… It was decided that a swift return to our air-conditioned hotels was in order, and after summoning our water taxi, we made it back to town in double quick time…
Sam received a call later that afternoon to advise that the barge had finally sailed from Wadi Halfa! We could begin planning for the release of our vehicles, and our continued journey through this amazing country, with its irritating population…
We went out into the souk and had dinner washed down with Karkadeh, a tea made from the red flowers of Hibiscus… It is used to counteract the effects of high blood pressure, something we were all suffering from, having to deal with these pesky Egyptians…!!!
©GBWT 2010
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