My Trip to Abu Simbel

The night before we left Luxor for Abu Simbel; I spilled coffee on my leisure suit. Leisure suits were very popular in the ’70s. I washed it out that evening in the hotel room’s bathroom. Twenty minutes later it was completely dry. That illustrates how dry the desert air is.

The following morning we took a bus ride across the desert to Abu Simbel. Ramses II built Abu Simbel. He was called the Sun Pharaoh because he was a great warrior and because he was a great builder. He lived to be 90 years old which was unheard of in his time.

The bus stopped very close to Abu Simbel and we all had a very short walk to the temple The first thing that strikes the visitor is the 65 foot statues of Ramses II. There are two on either side of the entrance. On the right side of Abu Simbel is the Temple of Hathor, the goddess of love.

In the Hathor Temple there are floor to ceiling columns with carvings of Hathor on each face of the columns. When the Aswan Dam was built, engineers knew that it would create Lake Nasser. The new lake would flood Abu Simbel so it became a United Nations project to move Abu Simbel. The U.N. team moved Abu Simbel without destroying its value as an antiquity.