Nile River Cruise

Miles: 2.4 Steps: 6033 Flights: 10

We started our 4 day cruise up the Nile today! We are “sailing” from Aswan to Luxor - it doesn’t cover that big of distance, but we’ll be seeing a lot of sites between the two cities.

The boat has seen a few miles, but is still nice - especially as we’ve been staying in mostly budget accommodations or hostels so far. This seems luxury to us now.

After getting settled in our room, we met our guide (also a luxury we haven’t had thru most of the trip) and headed off.

First he took us to the Aswan high dam - they built it in the 1970’s - well, the Russians built it compensated with HALF of their Egyptian cotton harvest for the next 25 years! He said (haven’t fact checked it) that it’s the largest dam in the world and the lake it created, Lake Nassar, is also the largest man made lake in the world. It was 98 meters deep! The dam now provides Egypt with 80% of its power needs. The other positive is it controlled the crocodiles! Before the dam was built, 4 out of every 10 Egyptians were killed by these crocodiles. 😳 They can leap 3 meters and would literally snatch people off their boats or the shore. They contained all the crocodiles, and they now live on the other side of the dam - approximately 18,000 of them! The negative impact - it displaced the Nubian people, and they had to relocate dozens of ancient temples to higher ground.

The dam is under military control so our very short visit was very controlled. Hard to get any good pics. Apparently, if it were to be destroyed it would kill all Egyptians within 12 minutes (as almost all live near or on the Nile) and the flow would rock the pyramids in Cairo! So there were rocket launchers, missles, and motion sensors everywhere to protect it. 😳

Then we went to the Temple of Philae. It is the only temple in Egypt built on an island. It was one of the temples that was relocated - taken apart and completely rebuilt on an entire different island

Excited to be able to just sit back and enjoy the next 4 days not having to worry about how to get anywhere, where we’ll be laying our heads, or what to eat.Read more