The day after my last post, the combination of too little food and water, busy days, high heat, and bad air pollution finally caught up with me and I came down with a nasty sore throat. That evening the hotel manager and another guy working at the hotel asked me to go to a cafe to smoke a sheesha with them. I probably shouldn't have, feeling sick and all, but I went anyways.

This of course, was the last thing I needed. My sore throat was much worse the next day, and was turning into an all-around nasty cold. I figured that the air pollution in Luxor wouldn't be helping my recover much, so we decided to cut the time in Luxor short, and head on to Aswan.

After a two or three hour train ride, we arrived in Aswan. There was clean air! Green grass! Roads you could safely walk across without getting mowed down by taxis! And the hotel we found, the Keylani, had clean floors, clean sheets, towels, crepes for breakfast, and a lovely rooftop terrace.

The only drawback to the location is that the muezzin (or is he the imam? or Quran reciter?) at the nearby mosque seems to think that praying five times a day is not enough, and that he needs to give an amplified sermon every hour or so. Luckily his sound system isn't very reliable, so usually after half an hour of staticky preaching, the amplifier dies, and we have peace and quiet until the next sermon.

After a couple days of resting, I was feeling much better, and was ready to do some more sightseeing. We went to the Nubian museum in Aswan, which isn't as good as the Luxor museum, but is still nicely done. We also went to the Aswan museum. The Aswan museum itself isn't really worth visiting, but with the ticket, you also get admission to the ruins of Abu, a town currently in the process of being excavated by German archaeologists. None of the buildings excavated are really spectacular, but it's fun to just wander around in the ruins.

Yesterday, we took an early morning minibus ride to Abu Simbel, to see the two temples there, built by Ramses II. Abu Simbel is the most southern town in Egypt, almost at the Sudanese border. It's a two and a half hour ride there. It's amazing how desolate the desert is. I thought that the American Southwest was empty, but the American deserts are jungle compared to the Sahara -- there's nothing -- no plants, no animals, no towns, no people, just the highway and the desert.

The temples at Abu Simbel were, along with many of the other monuments in Upper Egypt, going to be flooded when the High Dam was built in the 1960s. UNESCO sponsored an international effort to move all the monuments to higher ground, so that they would not be sitting underneath Lake Nasser after the Nile was dammed. So the Abu Simbel temples were cut up into large blocks, moved to higher ground, and then completely reconstructed. Now they sit right on the edge of Lake Nasser. The temples there are unlike others that we've seen so far, because they're carved into hillsides, rather than free standing. I think that this is what has allowed them to be so well-preserved. The Ramses temple has the four massive statues of Ramses II in the front of the hillside that you've probably seen pictures of, and has some lovely reliefs on the inside, of Ramses slaughtering his enemies in battle.

Today, we're just taking it easy in the morning, and will finally go for a felucca ride this evening. Tomorrow, who knows . . . It's so nice to not have to be anywhere and to be able to travel with no plan at all!