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One day in Luxor The final stop on our tour of Egypt was a half day excursion in Luxor with Spring Tours. We arrived in Luxor by the non tourist train at about 10pm the previous evening and then made our way to the Nefertiti hotel by foot. When I booked the hotel we had been planning on arriving at the hotel at around midnight and they offer a free pickup service as it is only a short distance to the station; as we were early I thought it easier just to walk it. I had a small map and some rough directions from their website but we got there in the end. We finished off the night with some food at the restaurant outside the hotel followed by a quick scouting of the local area. The one thing we didn't realise at this point was how close the MacDonald's was!! Valley of the Kings The first stop on our private tour was the Valley of the Kings and visits to three different subterranean tombs; the map of each is shown below in the images section. Like a lot of the places in Egypt they don't allow people to use cameras inside of the tombs through fear that repeated flashes would damage the colours. Two German women obviously didn't take this advice seriously and I saw some local security people take their cameras and look at some of the pictures they had been taking. As a general rule the tombs were pretty deep and very humid, but unlike with the temple at Abu Simbel, nearly all of the decoration was painted onto the rock rather than carved into it. The expectation when you go these famous tombs is that they will be gigantic inside and well decorated, but some were just well made caverns with little detail. Tourists were only allowed to enter a small number of the many temples in the Valley of the Kings and there were lots of local people excavating around some of the tombs by hand. Perhaps they were searching for other tombs, but I would have thought that seismic approach would be more effective at detailing where all of the temples would be and hence they would have all been found by now. Temple of Hatshepsut The next stop on our tour was Hatshepsut temple and by this time it was getting very hot. A lot of my sun tan from the holiday came from this one scorching day!! Hatshepsut temple has a large front and a passage which leads into the mountain, when we reached the top of the temple I saw a couple of western looking people milling around inside, perhaps doing their PhDs on something Egypt related. One consistent thing in Egypt is that everything seems to have been discovered by foreigners, yet they take every opportunity to rip off said foreigners to see these things. As you enter the site, there is 3D model which shows what the temple was expected to look like after it was constructed. Not much remains of this temple and we were told that a lot of the statues were smashed by Hatshepsuts' son when he regained his power from her. Some of the statues in the temple were incomplete and others had been visibly reconstructed from parts of different identical statues. |
