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Egypt
September 2003
A three week journey around Egypt. I wrote a full account of the trip, to record both the memories I want to keep and the historic facts I want to remember.

Part 4: Luxor
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Luxor
After 4 days in the desert and oases west of the Nile, we arrived in Luxor in the evening of our 7th day in Egypt. Luxor is Egypt's biggest tourist trap; millions of tourists come here every year. After four days in the western desert during which we saw other tourists only once (a group of 8 Germans and 4 Japanese at the Crystal Mountain), it was quite a change of environment.

Luxor is the place where the capital of the New Kingdom (1570-1070 BC) used to be. That capital is usually referred to as Thebes, but that's just what the Greeks called it; its real name was Waset which means scepter. The later Arab inhabitants called it al-Uqsor which means the Palaces (referring to the ancient temples), and among Europeans that became Luxor.

The principle tourist attractions are the temples of Karnak and Luxor on the east bank of the Nile, where Waset used to be, and the Valley of the Kings and the temple of Hatshepsut on the west bank, which was reserved for the dead. We'd stay in Luxor for 3 nights, giving us 2 full days there.

Hotel Nefertiti
Our hotel here was easily the nicest of the trip; it had a big roof terrace and the rooms had air conditioning; all for only 3 euro per night. After that stormy last night without sleep in the desert I was walking around like a mumbling zombie, but here I'd finally get some solid sleep.

On the roof floor there was a bar with a pool table so Danny and I played some pool, but he totally owned me. We met a Flemish girl called Sara there who'd just arrived in Egypt and was waiting for her two friends, who were coming down from Cairo later that night. When Danny wanted to play pool again I gave her the stick and after first losing a close game she beat him, and gave him some trash talk on top :)

For dinner I got a big pizza, but I still couldn't swallow food and only managed to eat 1/8 of it. Later I went out and bought 2 kilo of grapes, and those filled me up nicely.

Now that we were out of the desert we could finally communicate with the rest of the world again, so we were all frantically sending SMSes and using the hotel's internet connection. I managed to get in touch with my friend Salma in Alexandria, who'd just returned to Egypt from her vacation in Tunisia. In the beginning it was hard to get each other on the phone, because the phones in the hotels can't make (only receive) long distance calls and using my mobile would be ridiculously expensive, but we soon thought of a great system: I always let her know the phone number of my current hotel through SMS or email, then when I wanted to talk I went to the hotel lobby and used my mobile to let her mobile ring a few times, after which she would call the hotel phone. We'd talk on the phone almost every day this way until I got to Alexandria.


The Temple of Karnak
In the morning of our first day in Luxor we visited the temple of Karnak, the biggest and most important of the New Kingdom temples. It was dedicated to Amen (aka Amun aka Amon), a local god who became Egypt's chief deity during the New Kingdom. Karnak is the name of a village near Luxor; the temple's original name was Ipet-isut which means 'most splendid of all places'.

The temple was actually founded around 1900 BC during the Middle Kingdom and would be continuously expanded during the next 1500 years, but most of the temple's core was built between roughly 1500 and 1200 BC by the great New Kingdom pharaohs (Tuthmosis I and III, Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, Seti I and II, Ramesses II and III, ...).

The most impressive part of the temple complex is the Hypostyle Hall, which measures 100 by 50 meter and has 134 massive columns, all decorated with reliefs and hieroglyphs. It was built in the 13th century BC during the reigns of Seti I and Ramesses II.

The 12 columns of the two center rows are 21m high and 3m wide, the 122 other columns are 15m high and slightly less wide. The shafts of the columns represent stems of the papyrus plant, while the capitals are shaped like papyrus buds: open buds on the high center columns, closed buds on the other columns.

Nothing is left of the roof that the columns once supported. The temple was intended to be very dark, and the columns must have given a spooky impression then. As it is now the sunlight can play between the columns and make them cast shadows on each other, which looks great too. This hall is one of the most spectacular monuments I've ever seen.

The Karnak temple has 3 of the 6 obelisks that remain in Egypt. Of the four obelisks erected here by queen Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC, only one still stands. At 29.6m tall, it is the 2nd tallest in the world, after the Lateran obelisk in Rome which the Romans stole from this very temple. There are only 27 standing obelisks in the world, 21 of them now outside Egypt.


Club Med
Cathy, Danny and I met up with the group at the exit of the Karnak temple. In the afternoon we were all gonna swim, but the group first wanted to have lunch somewhere so we went off on our own.
At the hotel we put on swimming clothes and took a minibus, a very cheap and efficient means of transportation in Egypt's smaller towns. The minibusses can hold 10 persons (though I've seen up to 17 in one) and drive a fixed route around town all day. You can stop them anywhere to get on, and ask them to stop anywhere else along the route to get off. You only pay 25 piaster per person, which is 3.5 eurocent, i.e. almost nothing.

We first went to the Novotel hotel along the Nile where normally you can pay to use the hotel's swimming pool, but we asked the wrong person and got turned down ("guests only"). So we walked on to the Club Med resort. The price was 37 pounds, about 6 euro, but that turned out to include several drinks.

The pool was super luxurious; it had a bar in the middle of the pool so you could order drinks while in the water, and you had a great view on the Nile which was right next to the pool (the Nile itself has tiny worms which creep into your skin to lay their eggs, so you shouldn't swim in it).

I'd spend 4 afternoons in different swimming pools but this first one was definitely the most fun. I've never in my life enjoyed a drink as much as I enjoyed my first one here: a Fanta on the rox. I also got some colour this day, finally; until then I had been so careful with the sun (using sunblock and staying in the shadows as much as I could) that I was still my usual white.

The pool had a volleybal net and Danny and I played volleybal for hours. At first we totally sucked, one of the first balls Danny hit fell inside the bar, without breaking bottles luckily. We got the hang of it though and in the end owned two Egyptian guys in a 2on2.


The Temple of Luxor
In the evening we visited the temple of Luxor, which lies in the middle of modern Luxor. In fact it lay under Luxor for centuries; only the top parts of the columns were sticking out of the sand that had covered the temple. Houses and a mosque had been built on top of it. The houses were removed when the temple was excavated in the 19th century, but the 13th century mosque is still there on top of the temple because the locals understandably refused to remove it. It is quite a spectacular sight (check this pic of the mosque's back door at the top of a column).

The temple was built in the 14th century BC by Amenhotep III and expanded a century later by Ramesses II, who added a courtyard, six huge statues of himself and two obelisks. Two of these statues were taken away to Paris, as was one of the obelisks, which now stands on the Place de la Concorde. The temple was dedicated to the triad of local gods Amen, his wife Mut (the goddess of war) and the moon god Khonsu. Due to the darkness we couldn't take much pictures.
The temple of Luxor was connected with the temple of Karnak (3km further down the Nile) by a straight lane that had sphinxes on both sides at regular intervals. The surviving sphinxes have been used to restore part of that lane here.
Inside the temple we ran into Sara and her two friends, Cathy and Esther. I'd already run into Sara on the street that morning when I went out to shop, so this was the second time, and as you'll read later I'd keep running into these ladies all over Egypt. We got talking about the 7 wonders of the ancient world and all together we could list 6 of them, not bad!


The Tourist Hunt
We ended the day walking around Luxor and got to experience Egypt's worst aspect at its most intense level. I'm talking about the tourist hunt, which was a daily torture here and in all other towns where a lot of tourists stay.

The streets are full of vendors trying to sell all kinds of souvenirs, captains trying to sell boat rides, taxi drivers trying to sell taxi rides, money changers, and so on, and they all prey on tourists. As a non-Egyptian walking on the street, you get approached by these guys continuously, and they are very, very obtrusive.

The least annoying of them just try to draw your attention to their wares, but most try to get you talking by asking where you come from, what your name is or where you are going, and then they follow you or stand in front of you. The ones that are too far to start talking raise their arm and yell "yes!", as if they know everything about you, or they just hurry across the street to hassle you.

This goes on non-stop, you get approached like this every 5 seconds; when you get rid of one guy you immediately get hassled by two others. In the beginning you try to reply or give a friendly smile, but you can't keep doing that because that just encourages them; the only way to get anywhere is to completely ignore them (they all start yelling at you together then though), push aside the ones that jump in front of you and walk very fast as if you're in a hurry.

As a result it is impossible for a white person to just walk around and have a good time, because you feel like a deer being hunted, especially late in the evening when there are only a few tourists left for all the vendors to hassle. Many people just don't feel like leaving their hotel anymore after a while. Not that it's dangerous, it's just extremely unpleasant.

The irony is that Egypt is swarming with tourist police. They won't let you alone when you're visiting some remote temple, but in the one place you would actually want to have them around, in the small streets of the city centres, they are nowhere in sight. It's ironic but understandable; tourists getting attacked by terrorists is bad for the tourism industry, while tourists being hassled is not gonna make the news anywhere.

This continuous harassment made me more assertive the longer I stayed in Egypt; in the end when I went on the street I just set my mood to stormy weather and scowled and snapped at any vendor who approached me to leave me alone. In a good mood I was more creative; when they asked where I was going I just pointed forward and said "there", and when they asked where I was from (by far their most popular opening line) I made up false answers. It was always funny to see them wonder if I was really from Bulgaria or Uzbekistan.

When you do want to buy something, the vendors will almost always try to rip you off by asking up to 10 times the normal price. You have to negotiate about everything, even a simple coke, which is very tiring. Only in areas in Cairo and Alexandria without tourism did I ever get asked normal prices.

In Luxor there was one little shop that had a sign saying "no hassle" and prices indicated on the products. I bought everything I needed there if they had it just to support the principle.


The Valley of the Kings
On our second day in Luxor we had to wake up at 5am. We were gonna visit the Valley of the Kings, where all the New Kingdom pharaohs were buried, and to get tickets for the most beautiful tomb (that of Ramesses II`s wife Nefertari, in the adjacent Valley of the Queens) you had to be there at 6am. In the end we never even tried to get those tickets; I think we'd just been tricked by the guide who wanted to get things over with quickly.

We first took a boat across the Nile. 12 donkeys were waiting on the other side to carry us to the valley. Riding donkeys was a bit too touristy for my taste, but admittedly a lot of fun. You could steer them left or right easily enough, but there seemed to be no way to influence their pace; they would just start running fast whenever they felt like it. We still made something of a race of it though; when my donkey did a sprint and passed Danny's, I'd steer it in front of him so his donkey had to stop :)

Riding to the Valley of the Kings took about an hour. We passed the Colossi of Memnon, two huge statues of Amenhotep III (1386-1349), each 23m high and weighing a 1000 ton. Amenhotep III, who also built the Temple of Luxor, built his mortuary temple here (this side of the Nile was entirely devoted to the dead) and it is thought to have been huge, but nothing is left of it except these two statues.

We left the donkeys on top of the rocks that surround the Valley of the Kings, and descended into it on foot. There was a guide waiting for us with tickets with which we could enter 3 of the 60 tombs in the valley. We were first led into that of Seti II, which was entirely uninteresting, and could then pick two more ourselves.

Danny, Cathy and I ignored the guide's advise and picked the tombs of Tuthmosis III (the oldest in the valley) and Merenptah. While leaving the tomb of Tuthmosis III we ran into Sara, Cathy and Esther again, who said I had to buy them drinks now coz this was the third time :) The tomb of Merenptah was the nicest one we got to see; a very long decorated corridor descended to a big hall supported by 8 pillars, in which still stood Merenptah's stone sarcophagus. I took three pictures behind the guard's back, but they all failed.

The two most beautiful and interesting tombs of the valley, those of Seti I and Ramses VI, were unfortunately closed for restauration. The tomb of Tutankhamen requires a separate ticket because it is so famous, but it is small and uninteresting since the treasures are now in the Cairo museum.


The Temple of Hatshepsut
Just outside the Valley of the Kings lies the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, which was partly cut from the surrounding rock. Hatshepsut, the most famous and powerful of the female pharaohs, ruled from 1498 to 1483 BC. When her stepson Tuthmosis III, who should have reigned instead of her but had been too young when his father Tuthmosis II died, finally succeeded her, he had much of the temple destroyed, and later it lay buried in the sand for many centuries. It was finally reconstructed in the 1960s by a Polish team.

In 1997, this site saw the most brutal terrorist attack ever on tourists in Egypt. Six masked gunmen entered the site and started machinegunning people, killing 58. Later they were all killed after a long gunfight with the police, who arrived much too late.


Who's the donkey?
From the temple of Hatshepsut most of us would have liked to just drive back to Luxor, which would have concluded a fun time, but instead we were to get back on the donkeys and ride to two museums, one about alabaster and one about papyrus. I wanted to skip all that and just get a taxi, but the guide insisted it wasn't possible to take a taxi here, and indeed I didn't see any.

The museum visits got scratched because noone wanted to, but we were still gonna have lunch at the house of the donkey owner because Eva didn't want to refuse that. So we got back on the donkeys and let ourselves be led around like sheep. We passed the Ramesseum, an interesting temple that I would have liked to visit, but that was not on the program.

The ride lasted over an hour and I felt the midday sun burning my skin without being able to shield it; there is no shadow on a donkey. When we finally got to the donkey owner's house he immediately started whining to the group leader because we hadn't gone to the alabaster museum; obviously he was missing out on a commission. He tried to convince us to go to the papyrus museum but we said no.

We got a small meal of tomatoes, cucumber and cheese, and then he was gonna take us for a tour of his house. I lagged behind a little to put sunblock on my arms and neck before going outside again. Two of the man's little daughters were staring at what I was doing with great interest, so I put a little sunblock on their arms too. They didn't know what to do with it so I put a bit on myself again and demonstrated how you have to rub it in :)

When I caught up with the group I discovered that the donkey man had lead them out the backdoor of his house, through a field and then through the backdoor of the nearby papyrus museum. Thus he had suckered everyone into the papyrus museum after all, against our specific request. I was so pissed off with how the group was letting itself be herded around again that I left immediately; I rather waited outside in the heat than be a docile tourist.

It's then and there that I started thinking about leaving the group; I was being led around for hours doing things that I didn't want to do, while there were plenty of other things that I did want to do; e.g. I could have been spending these hours in the Ramesseum.

Of course the museum was really just a big shop. The group got to hear that they could buy everything at a special price of only half of what was indicated, which should have alerted everyone that those indicated prices were probably four times the normal price. Two of them bought expensive papyrus sheets anyway. Mission accomplished for our donkey man.

Xavier and me took a taxi to the Nile to spare ourselves another half hour of donkey riding in the burning sun. When the group arrived we took a boat back to Luxor, where we spent the afternoon in another swimming pool.

In the evening Danny, Cathy and me found out that Luxor has a McDonald's and went there to have dinner. The entrance was being guarded by three soldiers with machineguns, very funny. It was soooo nice to just eat fish and fries, and the cold milkshake was simply heavenly after all that heat. Mind you, Egyptian food is really good, but in the desert we'd had very little variety, especially me as a veggie.

The next morning we got up at 6 and took a train to Aswan.




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