Advertisement
Published: February 15th 2007
Edit Blog Post
The convoy to Luxor might be a fine way to keep the Islamists at bay, but it’s an even better way to steer you into the hands of the city’s infamous touts. There’s no time to brace yourself for the onslaught; our driver - a wily cat who must make half his salary on commission - picks up a couple of young hustlers on the city’s outskirts. In all my travels, this is a first. I’ve seen hotel touts milling mischievously around bus stations, or waiting on train platforms with a dubious claim that my hotel’s been overbooked. But here they clamber onboard our minibus and squeeze into the seats, smiling, smooth-talking, all but taking pictures with us and writing postcards to our moms.
That most of us are already booked into hotels across town doesn’t slow them. There’s a Japanese girl holding out in the back, a German couple with their faces warily scrunched up over a guidebook. One of the touts - his linen suit wrinkled, his face lean and predatory - starts to rattle off the names of the competition. He has a complaint for each of them: cold showers, dirty towels. The Germans are
making anxious eye signals and conferring under their breaths. In a move of boundless treachery, the driver kills the engine and gets out to smoke a cigarette.
We’ve stopped in front of a budget hotel, the owner - a plump, ruddy French woman - coming out to greet us. She talks her place up like it’s the Nile Hilton, extolling the amenities of a hotel whose beds start at 10 Egyptian pounds - about US$1.80 - a night. A dubious letter is produced, a complaint written to the editors of
Lonely Planet about a hotel some of the others are considering, signed by “Michael (German)”. Improbably, a bleary-eyed South African is rolled out to sing the hotel’s praises. We suspect they’re holding his clean sheets hostage until he’s managed to rope in more guests. Later, after two of our friends have checked in, we’ll find out that he’s actually a Frenchman from Corsica. He also happens to be married to the owner.
It’s an informative introduction to the city, the most notorious of the country’s tourist traps. The sheer concentration of Luxor’s tombs and temples, scattered around a lush stretch of Nile, makes it a favorite for tour
groups and luxury cruise lines. In the morning a caravan of taxis and tour buses barrels across a patchwork of farms, the men in their
gelabbiyah hacking and digging in the fields. We wave to young kids puttering along beside us on their scooters, their faces erupting into wide grins as they give us a thumbs-up. In the parking lot of the Valley of the Kings, or the Temple of Karnak, throngs of white-haired tourists are slathering sunscreen onto their arms and their pink noses, the African sun intense, the heat baking the tarmac. There are American men in baseball caps,
USS Arizona Memorial or
Pebble Beach Pro-Am stitched across in slick cursive. There are English men in safari hats, looking for all the world like they’re set to plug a couple of lions in the Serengeti. Outside the tomb of Tuthmosis we bump into Giorgio, the Irishman who’d spent most of our felucca ride buried in his book. He’s holding his sandals and walking gingerly in bare feet, his hair tucked up under a
kuffiyah. “There’s so much energy in the earth here,” he says, “you just need to absorb it through your feet.” A line that, as me
and Paul will later agree, we just couldn’t see coming.
We visit the tombs of the ancient kings, dug into the sides of craggy cliff faces, then hike a rocky path until we’re high above the valley. Below we can see the brightly colored windbreakers and white walking shoes shuffling from tomb to tomb. A few lone clouds dot the sky, their shadows moving across the valley floor. The place looks like millions of years of geological grumbling and shifting at work, massive ruptures that sent up jagged cliffs and pounded the rocks into rubble. It’s the perfect setting for these tombs, this endless processional of death. That most of the tourists themselves are pushing the century mark makes for a poignance they’d probably prefer to ignore.
We circle the mountain and catch sight of the Nile, shimmering beneath the haze and the mid-day sun. There’s a quilt of farmland spread beside it; smoke rises from the burning crops. A young guy in a
gelabbiyah and Yankees cap materializes from behind the boulders, hoping to point the way into the valley. He pulls a couple of trinkets from his pocket, wrapped in a bundle of newspaper. “I make
you a good price,” he says, showing us a gleaming piece of rock we’ve seen in all the tourist shops and asking for twenty American bucks. We pass two young Japanese couples in expensive sneakers, looking beleaguered in the heat. A soldier sits in the shade of a checkpoint above us, lazily hugging a rifle to his chest.
In the valley, at the Temple of Hatshepsut, we’re given a pharaoh’s welcome. There’s a pack of young guys from Cairo who want us to pose in all their pictures. Never mind the magnificent temple that’s so well-preserved, after all these years, that it looks like a Hollywood set. They buddy up beside us in twos and threes, snapping away, laughing wildly, pumping our hands as if the fact of our American births had taken years of training to accomplish. One young kid has more or less affixed himself to Paul’s hip. He’s wearing cheap plastic shades and a button-down denim shirt, his ill-fitting jeans hitched above his waist. You can easily imagine the sorts of hieroglyphics that would’ve been written about him in the schoolyard 3,000 years ago. But here, beaming, clicking away on his disposable camera, he’s quite possibly
crowned himself the coolest kid in Egypt.
We’re covering the sights at a brutal clip, our schedule packed for the two long days we’ll spend in the city. Mimo, our portly point-man in Luxor, greets us in the hotel lobby with a cheerful grin, his shirt sloppily tucked in, his stomach looping below the belt. There’s a certain sadism to a job like his, to the way he smiles and wisecracks and adjusts the crotch of his pants while telling us the taxi will pick us up at eight the next morning. I’m reminded of the old Gestapo guards, the paper-pushers of the Third Reich, who had to know exactly what they were up to. When he laughs it sounds like a death rattle, an intimation of mortality that no amount of
falafel sandwiches will help me to erase.
These days of tramping through the dust and laboring under the sun have wrecked me. On the doorknob of my soul is a little sign that says “Out to Lunch.” When we meet some friends for a farewell meal, I’m practically snoozing into the
moussaka. Quinn wants to know why I look so bummed. I try to put my finger on it. “I’m not eating enough, I’m not sleeping enough, I’m dehydrated, my feet hurt, I spent six hours in the sun.”
Though I’m hardly one to complain.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.477s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 25; qc: 127; dbt: 0.2612s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb