We slept like the dead back in our comfortable hotel, and despite a possible case of domestic violence down the hallway (some guy was very unhappy with his family) and a couple of power outages it was a normal night. We had breakfast and there were more tourists today. Some were pretty demanding, complaining about how their eggs were cooked among other things. The way I see it, it is hard to complain about a free breakfast, and we happily drank our coffee and ate our Egyptian yogurt. We were in a pretty good mood.
Our plan for the day was to cross over to the west bank of the Nile River to see a dramatic temple and then to go to the Valley of the Kings and explore some underground tombs. We walked outside and selected a driver from the many who were waiting, and I started the negotiation dance. We ended up hiring our driver for 400 pounds for the day. He was a nice enough guy, and interestingly enough he stopped at the same sort of convenience store that we had visited with our previous tour guide to buy us a “welcome drink”. It must be a standard Egyptian hospitality thing.
It was a short drive south to the first bridge over the Nile, and then a ten or fifteen minute drive to Hatshepsut Temple. The driver dropped us off at the gate, we walked past a line of shops just getting started for the day, and then paid and went inside. It was a pretty good walk to get to the Temple itself, and there were trams around taking people who didn’t have the leg power. It was really not that far and we were happy to get our legs moving again after so much time in the car the past few days.
The Temple was very striking, built right in front of a canyon with dramatic pillars and stone statues of pharaohs. As we got closer details appeared and it got more dramatic, and I really enjoyed the slow approach. We walked around the grounds and up the steps to the upper floors to explore the place. As usual there were “guides” who tried to pull you over and explain something, and we did our best to avoid them. One “guide” plucked my camera from my hands, stepped over the railing and took some pictures and then held out his hand for money. Even the guards carrying machine guns kept asking us if they could take our picture. It is easy to turn down old men who want to get a tip, but a different story when armed guards are looking for tips, too. Kind of sad, really – apparently even security guards don’t get paid enough in Egypt.
Eventually we headed back to our taxi and moved on to the next stop, the Valley of the Kings. On the way our taxi driver had to suddenly swerve when a donkey pulling a cart made an unexpected move into our lane. I liked the gesture that our taxi driver made to the man on the donkey cart- it was like, “Don’t you even know how to drive a donkey?”
The Valley of the Kings is a major tourist destination, and there were a lot of tourists there already. We bought our tickets, and I decided not to buy a photography ticket, which allows you to take pictures inside. It wasn’t so expensive, but I felt like it would be better to put the camera away and just absorb the experience, and I’m glad I did. There are more than fifty ancient tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and they are opened to the public on sort of a rotation to minimize the impact of all those tourists exhaling and bringing in moisture to the tombs. We could choose to enter three tombs for our ticket price, and if we wanted to visit more we could pay for a separate ticket. The system was a little odd, but it turned out that three tombs was plenty for us.
The tombs had codes, we visited KV8 and KV11, and I’m not sure about the code for the third one. You descended on a platform deep into the mountain, passing stone walls with surprisingly colorful paintings and hieroglyphics – showing scenes from the history of the dead pharaoh. Despite being 5,000 years old some tombs were in excellent condition. As you proceeded deeper you would eventually find the burial chamber, and in some tombs they had the original sarcophagus still there, lying empty. The occupants had either been stolen, sold, eaten(!), disintegrated over time or had been taken to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for safekeeping. We’d get there in just a couple of days.
I liked poking around but you did tend to feel like you were deep underground and a little bit of claustrophobia sets in. The air is slightly warm and moist from all the tourists, and soon we were taking off layers for comfort. And the photo ticket system was oddly enforced – staff walked around and demanded to see a ticket from each person who took a picture. Some people had the ticket, some people didn’t and weren’t aware of the system – they just saw other people taking pictures and thought it was OK. The photo police looked busy and there were a few angry confrontations just in the short time that we were there. Maybe they should re-think how they do that.
So we got our fill of the Valley of the Kings, headed back to the taxi, and had him drive us back to the hotel. We figured we deserved a little relaxation time, so we found the hotel pool, and lounged poolside in comfortable chairs like proper tourists. There was a surprising amount of plump white people around the pool, and the staff were going out of their way to chat with the foreign tourists and trying to make friends, perhaps in the hopes of getting some kind of tip down the road.
For lunch we decided to go out and look for some good local food. We originally were targeting a specific restaurant, but when we couldn’t find it we walked into a hole-in-the-wall kind of place. We got a good vibe from the owner who was standing in front of the shop cooking his food. Inside we sat at a table and realized that we had no way to read any menu, but I went up and talked to the owner, and he knew just enough English to describe what he could make for us. We ended up with some taamiya sandwiches – three kinds: ground lamb, eggplant and onion, and falafel with spicy vegetables. The food was really good there. This is what the locals eat and it was priced accordingly. We got out of there for only 20 pounds ($1.20), and just to compare – our hotel was charging 75 pounds for a can of beer.
On our walk back to the hotel we noticed that the traffic and amount of touts was significantly less. Today was Friday, and that is a day of rest in Egypt, so it was nice not to have to say “No thanks” as often when we walked around town.
Back at our hotel our room was not ready, so we decided to go drink expensive beers by the poolside. We were drinking our go-to Egyptian beer called “Stella”. The beer can featured some line-drawn characters enjoying themselves, and our favorite character was a woman with her hand held horizontally in front of her nose and her tongue sticking up and out – almost touching the bottom of her hand. Is she singing? Being seductive? About to puke? Who knows, but we were cracking each other up by doing the “Stella pose” the rest of the trip.
With a small side dish of bruschetta on some delicious bread we downed five Stella beers and enjoyed some quiet relaxation. Thanks to those five beers we felt like a nap soon enough, and when we went back to our room it was all ready to go.
We woke up from our nap with the sound of some kind of spooky prayer music coming in from outside our window. I guess there was a special event at a mosque nearby and the music was really strange – I don’t know how to describe it more than it sounded like it was from a cult horror movie soundtrack. For all I know it was wedding music but it gave me a creepy feeling.
So back out on the streets we made good on our promise and went back to Sofra for dinner. The touts were waiting at the front of the hotel but their pleas for money were starting to get a little half-hearted. Maybe our reputation was spreading as stingy tourists who never ride horse carriages.
In Sofra the staff remembered us from the previous night and were happy to see us again. We had another good meal, although not quite as good as the previous night. This time we ate an egg omelet with salty beef strips and onion inside, shrimp boiled in garlic oil and vegetables that was really good – we dipped all our bread in there and ate every last bite. Kuniko ordered a stewed duck dish that wasn’t beautiful but quite delicious. We washed it all down with fresh melon juice and strawberry juice. It was a busy night at Sofra, and two solo-dining Asian guys who had arrived about the same time ended up having to share a table with each other. Luckily they had smartphones to stare at and avoid accidental eye contact.
Today was a good day with a lot more relaxation (and beer) and it was our last full day in Luxor. We went back to our hotel, had a couple more cold Stella beers as a nightcap, and then went to bed for some rest before the last bit of Luxor sightseeing tomorrow morning.
