Blogs from Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa - page 80

David and I went to Luxor, Egypt for a week away to the heat and sunshine. And HOT it was - and the sun never stopped shining! We managed to pack in quite a lot during the week, lazing round the pool as well as a balloon flight over the river Nile, a trip into the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens on the west bank of the Nile (see Thebes Travelblog entry) and visits to Luxor Temple, Karnak Temple and Luxor Museum. The Luxor Museum was much smaller than the museum in Cairo - but more manageable and well laid out and labelled. There were chariots and bows and arrows from Tutankamun's tomb, a couple of mummies, one still with hair, and lots of great statues and figures. We walked along ... read more

write down your name on the wall of the stones in the valley of the kings and climb to its top finding the times difficulty passing by watching couple of bikes from a distance, our travel and the grain of the sands are dancing in thebes a ray od sunlight a gift from the ancient of sun god amon-re ra pushing the inert gases warmering the ground of mother earth at the gate of colossi of memnon maat-kau-re ra-setep-meri-amen memnon the legend who killed by achilles' sword in the battle of troy how far those bikes will travel passing the sugarcane fields the old catacombs the coptic cross; ankh reading every single word in their holy book bi-lingual arabic and greek saint tawdros el marsekiy among the sands i already found the ancient legends the conquers ... read more

I had a clever and witty blog, all typed up on my friend's computer that I was planning on uploading, but ... something got messed up somewhere along the way with the file format and all (how I hate windows), and the file is corrupt (due to "long lines"), and so I can't upload it... I'm heading out to Sudan in a few minutes, and will be there for about a month... don't expect to receive any emails or updates from me, since it is a real 3rd world country, and I've heard reports of an hour of internet costing $15. Apologies for the anticlimactic end to Egypt... hopefully I'll have the opportunity to upload it sometime later.... read more

As we were finishing up our Arabic Language course, we had the option of adding on a Nile cruise for $130. At this price, why not? The cruise was from the southern city of Aswan to the Ancient Egyptian city of Luxor. We took an overnight train from Cairo down to Aswan. We were in first class so it was not too bad, but upon arrival, I had the feeling reminiscent of a good long trans-oceanic flight. Once we all got used to the idea of having traveled south for half a day and now being in ‘upper Egypt’, we started to savor being in a really really hot part of the country. The savoring lasted for about 5 minutes, after which we initiated an ongoing mission of finding ways to avoid the sun. I will ... read more

The tour we were booked on this morning didnt turn up. After hassling the guy in the hostel for a bit - he wasnt bothered that we had paid already! - he spoke to someone on the phone then wandered into the street and flagged down the first passing minibus full of tourists. This he claimed was our tour, but... still, it was going where we wanted to go. We drove about 7km from Luxor until we reached a bridge over the Nile. Then of course, we had to drive all the way back again as the tombs we were going to are pretty much across from Karnak. We went to the Valley of the Queens first, a bit of a misnomer as there are not only Queens buried here but also high officials and royal ... read more