and another shot of dawn at Luxor.

A balloon rises from the west bank of the Nile, a few minutes before daybreak.
This photo was taken from the same position as the previous one (Tokina zoom at 400 mm + 1,7 tele extender).

I had to get up pretty early to get this shot.

The moon seen from our hotel room in Aswan.
For the technicall inclined: Minolat Dynax 9, Fujichrome Velvia, Tripod, Tokina 80-400 mm lens + 1.7* Tele extender (=680 mm focal length).

Nubian House at the first cataract, near Aswan.

I saw this fox in Patagonia, Chile.

There are several ways to see Abu Simbel:
you can take the convoy. This is the cheapest and most popular option, giving you, however, little more than an hour at the site!
The luxury way is to take one of the ships cruising lake Nasser.
We opted for the plane instead: this gave us time to visit the site at daybreak, before the big crowds.
A side-effect of this approach was that we also saw the sound and light show at night.
While we enjoyed the illuminated temple, the laser projections simply were too much!
The picture above shows the Ramses temple with laser beams behind it.
If the statues look a bit blurry: this is due to the fact that during the long exposure time several images were projected on them…

Even worse: The temples were (ab)used as an projection screen! Here you can barely discern the Nefertari temple under the projected image:

more photos of Egypt

Now, as always, one can only approach this temple by boat.
Looking at it, it is very difficult to believe that the whole complex was moved from one island to another one when the new Aswan dam was constructed. Even the shape of the new location, Agilika island, was changed to make it as similar to the original Philae island as humanly possible.

View from Elephantine island at Aswan.

This pig was wandering through the streets of Pisac village.

This is the second gallery of pictures from Egypt in this weblog.
There also is another one with Egypt photos taken in 1992.
Also, there’s the Egypt section of Travel Photo Net.

Some mighty Andeam peaks appear just like tiny islands…
Seen on the flight from Arequipa to Cuzco.

The famous pyramid at night

Everybody knows the Seine, but few people walk along this charming old canal right in the center of Paris.
Highly recommended!

Looks as though the llamas had something interesting to talk about…
By the way: I just uploaded 30 pictures from Machu Picchu to my galleries