Exploring Upper Egypt - Aswan and Luxor

Why can’t I keep up with this thing? Actually I know why. It’s laziness, plain and simple. This will be an attempted abbreviated version to try to help me catch up. After our awesome camping trip, we decided to book the “luxury” overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. Luxury it was not, but we did have our own two-berth cabin and got a good night’s rest. The real problem was the crummy food they served us - this was below airplane food. After a month and half traveling South America and almost a week in Egypt, the food on the luxury sleeper train made us sick. Go figure. We never were too sick (the vomit streak is still intact), but it was a lingering sickness that forced us to alter our plans for the next week. The plan had been to stay in Aswan for a couple nights, then Luxor for a couple before heading to the Sinai Peninsula. Steph was not ready to travel after two days, so we ended up staying 3 nights in Aswan. I wish I could say we managed to do a lot of sightseeing despite our illness, but we didn’t. Probably the main reason people come to Aswan is to use it as a base to travel further up the Nile to Abu Simbel. Luckily, we hit a lull in our sickness for enough time to make the 6-hour round-trip tour to this ancient temple. It probably didn't help us get over our sickness, but we were up at 4am waiting for our minibus transport. For security reasons (Abu Simbel is very near the Sudan border), all the tour buses form a police-escorted convoy to make the 3-hour trek. Abu Simbel is currently located on the shores of Lake Nasser, which was formed when a huge dam, known as the High Dam, was built on the Nile to generate electricity and control the annual floods (ironically, these floods are what made life possible in ancient Egypt since they left a layer of fertile silt once the floodwaters receded). I say Abu Simbel is “currently” located here because it was originally located on the banks of the Nile, as a warning of the power of the Egyptian empire to anyone traveling downstream. I’m not sure at what point they realized this, but as the waters of Lake Nasser rose due to the building of the High Dam, Abu Simbel was going to be swallowed up. All sorts of ideas were brought to the table to save Abu Simbel, one of them being to build a transparent dam around it, with underwater viewing chambers for tourists. Though this would have been cool, they eventually decided to move this massive rock temple. They cut everything into huge pieces, literally tore away the whole mountain that the temple was carved into, and moved piece by piece to safety. It cost something like $20 million dollars and was a heck of a feat.

Being in southern Egypt, even at around 8am as we toured the site, it was hot. Ridiculously hot. We’ve had to delete every picture of ourselves from the site because we were so hot and sweaty and looked awful. The size of it was impressive, doubly impressive that they managed to relocate something so massive, but overall it wasn’t that much different than other, more easily accessible, attractions in Upper Egypt. Still, we’re glad we went as we would have been disappointed not to see it. The other attractions in Aswan, however, didn’t get checked off by us. There’s another temple, Philae, that had to be relocated from the rising lake waters and is currently located on an island in the lake (we did see it from the bus). There’s the unfinished obelisk, which is pretty self-explanatory except to say that it was set to be the largest obelisk in Egypt until a crack developed during construction leaving the thing sitting there... unfinished. The stretch of Nile around Aswan is really cool. Apparently this is the first cataracts, or rapids, that you cross coming upstream, but I didn’t see anything more than a few ripples. My only regret was that we didn’t get to take a felucca ride (Egyptian sailboat), but nothing I could offer was going to get Steph in a boat at that time. We spent the rest of our time in Aswan sitting in our hotel room (they had about 300 channels of weird Arabic TV, but had a few American stations in English, so we watched a lot of CSI and Alias) and eating McDonald’s - give us a break, it was the safest option we could find having already felt sick.

For some reason I like saying "the river Nile"

Eventually we felt well enough to leave Aswan and head downriver to Luxor, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt formerly known as Thebes. In case all this Upper/Lower Egypt, upstream/downstream, North/South stuff is confusing to you, you’re not alone. I think I’ve got it down now, though. Upper Egypt is the southern part of Egypt because this is further up the Nile (which of course flows south to north), while Lower Egypt is obviously further downstream at the lowest sections of the Nile, including Cairo and the vast Nile Delta. Got it? Anyways, we took the 2nd class train from Aswan to Luxor with all the locals. It was going well until the train started getting really crowded as we got closer to Luxor and they started moving us from seat to seat until we gave up and went to sit in 1st class. The ticket guy started to question us but let it slide and engaged us in the typical conversation we have with locals in the Middle East:
“Where are you from?”
“the United States”
“Where?”
“America”
“Ohhh, America! Obammmaaaa!!” Accompanied by a big smile and a thumbs up.

Luxor is divided into two parts - the East Bank of the Nile and the West Bank. The sun was a very important symbol to the ancient Egyptians - in fact, the sun god Ra was probably the most important god, later combined with local Luxor god Amun to form Amun-Ra, the “king of gods“ (it‘s very confusing). The sun rising every morning represents life and the sun setting every evening represents death. So, the East Bank is where the temples were located - to be used for religious purposes and celebrations. Alternatively, the West Bank is where the tombs and embalming temples are located. Since we were staying on the East Bank, we spent our first day exploring the sites on this side of the river. We were surprised to find Luxor Temple smack-dab in the middle of town. This worked out great for us - no taxi to get there and we could view the ruins easily from behind the fence for free. Luxor Temple was originally built by Amenhotep III in around 1380 BC (and expanded upon many times after). Remember that name because he will come up again. He probably wasn’t even a teenager at his coronation, but was lucky to inherit a relatively stable and flourishing empire. Without the distraction of wars and famines, he was left to build himself shrines and temples to underscore his greatness and that of Egypt. (Can you tell I’m referencing my book just a little?) Anyways, Luxor Temple was mainly used once a year during the Opet festival which basically celebrated the pharaoh’s role as god on earth. It’s big and pretty cool, but not really worth the entrance fee, especially considering what is nearby…

Luxor Temple - notice the hundreds of piles of rubble that they don't know what to do with

After our free tour of Luxor Temple (walking around the perimeter fence), we took a taxi to the mack-daddy of temples - Karnak. “The spiritual heart of the nation,” Karnak is a massive religious complex - one of the largest ever built. It’s big enough to accommodate the world’s largest cathedral, synagogue, Buddhist temple, church, and mosque in one. This is a little misleading, though, because it’s a huge complex and not just one large building. There is, however, one huge building called the Great Hypostyle Hall, which is a big room with 134 huge pillars that are supposed to represent a papyrus swamp. It was a truly awesome sight. The pillars themselves as well as the surrounding walls were covered in hieroglyphics - even what was left of the ceiling. The rest of the complex included a big rectangular sacred lake and lots of obelisks, pillars, statues, and random little rooms. All of the hieroglyphics were amazing enough, but the paintings that have survived the years were incredible.

Ancient Egyptians were the first Yellow Jacket fans

That night we went on another free tour of Luxor Temple then to the market for some work on our haggling. We went into it knowing what we wanted and what we wanted to pay for it, which is the only way in Egypt where the shop keepers are very aggressive. Any uncertainty and you’ll end up buying a handkerchief for 20 bucks, or something like that. They’re good. Being prepared, we picked our shop, selected what we wanted, and haggled with the guy until we got our price. I’m sure we still overpaid by a lot, but we were still happy.

Luxor Temple at night

To see the sights on the West Bank, we opted for a tour through our hotel. Our guide, Aladdin, was really funny and very knowledgeable. He had studied archaeology in university in London and had a funny way of repeating random words (“You can always tell a Japanese tourist because they have cameras and umbrellas, cameras and umbrellas”). Our first stop were the Colossi of Memnon - two huge statues (almost 60 feet tall) of Amenhotep III that used to guard the entrance to his funerary temple but are all that’s left of the site.

Our next stop was Habu Temple. Habu Temple was the mortuary temple of Ramses III, which means it is where he was mummified. The temple took around 30 years to build for the sole purpose of mummification, which only took 70 days! It was good to have Aladdin there to explain some of the hieroglyphics. Many of them were related to war - Ramses casting down of his enemies, captured enemies being led back to Egypt where their hands, legs, and…ahem…other parts were cut off as punishment. Some hieroglyphics showed men wrestling and fencing - some of the first ever sports - as well as hunting and fishing. The temple was nice but not nearly as impressive as Karnak, but getting to hear what everything meant made it very memorable.

See if you can figure out what is happening in this scene. Hint: there is a pile of hands to the left 

Two guys fencing, or maybe just giving high-fives, with one guy saying "I win!"

In the mountains just beyond the West Bank is an area known as the Valley of the Kings. It’s very famous due to the discovery of King Tut’s tomb back in 1922 by Howard Carter. There are at least 60 tombs here though, in a very unassuming rocky valley. We weren’t expecting much when we got there, both due to the uninspiring location and the dark, dank, empty tombs we saw in the pyramids. Boy, were we wrong. With your entrance ticket you are allowed into 3 different tombs (only about 11 are open at a time), while adding King Tut’s effectively doubles the ticket price. We opted against this because everyone has told us it’s not worth the extra money as all the treasures that made the site so famous are in the Cairo museum, so we’d already seen them. What we did get to see blew us away. We went straight to the tomb of Ramses IV, or KV9 (they are numbered based on when they were discovered, so King Tut’s being the last to be discovered is KV62). Looking back I wish we had saved this for last, because it was breathtaking. Like I said earlier, we weren’t expecting much more than a long dark tunnel with a room at the end, so when we walked into a large square tunnel completely covered in beautifully painted hieroglyphics we were blown away. The colors were spectacular, I can’t even explain it. The only two problems are that guide’s aren’t allowed in and you’re not allowed to take photos, so we were left to wander through the tomb and make up our own stories of what the hieroglyphics told. It’s basically a long tunnel with some small rooms off to the sides for storage and a big room at the end that served as the burial chamber. The paintings on the ceiling of the burial chamber were especially impressive, though the whole experience left us in awe. We visited two other chambers, at this point I can’t even remember which ones. They were nearly as impressive but not as well presented, with glass walls on either side of the walkway to protect the walls. I’m officially in favor of this as some tourists cannot resist the urge to touch things (which we all get for some reason), but not having the glass certainly made KV9 much more beautiful.

ceiling of KV9, stolen from internet

The last stop on our tour was the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, a female king. Hatshepsut's father was a pharaoh but she had no brothers, so when he died her half-brother became king. As was practice back then, Hatshepsut naturally married her half-brother to strengthen the royal blood line. Eventually her husband died and her nephew took the throne but was only an infant, so Hatshepsut stepped in to rule and eventually claimed herself king and nobody objected. The incest that was common practice among royalty was rampant and was beginning to take it’s toll as many of the pharaohs are depicted with cone-shaped heads in hieroglyphics. Aladdin pointed it out to us and told us that it was considered a good thing to have a misshapen head. Times have really changed. Anyways, Hatshepsut’s temple is very pretty from the outside, but there’s no much to see inside and it was getting really hot so we took some pics and called it a day.

Next stop, Sinai.