So, by 10am the next morning we arrived in Luxor to usual herd of people clamouring to get us to the best value hotel in town. It takes a real effort to push through them and look indpendently as these guys always get a 20-40% commission for taking you to a hotel which of course is added to the price you pay. After a bit of a long story we ended up at the Horus hotel with a nice view over the Luxor temple towards the Nile. Here's a view from our room (with the smoke courtesy of burning garbage on the side of ther river). We did visit this temple at night and here's a snapshot of what part of it looks like from the inside.
Luxor is famous for being the ancient town of Thebes, which was the capital of Egypt during some periods of the reign of the pharoahs. What remains here are some temples (including the largest one of ancient Egypt) as well as the 'Valley of the Kings" where the pharoahs of the 3rd Kingdom (from 1500 to 1100 BC) carved out their tombs in the rocks of this hidden valley. Here we are going into one of the side channels leading to one of thetombs. This valley is where
the famous King Tut's tomb is, the one which was discovered in 1920-something completely intact with all kinds of fabulous things which are now in the Cairo museum. All the other dozens or so of tombs had been robbed, some many times over so the pickings were quite slim by the time 19th and 20th century museum curators got on the scene. In fact, they claim some tombs were robbed within a few generations of their deaths and a lot of the 'art' of tomb building went into how to best conceal their contents. So what you do here is hire a car for the day that takes you around to these tombs and temples on the west bank of the Nile and over the day fork over about 100$ in entrance fees to get inside them. Specifically in the valley of Kings your entrance fee gets you into 3 of the 20 or so major tombs (except Tut's which is a special price of 20$ more). We should also mention that while we arrive in our puny little car, there are about 50 massive tour buses unloading hordes of package tourists so it's a bit of a zoo! Nevertheless, despite our whining, it is an amazing thing to be several stories down into the man-made caves hewn out of the rock and to see the usual Egyptian art we are all used to painted all over the inside and to think this has been here for about 3500 years. The art, and all the paraphenalia placed into the tombs are all about how to guide the deceased in their journey through the netherworld to find resurrection into eternal life. It was here that we first 'got it'... that it's not just about this megalomaniac men spending awesome amounts of wealth on their tombs...they really had a strong belief / spiritual sense that there was an afterlife and this was their best understanding of how it was to be attained. (too bad for all the rest of the poor smucks who didn't have the wealth to be able to follow the 'formula'!). That is also why they got into this mummification thing so that they would be preserved and so that the 'god's of the afterworld would be able to recognize and receive them. Here we have a view of some of the painting going on inside one of the tombs.
From here we were among the .01 % of the visitors who hiked 30 minutes over a hill down towards the next site which is Queen Hatsheput's temple. Of course you cannot make this walk without multiple locals coming alongside with the offer to 'guide' you (because otherwise you could lose your way with all kinds of bad consequences), for a fee of course. It's no use to try and resist it. Anyways, in this case, it seemed that the fellow was a genuinely nice guy needing to make some money. He hails from a small village over the hill who's inhabitants built their homes overtop of an area of tombs of rich nobles. Here the government is in the process of moving them off their homes and into a nearby new village that has been built. Supposedly this is to open the tombs up for archaeological work, however our guide claimed that (a) the new homes were not as good was what they were leaving, (b) there was nothing in these tombs anymore anyways, and (c) that a rumour was circulating that the government was selling the land to developers for 5 star hotels. Sigh...who knows what is the real story told from both sides. Here we are at the crest of this hill looking back down into the 'Valley of Kings'.
Well, by now it was about 11am and it was stinking hot (it hit 39 this day) and hiking back down the other side was no fun. What follows then is visits to the remains of a couple of fairly impressive temples, and then a visit to a few of the better tombs of the nobles. This was a great visit because these although smaller, were still about the size of a large room, and had the usual artwork and no one visiting them, so you had some real quiet time to appreciate them. Of course the staff checking your tickets also gives their limited English 'guided' explanation and expect a tip which usually meets expressions that indicate it's not enough!.
Well that winds up the day and by now you're pretty well cooked. It's a bit late in the season for visiting here because of the extreme temperatures so for you future Egyptologists out there keep that in mind. Evenings are spent walking about the town (about 200 thou people) and being constantly haranged to go on horse carriage rides as there must be thousands of them here.
The next day we were up at 6am to beat the heat visiting Karnak temple, the largest one of ancient Egypt. They are working hard at restoring/reassembling them from the rubble but what you can see today is quite impressive. This temple was added to by many pharoahs over the period 1500 BC to Alexander the Great (300 BC), each building a successive courtyard and temple (5 or so in total). The largest of these has a 'hippostyle' hall with a central corridor of 12 huge pillars (30m high) and then another set of 50 or so pillars 23m high on either side. The whole thing was then 'roofed' with huge stone blocks and covered the area equivalent to the largest cathedrals of Europe. All the pillars and some of the roof blocks are now up and it makes for an impressive experience wandering through there.
Here we have a photo looking down the center of the 12 largest pillars.The whole temple area is also sprinkled with very large pharoah statues and a few obelisks. (some of the other original obelisks that were there are now elsewhere...such as in Paris). These pharoahs were 1000 years ahead of their time in terms of the size of buildings they were constructing here. It's something to wander inside them and wonder what they must have looked like at the time and what went on in there and what was it like to be inside the head of an Egyptian living at that time....
We wound up our time here by 11am thanks to the heat and hung out in the hotel A/C till evening. By then a wind had come up (as it had been but flat calm the last few days) so we headed over the 100m to the river front and hired a felucca sailing boat for a sunset cruise on the Nile.
These boats can be hired for several day trips to sail down the river and sleep overnight at anchor. They stop at several places along the way where there are other temple ruins along the riverbank. This could have been nice (especially as an alternative to the several hundred huge 5* , 200 or some room cruisers which are also plying this section of the river. The Nile is moving pretty hard here...perhaps at 3-4 knots and there is a lot of water flowing down which is irrigating the few kms of fields on either side of the river (before the desert resumes) and so feeds the 80 million people of Egypt (which is growing at the rate of 1m new people every 9 months!).Well, there are many other temple ruins to see within 200kms of here, especially going south to Aswan, but it was just too hot to contemplate that and besides we were having ancient ruins fatigue setting in anyways, so early the next morning we were on a bus for the 6 hour ride eastward back to the Red Sea.
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