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Egypt Journal 4

已有 5250 次阅读 2008-3-25 22:51 |个人分类:生活点滴|系统分类:海外观察

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3/25/08

Egypt Journal IV (3/16-4/1/2008)

Day 7 – We spent a quiet day on board ship while some visited one more temple ruins at Kalabshi, the valley of lions. The Ship arrived at the Aswan High Dam in the evening. Unlike the three Gorges Dam, in the 1960s due to cost and technology, Egypt did not built locks to permit ships to go through the dam. As a result we left the ship and moved to a hotel on land in Aswan.

Day 8 -During the day we visited another salvaged temple – the temple of Philae. This is a much bigger temple built with Greek and Roman influence when Egypt was occupied by Greece and the Roman empire successively (Note:Actually from 300 BC to 1952 AD for 2000 years Egypt was occupied successively by Greece, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the French and British ).

Aswan High Dam Memorial

Temple of Philae

Day 9 - Aswan is a port city which all traffic must transit through changing from ship to ship or ship to rail, ship to air, etc. This is because the Nile has been broken into two section by the Aswan high Dam. It is thus a busy city. There are actually two dams breaking up the Nile, the old and much smaller dam built in the late 19^th century by the British which actually had a single lock to enable ships to go through and the new High Dam built by the Russians in the decade of 1960 (Note this reminded me of the two dams on the Yangtze – the Guezhou Dam and the Three Gorges Dam built some 50 years apart. The Chinese version is much grandier).

There is also considerable Nubian culture in Aswan. The Nubians are an African tribe conquered by (during the Pharoah dynasties) and integrated into the Egyptian society. We visited a Nubian village along the Nile after the dams

Aswan city from a motorboat on the Nile