Nile & Luxor · Sep 9, 2026
Aswan in two days: Philae, the High Dam, Abu Simbel
Where Egypt stops being a river valley and starts being Africa — and where two of its greatest temples were moved to save them.
Aswan is where Egypt stops being a river valley and starts being Africa. The Nile widens and fills with granite islands, the desert comes right down to the water, and the light goes hard and clear in a way it never quite does further north.
Two days here covers Philae, the High Dam, the quarries and Abu Simbel — and Abu Simbel is the reason most people come.
The Temple of Isis at Philae on its island in the Nile near Aswan
Philae — the temple that was moved
The Temple of Isis sits on an island, and you reach it by motorboat across open water, which is already better than arriving at a temple by coach.
It is not on its original island. When the High Dam was built, Philae's home would have been permanently submerged — it had already been partly underwater for months each year since the older dam of 1902. In a UNESCO operation through the 1970s the entire complex was dismantled, block by numbered block, and rebuilt on Agilkia, a neighbouring island reshaped to match the original topography. What you walk through was taken apart and put back together within living memory.
The other thing to know is what happened here at the end. Philae was one of the last functioning temples of the old religion, still operating well after Egypt became Christian, and it carries the last dated hieroglyphic inscription anywhere — cut in the late fourth century AD. Three thousand years of a writing system ends on this island. Later, part of the temple was converted into a church, and you can see Coptic crosses cut into pharaonic walls.
Go in the morning if you can, or come back for the evening sound and light show, which is one of the better ones because the setting does most of the work.
Abu Simbel — and the honest logistics
Abu Simbel is roughly 280 kilometres south of Aswan, near the Sudanese border, and reaching it is the whole planning problem.
By road it is about three hours each way across empty desert, traditionally leaving very early. Cheapest, longest, and you arrive when the site is at its busiest and hottest.
By air it is a short flight from Aswan with a fixed window on the ground. Considerably more expensive, dramatically less tiring, and the flight itself over Lake Nasser is worth something.
What you find is two temples cut into a cliff by Ramesses II: the great temple with four seated colossi of the king, each around twenty metres tall, and beside it the smaller temple for his wife Nefertari — notable because her figures on the façade are carved at the same height as his, which is close to unheard of.
And these too were moved. In the 1960s the entire cliff face was cut into more than a thousand blocks and reassembled sixty-odd metres higher, inside an artificial hill built to hold it. Standing inside the great temple, the mountain around you is concrete. That does not diminish it — it is one of the more remarkable things engineering has done for archaeology.
The colossal seated figures of Ramesses II at the great temple of Abu Simbel
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