Blogs from Luxor, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa - page 35

So unfortunately the felluca cruise didn't happen. A real bummer that, the weather took a turn for worse and became very windy - and seeing the River Nile is about as wide as the English Channel (maybe a slight exageration but it is pretty damn wide!) it was fairly choppy and not safe for a felluca! So we had to spend a day on the felluca docked on the side of the Nile anyway, just chilling out, playing cards and eating Egyptian food. That night another group joined us and we had a bonfire on the river bank with a few beers and Nubian drumming and singing, so that was cool. The Nubians of course have their own songs but they seem to prefer an old song which everyone knows - 'She'll be coming round the ... read more

Another early morning…up at 6:30am. I thought this was supposed to be a relaxing vacation. I ate a quick breakfast with my fellow tour participants and disembarked from the ship at 7:30am. We meet up with our tour guide for Luxor, Mohammad, who brings us to the hotel. Ostensibly, we are staying at a 5-Star hotel, but based on the wafer thin mattress and push button TV (you can select between UHF and VHF…and can even manually tune each of the 10 push button channels on the TV)…I am a little skeptical of the rating. Obviously, this is not a 5-Star hotel based on the Michelin (they don’t just make tires) standard. After getting up so early, we are rewarded with the news that we will not start our tour until 3:00pm, since we need to ... read more

In our first blog, we had just arrived in Luxor. Luxor is located along the Nile and contains a wealth of ancient Egyptian sights. It is also a popular destination for tourists who want to come and see the temples and tombs. Coming from the desert into Luxor was like night and day and we were not used to seeing so many tourists. We arrived mid-day on Friday, which is the Muslim holy day and we weaved through traffic where there were tons of people overflowing from the mosques into the streets praying. We had originally planned to head south right away, but instead decided to do a Nile cruise down to Aswan. There are tons of these Nile cruise boats that sail between Luxor and Aswan and we were able to find a very reasonable ... read more

We moved to the West Bank of Luxor and have found ourselves a gem of a place called El-Fayrouz. It's a lurid apricot palace with spacious and cool tiled rooms with a fantastic rooftop area and a very pleasant garden outback with seating under the shade of creeping plants and vines. I am sorry now that we stayed on the East Bank for the first 3 nights, although it was convenient for the things we wanted to see on the east bank like the Temple of Luxor and Karnak. I think after the two and the previous ones in Aswan and Cairo, I am just about getting to the 'all templed-out' point and they are all melding into the 'yet- another-Pharaonic-temple' syndrome for me. Rob is still raring to go... The west bank seems to be ... read more

We celebrated out arrival in Luxor by having a custom tourist show complete with belly dancers. To complete the western tourist effect we all dressed up in Galabea’s and other Egyptian attire. Very authentic, honestly! Funniest thing about the show was watching everyone else watching the belly dancers. There were those who were disgusted, those who were really REALLY interested, those who were trying to pick up tips and then those who were just plain uncomfortable. I didn’t quite understand the whole transformation from totally cloaked Muslim to belly dancer. But did enjoy quite a few Egyptian Stella’s. Had an interesting conversation with another person who had the same operation as a friend of mine. He fell out of a 5 story building was in a coma for a week and they took out a bit ... read more