Nothing quite prepares you for the four enormous seated statues of Ramesses II, each some twenty metres high, carved straight out of the cliff at Abu Simbel deep in Nubia near the Sudanese border. Alongside stands the smaller temple he dedicated to his beloved queen Nefertari, its facade lined with standing figures. Inside the Great Temple, halls of Osiris pillars lead past reliefs of the Battle of Kadesh to an inner sanctuary where, twice a year, the rising sun still reaches in to strike the gods at the very back. The astonishing part is that the entire complex was sawn into more than a thousand blocks in the 1960s and reassembled sixty metres higher to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, one of history's great feats of rescue engineering. Reaching it means a very early start: a three-to-four-hour desert drive from Aswan, or a short domestic flight. Long as the day is, almost no one regrets going.
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