Luxor

The third city that we visited in Egypt was Luxor, which, according to the guidebook is known as the hassle capital of Egypt. In Cairo and Aswan there were two Egypts: living and dead, but here it felt like there was only dead Egypt with modern Egypt surviving as Ancient Egypt’s impoverished ghost. The thing is, Luxor was the ancient city of Thebes, which was the religious capital of Ancient Egypt. This means that Luxor offers access to some of the most spectacular ruins Egypt has to offer: this is where you find valley of the kings and the temple of Karnak and other unbelievable sites (Pictures are at the bottom). The richness of the ancient sites has made Luxor the tourist capital of Egypt, and the locals there seem to live for the opportunity to pick up tourists and show them around the temples for a little backsheesh. We decided a good marketing slogan for Egypt might be “Egypt: Where the cabs hail you!” because everywhere you go cabbies would stop and try and get you to take their cabs, although we didn’t anticipate that the slogan could be a very successful slogan outside of New York. As we were walking down the Corniche and people kept coming up to us offering shoeshines, felucca rides, and postcards we kept saying “La shokram, la shokram,” over and over. Once, Caroline whispered to me, “Hey, what’s the Arabic word for yes?” and I didn’t know. We both realized it hadn’t yet come up.

As bad as the hassling was, however, the temples were incredible. There are two main archeological sites in Luxor—the west bank and the Valley of the Kings. There are also two separate temples located in the middle of Luxor proper—Karnak and Luxor temple. Luxor temple was located directly across from our hotel, so we went there the first night we were in Luxor. It is huge, though it turns out not as big as Karnak, which probably has its own zip code. Seeing an ancient Egyptian temple in the dark was a wonderful experience. The crowds had died down some and we didn’t have to deal with the intense heat that we had in Valley of the Kings or the West bank. Also, Egypt has these amazing fruit bats that seem to really like to hang out in temples. They are huge, a little bigger than your average pigeon, and swoop around screeching, but don’t bother humans. I’m too short to fear bats, and its kind of fun to be in an ancient temple with them as they add a touch of atmosphere a la 1930s Hollywood.

Valley of the Kings and the West bank were both also really cool, but we visited them mid day and the heat was really intense. We all took plenty of water with us and wore sunscreen (although I still managed to turn a little red on my arms) but there’s only so much you can do before the heat just wilts you. The Valley of the Kings is where many of the Pharoh’s (including King Tut) were buried. You are allowed to see up to three tombs in a day. All of the tombs are empty, with the exception of King Tut’s, whose corpse has been moved back in in one of it’s original sarcophagi, but the carvings on the walls have been nicely preserved out of the sun and the elements. Many of the tombs had their original color left on their walls, which was something you don’t see a lot. My personal favorite tomb was one of the first to be located in the Valley. The Pharoh had wanted a particularly hard to access location (to guard against tomb thieves), so he set his tomb far up the mountain and dug deeply into the rock. It’s now accessible only through a series of steep ladders and staircases up and into the mountain. What I liked about it, though, is that the hieroglyphs on the wall are clearly from an earlier period than the other carvings that we saw. They are mostly stick figures, and this gave them a sort of comic book look, which was fun.

It was fun to see Queen Hatcheptsut’s temple on the West Bank, but the highlight of the West Bank, which is a collection of ancient temple complexes, was the Ramsesium. It contains a huge tumbled statue of King Ramses The Second (I think it’s the second, I can’t keep my Ramses straight). The statue was supposed to have been the largest of Ramses, and now his huge stone body parts are strewn everywhere. His huge stone feet are supposedly very famous, but I had never seen pictures of them before. The statue inspired a poetry contest between two nineteenth century poets (I think one of them was Shelley) and the phrase, “Look on my works, ye mighty and tremble” is based on it. While we were looking around the temple we struck up a conversation with four Egyptian girls who were also there. They were students at the university in Cario, studying English and they were just our age—all nineteen and twenty one. I was a little surprised because I hadn’t seen many (or in some places any) actual Egyptians at the temples, but they were really nice and spoke excellent English. We exchanged email addresses, so lets see if they write.