M&I / GBMINI

After the busy time in the Grand Egyptian Museum we flew a couple hours south to Aswan. In the morning our new (and best!) guide Mina arranged an easy day on the River Nile which made for a pleasant change from the chaos of Cairo! The first two photos are the River Nile view from our hotel room; there’s some pics from a botanical garden we stopped at; the last photo is me standing in the River Nile! Notice how green everything is, close to the river …

We also stopped at a Nubian village, where we had lunch in someones home …

In the afternoon we visited a “Roman” temple, the Temple of Satet, which in fact has multiple temples layered one on another back as much as 5000 years! It was easy for us to see newer Roman stone structures on top of older mud brick …

In the evening we took a walk along the river, feeling safe in Aswan (we would not have risked that in Cairo with its traffic everywhere!)

Wow this is an overwhelming place! We spent a frantic half day at this huge museum and probably should have spent 2 or 3 days (though that would be even more overwhelming!); the museum is divided into multiple levels (for ages from “old kingdom” to greek/roman) and each into themes (society, kings, beliefs) and separate to all that is a huge Tutankhamen section! Our guide frustratingly ran us through the 12 sections with no time to see anything – I tried to snatch photos as we went! We were then expected to guide ourselves but that was almost impossible when we knew so little about the history (the museum layout means you don’t know where to go unless you already know where to go).

Anyway, here are a lot of photos! As you see the building itself is impressive, but it’s contents are extraordinary (and I have photos of just a tiny proportion of all that is on display)!

I’m going to miss out the solar boats which we also toured (they are huge but hard to photo), and move on to another load of photos just from the Tutankhamen section – and this place was CRAZY crowded, unpleasantly so; the museum needs to do some sort of timed entry here, I think …

There are many more than just the three Giza Pyramids, and today we visited what might be my favorite, the Bent Pyramid. This pyramid changes slope angle partway up, suggesting that the original steep angle was realized to be too much (stability? asthetics? time?) – whatever the reason for the angle change, this pyramid makes it clear that early design was somewhat trial and error …

We later visited the Djoser or Step Pyramid which we were told was a very early design, perhaps initially just a stone platform that then had multiple smaller platforms put on top to give the final stepped pyramid shape. This pyramid is part of a big complex with a colonnade entrance, walls, temples and tombs …

I also spotted the Giza Pyramids in the distance – in this view you can’t see Cairo and it makes those pyramids look much more alone as they might have been many thousands of years ago when they were built: