Part Deux

After spending a few days in Cairo, it was off to see the sights, starting with the tombs and temples of Luxor. Luxor is in Upper Egypt, which I learned means that it's south of Cairo. You should also know that the Nile flows north, so the water at Luxor is actually clean and beautiful rather than polluted and full of unidentifiable floaty things like it is in Cairo. Anywho, the flight to Luxor was rather interesting. My eyelash curler was nearly confiscated by one of the airport security guys, which is surprising considering the knife that we saw them let the guy before us take onto the plane. An interesting concept. Well, Keith didn't notice because he was out before the plane left the ground, but the pilot kept gunning it and then slamming on the breaks (as much as a pilot can do when flying a huge plane) and we were moving up and down like a kid on a teeter-totter. During the landing, gasps could be heard throughout the cabin and there was applause and a wide-spread sigh of relief when the plane stopped wobbling and touched down safely. If only those people had been on the flight we took a few days later to Sharm! The Luxor ride was nothing!

The view from our hotel room was beautiful as shown below and the tv even greeted us with something like "Welcome Mortensen Kelin Mr." What an inviting welcome! The hotel was full of rich, older people who enjoyed staring at us. I felt like a celebrity, minus the drug addiction. I guess we stood out with our backpacks and jeans. Or perhaps we're just THAT good-looking...
Since we arrived in the afternoon, we decided to take a walk down the Nile to a little temple called Luxor. It was so awesome! So, as my tour guide, Keith, told me, the temple was discovered fairly recently because it was buried by tons of sand for thousands of years. In fact, there is a mosque build on top of part of it. Now that the whole temple has been unearthed, the door to the mosque is something like 30 feet in the air! Very cool and very old! It's really too bad that huge parts of it have collapsed over the years. It would have been a whole new level of amazing to have been able to see the temple when it was completely in tact and bearing its original colors. After touring the temple and a photography lesson, we headed to one of the little restaurants on the river to watch the sunset.
Oh, I almost forgot the mention this guy! Stories say that he was a councilman who wanted to wage war against somebody, I dunno who, sorry. Well, when he didn't receive support, he decided that he'd make his own army. He accomplished this task by sleeping with all of the women in the land and getting them pregnant. This made all of the other men angry, so they cut off one of his legs. As you can see, as a hieroglyph, he has only one leg. Since he was so successful at reproducing, he has become a symbol of fertility in modern times and it is considered to be good luck (in the realm of fertility I suppose), to rub his phallus, hence the blackness in that general region.Dinner that evening was eaten in an Egyptian restaurant at the hotel. The restaurant was by the pool and overlooking the river, so that was neat, but the evening got even more "neat." About half way through dinner, the waiter, very excitedly announced that there was going to be a bellydancer! Having never seen a bellydancer, I was intrigued...not for long, however. While I'm told that bellydancers have bellys, she had a little more than I expected, and she was super awkward! There was another older couple in the restaurant and us, and the dancer kind of wandered from one table to the other doing her thing. The weird part was that she was constantly looking over her shoulder and watching her reflection in the window. She also had a tissue in her hand which she was using to wipe the sweat from her face and chest. In doing so, she managed to collect little bits of tissue on her face. Special! A few minutes after we made our great escape, the other couple from the restaurant caught up with us and gave us a hard time for leaving them all alone with her! It was pretty funny!

We woke early the next morning with the mission of finding a guide for a tour of the Valley of the Kings. We arranged for a driver and a guide, but when we went to get into the van, there was no guide. We pretty much got ripped off, but ended up getting the guide and the tour. We went into 3 tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It's a wonder to me that anyone ever found the entrances in the first place. The tombs were concealed in the mountains and hills in order to prevent them from being robbed. It sort of worked. Our tour guide was really nice, but didn't speak English incredibly well. He kept talking about something that I interpreted to be "modification" and Keith interpreted to be "on vacation." Turns out he was saying "mummification" minus a few syllables. It all makes a lot more sense now...

Scaffolding is a big plus!

Many steps and many dollars later, we headed back to town. We stopped for lunch at the restaurant we had been to the night before and ended up staying there for the rest of the afternoon. We were planning to go to Karnak Temple, but we were both exhausted and my knees, though chubby, were not feeling up to the occasion. I guess we'll have to go back someday. Darn! As a side note, you, especially if you are a female, should carry paper and had sanitizer with you at all time in Egypt. The restroom along the river was less-than-clean and lacking important supplies, to say it politely. Just an fyi.

We headed back to the hotel early so that we could get to the airport plenty early for our flight that was taking off at 7:oo pm. The travel agency had arranged a driver and he told us that he would be at the hotel to pick us up at 5:00. He lied. Keith made several calls to the travel agency and they eventually sent the driver over. He arrived at 5:45. Not only did he arrive late, but he was probably the slowest driver in Egypt. We should have taken one of those buggies with the emaciated horses pulling them. Might have been just as fast. Luckily, we did arrive early enough to catch our flight. So ends Luxor, for now...