Luxor to Sharm El Sheik

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We are now at the Red Sea/Sinai Peninsula resort of Sharm El Sheik and it is 6.30pm as I start trying to catch up on the last couple of days. It looks as though we might get a decent internet system here, even though it is very expensive so I’ll try to get this typed up and cut and pasted onto the website tonight – if the internet works out!!
To say we are both physically ‘shattered’ is probably putting it mildly as the schedule has been just crazy over the last 2 days.
I left things last as we waited on Sunday night for a call from a doctor to give Joy her B12 injection. WELL, that didn’t work out!!!! After sitting up late waiting I went down to reception at 11.30pm to discover that the doctor had been cancelled by the people who had originally called him but no one let us know!!!
Anyway we got to bed rather late as I decided to get an internet connection USB thingy while I was at reception and sent the last blog and check emails, even though we had an early start the next morning. The internet system they had on board wasn’t too bad if no one else was using it and I figured that there wouldn’t be too many as stupid as me and sitting up at that hour.
6am wake up call on Monday morning for showers etc, breakfast and an 8am start for the days tours and they were tours we had been looking forward to for some time.
We crossed by minibus to the West Bank of the Nile and headed to the ‘Valley of the Kings’. I can’t remember the exact dates that all of these tombs were discovered but look at Google if you are interested. However it is a ‘massive’ valley with untold huge Royal Tombs, including Tutankhamen’s (which we didn’t go down into as it was an extra payment and our guide Ishmael reckoned that it was very plain as everything that had been in it has been taken out and is displayed in the Cairo museum). I don’t know how many tombs there are but quite a few. All of them, of course, go way down into the earth so plenty of stairs and confined spaces were the order of the morning. Our ticket got us into 3 tombs and we paid an extra 50LE(Egyptian pounds) to visit a fourth on the advice of our guide as he reckoned the tomb of Ramses VI was the best and that’s why it carried an extra charge, and he was right!! All of them were incredible affairs with lots of paintings and hieroglyphics telling the Kings stories etc. etc. But Ramses VI tomb was by far the most impressive. Our guide called it the ‘Sistine Chapel’ of the Valley of the Kings. It was very obvious why he called it this because the paintings in the tomb, painted just a few thousand years before the Sistine Chapel was done, were every bit as impressive. It was a huge tomb with very brightly coloured ‘Egyptian’ story paintings everywhere, including all over the massive ceiling. The tombs were simply incredible. However it was very, very, very hot, there was lots of stairs to climb and we were way underground and it was physically demanding.
We left this area and next went to the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, just down the road a bit. This is a massive temple set back into the towering rock canyon walls but most of it is a reconstruction. Never the less it was a colossal building but was again physically demanding due to the heat and distances walked and climbed.
We then visited a nearby ‘Alabaster’ factory, of which there are literally dozens, but our guide obviously had his favourite. We were shown how hand made granite, basalt and alabaster pots are made etc. etc. Joy purchased a green phosphorus statue of the ‘cat’ the same as the large papyrus painting we have framed on the living room wall. The phosphorus is quarried locally and is a beautiful green colour that naturally glows in the dark.
On the way back to the boat we drove past and got information from Ishmael about a number of other archaeological sites of interest. There is just no way in the time we had available that you could get to everything that was there.
We got back to the boat around 2pm and they had been holding lunch for us.
After lunch a group of us wandered a little way into Luxor near the boat. Some needed an ATM and we wanted to try to purchase a syringe and needle at the Pharmacy so a nurse on board who was part of our ‘team’ could give her the B12. This was a different experience!!!to put it mildly. A sign on the pharmacy door stated that all medicines were available for purchase over the counter. The pharmacist spoke and understood English reasonably well so we didn’t need the note from one of the crew with ‘hypodermic syringe ad needle’ written in Arabic. However what did get lost in the translation was that we already had the, in NZ anyway, prescription only B12 ampoule from our own doctor. The chemist was happy to sell us one over the counter!!!
Anyway got the needle and some Egyptian pounds from the ATM, ran the usual gauntlet of vendors, kids, taxi drivers and horse and cart drivers, and made it back to the boat relatively unscathed.
We got back to a message from our travel company that we had a 5am pickup the next morning for our prebooked hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings. Just what we needed, another really early morning!!! We knew it would be an early start but not quite that early.
Anyway it was the last night on board and one had to be social and attend some of the last night party with the team and after dinner that’s what happened. However we didn’t stay up too late and hit the sack expecting about 6 and a half hours sleep. I especially had one of those sleepless nights that seem to occur all too frequently and when I woke at 4.25am just before the alarm went off, I’d probably had less than 4 hours ‘light sleep’. Joy wasn’t much better. We threw some clothes on and headed up for the 5am pickup … on time…..and off to the river taxi area for a quick dash across to the West Bank only to sit on the boat for 40 minutes and wait for others. Wasn’t all that impressed!! Finally got to the balloon ‘tarmac’, a big open area near the entrance to the Valley of the Kings and there must have been over 200 people waiting for rides. However over a dozen balloons were there an each has a large basket carrying 16 – 20 people plus pilot. We eventually took off around 6.35am and drifted with the breeze no where near the VOKs but I suppose we could sort of see where it was. However we got the most amazing birds eye view of Queen Hs temple (see above) and a lot of other ruins plus that whole Luxor/Nile area. It was brilliant. We drifted for about 40 minutes before a perfect landing in a ploughed field beside a paddock of corn and headed back to the boat for a late breakfast and an 8.30 start to the tour for the day. No time for a shower, that came later in the day. However it was certainly a great experience, one not to be missed.
We hit the ground running, albeit very tired, and headed to the Karnak Temple first up. This is right in Luxor and another truly amazing place. Huge columns etc. etc. but again very, very hot and a lot of walking. Some of it is still being excavated and only recently they found some old Roman ruins on the edge of it and moved a whole lot of families out of their homes and demolished them so they could excavate the ruins.
Next came the Temple of Luxor and this is a complex that covers a huge area. In ancient times both Karnak and Luxor Temples were linked by an avenue of Sphinks over a kilometre lone. Many of the sphinxs have been unearthed and the old avenue is slowly being cleared of all the modern buildings on top and is being excavated and reinstated. Our guide reckons you will be bale to walk between the two temples along the avenue of sphinxs again within 2 years. Nothing seems to stand in the way of uncovering and preserving their historical sites as we saw at Abu Simbel and Philae. However another huge complex and incredible heat and lots of walking again. We were shattered by the time we got back to the boat around 1pm.
We had arranged earlier, and paid extra, to keep our rooms until we were to be picked up to go to the airport and this allowed us to have a shower and pack up at a more leisurely pace. Also paid extra to have lunch on board.
We felt a little more human after a shower and lunch but we still very tired. We packed up and had a hour to relax and have a cold diet pepsi with the rest of our team who were all leaving Luxor for Cairo on the same flight as us.
Off to the airport and eventually flew to Cairo where were said our farewells to the rest of the group we had been with for 3 days. Really neat people and I’m sure we will stay in touch.
We then flew on from Cairo to Sharm El Sheik. BUT our flight wasn’t until 10.30pm so we had 3 hours in the Cairo departure lounge, a one hour flight and then a 30 minute drive to the hotel and check in.
You might well imagine just how we both felt by this time. We were running on adrenaline well and truly.
We were even more impressed when our tour company rep told us we were to be picked up at 7am in the morning for our trip to Mount Sinai and the St. Katherine Monastry.
By the time we got checked in and shown our ‘suite’ ( and I mean suite in the biggest sense – we have never stayed in a hotel suite that is so huge, it’s bigger that a two bedroomed house!!) it was after 1am before we got to bed and up at 6am again!!!! MAD MAD MAD!!!!
Anyway up we got and away we went with a breakfast box from the hotel which we ate in the 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser that was our vehicle for the day, not the most comfortable of rides with seats going sideways along the cab. I insisted that Joy sit in the front with the driver as she would never have made it otherwise. 250km drive to the Monastery sitting side saddle on low seats???
Leaving the hotel and heading into the Sinai Desert gave us our first look at Sharm. It is spread along the Red Sea Coast around a number of Bays and has 192 hotels and all of them from what we could see at the top end of the market and huge. It is a real mix of western and Egyptian with shops more like the western style. It is very busy, or appears that way to us compared with what we have seen in the other tourist areas of Egypt we have been in. It seems to cater mainly for Russians and Eastern Europeans, Germans and Brits and there were a lot of big tourist coaches on the road today.
The drive to Mount Sinai, or ‘Moses Mountain’ as they cal it here, was 250kms of drive through arid desert, only broken up by the very occasional Bedouin village and believe me, they don’t appears to have changed at all for thousands of years. The only thing we did notice was that the Egyptian government has built a number of very large and very ‘flash’ schools out in the desert for the Bedouin and any local Egyptians that might want to travel. There were a lot of them along the way. A few herds of ‘wild’ camel were also wandering around. The landscape is not dissimilar in many ways to what we saw at the Grand Canyon and indeed, there are a number of large canyons in the Sinai although we didn’t go to any of them. Very little vegetation on the huge rocky mountains and, of course, sand everywhere.
St. Katherines Monastery was built around the 16th century, I think, is on the site that Moses confronted the ‘burning bush’ and a whole lot of other Old Testament happenings. Of course, Mount Sinai where he was delivered the tablets with the ten commandments is just up the hill further so the whole place has huge significance in both the Christian and Moslem faiths.
The Monastery is still a ‘working’ one with 30 monks living there, mainly Greek . The church of St. Katherine inside the Monastery was something to behold and unfortunately NO PHOTOS allowed so if you haven’t been, you’ll have to take our word for it. ‘THE’ burning bush is still just at the back of the church and the museum on site has Christian icons and other religious icons going way back. If you want you can walk up St. Katherines Mountain, the one directly behind the Monastery and the next one from Moses Mountain, leaving at 3am and trekking 3 hours and climbing a rough track with 750 steep stairs at the top, to watch the sunrise and then come down again. We passed on that one!!!! But we could see the track, at least.
On the way back we stopped at a site that has a lot of ‘writing’ carved into a stony outcrop just off the road. This is in ‘hebrew’, Greek, Arabic and other languages and has been done by pilgrims walking to this holy place over the centuries.
We also walked through the sand and over a pass and looked down on a real oasis in the desert. A very old and famous well is at the centre of it and Bedouin still live there and it was quite incredible to see this bright green patch in the middle of the desert.
Got back, eventually around 3pm and relaxed for an hour before taking a taxi into Naama Bay, the next one along from where our hotel is and the main CBD area for Sharm. Believe it, or not, there is a Hard Rock Café there and , of course, Joy just had to get the Tshirt. We had a diet coke and some potato skins while we were there for lunch and then wandered back through the shopping centre to where our taxi was to pick us up. Sharm was busy with mainly Russian sounding people.
Back at the hotel at 6pm and blog time and then we had a late dinner and then some good news. Praise the Lord, we don’t get picked up until 9am in the morning to head off on the next part of the journey, an all day ferry ride from the Sinai port of Nuweiba to the Jordan port of Aqaba where we meet our guide who will introduce us to our hosts for that evening, the local Bedouins, who we will be staying with at their desert camp for the night near Wadi Rum.
So that’s the last few days. Some incredible sights and sites and experiences albeit it just a tad tiring BUT we are still standing, just, and looking forward to an earlyish night tonight.
Catch you all as internet access permits over the next few days.


Sorry but no photos again at the end of this rather long one as the internet access is again iffy and terribly expensive so I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching for photos and then have them take an age to download, so sorry about that. Will try to catch us with some photos later on.

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Comments

[Craig]

Holy Moses Batman!!
Crikey by the sounds of it you guys are gonna need a holiday after the holiday...But enough of the sympathy..Sounds like an amazing time had by all and well worth the short sleeps..Lucky you guys are young and able to handle it?? Save yourselves for Petra its worth it!! Enjoy and travel safe.