Sailing The Nile / Dendera Temple / A Tour of the Osiris

September 17

As we woke up today we looked out our window to see the hot air balloons from our fellow guests floating over the Valley of the Kings. Pretty cool. Then after breakfast the Osiris set sail northward towards Qena where we would eventually dock to visit the Dendera Temple. I LOVE the cruising part of a river cruise and this morning was no exception. Throughout the morning as we sailed I kept looking at the serene sights of Egypt and thinking "I am ON the Nile River.....wow!" So very cool :)

Dendara Temple Excursion

Today may very likely turn out to be my favorite day, if there can be because EVERY day has been oh-so-amazing. But in the picture above I am with the TWO MOST FAVORITE WOMEIN to me in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD......of course my wife Kim and Cleopatra! In one of the rare carvings of Cleopatra in Egypt there was one on the temple today. If you'd told me ahead of the trip that I could pick one and only one ancient Egyptian to see a carving of them, Cleopatra would have been my pick. Once we arrived in Qena we had lunch then at 2pm we disembarked to board the buses for the short drive to the Temple of Dendera. Much like the two temples yesterday, while the temple appears land-locked now, in ancient times it was directly connected to the Nile and had a long ceremonial walk way to reach the First Pylon, or entry gate.

The First Pylon Gate - note the artwork

And again it is a massive complex. This temple is dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Hathor who was the god of many things but largely maternity. So she is often portrayed as a cow, or a combination of female and cow - often times her human head has large cow ears which you can see at the top of the columns in the Hall of Columns. What truly makes THIS temple stand out and in my opinion a MUST SEE on any trip to Egypt is the ceilings in the Hall of Columns. Truly the colors are amazing to behold.....

Here's the crazy part - Kim and I had booked this trip to Egypt FOUR previous times and each time either it was cancelled or we'd changed our plans. BUT.....had we come on ANY of those trips we would not have seen what we saw today. BECAUSE for centuries after the fall of ancient Egyptian society the temple was just a shelter and families had cooked, etc. with fires in the building. This led to soot building up on the ceilings. Restoration attempts to remove the soot had always led to taking away the original colors. But it was not until LAST YEAR that a solution was discovered to remove the soot and reveal the original ceiling art work. So WE are in the first generation of tourists to see those original ceilings! WOW. Along one side wall our guide Hany pointed out how the entire panel of this side room told the Egyptian myth about the rising and falling of the sun each day. The god of the swallow the sun in the morning - the left side of the photo below and in the morning she would birth the new sun - symbolized as a scarab in the photo on the right! The detail and colors, again.....WOW.

You may wonder....these photos I've posted with the detail of the hieroglyphics, just how close do we really get to these 3000 - to - 5000 year old walls and inscriptions. Many times, like today - just inches away as you can see here as I point to the reliefs on this temple wall!

Another cool thing about THIS temple is it's the ONLY temple we'll visit in our entire trip where we are able to go ON THE ROOF of the temple. It was a major ceremony here at Dendera that the goddess Hathor also represented the re-birth of a new year. So on the eve of the new year there would be a ceremony where the high priests would carry her statute up through the temple walls to the ceiling where she could greet the rays of the rising sun and then she would be brought down. So Hany led us to a side door and THERE were the original steps, from some 5,000 years ago - the very steps the high priests walked on to the roof. I kept thinking, "I AM walking on the SAME steps as a high priest did 5,000 years ago!" It was interesting that the stair case to ascend to the ceiling was a winding affair where you would walk about a dozen steps - which, and this was ingenious of the builders, were only three inches high.....I mean if you're carrying this massive statute to the roof you wouldn't want to have BIG steps to climb, right? - but after a dozen steps a 90-degree right turn; more steps, 90-degree turn. Over and over until you reach the top. But the staircase coming down, on the opposite side of the temple was a straight shot down (again the three-inch steps). So we ascended to the roof and explored the rooms on top. One of which contained the ancient Egyptian zodiac carved into the ceiling.

After we descended back to the ground level we were taken around the back of the temple where we saw one of the few engravings of Queen Cleopatra and this one depicts her with her son, through Julius Caesar, Cesarian.

One last story that was truly fascinating - but I must warn my readers.....the following story is NOT PG-13, but would be rated R or even an X-rated in a movie theatre so......you've been warned! So as the creation story goes via Egyptian beliefs there were two brothers and two sisters. One "couple" were Osiris and Isis. They represented everything that was good and the other brother, Set was jealous. So he killed Osiris and cut him into pieces. But Isis through her magic brought him back to life, briefly so that they could mate and she bore their son, Horus who became the god of war and the sky and HE married Hathor for whom this temple was built. Where on the walls in a sanctuary on the roof was this myth told in story board carvings. And there are two versions of the conception of Horus - can't explain why...... in the one version Isis brings Osiris back to life and she changes into a bird and then has sex with him. In the other version she brings him back to life, he masturbates and she collects his semen to impregnate herself. That this is the myth is one thing (and you should look up the entire story details because it has oh-so-many similarities to Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel).....but that both of these consummation stories are illustrated is another. Check out the highlighted portions of this photo - the bird version just to the right of the gentleman in the photo, the self-generated semen story on the left. Those Egyptians......wow, interesting story tellers, eh?

The Viking Osiris

Now that we're on board I can tell you first hand that the Osiris is truly a beautiful ship. It's more spacious and it feels bigger. Let me take a minute and share how great the Viking staff is as well. When I did my Viking TV episode last week (it airs the first week in October) that was a major theme to my stories as they always make you feel so special. As an example - if you followed our "Paris to Normandy" trip with Avalon, we had a wonderful time but as nice as the staff was they were not "Viking-like." On the last day after having been with the program director for over a week we had a few questions about our London extension. First she said she "didn't know much about that" and then she said, "And what's your name - what stateroom are you in?" Yesterday here on the Osiris at our initial Port Talk it was announced if you were doing the Jordan extension to stop by the desk to answer three questions. As we walked by the desk on our way to our stateroom the Hotel Manager stopped us with a smile and said, "Hello, I know you are going to Jordan, can you answer these questions please?" We'd been on board less than a few hours and already she knew us and knew our plans. Then she told us there would be a briefing about the extension - how it would work, what to expect. THAT is the "Viking way!" The Osiris has a much smaller guest capacity making it very intimate in spite of the openness. Here's a photographic tour of the ship's spaces, enjoy!