Aswan High Dam

This afternoon we visited the Aswan High Dam as part of the afternoon programme of excursions. If you don't know of the Aswan High Dam, it was built to help increase fertile lands in Egypt for agricultural purposes, and to help control the Nile Floods, which continued even after the building of the first Dam.

The building of the High Dam had a number of knock on effects although they are now a distant memory to most, and didn't really exist in mine as I stood and admired the construction that holds back the Nile. As you stand on one side of the Dam you witness the end of the River Nile in Egypt, for here it ends, with water lying stagnant, as if desperately trying to go somewhere. They say the Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt, this stretch of water looked like it was trying to breathe.

As you cross the road to the other side of the Dam you are greeted with the awesome view of Lake Nasser, an immense stretch of water, the largest reservoir in the world, brought into being by the building of the Dam, stretching for hundreds of miles throughout the rest of the south of Egypt, and into northern Sudan, where it again becomes the Nile. It's easy to think of the lake feeding back into the Nile at that point in Sudan, but as the river runs south to north, effectively the Nile feeds into Lake Nasser at this point, and therefore the stagnant and lifeless stretch here at this point in Egypt is the River's starting point in this country, and not the end.

The Dam itself is impressive. I was half expecting to see something akin to the Hoover Dam in Nevada, but it's built for function rather than to impress and the engineering of it fulfils that expectation, but other than that, it's a dam.

 

 

 

Lake Nasser