…..and in many ways it is one of the most amazing sites I’ve ever visited. Reportedly it would take a week to visit everything here but I selected the things I was most interested in and designed a custom one-day trip. I flew from Cairo at 5:00 am and arrived in Luxor an hour later after the sun was up. I flew on an old Airbus 321 that looked like it should have been scrap-piled ten years ago but I didn’t worry about it until after the sun had come up and I glanced outside the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. In fact, I had to take a photo: That’s right folks, that’s duct tape on the aircraft wing!!!A
nyway the city tour was fantastic. We started in the Valley of the Kings and I visited four underground burial tombs of Egyptian kings including the burial crypt of Tutankhamen, or King Tut, which involved descending a ramp deep underground into the chamber which displays the burial coffin with his mummy inside. I also visited the tombs of three of the Ramses kings but Tut was the highlight. Cameras weren’t allowed inside, so here’s one of me at the top. Since the interesting stuff was underground and no photos were allowed, I didn’t get a lot of pictures but here’s another one I found interesting involving caves in the cliffs above the tombs. These were caves where the Christians lived to escape persecution during the Roman occupation. The Coptic Christians occupied this area around 500 BC and, frankly, desecrated many of the h
ieroglyphics and beautiful wall pictures. The ancient Egyptian
s recorded many of their pictures in the nude and the Coptic’s came in and chiseled out naked parts of the anatomies. Kind of an ancient Moral Majority I guess but they desecrated a lot of antiquities forever.From the Valley of the Kings I went to the Hatshepsut Temple—an ancient mummification, or mortuary, temple that was discovered around 1850 completely buried under the sand. It’s still being reclaimed from the dessert but is yielding a treasure of information and antiquities.
The highlights of the day, however, were the two temples on the east bank of the Nile: Luxor Temple and Karnak Temple. Considered a showpiece of Pharaonic temple architecture, Luxor was built by a series of Pharaohs and modified by Alexander the Great. With a massive stone entrance with a giant obelisk and two solid stone colossi of Ramses II, the entrance is awe-inspiring but the temple inside, dominated by columns, is even more so. It’s a massive complex, still under renovation and excavation.Nearby Karnak, or Temple of Amun, is even more breathtaking. Covering
over 40 acres, you enter through another massive entrance lined with rows of stones sphinx and pass imposing statues of Ramses II into the most amazing series of stone columns I’ve seen anywhere: A massive forest of 134 columns that the pictures here don’t do justice to. Inside the temple, you wander through a series of passageways, alleys, dead-ends, hidden staircases and water pools—all covered with ancient hieroglyphics and artwork. I spent three hours in it and then went back after dark and attended a light and sound show where they lead you through the whole complex at night. We had a full moon and sky full of stars which made it even more magical.
I caught a midnight flight back to Cairo and even through I was dead tired I couldn’t sleep—I kept having visions
of duct tape……
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