Category: 2018 Middle East

We were picked up for our balloon ride at 3:50 this morning.  We collected up some other people and then headed to the river.  We got on one of the boats, had some breakfast and filled out paperwork.  There we met some very nice people from the Maldives and spoke with them about sailing around their homeland someday. They were very encouraging and eventually asked us to visit them if we ever made it there.

Once the Luxor airport tower declared the weather conditions satisfactory we went across the river and were loaded into vans for transport to the balloon launching area.  They were blowing up the balloons when we got there.  We were in a large basket with a capacity of 32.  We only had 26 so there was a little extra room for all.  The balloon ride was amazing.  It was beautiful to watch the sun rise on the West Bank.  The ride was calm, stable and we were never concerned.  We couldn’t take our cameras because the army has several installations close to theValley of the Kings and thus doesn’t want people taking high res photos. We were limited to our cell phone cameras.  We came down in a farming area and the crew had to pull us away from the active fields so that we wouldn’t damage the farmers crops.  Here are some pictures.

After we landed we stopped at a small restaurant to wait for our guide to pick us up.  We sat with our new Maldivian friends and had a coffee.  After about 1/2 hour Ahmed the Great picked us up and off we went to Valley of the Kings, where, for a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BC, rock cut tombs were excavated for the Pharaohs and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom (the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasties of Ancient Egypt).

With the 2005 discovery of a new chamber and the 2008 discovery of two further tomb entrances, the valley is known to contain 63 tombs and chambers (ranging in size from a simple pit to a complex tomb with over 120 chambers). It was the principal burial place of the major royal figures of the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as a number of privileged nobles. The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues as to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period. Almost all of the tombs seem to have been opened and robbed in antiquity, but they still give an idea of the opulence and power of the Pharaohs.  Here are a couple of pictures of the valley including people excavating.

Our tickets allowed us to go into 3 tombs.  Based on Ahmed’s recommendation we went into Ramesses IV, Ramesses II, Merenptah and Tutankhamen (we had paid extra for King Tut).  Each one was different but they were all amazing.  I found it very overwhelming to think about being inside a tomb which was almost 4,000 years old and a place that optimizes the royal families of ancient Eygpt.  Ahmed did a great job of explaining the process of entombing the pharoahs, their beliefs about the after life and what the images represent.  We didn’t take pictures but here are some that I found on the internet.

After Valley of the Kings we had some time to kill so we went to an alabaster showroom.  They explained how they shape the stone and then they took us into a showroom.  We liked a candle votive and were just curious about how much it would cost.  We didn’t want to buy it, but were just wondering.  Their original price was $80 but we ended up buying it for $20.

Next stop: Queen Hatshepsut mortuary temple. Queen Hatshepsut came to the throne of Egypt in 1478 BC and was the second confirmed female pharaoh.  According to Ahmed she usurped power from her step son.  Here are some pictures

Rick has been fighting a cold for last couple of days and between that and lack of sleep, he was feeling pretty bad by this time.  We were supposed to go to lunch, but he just wanted to go back to the hotel where he took a short nap and then we had lunch.  After lunch he slept for most of the rest of the day while I worked on the blog.

I know it’s just the beginning of the trip but it’s hard to image we are going to have another day as wonderful as this.  Words can’t describe it.

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.

 

Happy 12th birthday Josh!  I can’t believe you are 12.

Not much to report.  The flights to Frankfurt and Cairo were uneventful and largely sleepless.  We were met in Cairo by our tour company who whisked us through immigration.  We drove for about a hour, through rush hour traffic, to our hotel.  We are staying at the Sheraton which is a very nice hotel overlooking the Nile.  After getting settled in our room we explored the hotel a little.  The area around the hotel didn’t look great and our guide, Mustafa, told us that we would be approached by aggressive vendors so we decided to eat at the Egyptian restaurant in the hotel.  Rick got hummus, roasted beet salad, and tameeya.  I had chicken shawarma.  Everything was great.  After dinner we fell into bed to get soon very needed sleep in preparation for an early 4:30 AM departure for Luxor.