Grand tour of Egypt: Aswan

Our first excursion in Aswan was to the Philae Temple

and then we examined the Aswan High Dam and the unfinished obelisk. At the dam we stepped over a bit of string going from a palm to the ground and headed off to the hydroelectric end of things. We could hear whistling but when we looked back, could see nothing so continued on. Eventually a soldier came puffing up to us and explained that we were in the no-go zone and also taking photos. The Egyptians do not allow photos at stations, at check points and at various other national infrastructure sites so of course we should have realised that their main source of electricity was on the no-no list. The soldier looked at all our photos – heaps of them – and asked us to delete the ones of the dam. The same thing had happened to others in our group so I suppose the only thing we should have been taking photos of would have been the Nasser Lake which is an enormous stretch of non-infrastructure water. It is because of the dam that there are no longer hippos and crocodiles in the Nile beyond it.
We visited the quarry from which much of the granite used in Egyptian monuments was taken. The method used for splitting the rock is to make a series of wedge shaped holes, jam wood into them then wet the wood. As the wood expands it forces the stone to break. An unfinished obelisk can be seen there, ¾ cut but abandoned, apparently due to a flaw being discovered in the rock.

This would have been the largest obelisk in the world if it had been completed. Thinking about how it could be moved and erected was mind boggling.