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Published: April 20th 2007
Sunset over Luxor
A felucca drifts along the Nile, as the sun sets over Luxor's monument-rich West Bank
Tom Griffith
The Nile at Luxor
Hypostyle Hall, Karnak I never realised how many great friends I had until I arrived in Luxor. Every second guy stops to say hello, welcome me, tell me how wonderful Australia is, or I am, or give me a piece of helpful advice. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that they are trying to sell me a hotel room/horse ride/felucca trip/dodgy souvenir/taxi journey/bottle of water/drugs/random tourist keepsake or service. They are just plain nice fellows.
Luxor is known as the 'Hassle Capital of Egypt'. So pervasive is this reputation, that many shops put signs in the window saying, 'No hassle!' or 'Hassle-free zone'. A hotel tout who met us at the train station told us that, despite his hotel staff being described as 'pushy' by the Lonely Planet, things had changed and they were now not pushy at all. And then he followed us down the road for ten minutes pushily trying to lure us into his establishment. Everywhere you go, people try to sell you something or rip you off. Sometimes it's fun playing the game, pretending to be interested, or having a joke with the hawker. However, after 95 blokes ask you to come onto their
Hatshepsut's Temple
The amazing Temple of Hatshepsut, cut into the rock of Deir El-Bahri. Built by Egypt's most famous female pharaoh, the temple was also the site of the terrible Luxor massacre of 1997 boat it becomes a little tiresome. When it becomes too much you have to remember: this is how they make their cash, and they've had a century's-worth of archaeologists and tourists to practise on, so they're pretty good at it.
The trip here was broken by a short stop in Cairo to meet my great mate and fellow Westfields Sports history teacher, Bec. She is darting around the Mediterranean during the school holidays like a woman possessed, and had four days pencilled in for Egypt. Her first taste of what this country is like came just outside the airport arrival hall. After negotiating a taxi into the city centre, we were stuffed into an ageing black Peugeot, and then told by the driver to wait a moment. He opened the boot, rummaged around, and reappeared holding a jack. He then got to work fixing the flat tyre that he had known about all along, but had neglected to inform us about until we had confirmed the fare, and gotten safely into the car. Bec wasn't quite sure if this was normal practice, but I assured her that yes, it was pretty standard. The tyre was changed in moments, and
Hypostyle hall, Karnak
One of the 134 huge columns in the hypostyle hall at Karnak we went merrily on our way.
Bec's flying visit meant we had a pretty tight schedule. We decided to knock Cairo over in one day, and, as history teachers, that meant the Pyramids and the Museum. We spent Monday jumping in and out of taxis, on and off of camels, and trying to evade all the cops and touts after a bit of baksheesh. I introduced Bec to the simple pleasures of Egypt: freshly-made felafel for breakfast, ice-cold guava juice for a quick energy burst, and shaay and sheesha pipe at sunset. After marvelling at the pyramids for the seond time, we visited the museum. I'd seen it all before, but this time I got to see the room full of animal mummies that I missed on my last visit. The highlight was a wonderfully-preserved, 2000-year old, 3-metre long Nile crocodile. Those Ancient Egyptians certainly did nothing by halves.
We took the night train to Luxor, and planned on two full days down here. The place is literally bursting with ancient monuments, so it's tough work fitting it all in. Luxor sits on the site of Thebes, which was Egypt's capital during the New Kingdom (that was when
Mohamed the backgammon champion
Mohamed, a friendly taxi driver, who played me at backgammon, beat me twice, and made me pay for his coffee. He wanted to take me to a belly-dancing club too, but there was a scam in there somewhere so I didn't take up his offer Tutankhamun, Ramesses, Nefertiti, Hatshepsut and all those folks were around). In the city itself, on the east bank of the Nile, only the Luxor Temple still stands; a few kilometres out of town, the mind-bogglingly huge Karnak Temple rears out of the surrounding fields; and, on the desert escarpment of the west bank, the funeral temples and tombs of the Pharaohs dot the landscape for kilometres. The city itself is a fairly laid-back place, despite the hassle-mongers, and there are some cute little backstreets to explore, where mule-carts trundle past you, and smiling kids pop up to say a breathless, 'hello!'.
The quality and quantity of the monuments around Luxor have attracted tourists and treasure-hunters since the 1800s, and the town is fairly heaving with tour groups, posh hotels, Nile cruisers with swimming pools on the roof, and buses to-ing and fro-ing between the sites. We dealt with the East Bank on our first day, starting with the temple (well, lots of temples, really) of Karnak. Like many Egyptian temples, this edifice started off quite modestly, and pharaohs added their own layers as time went by. Karnak grew into an unwieldy precinct of shrines, statues, obelisks and halls, and
Luxor Temple by night
The illuminated ruins of Luxor Temple the ruins today give you some idea of just how massive this complex would have been. I most enjoyed the Hypostyle Hall, a magnificent room of soaring columns and hieroglyphic murals, not just for its appearance, but also because this is where Roger Moore eluded the iron bite of Jaws in
The Spy Who Loved Me.
Next we did the Luxor Temple, a crumbling nonentity next to its big brother just out of town. The setting sun cast some beautiful light on the building, though, and it was quite romantic being there as the muezzin did the call to prayer from the mosque that has been built in the middle of the ancient temple.
Day Two we devoted to the sprawling West Bank. We hired a couple of rattletrap old bikes to ride between the ruins, and the brakes went on both of them by the end of the day. A local guy on the ferry took one look at them and said, 'Mish kwayyis' - literally, 'no good', so obviously not even up to Egyptian standards. But they got us around, so I shouldn't complain. We started with the Colossi of Memnon, two 18-metre statues of Amehotep
Colossal dudes
The Colossi of Memnon, two great statues of Amenhotep the Something or Other, still standing despite an earthquake that wrecked them 2000 years ago III sitting next to a wheat field near the desert. Then we saw the Ramasseum, the funerary temple where Ramesses II, perhaps the most prolific monument builder of Ancient Egypt, was embalmed and deified after his death. Then on to the sheltered valley of Deir El-Bahri, with the fantastic Temple of Hatshepsut. This place was both jaw-dropping, and creepy- it's where 62 tourists were machine-gunned down ten years ago, wrecking the tourist industry here for ages.
The story of Hatshepsut is an interesting one. She was the most famous female pharaoh, and she even wore the false beard and called herself 'king' to legitimise her reign. Her nephew/stepson, Thutmose III, tried to erase her from the historical record after her death. He did this by having her name and image erased wherever it appeared: so, whenever you see hieroglyphs spelling her name, or a portrait of her, it has usually been completely chiselled-out, or attacked and disfigured. Apparently, back then this was tantamount to a second death, and was very dishonourable. Poor old Hatshepsut even had her two obelisks at Karnak completely covered up. Ironically, this helped to preserve them, and today the one that is still standing is
Relaxing next to the Nile
Bec and I have a few beers and a sheesha after a hard day of trudging around temples... better kept than anything Thutmose left behind. Even better, the temple he built behind hers was destroyed in a landslide, while the cliffs above her temple kept it protected. And today? Hatshepsut gets a lot more airtime than her vengeful nephew.
Our final destination was the Valley of the Kings. This is where the New Kingdom pharaohs had themselves buried. rather than flashy tombs, they built underground chambers where their remains and possessions would be safer from grave-robbers. Today you can visit a handful of the chambers, including that of Tutankhamun. Each tomb is unique, and most have wonderfully colourful hieroglyphs on the walls, some looking as fresh as the day they were carved and painted.
Three tombs and we were toasted, so we headed back across the Nile for some refreshing beers. On the journey, I got the usual, 'You lucky man!', as the sleazy local guys cracked onto poor old Bec. She got many offers of marriage along the way, and I even got asked how many camels I would accept in exchange for her hand. One bloke offered me 2 million camels, which seems a tad excessive. My favourite line, though, was the one that
Ozymandias
The collapsed statue of Ramesses II, at the entrance to his funeral temple, the Ramasseum. The statue (7 metres from shoulder to shoulder) inspired Shelley's poem, Ozymandias:
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
graces the title of this post. The felucca captain was scratching his groin as he delivered it, which really added to its romantic quality.
Anyways, Bec headed back to Cairo this morning, and I move on to Aswan tomorrow. I hope to bore you with more photos and tales of ancient temples in a few days...
PS: I told my hotel manager, Salah, that I would plug his cheap and friendly establishment on my blog. So, here we go: please stay at Princess Hotel, it is cheap and best in Luxor.
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Gerry
non-member comment
Keep up the good work!