Tickets went on sale today for the Egypt v Algeria match on Saturday. Boys have already started selling flags on the streets in the lead-up to the match, and it’s rivaling swine flu as the top story of the day.

This is Egypt’s last chance to get into the 2010 World Cup, and the build-up is intense. Algeria needs to win, draw or even lose by just one goal to qualify, but Egypt needs a three-goal margin to qualify. If they come out two goals ahead, they’ll go into another play-off in Sudan on 18 November.

The match will be held at Cairo Stadium, which holds 80,000 fans, and organisers are upping the security to stop them from bringing in fireworks and…lighters. Um, hello, in a country where smoking is a profession? When we watched the Egypt v Zambia match at the stadium, they even took the poles out of our flags.

Fans on both sides have been slagging each other off online for weeks in what’s been described as a cyber-war that’s downright nasty. They’ve hacked the websites of the major newspapers and even the prez, Hosni Mubarak, isn’t immune, with his own website getting done over.

An Algerian song on YouTube is poking at Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six Day war with Israel (“We are not the ones who sold Palestine to the Jews”) while Egypt slapped back with the gibe, “”We liberated you when France made you slaves/Talk to me in French because your Arabic is so broken.” As you can see, they’re playing nice.

I love the fact the National Heart Institute has issued a warning to heart patients, telling them not to watch the match. Quoting a Swiss study that found a 60 percent rise in heart attacks in the last World Cup, the good doctor has advised Egyptians to exercise, avoid smoking and drinking alcohol and refrain from fast food before watching the match.

Women and girls are being told to stay home (they can’t shout loud enough, anyway), though with a history of rioting at previous games between the two countries, many girls will be happy to steer clear.

If Egypt wins, Cairo will burn and the car horns won’t stop till dawn. If she loses, this will be one sorry city.

A snippet from a regular column in The Egyptian Gazette by journalist Hugh Nicol, titled “Red-Handed”, which salubriously details local crimes, very often featuring rather horrific crimes of passion. See below.

“A 23-year old woman called Samar Attiya got her revenge on the lover who refused to marry her by pouring acid on a sensitive part of his body in the early hours of the morning. The young man died of his injuries in hospital.

The deceased 25-year-old Ahmed Moustafa, an accountant from Maadi, was due to get engaged [to another woman] the following day…Two of Ahmed’s friends told police that he’d been intimate with a young woman called Samar, whom he refused to marry. She then asked him to pay for a hymen reconstruction operation, in order to prevent scandal. When he didn’t cooperate, she got in touch with the woman who he was planning to marry and started threatening her. Samar, a 23-year-old nurse from Shubra el-Kheima…admitted killing Ahmed, explaining that she slept with him because he’d promised to marry her.

On the night he died, Samar rang Ahmed and told him she wanted to make love with him just one more time before he got engaged to the other woman. He met her in the early hours of the morning on the Cairo-Helwan Agricultural Road.

She got into his car and they started making out together. Samar got him to lie on the back seat. She then pulled off his trousers and poured the lethal acid…on his chopper.”

Chopper. Hmmm. Other notable stories this week include a teacher from Alexandria charged with beating a tardy student with a stick, breaking two ribs. Notable because last year, another Alex teacher was convicted of beating a student to death.

And the lead story: The Egyptian transport minister has resigned over the rail crash that killed 18 people earlier this week. The crash took place when one train stopped as there was a water buffalo on the track, and a second train rear-ended the first. Three railway workers, who were supposed to be watching the track, have been charged with manslaughter. One survivor reminisced about an injured woman “screaming for her new shoe and asking other wounded passengers to help her find it”.

The daily cartoon is particularly bleak: a man buying a train ticket from the station window is asked for his destination, to which he replies, “The hereafter”. Thanks to everyone who thoughtfully emailed to make sure I wasn’t on the train.

Hi all, Egypt’s going great guns in the Australian press at the moment. This piece appeared this week in Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper. Much is drawn from blogs, so don’t yell if you think you’ve read some of it before!

At the feet of gods: Cruising Lake Nasser to Abu Simbel

If you were asked how you’d like to spend a year of your 20s when you’re fit, strong and virile, you probably wouldn’t choose a drowned Nubian desert with no women, no shops, late-night cafes and definitely no all-night rave clubs. Unfortunately for the young Egyptian guy standing in front of me, that’s exactly the hand he’s been dealt.

He’s stuck here in southern Egypt, serving his compulsory military service in a grubby might-have-been-white uniform as part of the police presence at the historical temple complex of Wadi el-Seboua.

We get excited spotting him as he’s one of the few people we see from our cruiser, the MS Kasr Ibrim, as we coast from Aswan to Abu Simbel on the silent waters of Lake Nasser, just north of the Sudanese border.

“No photos, no photos!” he shouts as we attempt to snap the first living thing we’ve seen all day.

But every time he senses a camera, he avoids eye contact and assumes a suspiciously practised pose, gazing out to the water, gun at the ready.

These temple sites are serious one-donkey affairs and accessible only by boat. “In 2009, the lake is considered isolated but in 1300BC, when the Pharaoh Ramses II built these temples, this would have been considered the end of the Earth,” our guide, Safi, says, waggling a long finger. For the policeman, it still is. Aside from travellers in a few luxury cruisers, the only people the young copper sees are the temple guards from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and some fishermen who double as camel-tour touts.

There’s just the temple and the lake. For him it’s hell but for us spoilt few, it’s two flights downstairs from heaven.

Lake Nasser is the world’s largest artificial lake and is often described as one of the great engineering feats, a statement that, unless you’re an engineer, just makes you want to nod off.

It’s not until you’re on the lake – and concurrently in the midst of the desert – that it sinks in. Lake Nasser is more than 500 kilometres long and up to 30 kilometres wide. Unlike the Lower Nile cruises between Aswan and Luxor, you can barely see the coastline. And what you can see is desert, sans oases. No lush palms, little villages or happy farming scenes.

Occasionally, we spot a tiny shack for fishermen chasing balti and the monstrous Nile perch that can grow to more than 180 centimetres long and tip the scales past 170 kilograms.

Of the handful of cruisers operating on Lake Nasser, our boat, a 1920s art deco extravaganza named after a ruined Nubian fortress, is the best known. Instead of a single cabin with a porthole the size of a pigeon’s eye, I’ve landed a suite with a wraparound sundeck and walls of walnut veneer. There are a few old-fashioned touches, like the built-in radio near the bedhead and the paper hygiene strip wrapped around the toilet a la the Miss Congeniality sash on a beauty queen.

The Kasr Ibrim is usually 60:40 French to Brits, though this time the French have well and truly won and there are but nine native English speakers on board. We’re a small, energetic group, me and the Brits in their 50s and 60s, and are raring to go with Safi, our own hip, lanky guide.

While still moored in Aswan, we take a little boat out to the Temple of Kalabsha, set on a sometimes-island in the lake. We take in the nitty-gritty of the carvings – sure there’s Horus, Isis and all the ancient godly gang but also reliefs of macho Ramses II giving some Nubian soldiers a good hiding, receiving an exotic procession of people bearing leopard skins, shields, fox furs, monkeys, cheetahs and giraffes and, as a full-grown man, being breastfed by goddesses; cue for naughty snickering and talk of Oedipal complexes.

The next morning we set sail, navigating the original channel of the River Nile. Looking over the pilot’s shoulder, I see dark spots on the radar, a drowned landscape submerged in up to 180 metres of water.

We clink glasses as we cross the Tropic of Cancer and stop to explore the temples of Dakka, Amada, Derr and the ancient tomb of Penout, where a bloke wearing a dusty jellabiya waggles a baby crocodile at me. “Five pounds for a photo,” he mutters as I pass.

It might be just a few weeks old but already the Nile crocodile has the 1000-yard stare of a born killer. They’re famously bad-tempered and famously shy of humans (despite having a taste for us) and we spot a grown-up croc languishing on a muddy riverbank giving a few flamingos the eye before sliding into the waters. In their heyday, the temples along the lake’s shores were part of the lands of Nubia, one of those ephemeral concepts of a country where a distinct ethnic group’s traditional lands have been swallowed by surrounding countries or, in this case, a lake.

Poor Nubians – they’ve been beaten by both ends of the stick. Their heritage was first lost to the shifting desert sands, then rediscovered in the early 1800s when a Swiss explorer stumbled upon Abu Simbel, only to be lost once again, along with their villages, to the rising waters of the dammed Nile in the 1970s. It gives a whole new meaning to being between a rock and a hard place.

The government relocated the 800,000-odd villagers, paying them a small compensation, and when the global village realised the proposed Aswan High Dam, built between 1958 and 1971, would also immerse a swag of significant temples, 54 countries rushed in to perform heroic piece-by-piece removals and reconstructions, including the piece de resistance, the relocation of Abu Simbel.

After three days’ easy sailing, we arrive at Abu Simbel, the jewel of Nubia, bang on lunchtime. Our cruiser prowls the waters in front of the temples for a rare view of the 13th-century BC temple, with the megalomaniacal tribute to Ramses II – four 20-metre colossi demanding the attention of our cameras. Forget schlepping through the temple in the heat of the day with the hundreds of tourists who’ve flown down or travelled from Aswan in a convoy of buses, though; later, once the weather cools and the other tourists have gone home, we’ll disembark to explore the temples in relative peace. But for now, we will take lunch with kings and gods.

During the relocation, the temple was sliced into 830 blocks and moved up and away from the lake. Only the faces remained uncut.

The temple was even reconstructed so the sun still falls on Ramses’s face twice a year, on his birthday and his ascension to the throne, as per the original design.

Essentially, Abu Simbel was an enormous public-relations exercise – those entering the kingdom from the south via the Nile would be reminded of the greatness of that land’s ruler by being confronted by massive statues of Ramses. Word has it he was a bit of a cuckoo, stealing earlier kings’ victories by slapping his cartouche everywhere, talking himself up as ruler of the world. Seems he was more a lover than a fighter, fathering almost 100 children.

Beside the great temple of Ramses II is the smaller temple of the mother-goddess Hathor, built for Ramses’s beloved and beautiful wife, Nefertiti. Inside her temple are massive reliefs of the battle of Qadesh in 1275BC, where Ramses shows off, sticking it to the Hittites in a classic case of: “Look at me, Nefertiti!”

Officially, you can’t take photos inside the temple but for an idea of scale, thousands of tourists are snapped beside Ramses’s seated statues at the front of the temple. Little ants, we barely reach the top of his great toes.

We stay at the temples until dusk, then take a seat at his feet for the sound and light show.

“Son of the sun, king of eternal time,” begins the stentorian voice of the storyteller in the darkness.

Clouds of light race across the night sky to grow stronger until they illuminate the temples of Abu Simbel. Lover, fighter, builder, glory hound: Ramses II is showing nightly, proof that fame is the elixir of eternal youth.

GETTING THERE

Etihad Airways flies from Sydney and Melbourne to Cairo via Abu Dhabi. Phone 1800 998 995, see etihadairways.com. EgyptAir flies Cairo-Aswan-Abu Simbel.

SIGHTSEEING

MS Kasr Ibrim sails every Saturday from Aswan to Abu Simbel for four nights-five days and every Wednesday from Abu Simbel for three nights-four days. Winter berths (October-April) are priced from €173 ($278) a person, a night, twin share. Includes all meals, a guide and entrance to all sights. Book through Soleils d’Egypte, phone +202 2644 0150, email contact@soleilsdegypte.com, or Nemonic Concepts, phone (02) 9526 8519, see nemonic.com.au. Also see kasribrim.com.eg

The Abu Simbel Sound and Light Show takes about 35 minutes, see soundandlight.com.eg

FURTHER INFORMATION

See egypt.travel