We were up very early to catch a 7:30 flight to Luxor. Our guide, Mustafa, picked us up at 4:30am. There’s no traffic at 4:30 so the trip that took over an hour the evening before took us 20 minutes this morning. We had time at the airport to get coffee and eat the box breakfasts provided by the hotel.
The short one hour flight was uneventful and we were met at Luxor airport by our local tour leader, Ahmed, and our driver. We arrived at our hotel by 9:30. We were scheduled for lunch at 1 and our tour was scheduled to start at 2 so we had a couple of hours to get settled. Our hotel is on the east shore of the Nile. It has a beautiful pool area overlooking the Nile and the West Bank, where the Valley of the Kings is visable in the distance. Here are some pictures of the hotel, the West Bank, and the Nile.
Ahmed picked us up at the hotel and took us to a local restaurant, El Hussein, for lunch. The food was great and we really enjoyed getting to know Ahmed. He graduated from college in June with a degree in English and started working for our travel company in August. He lives in Cairo but is stationed Luxor for the next three months. After lunch we came back to the hotel where we meet our tour guide, again named Ahmed (we called him Ahmed the Great, ATG, to differentiate between the two). ATG was a high school teacher who taught Egyptian history for many years before becoming a tour guide. He has a great sense of humor. Here he is acting like a pharaoh and walking like an Egyptian.
Luxor, also called Thebes by the Greeks, was the Egyptian capital during the 16th–11th centuries B.C. Our first stop was Karnak Temple. The temple was started around 2055 BC, augmented over the next 500 years and used for about 2100 years. It is the second largest temple complex in the world (Angkor Wat is the largest). The temple is dedicated to Amun, his wife, Mut, and his son, the moon god, Khonsu. Here are a couple of renderings I found on the internet of what it might have looked like in its prime.
Here are some pictures of what it looks like today.
From Karnak we went to Luxor Temple. An avenue of sphinxes runs the entire 3 kilometers between Karnak and Luxor temples connect the two sites. This avenue is currently under excavation.
Amenhotep III, one of the great builders of ancient Egypt, started constructingthe temple during his New Kingdom reign, which lasted from 1390 to 1352 BC. Ramesses II also make significant contribution to the temple. ATG gave us a lot of information on the statues and hieroglyphs.
It was getting dark while we were there so I couldn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked. Here are a few:
Luckily we had a big lunch because that evening we went to the Karnak Temple sound and light show. Rick is interested in photographing the various temples at night. The show was a little cheesy but here are a couple of his pictures.
I was so tired because we had gotten up at 3:30 that I fell asleep at the end of the show. We got back to the hotel and immediately went to bed because we have to get up very early for a hot air sunrise balloon ride.