So, I thought 4:15 AM was a rough time to wake up, but I was wrong…a 3:30 AM wake up call is much, much worse (especially when you only had 3 hours of sleep!). Anyway, after rolling out of bed, I packed up my bag and grabbed another boxed breakfast in the hotel lobby before jumping on the bus again to the Cairo airport for flight to Luxor. It was so early, I couldn’t even pay attention to the airport – I just went through the motions. I actually fell asleep while we were waiting at the terminal for about 20 minutes – usually I can never sleep sitting up or in public…so that just shows you how exhausted I was! Good thing my friends woke me up when we started boarding!
Again, I found that the early wake-up call (as much as it hurt) was TOTALLY WORTH IT. As soon as we landed in Luxor, we took a short bus ride to the Valley of the Kings. Luxor is right on the Nile River, but after you get a little further away, it is completely desert. The Valley of the Kings was all sand and stone – not a blade of grass in sight. The good news is that the Valley was incredible, but the bad news was that we were not allowed to take cameras into the Valley…we actually had to leave them on the bus so they wouldn’t have a chance of getting confiscated! Yikes. Anyway, I will just have to remember all the details in this blog (or Google image it later…) The best was to describe the Valley of the Kings is that it was “other-worldy.” I’m not even kidding, it reminded me of a scene straight out of those old Star Wars movies that Dad used to make us watch! Remember the scene with the little alien guys in red coats and hoods with just 2 small light bulbs for eyes? Probably they were working for that big worm with the tongue…what was his name? Jabba the Hutt?? Haha I wish I were kidding, but I am telling you, that is exactly what I thought of when we arrived at the Valley.
To get to where all the tombs were, we had to take a short tram ride into the heart of the valley. All of Egypt’s ancient kings are buried in this one valley – they have found 62 tombs so far, but I believe that they suspect there are more to be found. King Tut’s tomb was the 62nd tomb that was excavated in the 1920’s. It’s funny though, because his tomb is not really in great shape. Because they buried him so soon after his death, they didn’t wait long enough for the paint on the walls to dry. There are black spots all over the walls from a fungus that grew after the moisture in the tomb’s paint couldn’t escape. We also had to buy a special ticket to go into King Tut’s tomb. Several people in my group elected not to do it. I felt like saying…are you CRAZY?! We are in EGYPT and King Tut’s MUMMY is about 100 feet underground and two minutes from where you are standing! Needless to say, it was flippin awesome. King Tut’s mummy looked like a child’s body, it was so shriveled up. The middle part of the mummy was covered with a white piece of cloth, but his head and feel were as black as coal. We also saw three other tombs (plus one extra that Greg and I sneaked into after befriending the ticket guy/guard). The other tombs were: Ramses III, Ramses I, and Ramses IX. The other one’s name has slipped my mind for the moment (probably because it wasn’t a Ramses!).
What is interesting about seeing the different tombs is that some are much longer than others. The longer that the king lived, the longer his tomb would extend under the ground. One of them, for Ramses I, was extremely steep and you had to climb down stairs at a pretty dangerous angle to get into the tomb room. Others went down gradually and had much more room. As a side note, I expected the descent in to the tombs to be through small, narrow openings like I climbed through to get under the pyramids…but it wasn’t at all like that – it was like walking down a spacious hallway leading underground.
Another mind-blowing thing was that the paint on the wall was amazingly preserved. I was seriously speechless after seeing the details of painting on the walls. HOW has that artwork lasted thousands of years? Apparently, they used egg whites, vegetable dyes, and a honey glaze to seal in the paint. Who knew eggs and veggies could be so well preserved? There is so much symbolism in the figures that it would take a life time to understand it all (which I suppose is what an Egyptologist does…). Every image would depict a story from the Book of the Dead or other Egyptian literature/text. The paintings were all very flat in the sense that in a painting of a person, you could only see one side of his or her profile and then his or her feet would be flat on the “ground” facing to one side. You can always tell the men from the women because the men in the paintings have orange skin and the women have much fairer complexions. Sometimes, if a female figure was REALLY important, she would be depicted as a king to show her high status. Hmmm….I know! Also there are kartouches (pronounced “car-TOO-shez”) everywhere – these are little ovals with hieroglyphics in a line from top to bottom that symbolize the identity of the person. Also there are ankhs (symbol of eternal life) and scarabs (symbol of existence) all over the walls. All in all, the tombs were awesome and I could have stayed there all day if it hadn’t been 120 degrees when we were there!
After the Valley of the Kings, we drove a short distance to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. It was so cool because from far away, it seems as if it is just a building with three floors built into the mountainside. When you get closer, though, you can see that the temple actually stretches out toward you and each “floor” has a huge flat space you have to cross before you can get to the next set of stairs. It was an optical illusion…and I completely fell for it! haha Another cool thing about this temple is that the Queen had a secret passageway built into the temple that would lead a few kilometers away to the burial site of the queens, which is know as ...you guessed it! The Valley of the Queens. We didn’t get a chance to visit that, unfortunately, but it was ok because we had a ton of other things still to do that day…
We next make a short stop at the Colossi of Memnon, which were two large (maybe three or four stories high?) statues of pharohs that were almost identical. I’ll have to show you pictures to understand the magnitude! After that brief stop, we went to our hotel in Luxor to check in and have lunch. I had my OWN hotel room, which was sweet because usually everyone gets a roommate. You might say…”Your own room? Big deal.” It was, however, quite significant because I realized that it was the first time in almost a month and a half that I had total privacy! Don’t get me wrong, I love being roomies with Erin on the ship, but it was just nice to spread out and make my own mess. Our hotel/resort was really nice – the pool was right by the Nile River and…there was a swim-up bar so that you could sit in the pool and enjoy your beverage. It was sweet. : ) If I ever get a pool in my home, it will definitely have a swim-up bar. haha
After resting up a bit (and letting the hot part of the day pass a little), we jumped on the bus again to see Luxor Temple. Because of the amazing things that I had seen already in Egypt, I wasn’t sure that I would be wowed by “another” temple. Ohmygoodness. I was SO wrong.
The temple was located on a huge complex. When we got off the bus, we could only see the front walls and entrance way (lined with like 30 big lion statues). When we walked inside, we found out how expansive the temple actually was. Luxor Temple is an ancient Egyptian temple built on the east bank of the Nile was founded in 1400 BCE. It had parts added on from various kings throughout history. The columns were humongous and everything was a sandy brown color. Even though the weather had eroded some of the details away, you could still see an amazing amount of carving and painting. Every image told a story, which was cool. It was fun to try to imagine what the temple would have looked like in all of its glory. It would have been spectacular, of that I’m absolutely sure. After spending about an hour there, we headed back to the hotel for a late dinner and bedtime.
On a more serious note, I just want to mention that this trip through Cairo and Luxor really opened my eyes to the severe poverty that exists in Egypt. There are people all over the place who are without homes and jobs to support their families. It is really a sad thing. The most shocking thing that I heard had to do with the City of the Dead – which is a huge complex in Cairo where families have little buildings that act as tombs for their deceased loved ones. In this city/graveyard, over ONE MILLION homeless people take shelter in the tombs. When the families of the deceased come to visit, they bring sandwiches and other food to the people who are living in their family’s tomb. It is hard to justify why it is ok for me to stay in beautiful resorts with swim-up bars, when just outside the walls, there are people who literally have nothing. How can I be ok with that? The short answer is that I am really NOT ok with that…I just don’t know what to do to make it better. Should I not travel? Maybe, but then I wouldn’t know about the problems of the world! It’s just another example of why tourism is a frustrating concept to grapple with when it clearly benefits the rich and takes advantage of the poor. Sigh.
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