OUR TRIP THROUGH EGYPT AND MORE
The Aswan High Dam
Years ago, Mari and I had the opportunity to travel through Egypt as part of a Finnish tourist group during our January vacation. We met up with the tour leader, a bright Finnish fellow with many contacts in Egypt. We started out in Cairo and traveled by a small but comfortable tour boat all the way to the Aswan Dam. Our guide had made many friends along the way on previous trips, so we met many Egyptian people. It was, then, both a relaxing tourist trip and a fascinating visit to many great historical ruins of ancient Egypt.
Of course, the chance to be right up beside famous and monumental ancient Egyptian ruins and sites was a special treat for me because I had studied off and on a good deal of Biblical history involving Egypt. But being amidst, beside, and under many of these great monuments was quite different from reading about them. It was also fascinating to meet occasional Arab folks along the way in villages and cities where our guide had made friends. Of course, we started out with a visit to the Great Pyramids near Cairo, where I had the great privilege, years earlier, of actually climbing to the top of the famous Cheops Pyramid.
While in Cairo, we learned that we could rent a car and driver to take us just across the border into the Nubian Desert, barely into Sudan, to the place where the United Nations had arranged to relocate some of the Great Pyramids of Lower Egypt so they would not be swallowed by the rising waters of the now-dammed-up Nile River. This, incidentally, was a multimillion-dollar project involving numerous countries worldwide. Most of these monumental temples had been relocated from Luxor in Lower Egypt. It truly was an amazing experience and a privilege to see these vast monuments, beautiful frescoes and all, which, if they had not been cut up into movable pieces and transferred way upriver, would have been lost to the world forever under the southern Nile.
We had gotten up hours before dawn and been driven for four hours, watching the sunrise across the desert, but it was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime thrill to see and walk through these ancient Egyptian monuments. This experience was similar to crawling into Cave #1, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been hidden 2,000 years ago and were only discovered in our time. Sometimes I wish I had become an archaeologist.