Luxor

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.