The High Dam is not a pretty monument, but it is the reason modern Egypt looks the way it does, and standing on it drives that home. Completed in 1970 with Soviet help, this vast embankment nearly four kilometres long tamed the Nile's annual flood, generates a large share of Egypt's electricity, and created Lake Nasser behind it, one of the largest artificial lakes on earth, stretching south into Sudan. You drive across the top, with the tamed river far below on one side and the sea-like reservoir on the other, and stop at viewpoints and the lotus-shaped Soviet-Egyptian friendship monument. Your guide will explain the trade-offs that shaped everything else you are seeing in Aswan: the reservoir is exactly what drowned old Philae and would have swallowed Abu Simbel, and it forced the Nubian people from their ancestral land. It is more a place to understand the region than to be wowed, a short but worthwhile stop, usually combined with Philae and the obelisk.
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