Gand Tour of Egypt: Kom Ombo and Etfu

Waking early we were back in the tour bus and off to visit some temples. Kom Ombo Temple is in a loop in the Nile and is dedicated to the Gods Sobek, who is represented wearing a crocodile head, and Horus, who has a falcon head.

Etfu Temple, one of the best preserved in Egypt, is also dedicated to Horus. Some interesting relief sculptures depicted surgical instruments, detailed fruit and vegetable offerings and a ‘birthing chair’.
The drive was fascinating since we passed through rural villages with buildings and yards made of mud brick and tiny joining plots of crops with irrigation streams from larger irrigation channels leading to them.

The main crops were sugar cane, onions, clover, something that looks like long grass, cabbages, strawberries, zucchinis and dates. We have also seen oranges and olives. One small area will have several plots of about ¼ acre or less with a larger spot for sugar cane. All labour seems to be by hand with the aid of donkeys and carts, although we have seen tractors occasionally. The cane is cut, stripped back a bit, loaded on small carts and taken to a central spot where it is loaded onto cane trucks to go for processing.

The stubble and waste is burnt. Some cane is consumed locally as a sweet treat to suck on, or, after going through a juicing machine, as a drink. As there are no fences between plots or adjoining farms, cows, goats, sheep and donkeys grazed under the supervision of young shepherds, most of whom looked like they would have been school age.

Some wall structures made of palm leaves or mud brick act as wind and sand breaks, with some enclosed for keeping animals in. The Bedouin woman we spoke with in Jordan was horrified to hear that our herds are kept in fenced paddocks rather than being shepherded about the countryside in search of food, because she felt that the Australian animals were not having a good and interesting life. Unlike Australian rural scenes, people were everywhere working together. The fertile strip along the Nile is not wide but it is certainly strikingly lush, vividly green and productive. Since the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s there has been no annual flooding of the Nile Valley. This has saved many lives, but it also means that there is no annual addition of fertile soil to the farms, so fertility will inevitably decline over the years. All the mud that annually flooded over the Nile Valley is now slowly but inevitably filling up Lake Nasser.
The trip to the temples and eventually to Luxor was in a military convoy, so at each spot the many tour buses lined up and disgorged their contents with strict instructions to be back at a certain time. While this makes for a crowded experience, it is an initiative to ensure the safety of tourists and the continued support internationally for visiting Egypt.