5/12 - 5/18
You know the first four entries returned for Google on Luxor are for Las Vegas? In fact, it's only thanks to Wikipedia, Wikitravel and touregypt.net that Luxor is on the first page at all.
Tourists aren't allowed to take any trains from Cairo to Luxor except for the luxury night train, priced in dollars. The people we asked wouldn't sell foreigners tickets in advance for any other trains. We decided to ignore the restriction and boarded the 1st class daytime train without tickets. No-one batted an eyelid, and we bought a scrap of paper with some illegible scrawl on it from the conductor without any trouble.
Many hours later we only got off at the right stop by pure chance as we were thinking of buying food or water from the station. We were immediately accosted by a bunch of hotel touts since we were the only foreigners on the platform. One seemed a little more honest than the others and a little more closely affiliated with the hotel he was touting so we took advantage of the lift he offered.
Lots of desperate touts and horse-and-carriage drivers in Luxor, hit hard by the political turmoil.
The missing obelisk at Luxor temple is the very one we saw the Place de la Concorde in Paris about two years ago. Apparently both obelisks were gifted to France by an Albanian/Ottoman/opportunist empire builder in 1829 just after the short-lived French occupation, but to us the empty plinth next to its mighty neighbour seemed like the most striking example of European theft we've ever seen. The remaining obelisk just looks so lonely!
The sphinx-lined road is said to have continued all the way to Karnak, a few kilometres North. The alley is quite far below modern Luxor though, so only visible where it's been excavated.
Our camera doesn't take night-time photos very well, but this is a shot of the Roman(?) ruins to the side of the temple.
Karnak was really awe-inspiring. We got there so early that even the huge square at the entrance was totally deserted and we had the place almost to ourselves for an hour.
The great hypostyle hall lived up to its name. The massive pillars covering 5500 square metres represented a papyrus swamp, and I can only imagine what it looked like during the annual flood, fully roofed and lit only by torches... Did coracles ferry people amongst the pillars?
The tallest obelisk in Egypt survives here, thanks to Hatshepsut's stepson walling in the obelisks erected by her in an attempt to erase her from history and thereby, ironically, preserving them.
The tip of a fallen obelisk gave us a good perspective on just how large these things are.
The temple of Khonsu featured some red, blue and white striping that looked pretty tacky to us with our jaded modern sensibilities, but I'm sure it was the height of fashion 3400 years ago. It even had some graffiti for that hip Roman touch.
I like maps. The numbers represent roughly where each of the Karnak photos above were taken.
To explore the West bank we haggled and shopped around Luxor until we arranged a driver for a day named Mohammed. On the day itself, after crossing the Nile, it turned out he wasn't actually planning on driving and handed us over to another guy who couldn't speak a word of English. I suppose we got what we paid for, even if a later stop 'for tea' turned out to be a closed-door sales pitch opportunity for a stone carving studio. At the end of the day we were rejoined by a despondent Mohammed who had failed to drum up any further custom. "Business is slow" he said, while pitching boat tours and other sights.
The Valley of Kings. One ticket gets you into three tombs, of which about half are open at any given time. With little information to go on we picked Ramses IX, Merenptah and Ramses III.
Ramses IX's tomb: Wide, short, well preserved.
Merenptah's tomb: Long tunnel, pit, fake burial chamber, flood damaged but featuring a granite sarcophagus.
Ramses III's tomb was the most impressive, beautifully preserved with a wide variety of inscriptions including blind harpists, pottery tribute and all the usual suspects (gods).
While we were looking around a young, amiable guy latched onto us and wouldn't leave us alone. Eventually he took it upon himself to 'lead' us up the valley side for a view. In other words as soon as we started walking up the valley side he walked ahead and chatted away as if he were guiding us. Before we got to the top he hurried back to us, asked for baksheesh, accepted a bit of loose change most Egyptians would sneer at and ran off. Mystified, we kept walking until we rounded a corner and saw the squad of soldiers about 100 metres away who were walking towards us. He'd seen them before they saw him and had decided to cut his losses and scarper. Thinking of the 'off-limits' signs we'd passed earlier we rather nervously continued along the path until the boss soldier hailed us. We could tell he was the boss because his fatigues were a fresher shade of khaki, he wasn't wearing a cap or carrying a bolt-action rifle and he was wearing aviator shades. He asked us what on earth we were doing up there since there was nothing to see and no reason to be there. He was friendly enough though, and perhaps even enjoyed the chance to show off his English in front of the rank-and-file. To our surprise he made no attempt to stop us and we went on our way and they on theirs.
We did actually get a great view of the West bank and the Nile, along with the Habu and Ramesseum temples.
The Habu temple featured vivid inscriptions depicting scenes such as scribes counting piles of hands and penises from defeated soldiers. Why both?
The Hatshepsut mortuary temple reminded me of Serious Sam (sorry!).
At the Valley of the Queens we were treated to some low-grade scrounging. The ticket vendor effusively praised me as a gentleman while forcing me to ask rather awkwardly several times for the remaining change he owed me in ever smaller increments. Let me clarify, as I don't think this has happened to me before. The two tickets were 70 EGP, I think I handed over a 200 EGP note. He gave me 100 EGP and told me what a gentleman I was. I stood there for some time until I realised he wasn't planning on giving me the remainder, so I asked for the change and he handed over a 20 and told me what a gentleman I was and how lovely my wife is and that we should enjoy Titi's tomb. He looked at me, I looked at him, the moment stretched on, so I asked if we could please have the remaining 10. He handed it over and asked if we had perhaps a pen we could give him...?
Anyway, Khaemwaset, Ramses III's son, had a tomb covered with inscriptions of him being introduced to all the gods by his father. Titi may have been one of Ramses III's wives. Amunherkhepshef was another of Ramses III's 13 sons and had the best preserved and most vivid tomb of all that we saw, and featured a mummified foetus.
On the way back we saw the big ol' Colossi of Memnon.
We forgot to take the camera with us.
On our last day in Luxor the a guy who seemed to always hang around in the hotel smoking sheesha offered to take us around town to buy a netbook for Hozumi. Me being the suspicious guy that I am I established up front that we didn't need a lift on his motorbike and would happily walk if it was money he was after. We were reassured that by taking us he could curry some favour with a shop owner and perhaps get a discount on future purchases or something. Fair enough, thinks I, and what followed was an hour or so of shuttling about town to dusty little shops that had nothing we could use. Finally he took us to the big, modern store which we had wanted to go to from the start. A waste of all our time, and of course he demanded money at the end of it.
I seem to have spent most of this blog writing about money and how stingy I am but that not really the impression I want to give. It's just quite interesting to me how different people react to a 'rich' foreign couple and how my own expectations of transactions should work often clashes with the local norms, so it's something I give a lot of space to. The photos will have to do a lot of the work when it comes to recording the good times we've had, as there's only so many times and ways I can write 'this place was beautiful'. Still, Luxor? Beautiful.
Tourists aren't allowed to take any trains from Cairo to Luxor except for the luxury night train, priced in dollars. The people we asked wouldn't sell foreigners tickets in advance for any other trains. We decided to ignore the restriction and boarded the 1st class daytime train without tickets. No-one batted an eyelid, and we bought a scrap of paper with some illegible scrawl on it from the conductor without any trouble.
Many hours later we only got off at the right stop by pure chance as we were thinking of buying food or water from the station. We were immediately accosted by a bunch of hotel touts since we were the only foreigners on the platform. One seemed a little more honest than the others and a little more closely affiliated with the hotel he was touting so we took advantage of the lift he offered.
Lots of desperate touts and horse-and-carriage drivers in Luxor, hit hard by the political turmoil.
The missing obelisk at Luxor temple is the very one we saw the Place de la Concorde in Paris about two years ago. Apparently both obelisks were gifted to France by an Albanian/Ottoman/opportunist empire builder in 1829 just after the short-lived French occupation, but to us the empty plinth next to its mighty neighbour seemed like the most striking example of European theft we've ever seen. The remaining obelisk just looks so lonely!
The sphinx-lined road is said to have continued all the way to Karnak, a few kilometres North. The alley is quite far below modern Luxor though, so only visible where it's been excavated.
Our camera doesn't take night-time photos very well, but this is a shot of the Roman(?) ruins to the side of the temple.
Karnak was really awe-inspiring. We got there so early that even the huge square at the entrance was totally deserted and we had the place almost to ourselves for an hour.
The great hypostyle hall lived up to its name. The massive pillars covering 5500 square metres represented a papyrus swamp, and I can only imagine what it looked like during the annual flood, fully roofed and lit only by torches... Did coracles ferry people amongst the pillars?
The tallest obelisk in Egypt survives here, thanks to Hatshepsut's stepson walling in the obelisks erected by her in an attempt to erase her from history and thereby, ironically, preserving them.
The tip of a fallen obelisk gave us a good perspective on just how large these things are.
The temple of Khonsu featured some red, blue and white striping that looked pretty tacky to us with our jaded modern sensibilities, but I'm sure it was the height of fashion 3400 years ago. It even had some graffiti for that hip Roman touch.
I like maps. The numbers represent roughly where each of the Karnak photos above were taken.
To explore the West bank we haggled and shopped around Luxor until we arranged a driver for a day named Mohammed. On the day itself, after crossing the Nile, it turned out he wasn't actually planning on driving and handed us over to another guy who couldn't speak a word of English. I suppose we got what we paid for, even if a later stop 'for tea' turned out to be a closed-door sales pitch opportunity for a stone carving studio. At the end of the day we were rejoined by a despondent Mohammed who had failed to drum up any further custom. "Business is slow" he said, while pitching boat tours and other sights.
The Valley of Kings. One ticket gets you into three tombs, of which about half are open at any given time. With little information to go on we picked Ramses IX, Merenptah and Ramses III.
Ramses IX's tomb: Wide, short, well preserved.
Merenptah's tomb: Long tunnel, pit, fake burial chamber, flood damaged but featuring a granite sarcophagus.
Ramses III's tomb was the most impressive, beautifully preserved with a wide variety of inscriptions including blind harpists, pottery tribute and all the usual suspects (gods).
While we were looking around a young, amiable guy latched onto us and wouldn't leave us alone. Eventually he took it upon himself to 'lead' us up the valley side for a view. In other words as soon as we started walking up the valley side he walked ahead and chatted away as if he were guiding us. Before we got to the top he hurried back to us, asked for baksheesh, accepted a bit of loose change most Egyptians would sneer at and ran off. Mystified, we kept walking until we rounded a corner and saw the squad of soldiers about 100 metres away who were walking towards us. He'd seen them before they saw him and had decided to cut his losses and scarper. Thinking of the 'off-limits' signs we'd passed earlier we rather nervously continued along the path until the boss soldier hailed us. We could tell he was the boss because his fatigues were a fresher shade of khaki, he wasn't wearing a cap or carrying a bolt-action rifle and he was wearing aviator shades. He asked us what on earth we were doing up there since there was nothing to see and no reason to be there. He was friendly enough though, and perhaps even enjoyed the chance to show off his English in front of the rank-and-file. To our surprise he made no attempt to stop us and we went on our way and they on theirs.
We did actually get a great view of the West bank and the Nile, along with the Habu and Ramesseum temples.
The Habu temple featured vivid inscriptions depicting scenes such as scribes counting piles of hands and penises from defeated soldiers. Why both?
The Hatshepsut mortuary temple reminded me of Serious Sam (sorry!).
At the Valley of the Queens we were treated to some low-grade scrounging. The ticket vendor effusively praised me as a gentleman while forcing me to ask rather awkwardly several times for the remaining change he owed me in ever smaller increments. Let me clarify, as I don't think this has happened to me before. The two tickets were 70 EGP, I think I handed over a 200 EGP note. He gave me 100 EGP and told me what a gentleman I was. I stood there for some time until I realised he wasn't planning on giving me the remainder, so I asked for the change and he handed over a 20 and told me what a gentleman I was and how lovely my wife is and that we should enjoy Titi's tomb. He looked at me, I looked at him, the moment stretched on, so I asked if we could please have the remaining 10. He handed it over and asked if we had perhaps a pen we could give him...?
Anyway, Khaemwaset, Ramses III's son, had a tomb covered with inscriptions of him being introduced to all the gods by his father. Titi may have been one of Ramses III's wives. Amunherkhepshef was another of Ramses III's 13 sons and had the best preserved and most vivid tomb of all that we saw, and featured a mummified foetus.
On the way back we saw the big ol' Colossi of Memnon.
We forgot to take the camera with us.
On our last day in Luxor the a guy who seemed to always hang around in the hotel smoking sheesha offered to take us around town to buy a netbook for Hozumi. Me being the suspicious guy that I am I established up front that we didn't need a lift on his motorbike and would happily walk if it was money he was after. We were reassured that by taking us he could curry some favour with a shop owner and perhaps get a discount on future purchases or something. Fair enough, thinks I, and what followed was an hour or so of shuttling about town to dusty little shops that had nothing we could use. Finally he took us to the big, modern store which we had wanted to go to from the start. A waste of all our time, and of course he demanded money at the end of it.
I seem to have spent most of this blog writing about money and how stingy I am but that not really the impression I want to give. It's just quite interesting to me how different people react to a 'rich' foreign couple and how my own expectations of transactions should work often clashes with the local norms, so it's something I give a lot of space to. The photos will have to do a lot of the work when it comes to recording the good times we've had, as there's only so many times and ways I can write 'this place was beautiful'. Still, Luxor? Beautiful.
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