Gray Aswan High Dam and Colorful Hilton Cairo Heliopolis

We began our final full day in Egypt with coffee on the sun deck of our ship.

Soon after breakfast, we were on the bus heading for Aswan Dam, a 20th Century Egyptian construction project.

Over two miles long, Aswan Dam used 57 million cubic yards of earth and rock in its construction.  That's more than 16 times as much as used for the Great Pyramid.

Upon completion of the dam, Lake Nasser  was 300 miles long and 10 miles wide, finally putting an end to the annual flooding, that seemingly miraculous Inundation that had been celebrated at the Festival of Opet in ancient times.

The "High Dam" opened over 800,000 acres of desert for farming.

The Aswan Dam also harnesses enough electrical energy to power most of Egypt. With twelve massive Soviet-built turbines, the dam is capable of generating 10 billion kilowatts of electricity annually.

Julie's dad, who worked as on the Hungry Horse Dam in Montana early in his career as an engineer, would have found the specs and how they were technologically accomplished fascinating.  My dad would have soaked it all in with a sense of wonder.  Both would have been disturbed by who backed the project.

Yes, the Soviet Union was key to the completion of this project.  In addition to providing these engineering marvels of electrical production, the USSR also provided financial funding.

This was back in the Cold War Era when there was a real and present danger that grey, centrally-planned Soviet-led communism would dominate chaotic-but-freedom-loving American-led capitalism.

Prior to the High Dam's construction, Egypt had nationalized the formerly-British-controlled Suez Canal.  The Soviet Union faced down its former European allies, Britain and France, with the threat of all-out war in Europe.

President Dwight Eisenhower insisted that the West back down rather than provoke a possible nuclear war only eleven years after World War II had ended.

As a History video linked here says, this standoff showed who the real world powers would be from that point forward: the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Suez Canal began generating major income for Egypt to go along with Soviet loans and engineering prowess to make the new Aswan Dam possible.

To clarify what may seem obvious, the nationalization of the Suez Canal was only part of a bigger picture of government nationalization of industry and agricultural "land reform."  It followed the communist protocols for redistribution of wealth.

While far from a perfect solution for Egypt, these radical moves earned President Gamal Abdel Nasser --- who had come to power in 1952 through a coup d'etat --- great popularity with Arab masses and communists around the world.

Nasser's name was used in naming the gigantic reservoir formed by the new Aswan Dam.  Think what you will of long-term consequences of his actions, that honor is fitting, given his leadership in making it happen.

With any major public works projects, there will be negative impact, too.

As I previously intimated in prior ports, the flooding required relocating 90,000 Egyptian peasants and nomads who lived in that region.

In addition, major United Nations projects had to be instituted to save archaeological treasures of ancient Egypt.  It's important to note that without the intervention of Western capitalist countries to preserve monuments and infuse tourism dollars over fifty-plus years since the High Dam was put into service, Egypt may be lingering in Iron Curtain-gray poverty.

This is not to say, however, that average Egyptian citizens live in close to the style to which most Americans have become accustomed.  Re-setting a game that had been unbalanced for 5,000 years required drastic actions by Nasser, even if we have problems with his political affiliations and short-term methods with 20-20 hindsight.

Now that the Nile Inundation no longer naturally enriches soil with river silt, the delta soil has been depleted and agricultural efficiency per acre has dropped, compensated by the fact that so many new acres of farmland were created.

Natural migratory fish in the Nile have declined, although the waters of Lake Nasser are now stocked with fish.

With fewer nutrients in the water flowing from the Nile into the Mediterranean, anchovy population has declined.  In addition to being part of human diet in the region, oil-rich anchovies are an important food for other fish, which have in turn also declined.

Other environmental ramifications follow from all of these unintended consequences.

However, we would not be sticking around long enough to watch any of this unfold firsthand, because we had a plane to catch.  Once at the airport, we found our flight had been delayed ... and delayed again ... and again.

Eventually, we boarded our plane and made the short flight to Cairo, where we waited for our luggage longer than the air time of the flights.  That was obviously considerably longer than would be reasonably expected, as had been the case for each of our prior flights on Egypt Air on this trip.

Upon checking into the modern Cairo Hilton, we were back in those Western comforts of a tourist mecca created with capitalist dollars.

Laszlo decided to head into town to check out the shopping areas.  He wasn't so much going to buy anything as to see what there was to see.

It was another hot, sunny day, so Julie and I changed into swim suits to go out by the lovely pool area.

We ordered cold beverages and enjoyed our lazy afternoon at this beautiful tropical-feeling resort.

Dinner that night proved to be a real treat, the best meal of the trip.

The overhead pastel lighting that gradually changed colors gave the modern, wide-open dining space an enchanting, somewhat futuristic feel.

When one in our party received the wrong meal, Fawzy traded with him to eliminate the crisis, and then Fawzy offered to give our fellow tourist that meal too.

Then again, I don't think there was a bad meal served.  Each serving was a work of art visually, and every dish proved to be as delicious as it looked.

As often happens on these trips, our tour director who had been with us from start to finish proved to go above and beyond to take care of his charges, always acting as a good shepherd caring for his sheep.

After dinner, some went to a belly dancing show, but Julie and I headed back out to the poolside lounge chairs.  When we headed for bed, we did not have time for a good night's sleep but we did enjoy a long nap, awakening hours before dawn to head back to the airport to catch our non-stop flight home to NYC on which we knew we'd have plenty of time for slumber.

At the second security check, we formed separate lines for men and women.  A third line for disabled people occasionally sent someone to the front of the pack. 

After a long time in line for a rather slow process, we were finally a dozen people from getting scanned and wanded by the Egyptian equivalent of TSA,  The number of handicapped folks suddenly expanded to become a nonstop flow, many with scuff-marks on their shoes indicating that they had been walking freely to explore the same ancient sites we had visited in the not-so-distant past.

Perhaps some were accompanying elderly family members in wheelchairs, but a dozen healthy line-cutters for every person for whom such accommodations seemed necessary became too much.

Goaded by a couple from our group in line behind us, I said something finally, and then one of the security men seemed to echo in his native language what I had said to the man who was supposed to be screening those with special needs.

In any case, we were finally through to the waiting room after a few more minutes.  Not long after, we were flying home. 

The inflight entertainment menu was nothing to write about, but I found enough mediocre videos to distract me.

Back in NYC, we cleared customs and began the train portion of our journey to Philadelphia.

Egypt had proven to be a memorable destination, though admittedly it flooded so quickly into our senses that it really took writing all these blogs for me to fully unpack what we had seen and experienced.