More Ancient Egypt

Here's a quick update of our trip to Luxor (ancient Thebes) two weekends ago...

We--Jennah, Annette, and I--decided to fly to Luxor (1 hour) rather than take the train (12 hours). The plane was almost as cheap as the train.

Here's a view of the Nile River Valley somewhere between Cairo and Luxor. Egypt is basically a strip of green surrounded by miles of desert.

We booked our hostel right before our plane took off, and so we stayed at the Bob Marley House with some old Australian men and Japanese women. Bob Marley is quite popular in Upper Egypt.

We were shocked when we got to Luxor--it has traffic lights! And speed limits! That doesn't stop the crazy driving, of course, but it makes crossing the street a little bit safer. Luxor is a very touristy town, and young men--and some women--pretty much go to school to get degrees in Egyptology and become tour guides.

Our first stop was the Valley of the Kings, but you can't take pictures inside the tombs, and above ground is just desert. It was exhaustingly hot and we were with a tour group, so it was rushed and stressful. After three tombs, we broke away from the group and struck off on our own, vowing never to do another organized tour.

The Luxor Temple is a place of very strange contrasts. It's a huge temple complex right in the center of the town of Luxor, so it's surrounded by houses and restaurants and everyday business as usual. This is why I thought it was fake at first; it looks like it was built as a"welcome to Luxor!" kind of thing to make the town look prettier for the tourists.

One wall of the temple holds a mosque from the 13th century that's still used today, and the back of the temple has some remains of paintings from when it was used as a Byzantine church

in the 6th century. Right next to the painting were hieroglyphics.

Here's Deir el-Bahry, or the Funerary Complex of Hatshepsut. By this time period, pharaohs weren't building pyramids anymore; they built temples instead. Hetshepsut was pretty cool because she was one of only a few female kings of Egypt. She's often depicted with a beard.

Deir el-Bahry is also the location of one of the worst terrorist attacks in Egyptian history, in 1997. This is the reason why every tourist area in Egypt is swarming with armed guards.

I think this is Medinet Habu (Mortuary Complex of Ramesses III), but I'm not sure. Honestly, unless there was an interesting story about a king or a temple, I was more interested in looking at everything than knowing exactly what I was looking at. It was visually overwhelming.

Medinet Habu. At one time, many of the temples were painted like this, and pretty much every surface was covered in hieroglyphics and carvings. There's continous restoration work to keep the temples looking like this.

Entrance to Luxor Temple

The hypostyle hall of Karnak, my absolute favorite temple and the site of some scenes of The Mummy. The hall is filled with these massive columns. It's mahvelous.

Karnak called for some drama in sepia tones, so here are Jennah and Annette running from the evil zombie mummy.

One last story: Luxor is full of tourists in touristy clothes (Americans wear sensible, clunky gym shoes, French women wear strapless dresses, etc). We didn't stand out as much as they did, but we also weren't part of a tour group, so we got harassed. By the time we got to Karnak, we were tired of it...so we decided to speak in Gibberish, a skill we've been practicing in markets so we can discuss prices without being understood, and pretend to be South African. This stopped the harassment because it confused people, but as we were leaving two blonde men rushed up to us and cried, "Oh my gosh, we are Russian! Where are you from?!" This was the moment I realized that it made absolutely no sense to pretend to be South African, as most South Africans speak English, but we still stuck to our story. The Russians walked away looking confused. From then on we pretended to be from Angola.