The road to Luxor – 19th January 2006

The Egyptian section of our tour has been very full-on. We are on the move every day and usually we leave early. Today was no exception. The convey to Luxor left at 8am from the outskirts of Aswan, so we were on our bus at 7.30am. Those of us who stayed in the hotel last night are faring considerably better than those from the felucca, so I think we made a wise choice.

Today we were the first vehicle in the convey, so after we picked up our guards and their guns, we were on our way. Our first stop was Kom Ombo temple, which was dedicated to the crocodile god. Unfortunately, the convey allowed only 20 minutes at this temple, approximately ten of which were spent getting a ticket and using the bathroom, so it was really a waste of time and money.

We charged on to the temple at Edfu. This is a huge temple that seems to be in relatively good condition. It is apparently renowned for its colourful walls, but we didn’t manage to find any. We did try to walk to the roof of the temple, but our path was blocked by a gate. We were unable to find a guide (one of the problems when you arrive at the same time as a thousand others), so can’t really tell you much about this temple as we don’t know anything about it. One of the disappointments of the Egyptian leg of this tour has been that our tour leader knows almost nothing about ancient Egypt and tells us nothing about the sites. We’ve found that when we arrive at places, the guides have been prebooked by other tours, so we are left to wander around by ourselves. Nobody brought a guidebook, thinking we’d get the information from the tour leader or a guide: it’s the blind leading the blind, to be sure.

Having spent a tiny amount at Edfu, we moved on to Luxor. This trip took several hours, broken up only by the police demanding that we stop at certain places (usually because they wanted something to eat). It was around 2pm when we arrived in Luxor, but we had to rush to get to the Karnak temple before it closed.

The tour company had arranged a guide for Karnak, and it made a tremendous difference to our enjoyment of the site! The guide, Saleh, is quite famous in guiding circles and was even in the film “Death on the Nile” (playing, of course, a tour guide). He is very knowledgeable and very funny, which is a wonderful combination for a tour guide. He appointed me as his Queen for our time in the site, and he also appointed several concubines and adopted a few sons. At the end of the visit, he divorced me and gifted me to Fletch. It was a good laugh.

Karnak is actually three temples in one and it is quite remarkable. The hall of columns was a standout – 118 columns in a space of about 400sqm. The Egyptian columns are quite different from Greek and Roman ones. There are two types of capital – a closed capital which represents Upper Egypt and an open capital for Lower Egypt (or vice versa, we can’t remember). There was remarkable preservation of colour on the columns. It is very cool being able to see what they would have looked like in antiquity.

After visiting the temple, we caught a horse & carriage back to our hotel in Luxor. We passed the evening strolling around the bazaar in Luxor. We ended up in a papyrus shop after I wrote an address down for someone on the street – he made me a bookmark as a thank-you and then of course tried to sell us lots of papyri. It was a fun night.

Fletch's tips for new travellers

Egypt is a profoundly religious country. Whether Muslim or Christian, the importance of religious devotion is very explicit. The ancient Egyptians themselves held devotion to their gods as so important that they built the most resilient structures in history as a means of delivering their gods on earth to the afterlife.

The reason for all of this devotion becomes clear as you travel through Egypt. Daily life abounds with miracles. Really it does. Let me give you give a few examples of miracles:

When you get a hot shower
When your taxi driver takes you where you want to go without having to resort to fisticuffs
When the train arrives within 2 hours of the specified arrival time
When you get all of your laundry back
And its clean
And its dry
When you manage to get out of a bazaar and you still have your wallet, your wife and your sanity

This is the reason that anything that is planned in Egypt happens “Insha’Allah” (God willing).