Our Final Day in Luxor

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.