Beautiful Temple of Philae

Not even over the jet lag yet, A and I were escorted to see ruins. Locating on Aglikia Island, southern Aswan, Temple of Philae was the first site for us to experience ancient Egyptian wonders. After stopping over High Dam, we came to the riverside of the Nile to take the boat, and not for long, we saw this beautiful well-preserved holy temple.

(The boat ride to the temple)

My head was very heavy due to the weariness. However, when catching this beautiful temple, my eyes were so wide open. The splendor of the Temple of Philae made all the running-around so worth it.

(The temple on the island)

The most ancient part of this temple was built around 380BC, during the reign of Nectaneboe I, to dedicate to Goddess Isis, symbolizing love, beauty, and healing.

Most of the buildings were constructed around 280BC, during Ptolemic era. And others were under Roman period.

As the temple now we could see, it was originally on Island of Philae, but due to Aswan Dam, the bottom of the temple was flooded most time of the year. Therefore, the Temple of Philae was moved to this new island in 1960’s, now 20 meters higher than before, with both technological and financial help sponsored from Italy and Germany.

This is the main temple. And the plaza outside.

Plaza from the other side.

The two halls on both sides of the plaza were for Roman Emperor Tiberius, around 42-37 BC, to place the offerings when worshiping the Goddesses.

The temple was well preserved. The Goddess with a round crown was Hathor, symbolizing fertility. While the God with a bird head was Horus.

The images of Goddesses Hathor and Isis were everywhere in every corner of the temple.

The columns here in the Temple of Philae rank one of the most fascinating pillars of all the Egyptian ruins. They amaze all the Egyptologists with their detailed lotus design.

The contrast of light and shadow brought me back to the secret holy territory of 25000 years ago.

Fulfilled with classic Egyptian totems and inscriptions, this peaceful afternoon had satisfied my dream toward this ancient country.

The Pharaoh is offering wine to Goddess Isis (the left) and Hathor (the right).

Beside the main temple, Kiosk of Trajan, never been finished, was built during the Roman era.

The sound and light show at needs extra charge. This is the audience seats. They looked burning at the high temperature of 50 degrees Celsius in the afternoon.

Anyhow, this beautiful Temple of Philae gave me a very satisfactory start to my Middle Eastern Journey.

Jet Lag‧Arriving and Leaving Cairo ‧Aswan

After four hours of flight from Taipei to Bangkok, waiting and transferring, and another nine hours of flying, when I arrived in Cairo, it was 5 in the morning.

Sounds easy! If you think flying shouldn’t be too hard for me since I am a frequent traveler, then there’s a big misunderstanding here. I do have a problem that I don’t want to whine about since there’s not much you can do. And that is I have always suffered from jet lag. It always takes 10 days or 2 weeks for me to be over the pain. This time when I arrived in Cairo, the tiredness from the travel plus jet lag, I supposed I would be exhausted so I made a reservation of an airport pickup and 3-day hotel stay. And that was the only preparation I did for the 2-month trip. Other than that, I was counting on Lonely Planet: Middle East in my backpack.

Anyways. Ever since I got into the budget hotel, the weird hotel owner had kept staring at me. (I was new so I didn’t realize how much attention a single female traveler would get in the Middle East. Of course, later on I learned.)He made me very uncomfortable. In the meanwhile, I noticed that there was another guy sitting on the couch beside. Due to the dark lighting, I couldn’t tell whether this guy was a local or guest.

Just as the owner was keeping his eyes on me and I was feeling creepy, the guy in the couch asked me if I wanted to buy a 5-day-4-night package to go down south to Aswan with him. (Right now I knew he was a guest for his North American accent.), leaving 10pm the same night.

(Camille thought: Holly smokes. That’s tonight 10pm. But I just arrived.)

I asked him to give me some moment that I would get back to him after taking a shower. So during the shower, I thought about how Lonely Planet said. From Luxor to Aswan, there was no way you could travel independently. It is compulsory for all travelers to join the convoy. While I couldn’t travel alone, I might as well join this guy’s invitation and go straight down to the south.

OK. I said to him, a Californian.

I couldn’t believe that I was leaving Cairo the same day I arrived. What should I do from 7am to 10pm?

My future travel partner A asked me if I would like to go to Giza with him and another traveler from Germany. The private taxi was 165 Egyptian pounds so that we could share.

(Come on. Give me a break! As a middle-aged woman, I am so tired that I am not going to do anything too physically demanding. OK?)

I said I just wanted to do something simple for the day. (Oh well, I have two months. Why rush?) So I would just meet him that night.

So that was the story. The same day I arrived in Cairo, I took off to Aswan. And the train we took was a slow train but we didn’t know that.

(Kids playing on the train.)

(Cute little girl.Sorry for the blurriness. The train was moving. So did the kids.)

The stateroom was for six and there were exact six of us there. I couldn’t lean to my left, nor could I tilt to the right. All suddenly I remembered that last time I was in such a difficult situation was on the train from Agra to Varanasi, India, which lasted for 17 hours. As the time passed, it was 12 and all the others were gone. Finally A and I had the whole room for ourselves so I got up to stretch and then laid down on the couch. (See the first photo. I was just pretending that I was asleep. Actually the whole body of mine ached so much.)

Weird enough. The owner of our hotel, also the guy we bought the package from, told us that we would be there at 8 the next morning, but we kept wondering. We tried to ask around. But people either didn’t speak English or told us different stories. By now we had figured that Middle Eastern people are just like Indians. Their conception toward time is so different from us. When they say the time, it doesn’t really mean anything. By the time we got to Aswan (Congratualtions!!!), it was 2pm instead of 8am, which we were told. And the train ride was 16 hours.

Someone holding a sign with A’s name on it rushed us to start the sightseeing tour right from the platform. I felt like puking. Alas! I had never been able to sleep well for the past 48 hours. Right now I couldn’t tell whether the weariness was due to the travel or jet lag. Somehow, I thought it was kind of a smart way to deal with jet lag.


Note: About convoy. Ever since the 1997 massacre at the temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor which caused 69 deaths, Egyptian government decided this convoy system to protect their tourists.

Nine Suns in the Middle East

It is not very smart to choose going to the Middle East in the summer. However, with a profession like mine, I have a three-month-long summer vacation along with a month long only of winter vacation. It seems that it makes more sense to go to the far-away Middle East in the summer. So even though knowing it would be scorchingly hot, I had to work up my courage to make the trip happen.

If you think 50 days is some kind of a trip, then I have to remind you something. Even going back to the 3-month Southern Africa trip in 1997, it sounded bragging. But on the road, I met so many travelers making round-the –world trips for one or two years. So comparatively, the trip I was making was just nothing. This time it was no exception. I’ve met a lot of travelers going round the world in the Middle East. Therefore the 50 days sounded pathetic. Nevertheless, considering being a middle-aged woman, I shouldn’t be put together to be judged with the young. The tough long-distance overland travel ought to be left to young men. And I have to admit that there are a lot of things in my life that I want to do but will not be able to do. The following is the summary of the route I made in this trip.


I flew from Taipei to Bangkok, and then transferred to Cairo.
















Stayed in Egypt for 13 days and then took a ferry, crossed the border to Jordan.

From Amman, the capital city of Jordan, I crossed the border to Jerusalem, trying to go into Israel but got rejected for not having the visa in advance, so I was sent back to Jordanian side. (And at that moment I decided the title for my article. How does A Day Trip between Jordan and Israel Borders sound? Alas! )


From Jordan, succeed of crossing the border to Syria. (What an ahievement!!!)



Came to Turkey after Syria.











Many thanks to Lee for receiving a tired dirty smelly traveler like Camille as a guest after I traveled for over thirty days. I rested at her place, stayed with her sweet family for a week and moved on to my dream city Istanbul. And due to an unexpected allergy outbreak and most route being finished, I changed my flight coming back to Taiwan 10 days earlier then scheduled. Luckily, now I am home and still under the treatment of this allergy thing.

The above is the introduction of this 50-day trip of Middle East. Hope you stick to my blog and Camille will share the stories with you.

Cheese Misunderstanding

The great memories I had in Barcelona was so connected to a German girl Bianca. We spent the whole three days together walking around and listening to the opera. Without her, I didn't even know that it cost only a few Euros to go to an opera if you had an international student card.

This day we came to a traditional market and decided to take a look. To be honest, there was nothing I wanted to buy. But I always enjoyed checking around a bit. From local markets, you could see a lot of their culture.

She turned around, saw a stall, and said to me, “Do you mind? I want to buy some xxx.”
And this xxx was a new word to me. So I repeated it and asked, “What is that?”

She looked at me as if I was some kind of alien. Started to give me a lecture saying that it was one sort of cheese. And then gave me a long list of different vocabulary for various cheeses. OK. Give me a break! In my life, I thought I could survive perfectly well with only one general name──cheese. I don't need to know two hundred names.

So if you see this photo with Bianca trying to shop for this cheese, you can imagine, I was there listening to this conversation, which was all Greek to me. So I thought I'd better make myself useful by taking pictures for her instead of saying something stupid to reveal my ignorance.

(Oh, yeah. It was also possible that she wasn't really speaking English. No wonder it didn't make any sense.)



So this reminded me of the year before this, I met Sylviane in Mexico City. She told me a very funny story of hers. She said that she was traveling in Thailand and one day, she came to this traditional market. Wandering around, she got to a very beautiful stand selling so many colorful “cheeses”. Watching and couldn't helping drooling, and in the mean time, strained by the language, the one thing she could do was to point at one after another and asked, “How much?”

The vendor showed a number after another on a calculator accordingly. Not having any cheeses for a long time, she finally chose one, paid the money, and couldn't wait to open her mouth and try to get a bite.

NO! NO! NO! NO EAT! NO EAT! The vendor lady shouted.

It turned out that the delicious-looking cheese was actually not a cheese. It was a piece of soap.
It was so hilarious that I laughed to tears. Luckily she craved for a cheese so much that she couldn't wait to eat it in front of the seller. Had she waited until getting back to her hotel, what would it have been like?

So next time when you go traveling in another country and see something colorful, you might want to ask to make sure what it is. As an Asian, you might think they are soaps. Oh, no. They actually are cheeses.

Film Killers Taj Mahal and Sossusvlei

Have you ever been to a place that its beauty is more than a “wow” for the first sight? As soon as you see it, you drop your jaw and start to wow. Every single step, you wow again. And you move forward for one more stride. Still you find yourself wow again. You feel like a fool that can't utter something meaningful.

I have.

Years later, when I was reorganizing the slides I took in 1995, India trip, and in 1997, Africa trip. I still felt the pulsations I had at that time. These two astounding sites were Taj Mahal in India, and Sossusvlei in Namibia. I took approximately 50 photos for each of them.





Have you never been there, you would just think it was me being undisciplined. Who would take so many pictures of the same thing? However, the truth is, once you get there, you cannot help raising your camera and starting to shoot. It is wonderful. So you take one or two. Well, maybe more, because you are afraid that the ones you just take aren’t prefect enough. Then you walk forward. Now you begin to wonder if the sunlight is brighter than a second ago. So you think you'd better shoot more. And when you just finish some, you suspect that the sun shines in a different direction now, therefore you don't want to miss better shots. There you go! You come home with over 50 photos of it, only to find that none of them shows the sensation you have at the scene.

(Taj Mahal)


(Sossusvlei in Namibia)

As for Taj Mahal, its gorgeousness attracts your attention, no matter where in the city’s corner you are. Its elegance and sophistication, be it dawn or dusk, bright or dark, are just like highly generated magnet, constantly emitting its glory to catch your eyes. Back that time when people were still using traditional negative films. I asserted that film companies, such as Konica and Fuji, should have sponsored the preservation of these two places for they have been attracting thousands of billions of tourists and killing countless films, which has been of great help to their profit.

Now even afterwards I have traveled to a lot more countries, I still think there are not many places like them. Therefore, Taj Mahal and Sossusvlei are both highly recommended. As for the control of shooting photos, since now people have digital cameras, the cost of the negative films is not an issue any more.

City of Eternity--Varanasi

Ever since I arrived in Varanasi, I had started to get sick. Especially the headache was killing me.



Varanasi’s history could be dated back to thousands of years ago, so it deserves the name “City of Eternity”. It has long been a populated big city. Until now, while talking in the street, it is almost impossible not to bump into someone physically. It was hard for me to imagine which city would be more crowded than it. My friend Nick was so into Varanasi. He stood there and shouted loudly: “Look! This is true India. This is true East.” Not me. Thank you! I am Eastern and I grew up in a packed traditional market in Taiwan. I have been very sick of being in a crammed place. And not only that, here the local people tracked you down and followed you everywhere, which really pushed me to the edge. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.


However, Varanasi had an undeniable attractive attribute of itself. The distinctive culture was built along the Ganges River. So if you want to see the true spirit of it, of course, the river was the must-visit.

Early morning, when it was still dark, we headed for the riverbank. To our surprise, we were not alone. People, old and young, men and women, also came out with their family and strolled down to the riverside. They had cups or mugs in their hands, some even with some kind of sticks, of which I was told were from a special tree and were used as their toothbrushes. Some people carried bottles or jars in order to take the divine water home, and some brought flowers for their rituals. And we were the very small part of this huge human stream flowing into the riverbank.

We hired a boat, sculling from the middle of the river, so we could see the waterside. Local people with colorful dresses were doing all kinds of activities you could think of. Some were bathing and chatting; others were brushing their teeth and taking care of their kids at the same time; and still the others were practicing a prayer, with drinking the celestial water as their endings. I looked at this brown holy water. Tree branches were floating, and the scullers were spitting into the river once every three seconds. More than that, there were two dead bodies drifting in front of everybody but it seemed no one cared. I thought about sputum and germs and bacteria and viruses; yet, they saw eternity in their eyes.

I dropped my jaw and stared at those devout people from all the castes. In a place that was so close to Gods like this, everyone appeared to be so humble. And the caste system seemed to be out of reach here. I was so touched by the sincerity and devotion of every single face's. Imagine myself to travel through the time and being in the same place two thousand years ago, it must have been the same picture. And in two thousand years from now, will it be still the same sight? No wonder hundreds of millions of people have been obsessed by this exotic country and coming here to seek for the mysterious eastern dreamland. Even for me as an Eastern, I could not help submitting myself to the enchanting sunrise in Varanasi and falling into the ancient sweet charm. Just like what I read in a book, like it or not, once you have been in India, you will never forget it. For it is a place that makes you remember your every day.

1997 While Hong Kong Was Being Handed Over

Recently the press has been raising the issue of the 10th Anniversary of Hong Kong Hanover here in Taiwan. And I suddenly realized that it was 10 years ago that I was in Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia, witnessing this important historic moment.

Alas! The older you get, the faster time seems to pass by. While I was little, a day seemed a year. Young children enjoyed holidays and festivals. I always felt it took forever for the next festival to come. And then when I got older, a day passed by and the next. Later, time passed one week after another. Now for me, it is one month after another. Well, one year is over following its previous. Yeah? Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997. What? That was 10 years ago?

OK. Enough. You don't want to listen to a middle-aged woman complaining about the lose of her youth. Now I am going to tell you about that day, July 1 of 1997, when I was at a guest house in Windhoeak, Namibia.

Namibia, previous a colony of South Africa, gained its independency in 1990. It was once controlled by Germany so that most travelers we met on the road were German. Here German was also its official language, along with English and Afrikaans. We ran into a lot of elderly people taking long trips, mostly German, too.

Of course, they were not alone. You could see young active travelers everywhere. There was this crazy German guy driving his 500c.c. vehicle, running around all over this beautiful country.

So, the guests in the house we were staying were European, mostly from Germany. Here there was a kitchen for us to buy and cook our own food. The leftover could be stored in the fridge but required the owner’s name on it. Every night after dinner, guests in the living room would go through channels to see what was on on TV. Nothing could really please EVERYBODY. Therefore, we decided to watch the video tapes that were neatly put beside the TV set. Approximately 30 different videos. All about African wildlife. Very professionally shot, exactly like nowadays the ones you can see on Animal Planet channel. (Basically travelers who would choose Africa as their destinations are very interested in wildlife.)

Nick and I now became their consultants. These Europeans had no idea about what was going on in the other side of world, Asia. Thus questions started to be thrown out. For example, why suddenly Hong Kong is now being handed over to China? And the historical background, etc..

As for Taiwan, it was Liang-zhang or who that was interviewed live. Therefore people asked, “ Now who is this guy?” and “Why does this have something to do with Taiwan?”

Alas! Nick was the one who did all the talking. (Having lived in Taiwan for eight years, he always thought he understood my country than I do.) Anyway, I listened carefully. While there was something I needed to add or I disagreed, I interrupted him and made some comments. (I was quite sure people wanted to ask me, not him.)

It was a precious lesson. For we were in a very young country Namibia, which was only 7 years old by then and with a group of Europeans, we witnessed the important moment together. Of course, I seized the opportunity and introduced my lovely and opulent country—free democratic Taiwan. Acer, Giant, these international brands made people all hear the name of Taiwan. As for China, that was another country that was far different from our culture. And it actually was a big bully that did not need me to say anything and no one liked it.

I remembered that I joked around saying Hong Kong Handover as Hong Kong HANGOVER. Now Hong Kong did have a terrible hangover since its freedom of speech was doomed to be cut down. Who would be happy to be taken away these basic human rights, especially when you already knew how wonderful it was to be able to say what you wanted to say?

July 1st, 1997. Hong Kong was being handed over to China. And I was far away from home, in Namibia, southern Africa, viewing this significant instant with a group of young European who really cared about the world. On top of that, I was young, as well.