As a day that started at 11pm the previous evening, we managed to cram in a whole of activity, so pardon the long post while I try and cover it all. It begins outside of the office of the travel agent where we book the excursion to Mount Sinai, where we are to be picked up by the bus for the two-hour drive. At around 11:30 the driver finally shows up (sure glad I could spend the extra 30 minutes sitting on a bench instead of sleeping in my hotel room) in the van.

After our experience in Abu Simbel, we are hopeful that fewer tourists will mean a bit more room to stretch out in the bus and get some sleep, and with only one other couple waiting with us, optimism is high. As the van pulls up, we see it is already close to full (I swear they must have a lot somewhere with vans of all different sizes and they take the smallest one that can hold all the people to save on gas). There are no fold down jump seats like the Abu Simbel bus, but the rows are MUCH closer together so I can’t sit straight, and instead ride side saddle with my knees pointed out towards the door (which probably is for the best as with three people in the seat, there is only room for one cheek). Now on any other day, two hours wedged into a minibus after midnight would be fun enough in its own right, but today we have the extra bonus of “camel butt”.

Traffic is fairly light, and with the exception of the occasional minibus half-full of people comfortably sleeping that we pass there is nothing but the desert. This quickly changes when we pull into the parking lot, which is full of tour busses, minivans, and hundreds of tourists milling about waiting to start their climb. In my head, I had pictured a quiet climb with our small group and guide instead of a miles long parade up the mountain, so it takes me a few minutes to readjust my mindset, by which time we have fallen into line and are headed upward.

As we begin, our guide (in one of his only moments of providing useful information) tells us the trail is 7 kilometers long, ending at the bottom of 750 steps that will take us to the top of the 7,500 foot mountain. Thinking how much I would have appreciated knowing this interesting nugget about 24 hours ago before we booked this trip, I look around and wonder how some of these people are going to make it (and if they do, how depressing it will be if I don’t).

The answer to that becomes clear a few hundred yards in as we see the first of what will seem like hundreds of people offering to help get you to the top of the mountain on yes, the back of a camel (for a small fee of course). Still sore from our last ride, and recalling vividly the extra pleasure of going uphill and downhill, we opt to grind it out on foot, but there are plenty of willing takers to keep the wheels of commerce turning.

In a few places, the path the camels take and the path for people diverge, by mostly they are one and the same. This of course means there are all kinds of camel turds to step in, as well as some great views when you get stuck behind one – two more great reasons to make this climb in the dark.

A bit after 4:30, we finally make it to the top. During the climb, we managed to make up a lot of ground on people that started before us, so we get there before the crowds and are able to find a pretty good place to sit down on the rocks and wait for the sunrise. Ang claims she has seen one before (it would have to have been before we met), but I’m not convinced, and am interested to see what she thinks. We took a bunch of pictures of course, but it’s really the kind of thing that only works in person.

There is a small monastery at the top of the mountain, so with the sun up, we take some time to look around and take a few pictures while the bulk of the crowd starts to make their way down the steps. As the traffic starts to clear, we make our way down to the first rest stop (little huts they have at different points on the mountain to buy overpriced water and such), where our “guide” tells us to wait for the rest of our group to catch up. I’m not a particularly good waiter, and every minute we spend sitting around is just one minute more to get hotter, so I cajole Ang to rebel against the man and we take off on our own.

About a quarter of the way down, the path splits, with one way being the path we took up, and the other being shorter, but comprised of 2,500 more steps. Just as we are about to make our choice and continue on, our guide comes running down the trail screaming at us for leaving the group, and that we shouldn’t be on our own. The concern seems a little hollow since on the way up, our group was quite spread out from the leaders to the stragglers, and I’m guessing the real concern is that we don’t get off the mountain without the opportunity to pay him a tip. Either way, we convince him we are capable of following the dozens of other people already walking down the trail and agree to meet him outside of the monastery at the bottom.

St. Catherine’s is purportedly one of the oldest working monasteries in the world, built in 527 on the site where Moses saw the burning bush. We don’t know much about it other than what we read in our travel book, and it turns out our guide is of little help as he rambles on about some of the things inside and then tells us to go look and meet him under a shady tree when we are done. So not really knowing what we are looking at, we try and get some pictures that we can use as references when we get back to the hotel and can read more on the Internet.

Of the things we are able to piece together, there is a bush in a small courtyard that is supposed to be the original burning bush, the Well of Moses, which supplies the monastery with water, and according to legend, never goes dry, and a finger bone from St. Catherine herself. Not knowing in advance about the finger, Ang (with years of medical training at her disposal) wonders why people are bowing down in front of a drumstick.

Finished with the sights, I fold myself up like an accordion and hop back into the van for the two hour ride back to Dahab, now with my butt sore from riding a camel AND my legs stiffening up for more exercise than I normally get in a month. Finally arriving back at the hotel around 1pm, we turn the lights out, air conditioning up, and head directly to bed.

But wait, there’s more…

After a few hours of shut-eye, we motivate ourselves onto the shuttle to go into town for dinner. We decide to go a little nuts, and splurge on a big platter of grilled snapper, calamari and king prawns. For around $40, there is enough for 3 or 4 people, but we put a pretty good dent in it before admitting defeat. It is a great night, so with some time to kill, we wander along the waterfront a while before heading back to catch our ride to the hotel.

When we get to the shuttle pick up, the van is about half full, but the driver waves us into the front seat anyway, which we figure is a good thing since it isn’t as cramped as the seats in the back. I zone out a bit looking at the mountains in the moonlight, so don’t notice for a while that we seem to be taking a longer route back than normal and that we are driving quite a bit slower.

An elbow in the ribs brings me back to attention, and I give Ang a “what you doing pushing me into the door?” look. She gives me a strange look and then points toward the driver with her eyes. I am slow putting it all together, but I finally realize that the driver (who I have now taken to calling Chester) has his elbows up at chest height (Ang’s in particular), and is shifting gears an awful lot, picking up some incidental contact in the process.

After contemplating for a few moments whether the laugh I will get out of it is worth holding my ground, I shift sideways to give Ang some more room to move towards me. Ever the innovator, Chester turns his attention to a little leg work, by holding his hand as far to the right of the gearshift as possible. By the time we pull up to the hotel, our driver has rounded second and is hoping to stretch things out for a triple.

There’s little that can top what just transpired, so we decide to end the evening on a high note and get a full night’s sleep.

While we took plenty of pictures to help us remember our camel trip, this morning my body doesn’t seem to think that is adequate to ensure that I think twice before doing something similar again. And while I expected some parts to be a little sore, I am surprised by just how many muscle groups camel riding can punish.

Moving noticeably slower than previous days, we mostly plan on taking it easy today. We are leaving for Mount Sinai at 11pm to climb the mountain and see the monastery there, so need to rest up a bit for that. We do still need to eat however, so as has become the norm, we board the hotel shuttle to town and head for Yum Yum’s and a few dollars worth of delicious pita sandwiches.

With some time to spare before the shuttle back, we wander along the shore trying to pick a place to try a milkshake (the restaurants along the water all advertise them so we figured we should give them a try). We finally settle on one, and are enjoying the break when we see a cart rolling down the street marked “rice pudding”. This is impossible for us to turn down, so Ang steps out to buy one, which we will somehow manage to stuff down.

As really should be no surprise, “rice pudding” in Egypt means something very different than it does in Redmond, WA. There is some rice in it, so the advertising isn’t wrong, but it is just one ingredient, along with some noodles, chickpeas, lentils, tomatoes, some kind of secret sauce, and dried onion flakes. This all is scooped into a container and served hot, for the equivalent of about eighty cents. The more surprising part is that it is really, really good.

Back at the hotel, we try and get some nap time in to stockpile for the long night ahead.

When we left for Egypt, we told the boys we were going to do two things – see the pyramids and ride a camel. The first was amazing. The second? Not so much (although I can now cross it off the list).

When we booked this excursion, we did so as a bit of an experiment with the travel agent to see how legit he was. He was cheaper than some of the other places we looked at, and the trips all sounded the same, so we figured we’d give him a try. But before booking some of our other excursions, we wanted to use this as a test case.

The itinerary called for transportation by Jeep to an area called the Blue Hole, where we would stop for a bit of snorkeling, then switch to camels for a ninety minute trek along the coast to Ras Abu Gallum (a protected area up the coast from Dahab). There we get lunch, snorkel some more, and then do the trip in reverse.

As promised, at 8am this morning, our jeep was waiting at the front of the hotel (a good sign). Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind (a bad thing), and looked more like a retired army jeep with the seats being two benches running the length of the vehicle and set up high above the wheels. It also had a low roof, so before even moving my head was already jammed into the canvas.

Around 30 minutes later, and with my spine slightly compressed, we arrived at the Blue Hole. This is a fairly famous dive site in Egypt, so for being a bit out of the way, there are lots of restaurants and convenience stores, presumably to serve the divers during breaks between dives and at the end of the day. We are amongst the first to arrive in the morning though, so we have the place mostly to ourselves.

Most dives in Dahab are done from the shore rather than jumping off a boat, so Ang is a little less excited about them. Given that, so far we have opted to just snorkel, and with the water as clear as it is here, I’m not sure that we’re missing that much. We spend about an hour circling and checking out coral and a variety of fish before heading back to shore. For how hot it is outside, the water is surprisingly cold (not Seattle cold, but definitely wet suit cold if you were staying in the water for any length of time), and we are ready to move on.

Now begins the real adventure, as neither of us has really ever been close to a camel much less ridden one. We did ride elephants in Asia, but those were fairly short trips sitting on a padded bench rather than an hour plus in what turns out to be a very uncomfortable saddle.

You board a camel when it is laying on the ground, and that part we handle like pros. It then gets up by first straightening it back legs (pitching you sharply forward) and then its front legs. I imagine we wouldn’t be the first people to roll frontwards out of the saddle during this process, but we both hang on and are soon ready to go.

The first thing I notice is that the back of a camel is really high, and that the ground below us is mostly rock and looks very hard. I keep both of these things firmly in mind as my ship of the desert starts off in the direction of our guide (a boy that looks about ten and is doing the trip on foot in a pair of knock off Crocs).

It doesn’t take too long for us both to realize that 15 minutes on a camel is probably enough and would still let us say we did it. The saddle is rock hard under my butt, and the two wooden pommels (one in front and one in back) serve only to dig into my back when we are going uphill and mash my pills when we are going down. It seems that camels sneeze a lot, so being downwind of that every five or ten minutes and catching the blowback is a special touch. The good news is that there are only seventy-five minutes left.

The trip wasn’t all bad, and after a while we start to get the hang of it, mimicking the locals we see from time to time by shifting a little more sideways in the saddle and putting a leg up crossways over the camel’s neck. Soon, there is a bit of rhythm to the whole thing, and without the noise of people or cars, the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, its all very peaceful.

At Ras Abu Gallum, there is a small Bedouin camp where the more adventurous sorts (or the backpacking hippies depending on who you are asking) pitch tents and camp out for days at a time. I imagine it is a fairly tourist flavored version of an authentic Bedouin camp (in part, since it has its own supermarket), but since we’re not going out into the desert in search of the real thing, we’re perfectly happy with this one.

We have about three hours there before it is time to head back. After a bit of tea they serve as a welcome (it felt hot enough to have killed the worst of the nasties that may have been in the water), we spent the first hour snorkeling along the reef. While there weren’t as many fish as we saw in the morning, the coral formations were just stunning. We’re not dive nuts, but we have gone quite a few places, and neither of us can remember seeing anything like this. The cool water eventually chases us back to dry land, but the underwater experience here is something we won’t ever forget.

The rest of the time we spend with a great lunch, and for me at least, a good beach snooze. It’s then back up on the camel for the return trip. The way back seems longer, probably because my butt is a whole lot sorer, and because in my haste to leave the hotel, I didn’t get sunscreen on the tops of my feet, which are now burned and rubbing against the straps of my sandals. We finally make it back to our jeep, and I am pretty happy to have my feet planted firmly on the ground.

We make it back to the hotel around 5pm, and make some half-hearted rumblings about taking the shuttle into town for dinner. Ultimately, we break out a few packs of noodle soup and are perfectly content spending the rest of the evening in the hotel.

As slow as yesterday was, today we took doing nothing to an even higher level, so there really isn’t anything to report. Tomorrow we’re back in action though, as we booked a full day trip riding camels and snorkeling, which leaves bright and early.

Our first full day in Dahab was pretty low-key, with a lot of time spent in a comfortable chair reading and sleeping. We took advantage of the hotel shuttle both in the afternoon and the evening to go to town for lunch and dinner. In the case of the former, we found a restaurant called Yum Yum’s that sold the pita sandwiches we ate in Luxor and filled up on those. We also looked around a bit for souvenirs, but this is clearly a late night town as most of the shops were still closed.

Dahab is split into two parts, with the southern end having most of the newer hotels and restaurants, and the northern part filled with cheap flophouses for the backpackers. With a little time to kill before our shuttle back, we walk all the way through both parts. Along the way we see a ton of hotels that are half built, but with nobody actually working on them. It’s hard to tell how long they have been like that, so we’re not sure whether this place is in the middle of a building boom that has been put on hold because of the economy, or if a decade from now, it will look exactly the same, with visitors asking themselves why there seem to be so many half finished buildings.

We did a little research, both at out hotel and back in town when we returned for dinner about day trips that we might be interested in. There are a lot of choices, but I think we have settled on a day to visit Petra, a day to climb Mount Sinai and visit the monastery there, and a day to camel trek into a nation park to do some snorkeling. Even with those we will still have a few empty days here, so time will tell whether we use those for more excursions, or to simply lay out on the beach some more.

Today was a travel day, as we left Luxor in the morning for Dahab. Other than the flight being delayed about an hour, the trip was fairly pleasant and on a relatively new airplane, putting to rest our fears of a repeat of the dilapidated planes in Indonesia. Travel time is a little less than an hour, so by the time we reach cruising altitude, it is pretty much time to start the descent.

The airport is in Sharm el-Sheikh, about 60 miles south of Dahab, so for the final leg we need to find a taxi. Unlike Cairo, there are plenty out front of the airport, but we know from some articles we printed from Wikitravel, that we are in for a treat when it comes to negotiating a price.

The opening volley is 350 Egyptian pounds (about 70 US dollars), almost double what the article says we should pay. We manage to beat this down to 250, but there is clearly some collusion here with drivers shouting to each other in Arabic to make sure no one cuts the price too low. Irritated that we are being held hostage by the cab mafia, Ang sees a minivan from the Novotel in Dahab and wanders over to ask the driver if we can pay him to take us (since he is obviously going anyway). It looks like he will, until one of the cabbies comes over a yells at him for a while and he finally says no.

Now more determined than ever to win this battle (I think Ang will sleep on bench at the airport rather than give these drivers satisfaction), we regroup to consider our options. We know there is a bus from Sharm el-Sheikh to Dahab if we can get to the bus station from the airport so we ask about that. Half the cabbies tell us the bus station is closed (which we know is not true) and the others offer to take us for 100 Egyptian pounds, which is even more inflated that the price to Dahab.

Finally, the tide turns when we see the shuttle for the hotel we will be staying at when we move back to Sharm in a week. We tell the driver we are going to be guests, but that today we would just like to get into Sharm so we can go to the bus station. He agrees, and now we have leverage. After that, the price for a taxi direct to Dahab drops into the range we find acceptable and we prepare to be on our way, with one interesting twist. Not thrilled about having to drive all the way to Dahab for the fare we negotiated, the driver goes over to the Novotel minibus and “sells” us to the bus driver for what looks like 40 pounds.

The ride to Dahab takes about a hour (although it ends up taking us two as the driver took us along on some errands), and while it is all desert, it is more mountainous than the desert around Abu Simbel, so actually quite interesting. We try to get some pictures from the car, but none of the really turned out.

From all that we read before coming to Egypt, Dahab is an ideal place to do not much of anything. It is an old fishing village that hasn’t been built up as a tourist destination like Sharm, so still retains some of its original charm. It is well know by backpackers, divers and windsurfers, so quite laid back, and without the big resorty feel.

Our hotel ends up being about five miles from town, which is definitely a negative, as we much prefer to be able to walk into town for meals and shopping rather than being stuck on the hotel grounds, but there is a shuttle that runs a couple of times a day, so that helps. Since the next one isn’t for several hours though, I decide it would be a good idea to walk to town along the beach, which the concierge says is about four miles.

I’m way to stubborn to admit it at the time, but this was not one of my finer decisions. Parts of the beach are fenced off, and once you leave the shore, nothing is clearly marked, so taking into account a few double-backs and a pretty optimistic estimate by the concierge, I think we end up walking closer to six miles by the time we arrive. It is also quite windy today which, on the one hand, keeps it from getting to hot, but on the other is a bit like pouring lemon juice on a cut (where the cut in this case is my travel buddy who is already unhappy about embarking on this poorly thought out walk in the first place).

After a few hours wandering around the town and some dinner, we find a cab to take us back to the hotel. There is a small incident where our driver throws the cab into reverse and jumps out to rumble with another driver who thins he stole his fare, but we are becoming immune to such things, and wait patiently for some of the locals to hold the drivers back and talk them in from the ledge.

Tomorrow we will start to get the lay of the land here and figure out what all we want to try and do. The original plan was to use this as a base to do trips to Mount Sinai and Jordan, and maybe to do some diving, so we’ll see how that all works out in the morning.

Today is our final day here, and there are a couple of things yet that we want to see, so we motivate ourselves out of the hotel and onto the street in search of transportation. The street in front of the hotel is lined with taxis and carriages, so wea re able to haggle a fair amount on the price and finally settle on a carriage, figuring that will be a little more authentic Luxor. We are headed to the Luxor museum, and on the way, our chatty driver offers to wait for us at the museum, then take us to the local market, and then back to the hotel for just a few dollars extra. We debate this for a while, and finally agree, figuring it will be around lunchtime and we can find some street food at the market anyway. Rookie mistake, but more on that later.

The Luxor museum is quite a bit smaller than the one in Cairo, but also far less packed with stuff, which makes it easier to focus on the pieces they do have. They also have a couple of mummies on display, including one of Ramses I, which for most of the last 100 years was on display in a oddities attraction in Niagara Falls before researchers actually figured out it wasn’t just some scrappy mummy found in the desert.

After the museum, we find our driver, and head off to the market. When we get there, it looks interesting and I see a couple of food carts, but just as quickly it is gone, and it becomes clear that we aren’t going TO the market, but only to SEE the market. Instead, our driver wants to take us to the special bazaar where only the locals go, because apparently the locals also buy tacky souvenirs. The light bulb finally goes on that this is the Egyptian version of the tuk-tuk drivers in Thailand, who offer to take you somewhere for cheap, but then reroute you to some shop where they hope you’ll buy something and they get a kickback.

We dutifully wander through the bazaar, but even the few things we have mild interest in are so absurdly priced, that we leave empty-handed, much to the chagrin of our driver. As it is getting into the afternoon, we figure we may as well go back to the hotel until it starts to cool off, so ask the driver to take us back, stopping by a pharmacy and a shawarma stand on the way. There are pharmacies everywhere here, so after we pass the 6th one, we ask where we are going, and it turns out, there is another very special bazaar that he is taking us to. This time we wave him off, and seeing a pharmacy on the corner, have him stop there.

For reasons I can’t explain, we still let him take us in search of a shawarma (basically an Egyptian version of a gyro), which he tells us he can buy us for 5 Egyptian dollars each. We know the real price is about half that, but figure if he knows a good place, it is worth the extra. When we get to his place of choice, we hop out of the carriage to take a look and settle on the meat we want, specifically saying not the one with liver. Our driver quickly shuttles us back into the carriage so we don’t see the actual price, and brings us back the hot sandwiches.
I probably don’t need to say it, but yes, as we start moving down the road and start to eat our lunch, we taste the succulent liver in all its glory. It is cheaper that non-organ meat of course, meaning a little extra profit for our driver. Ang chokes her’s down (big high five to her), but I don’t have it in me, so scrape out the chunks and just eat the bread, while finally making our way back to the hotel.

The silver lining in this otherwise depressing outing, is that we do see the part of town where a lot of stores and eateries are, so in the evening we wander back on our own and find some of the best street food we have had this trip (and with the exception of the Indian restaurant, probably the best food period). For about four dollars, we stuff ourselves with small pita sandwiches stuffed with a variety of fillings (eggplant surprisingly being one of the best) and fresh sugarcane juice.

It is great way to finish up our time in Luxor, as tomorrow we leave in the morning for the airport. We have mentioned to quite a few people we have met that we are going to Dahab, and the reviews have been universally positive, so we are excited to finally get there and see what it has in store.

Ang is home. Her home away from home at least, as we find ourselves once again at her beloved Sheraton. Now I give her a lot of grief over her penchant for cushy hotels, but I have to admit, after spending the night in a glorified closet on the train, and four nights in tight quarters on the boat, walking into a real hotel room with a real bed is a treat. And with the low season beginning here, its dirt cheap, so really nothing not to like.

We’ve slipped into relaxation mode now, so much so that I find it difficult to even find the motivation to pick up the laptop. Combine that with very little to report (save for a blow by blow account of my time reading by the pool), and it will make for a very short post.

The hotel is a few blocks removed from town down a semi-private street, so to walk to anything close you need to run the gauntlet of kalesh drivers (the horse-drawn carriages that are everywhere here in Luxor) and taxicabs. The kalesh drivers in particular are quite persistent, following us down the street telling the same bad jokes about Egyptian Ferraris. They don’t ever cross the line of being really annoying, but it would be nice to walk down the street in peace once in awhile.

Before we left Seattle, we were told about a great Indian restaurant in Cairo that we never got a chance to visit, so when we see one in Luxor that our guidebook recommends, we decide to splurge. A whopping $24 later we walk out stuffed, and head back to the hotel, stopping at a minimart to pick up a few snacks and drinks to take with us (breakfast for two at the hotel costs almost as much as the room so we do draw the line there).

All in all, a pretty average Redmond day for Ang (but with sun), although I can see why she likes it, as the break from a week on full speed is definitely nice.

Another day, another early morning, this time even a bit more so than usual as we need to pack up and check out. We’re less stressed about not knowing where we’ll be sleeping tonight, as we’ve come to terms with potentially losing a few dollars for the night we already paid for. One thing we will miss though is the cleaning crew that cleans our room. Every day that we have been here, they have come in during the afternoon and left behind a different creation made out of things in our room. Here are pictures of a couple of the more creative ones.

After breakfast, Mohammed meets us on the boat to take us to our tour guide. The plan is to visit the west bank of the Nile in the morning (where the Valley of the Kings is), return at lunch to find out the resolution of our room, and then spend the afternoon touring the east bank. It will make for a full day, but the costs are all included in our cruise price, and if we make it through, we will see most of the sights in Luxor and have a few days to take is slow before leaving for Sinai.

Although there are villages on the west bank of the Nile now, in pharaonic times, people lived on the east bank and buried their dead on the west. This matched the path of the sun, which was “born” in the east on then “died” in the west. And unlike earlier pharaohs that built large pyramids to mark their burial sites, pharaohs in this period carved their tombs directly into the mountain and then covered them to keep them hidden from grave robbers.

There are different parts of the mountain where you could be buried depending on who you were, and we start our tour in the Valley of the Queens. The most famous temple here (for Ramses II’s wife Nefertari) isn’t open to the public any more so we look at a few others, stopping in between for our guide to have a smoke break and show us pictures of all the things that we would otherwise be seeing if the tomb was open. Our guide is OK, but there seem to be a lot of places where he substitutes myth as fact, which makes a lot of the other things he says a bit suspect, but it beats having no guide at all (as we have experienced).

Our next stop is the Valley of the Kings, which of course is famous as the location of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. It is only about 10am, but already the heat is unbelievable (Susan, its hot enough here you could probably get by with just a long sleeve shirt ☺ ). The tombs themselves, while normally quite stifling, are actually a pleasant break as they are in the shape, and despite having little circulation and being stuffed with people, are actually cooler. The entry ticket includes access to three tombs (out of the 12 or so that are open to the public at any given time), and our guide recommends three from the Ramses line as being the best (back at the boat we see that our guide book recommends three others so I think the guides just like to pick the closest ones).

The tombs themselves are amazing for the condition they are in thousands of years later. When they were built, the walls were covered with carved hieroglyphics painted in vibrant colors, and the colors remain to this day. In some places they are in such good condition you wonder if they can possible be real and not touch ups by some local artists. In some, the sarcophagus is still in the burial chamber, and you see just how big these blocks of stone (weighing up to five tons) are and how difficult it would have been to navigate them through the tunnels to their final position.

Next up is the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs in Egypt. This is another building that gets a lot of air time, but again, seeing it up close and getting a sense for the scale provides a whole new perspective. Of all the places we have been today, this is the only one where we are allowed to take pictures (other than from the parking lot), so we collect quite a few of different parts of the structure.

The last stop of the morning is at the Collosi of Memnon, two giant statues that are all that remains of a mortuary temple that once covered 85 acres. With that complete, we head back to our boat and find Mohammed, who lets us know that we will be spending the night in our old room, but have to be out by 8am the next morning before it sets sail. That resolved, we sit down to a quick lunch and head back out for part two of our tour on the east bank.

The highlights on this side of the river are the Temple of Karnak, Luxor Temple and the Luxor Museum. The latter isn’t part of the tour, so is something we will do another day on our own. We first visit Karnak Temple, which at 200 acres, is the largest religious complex ever built. It would be impossible to really see something this size in the hour we have available, but we do see the most popular parts including the giant entry pylons, the Hypostyle Hall (a 50,000 square foot room with 134 massive columns, each weighing about 70 tons), and a couple of obelisks.

With the afternoon coming to an end, we head over to Luxor Temple. Back in the day, Karnak temple was connected to Luxor temple by an avenue nearly two miles long lined with sphinxes. Parts of this still remain and the local government is working to restore the full length of this avenue, kicking some people out of the way in the process. It will make for a very impressive stroll when complete though, apparently in the next year or two.

Luxor Temple is amazing in its own right, but at a fraction the size of Karnak, is the less impressive of the two. We are there at the end of the day though, so decide to let our tour group leave without us (the site is almost directly across the street from our boat) and stay until it starts to get dark and the lights come on. This is the first site we have seen lit up, and it is a much, much different experience. We take a lot of pictures to try and capture the moment, but as is too often the case, they don’t do it justice.

Worn down from a very long day, we walk back towards our boat, passing by a McDonalds that we had to take a picture of for Sammy (they have McYum Yums here Sammy!). Tomorrow we check out for real and move over to our hotel. I am hoping that the connectivity there is better so we can upload all of our pictures so far. If we can, they will be here.

In general, our day today was to be pretty light, with only one excursion in to Edfu where we docked the previous night. Sadly, it doesn’t translate into getting up much later, as we need to be awake, dressed and done with breakfast by 8:00. We know from yesterday that we don’t have a guide arranged here, but are hoping that if we look sad and pathetic enough that someone will take pity on us and let us latch on.

Sure enough, one of the guides for an Australian couple offers to at least help us arrange to get from the boat to the temple site without getting ripped off by the carriage drivers (the temple is about two miles away and transportation for everyone is horse-drawn carriage). We are soon on our way, and the driver offers to let me join him up front and passes over the reins. The horse has probably made this trip a few hundred times, so I figure, what could go wrong?

I figure I pretty much have the hang of it – pull left to go left, right to go right, and back to slow down – and have just settled into a masterful rhythm, when something (probably my unexpectedly awesome skills) spooks the horse and it takes off. In her comfy seat, Ang takes it all in stride, but after trying to play it cool while the driver tries to calm him (or her, I didn’t really check) down, I quickly go to plan B, which essentially boils down to looking for anything close by to hang on to.

Our little piece of excitement over, we arrive at the temple site where the guide from our boat sells us some tickets and we follow her through the gate. The Australians don’t seem to mind having us around, so we ask if it is OK if we join their tour and share their guide, and just like that, our problem is solved.

Of all the temples in Egypt, Edfu is in the best condition, so in large part, what you see today is the closest there is to what it would have looked like a few thousand years ago. The colors are faded and much of the roof is missing, but it is in such good shape, it feels a lot like a movie set. All of the cruise boats are on a similar schedule, meaning they have all disgorged their passengers to see the temple in the same one hour window, so it is quite crowded and a bit difficult to hear the guide as she explains the history, but we get the general picture of what we are looking at and are able to take a few pictures before our tour is done.

One thing we’ve noticed is the high level of security that is present. To enter, you need to pass through a metal detector like at the airport and several armed guards. Of course the guards are usually sitting down reading the paper, and they don’t stop anyone going through the metal detector, so it is just one long beep and people with cameras and pockets full of change stroll through. At one of the temples, the guard asked us a couple of time “No bomb?”. We looked at him, slightly concerned that we had set something off, and he started laughing like it was the funniest joke in the world.

For the rest of they day, our only plan is to cruise the rest of the way to Luxor, so in theory, it should be some time to rest a bit. I use the time to try and catch up on a bit of work (the Internet is spotty, but enough to take care of the major things) and Ang heads down to the front desk to see if we should expect a guide in Luxor, as we know we will need one given the number of things to see there.

When they ask her if she wants a 7:30 wake up call to check out by 8:00, she is a bit surprised, as the trip we booked in Cairo had us staying on the boat until Tuesday. The desk clerk called his head office, and they confirmed that we were only booked for three nights instead of the four that we paid for (there it is, the sound of the second shoe dropping) and that there really wasn’t anything he could do since they needed to get the boat ready for the new group of passengers that would be going back to Aswan.

After arguing a bit, it is clear that he really can’t help, in part because there is no one on the boat he can talk to (since we are in the middle of the river), and in part because his English isn’t that good. We do give him the number of the agency we booked with in Cairo and he is able to reach their office in Luxor. They tell him they will send a representative to meet us that evening at 8:00 when we arrive, and with no other options, we just try to enjoy the rest of the day, mostly sitting on the roof deck reading a book, and drinking one of my contraband beers.

When we arrive in Luxor, sure enough, there is someone there to meet us. Ang is convinced that we are going to just get the shaft altogether, while my bet is that someone will bribe someone else (who may then need to bribe a third person) and it will eventually all work itself out. Neither of us is right at least for today, as Mohammed from the agency tells us that we should just check out in the morning, leave our luggage on the boat while we go on a tour, and that when we get back, the problem will be solved.

The worst-case scenario it seems (once we have ruled out the boat leaving port with our luggage while we are gone), is that we will end up having to check into our hotel in Luxor one day early. Of course that’s not ideal, but overall, if that’s the worst thing that happens while we are here I’ll consider it a successful trip (and being stuck on a boat for four days, I haven’t had the opportunity to be scammed so have some extra money in the budget). Like all days, we need to be up early in order to catch our tour, so we plan to call it a fairly early night and see what tomorrow brings.