Abu Simbel!!

Abu Simbel!!

Aswan, Egypt, Africa

Today we had (what we hope to be) the earliest wakeup call of the trip. After going to bed around 12am a nice gentleman from the ship was knocking on our door at the completely uncivilized time of 2:15am! He must have been knocking for a while because I know I heard the knocking a few times before I realized what it was and answered the door. It was not easy getting up or getting Ryan to wake up, but we eventually got up and made it to the lobby to pick up our breakfast boxes and meet the group.

We left the hotel at 3am to catch our 4am flight to Abu Simbel. It was a relatively small group of people on the flight down, probably because of the ridiculous time of the flight, but that made for easy check-in and boarding. It was just a 30 minute flight so we arrived at the site of Rameses II at about 5am when it was still pitch black outside. The nice thing was that we were able to avoid the seering heat and large groups of people because we were so early. We saw inside the temples of Nefertiti and Rameses II before watching the sunrise over the largest man-made lake in the world. After I got around the fact that I was awake at 2:15am, I realized that this was absolutely worth the hassle. This place was amazing!

So after watching the sunrise and getting some pictures of the temples in the daylight, we made our way back to the airport to fly back to Aswan. By this time, waking up at 2:15am was starting to hit everyone and almost the entire group on the flight was asleep. We got back to the boat at 9am and missed breakfast so we all went back to bed until lunch time. I decided to go up to the sun deck to see what was going on up there. A lot of people were hanging out in the pool, and as appealing as that was I figured I’d be better off sticking to the shade so I don’t get third degree burns!

We arrived at the town of Kom Ombo and went to see the Temple of Kom Ombo for about an hour. Most of the people went through the market after seeing the Temple, but Ryan and I had had enough of that so we went back to the ship. After dinner on the ship we all went up to the sun deck and started drinking. The night consisted of music, power hour and a lot of drinking! We called it a night at about 1:30am as we have another early morning tomorrow.

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