Cairo to Aswan

After spending another day in Cairo, I decided that it was time to get away from the big city and do some exploring of the sites that are south along the Nile River. I hopped on an overnight train to the town of Aswan, twelve hours south of Cairo. Amazingly, this was the first train I had been on in my entire trip and was amazed at how comfortable and easy train travel was compared to bus, although much more expensive. After arriving in Aswan I did some site seeing a few minutes outside of the city. The best thing about Egypt is that almost everywhere you travel to there are ruins or a temple or some other amazing area that alone would warrant a day trip, but because there are so many, you can pack many sites into one day. That night I was woken up at 3 AM and put on a bus to Abu Simbel, a four hour bus ride south into the desert. Abu Simbel is very impressive. It is a massive temple built by Ramses II that had to be moved after the creation of the third largest dam in the world (creating Lake Nassar) and now sits on the side of a mountain. It is hard to describe all the various temples that I have visited because they are all so magnificent, with giant sculptures that are 100 feet tall and beautiful paintings on every wall, so I will leave that to the pictures that I have taken, but believe me, Abu Simbel was breathtaking. By this time I had traveled so far south in Egypt that I was less than twenty minutes from the border with Sudan. I then traveled back to Aswan and got on a Falluca, an Egyptian sailboat, and cruised on the Nile for a day and slept on the river. It was very peaceful and relaxing. I shared the boat with a French family and another Canadian girl and had a great time cooking and sleeping on the boat and swimming in the Nile. When I got off the boat I was picked up by a guy I met at my hotel who told me that "Bin Laden has been shot", to which I thought he was just joking. But, to my surprise I turned on CNN when I got back and he was right. I am interested to see what people are going to say to me here when they start to hear the news. If they care at all or what their feelings are on the subject. So far, since I left Cairo I have been harassed a lot less, and people are genuinely happy to have tourists here because it seems as though business is really slow in these outlining areas. You still have people aggressively trying to sell you crap at very high prices, but it is nowhere near as bad as Cairo. Later today I leave for Luxor which is known as the scamming capital of Egypt, so this should be interesting. One thing that is a little scary is I originally was supposed to take a bus north from Aswan to Luxor, but because there are no police and order in some villages along the route, I now have to take a train and bypass all the trouble. Apparently, buses with tourists are stopped and people are robbed and hassled by the "sheriffs" or these villages. Not a situation I want to be put in to, so train sounds fine to me. I will report back in a few days on my Luxor experience as well as my last few days in Cairo.