Leaving Venus for Emilio

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We woke up this morning to find that our room had no hot water and that the toilet wasn't working. This was the final straw with our experience with the Venus hotel, and I resolve that we will be out of there today. After breakfast, we have no luck calling places with my cellphone and then realize that the Arabic words I am hearing when I dial means that the prepaid time has run out. After having the shop across the street sell me a top up card, we call a few local hotels. Without INTERNET we are confined to the few hotels in our guide book and not surprisingly, they are full. Down the road from our hotel is a fancy looking hotel called the Emilio, so we walk down the road to take a look.

The Emilio has all the features of a higher end place with a door man, fancy lobby, restaurant and bar. There is a rooftop pool and patio overlooking the Nile. They first show us double rooms (which we would need two) at $50 US each per night. Somewhere else, this might be a deal, but this is quite high for Egypt. In the end, they let us have a four person room for $40/ US a night - double what we have been paying for the last while but still within our budget. The Venus hotel people don't seem too surprised by our move. As it is less than half a block, we lug our bags up over to the Emilio and settle in.
Once we are settle in at the Emilio, we take a walk to visit the other West back temple, Luxor Temple. We quickly realize how close it is ( a two minute walk) and buy our tickets.

One of the first striking features of the Luxor temple is the “Avenue of the Sphinxes” which runs to the temple. At one point, this series of smaller Sphinx sculptures ran the 3 km from Luxor Temple to Karnak temple. Now most of this avenue lies underneath the present day buildings, though plans are being made to excavate it.

In front of the temple proper are two huge seated statues of Rameses. The sheer scale of these figures seems deliberately planned to dwarf visitors into insignificance. Entering the temple, a series of high columns with hieroglyphics. Again, the sheer volume of these seems to overwhelm the visitor. Further into the temple, there is a wall where the Egyptian carvings have been covered over with a 3rd century Roman fresco, amazingly well preserved given the exposure of the spot to the elements.

After lunch at the Lotus restaurant, we returned to the hotel to do school work. With all the moving around in the last few days, we have decided to take it easy tomorrow and put off visiting the City of the Dead, the East bank of the Nile until the next day.

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