Travel Photo - Lisbon, Portugal

Portugal has been on my mind recently since we have booked a European cruise that goes from Barcelona to Copenhagen this summer. We are really looking forward to this trip; it is on Oceania's newest vessel Marina.

This is a slide I took of a street in Lisbon c1958; I scanned the slide to convert it to digital and I cannot get over the colors after all these years!

Golden Corral

Happiness is having a Golden Corral in your neighbor! Now I can have fried chicken, fried fish, and hush puppies every night!

Egypt - Abu Simbel

Jenny and I were fortunate to be able to go to Egypt recently to see some of the amazing ruins and antiquities dating back some 5000 plus years. The Egyptian Government, with the help of many other governments, have done a beautiful job of restoring some of these priceless work of arts: yes works of art.

On day nine we had to get up about 5:00am to catch a flight from Aswan to Abu Simbel to see Rameses II temple. This was an optional tour and although I was getting a little tired of seeing beautiful temples, we had booked the tour before we left the States, so off we went. I’m glad we did go because it was fantastic!

Jenny and I have flown on many airlines in different countries, and when we or at lease I, take the first domestic flight in a country; I get a little apprehensive! Of course it helped that we had already flown from Cairo. Both of our flights were as good as it gets when one talks about all the hassles one gets when he flies. The Aswan Airport had security guards everywhere: read military. This was the first airport I ever had to show identification and flight itinerary before entering the airport.

Abu Simbel is about 150 miles southwest of Aswan and located on the western bank of Lake Nasser. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Monuments called “Nubian Monuments” which includes sites as far north as the Philae Temple just south of Aswan, a temple we visited he next day, of course!

Lake Nasser is over 340 miles long, with about 270 miles of the lake in Egypt and the rest in Sudan; where the lake is called Lake Nubia. There are two dams built in Cairo which created this massive lake; Aswan Low dam completed in 1902 and Aswan High Dam completed about 1970. The first dam wasn’t was large enough to control the flooding therefore the large High Dam was constructed.

I wanted to introduced Lake Nasser first because Abu Simbel Temple (actually two temples at this site but I refer to both singularly) had to be moved when the High Dam was built otherwise it would have been flooded and lost forever. The two temples was moved around 1964 over 200 feet higher and about 660 feet west of the lake. This unbelievable engineering feat was financed by international donations under the direction of UNESCO with archeologists, engineers and skilled construction workers from around the world.

This is a model of Abu Simbel site which shows where the site is now compared to where it originally was located. Today the lake is several feet above the original site.

The site as it looks today; Ramses II temple is on the left and Queen Nefertari is on the right.

A closeup shot of the facade Rameses II Temple.

Egypt - Karnak Temple

The Karnak Temple comprises a vast mix of ruined temples, chapels, pylons, and other buildings, also known as the great Temple of Amun; Construction begun by Pharaoh Ramses II (ca. 1391–1351 BC) and was added to by virtually every Pharaoh for the next thirteen centuries. It is located near Luxor, about 300 miles south of Cairo. The Karnak complex takes its name from the nearby village of el-Karnak just north of Luxor.

For the largely uneducated ancient Egyptian population this Temple could only have been the place of the gods. It is the mother of all religious buildings, the largest ever made and a place of pilgrimage for nearly 4,000 years. Although todays pilgrims are mainly tourists. It covers about 200 acres.

Entrance to Karnak

The huge, intricate, carved pillars of the great Hypostyle Hall.

The granite obelisks erected by Hatshepsut at Karnak in the mid fifteen century B.C. to the great god Amun were among the most magnificent ever constructed. She commissioned hundreds of statues of herself and left accounts in stone of her lineage, her titles, her history. On one of her obelisks at Karnak she inscribed: "Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people will say. Those who see my monuments in years to come, and who shall speak of what I have done."

Just one of many statues located at Karnak

Travel Photo - Yosemite - Cathedral Rock

Our daughter lives in LA so on a trip to visit in 2005, we all went to Yosemite National Park for a few days. As I remembered, it rained most of the time but that made for some great waterfall shots. This one is one: Angel Falls. Beautiful!

Travel Photo -Hong Kong

Followers of this blog will remember I had a "Photo Of the Week" category, but since I haven't been able to post weekly, I have replaced it with some of my travel photos taken over the past, well, fifty plus years.

I start with on of my favorites: Junk in Hong Kong Harbor, taken in 1982. While I was living in living Hong Kong, I always thought that the Hong Tourist Association would pay someone from China to cruise the harbor periodically so all of the tourist could take this shot and go home and show it to family and friends; the results would be, "Boy, I want to go there and see that"!

Egypt - Hatshepsut

Jenny and I were fortunate to be able to go to Egypt recently to see some of the amazing ruins and antiquities dating back some 5000 plus years. The Egyptian Government, with the help of many other governments, have done a beautiful job of restoring some of these priceless work of arts: yes works of art.

We saw so many tombs and temples that as I write this, I cannot remember what was what? But Hatshepsut I remember well because its beauty and, well a woman Pharaoh, although not the first; in fact her name means. “noble lady”. Most Egyptologists considered her to be one of the the most successful pharaohs. She ruled for a little more than twenty years in the mid fifteen century BC. It must have been difficult to rule and accepted as a woman, and just maybe that must have been why she depicted herself in many of her surviving images as a man.

Hatshepsut also is credited with being one of the greatest builders of of all the dynasties. The obelisks at Karnak, which I will be posting later, is among tallest and most magnificent ever constructed.

This Hatshepsut mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, one of my favorites of the temples that we saw. What a beautiful temple and to think it was built in the around 1460BC.

Close up shots of Hatshepsut; notice the beard!

Jenny and the security people at Hatshepsut!

Just one example of the intricate art work inside the temple.

Large granite sphinx bearing the likeness of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, depicted with the traditional false beard in the Metropolitan Museum.