Day 12: 01/04: Philae Temple and High Dam

Cairo to Aswan domestic flight was only for 1.5 hours or so. As soon as we arrived at the airport, our local guide(who we later thought was a taxi provider) Mr. Hamada met with us and assisted us on a drive from airport to our cruise-ship. The cruise ship was not very big at all. It could accommodate a maximum of 200 guests + a few more crew members. No point comparing this to luxury cruises in Hawaii/Florida etc.
We were pleasantly surprised though to see a relatively large sized room/bath. We quickly finished our lunch inside a restaurant in the cruise (there was only 1) and met with Mr. Nassr who was going to travel with us on this 3 night Nile cruise and be our local guide in Egypt. On second thoughts, he was quite nosy and over-friendly. I did not like him that much.
Post lunch our agenda was to go to High Dam and visit Temple of Philae.
High Dam was built under direction of Mr. Nassr(one of the former presidents of Egypt) in 1960. British (when they ruled Egypt) had also built a dam in 1902 (old dam); but high dam is indeed build very ingeniously. On one side it has now created Lake Nassr (feels as big as sea). Nile has sooo much water!

Apparently Egypt was still a poor country back in 1960 and when Mr. Nassr asked UN and others for loan to build this dam, they denied suspecting Egypt's ability to pay back the money. So Mr. Nassr came up with a brilliant idea to charge all the cargo/ships using Suez canal a cut (to Egyptian government). This turned out to be quite profitable in the long run and using this money they built high dam.
After this visit, went to see Temple of Philae (using a small boat ride). This temple was transferred over from Philae Island to Algelica Island when high dam got built and the original temple risked getting submerged in Lake Nassr.

Story behind Philae Temple (briefly):
Temple is dedicated to goddess Isis (goddess of love, compassion), wife of God Osiris(god of death). It is from Egyptian mythology that she was his favorite wife. Much after his death, during 'New Kingdom' era, the Greeks (who were then ruling Egypt) found his penis in Philae and built this temple. Egypt's history is divided into Old Kingdom (3000 BC, when pyramids and sphinx were built), Middle Kingdom (not much construction happened), New Kingdom(all the temples got built by multiple pharaohs and queens). Philae temple has beautiful paintings of Osiris, Isis and their son Horus (Phoenix God) and lots of other depictions of the love/hate relationships between Osiris/Isis and Osiris/Seth (2 brothers).
We got back to our cruise-ship by 6 pm, went out to walk through a local market (quite entertaining to see lots of mildly aggressive shopkeepers), had an early dinner and rolled into the bed early. Sadly there was some stupid dance program in the bar (right on top of our room) and was too loud and disturbing. After several complains also things did not improve a whole lot. We wanted to sleep as early as we could since tomorrow we were going off to Abu Simbel (starting 3 am from the cruise ship).