Our fourth and final day on the cruise was spent in Aswan and proved to be our busiest day by far. We started the day with a small coach tour around the city, which was a nice break from the heat of Egypt.

From here we ended up at the high dam in Egypt. The high dam created a 30% increase in the cultivatable land in Egypt and it provides irrigation and electricity for the whole of the country. This was quite fascinating because England has been facing a draught and water crisis for the past year and yet Egypt, which receives an average of 2 days of rain a year, never suffers from water shortages due to this dam. In addition, the high dam has created the world's largest artificial lake, Lake Nasser.

We then drove down the road and piled into a boat to head to Philae temple. Philae Temple was intriguing because this massive stone structure was completely dismantled, moved, and reassembled about 550 meters from its original home on Philae Island to protect it from the rising waters that resulted from the creation of the High Dam. The giant hieroglyphics can be viewed in the picture below.

Before heading back to the ship, we stopped at a papyrus shop where we learned how Egyptians make their intricate pictures on papyrus leaves. We stocked up on several pictures for our home as well, as artwork from various countries and cultures tends to be our favourite kind of souvenir. We were then supposed to take a Felucca ride down the Nile in Aswan but were unable to do so due to the lack of wind to drive the sails.

After lunch, we headed back out for a whirlwind tour of several sites including an unfinished obelisk. An obelisk is a tall, thin, four-sided, tapering monument which ends in a pyramidal top and is made of a single piece of stone. If completed, this would have been the largest obelisk ever made at 42 meters tall. We also visited a Coptic church, aromatherapy market, had tea on the Nile at sunset (where many of our group took the opportunity to smoke the "hubbly bubbly" from a water pipe, which consists of various flavours of tobacco and is demonstrated by Pete below), and gathered goods from a local spice market.

We (along with Pete and Carol who were also headed to Cairo that evening) rushed back from the spice market to catch our van to the Aswan airport at the appointed time. During this chaos of loading up, I somehow managed to fall (don't freak out, the baby was not harmed) and sprained my ankle. Not an ideal situation as we were heading to Cairo to tour the much awaited pyramids! Thankfully I have endured my fair share of sprained ankles in my life from basketball and would not let such an injury put a damper on the rest of my trip. (Tip: if you don't have bandages to wrap an ankle, flight socks work amazingly well to help with the swelling!).

After all of this, we arrived at the airport to discover that there were only 2 seats left on the plane for the 4 of us because Longwood had gotten us to the airport too late for check-in. (We later learned that the Longwood rep in Cairo had contacted our tour guide from the ship many times to warn him that he was planning to get us to the airport too late but his warning was not heeded.) Pete and Carol graciously insisted that we take the seats on the 9:30p.m. flight, agreeing to remain behind until the 1:00a.m. flight. We felt badly but the sad reality is that because of the pregnancy I get very ill if I am too tired and therefore could not really argue with this plan. In addition we were upgraded to business class, as they were the only remaining seats. Unfortunately the flight was only an hour long for such pampering but it was very exciting as I have never flown business class in my life! We even got tableclothes and real silverware for our meal! (We almost did not know how to act in this foreign part of the plane.)

When we arrived in Cairo, we encountered the only other glitch in our week as there was no representative from Longwood Travel there to meet us. This did not concern us until everybody else had emptied out of the airport leaving us with only the cleaners and security guards. Having no contact information for Longwood or our hotel, we were a bit anxious at this point. We figured we could find a taxi but had no idea how far away the hotel was and how much we should pay for such a service (which we would inevitably be ripped off on as a result). Thankfully, our representative showed up just under an hour after arrival, having been given the wrong arrival time for our flight. He took us to our hotel (the Rameses Hilton) and helped us book the tours we wanted for the following two days in Cairo. We were finally able to relax and sleep at about 1:30a.m., not long after Pete and Carol finally took off from Aswan.

The much awaited pyramid pictures and details will follow in the next (and final) Egypt post.