After heading out of Cairo, the next stop on the tour was Luxor. I can almost say that I liked Luxor as much as I disliked Cairo. The first port of call in Luxor was the Karnak Temple, which is the largest temple in Egypt. Roughly five thousand years old, the Karnak Temple has, among other things, the oldest surviving obelisks in the world. In addition, it has a room (once, but no longer, covered with a stone roof) with 134 (or something like that) massive columns that had to truly have been breathtaking while in use. To be honest, they were still breathtaking. We were at Karnak Temple for a few hours and, if I ever get internet service again, there will be plenty of pictures of it on Facebook.
After Karnak Temple, we returned to the boat for lunch on the Nile. Afterwards, a friend and I went down to the Luxor Bazaar. Let me tell you about the bazaars here in Egypt. Walking through a bazaar here is truly like running through a gauntlet. The bazaar in Luxor spanned several city blocks. On each side of the block were stores selling cheap, generic local souvenir-type items. In this sense, it was very similar to a Sunday afternoon in San Telmo in Buenos Aires. The difference is that every single shopkeeper at an Egyptian bazaar yells at you or grabs you and attempts to get you into his shop. (I will leave the pronoun in the masculine because there were few women running the shops in Cairo and no women running the shops in the smaller cities.) I learned quickly that the best plan was to not make any eye contact and to pretend that I spoke an unpopular Polish dialect because the minute that a shopkeeper thinks he has gotten your attention he becomes that much more aggressive. As a business technique, I think it probably is very ineffective because it dissuades people from browsing the merchandise. To pause even for a second is to invite a shopkeeper to pounce on you like a buzzard on a livestock carcass. Nevertheless, I was scammed into buying some souvenirs for people back home. I’m sure I overpaid, but I got the items that I wanted and I guess I’ll accept it as a learning experience.
We spent the night on our cruise ship on the Nile. It wasn’t moving and I slept well, but I was awakened at 5:00 in the morning so we could get breakfast and hop on a bus to the west bank of the Nile to visit the Valley of the Kings. Our first stop was at a temple built by a queen of Egypt around 3500 years ago. I forget her name, but her temple was breathtaking. (Note: I looked it up. Queen Hatshepsut.) Once we realized that around 60% of the temple was a reconstruction of what the temple used the look like, I was able to get my breath back and breathe much easier.
Technically, this temple was not in the Valley of the Kings. After visiting the temple, we went to the Valley of the Kings to visit three tombs. No pictures are allowed at the Valley of the Kings, so if that’s what you’re waiting for, I apologize. We visited three tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Two belonged to Ramses I and Ramses III. I forget who the third one belonged to, but I’m sure he understands. The tombs were very interesting, though all of the treasures have long been removed. The most striking thing about the tombs, from my perspective, was the vividness of the colors of the 3700-year-old paintings inside the tombs. We learned what some of the hieroglyphics meant and the names of various Egyptian gods, which added to the experience. We also went to the tomb of Tutankhamen. It cost an extra 100 Egyptian pounds ($19 U.S.) and we had seen all of the treasures in the Cairo Museum a few days before, so we didn’t enter the tomb, but it was interesting to see from the outside, nonetheless.
Overall, I was very pleased with Karnak. It was a much better representation of the Egypt that I expected to see than was Cairo or the pyramids. I can say that the Karnak Temple has been the high point of the trip thus far and I hope it is an omen of things to come on the trip and the first of many pleasant surprises.
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