EGYPT // You'll be served a taste of pharaonic ego when you stand. dwarfed, in front of the 20m-high (66ft) statues of King Ramses Il that guard the entrance to Abu Simbel's Great Temple. Along with the neighbouring Temple of Hathor, this complex was carved out of the mountain on the west bank of the Nile between 1274 and 1244 BC and stood sentinel over the road south for centuries. Abu Simbel's temples were saved from destruction during the building of the Aswan High Dam. An international rescue campaign relocated them block by gargantuan block to their current site on the shore of Lake Nasser. Today Abu Simbel is as much a monument to this modern engineering triumph as it is to Ramses Il's puffed-up pride.