October 30, 2026
From the USSR with power: the Aswan dam and lotus tower!
We began our cruise along the great Nile River in the city of Aswan. That’s a name familiar to anyone who grew up in the USSR in the seventies/eighties – and, I’m told, in the UK, where, apparently, its main feature (see below) was studied in middle-school geography classes (yet – no mention of Soviet involvement; grrr figure:). Anyway, it’s from there that I bring you the next batch of stories from this most unforgettable trip.
The main thing of interest here is the Aswan High Dam, which the Soviets helped build built in the 1960s, and which produced its first electricity in the early 1970s. Of course – we just had to go check it out. And our look around this vast power facility turned out to be great fun – and really quite fascinating…
My interest wasn’t so much technical, though – after all, I’ve already been to all sorts of hydroelectric power plants (the list is in this post). It was more of a historical one: ever since Soviet times, the whole topic of international aid has been stuck in my head. And here’s some of that international aid – in the flesh:
A Soviet hydroelectric plant in the African desert:
That structure way over there is the monument to Soviet-Egyptian friendship. We’d soon be heading over for a look:
Hmmm – couldn’t they have found someone who knows how to write in English?! ->
The quotes on the walls are perfectly legible:
Not a bad construction at all!
And there you have it: a symbol of Soviet-Egyptian relations by the middle-lower segment of the Nile.
Back on my first visits to Egypt, I learned that granite obelisks, monuments, columns, and just plain blocks for ancient Egyptian building projects – all of it was cut out and shaped in and around Aswan. It was here, too, where all this stone-and-granite was loaded onto boats and delivered to its customers in both capitals: Thebes (now Luxor) and Memphis (a little south of modern-day Cairo).
Today you can still see these ancient quarries around Aswan, and the most notable is the unfinished obelisk right in the city itself. So that’s where we headed after our walk around the Aswan Dam… but struck out big time. The thing is, this facility retires for the evening at 4pm, and it wasn’t just that everything was closed and there was no walking around: we couldn’t even get near the fence – an Egyptian policeman stopped us.
So we had to make do with pics from afar:
After both straining our eyes and using the strongest zoom on our cameras for a few minutes, it was time for us to press on with our pre-planned sightseeing itinerary. More on that in the next post…
