Egypt – Laying about in Luxor – Saturday 5 May

So 5am rolls round quicker than I’d like and the boys and I are all up and ready to go at 5:45am. Wesley got up and made us some toast – taking care of us and making sure we got safely on our way.

We got on the plane and safely made our way to Luxor. We’d only been on the ground for about 4 and half seconds and Colin had disappeared. Aidan and I were looking around and couldn’t find him. I swear he’s going to get himself in trouble wandering off in crazy countries… they always separate the weakest link from herd before they go in for the kill and every time I turned around Colin was someplace the rest of us weren’t!

Eventually we saw him waving at us though a glass door across the room. He’d gone outside (walking past 2 guards carrying large black guns) to have a smoke. Those ciggie’s are going to get him into trouble. He’d gone out for a smoke and the guards wouldn’t let him back in because he’d gone through an ‘exit only’ door. He was getting all cranky at us because he couldn’t get back to us and we hadn’t seen him waving at us. When I finally found him I went over to see what was going on and the guard said he wasn’t allowed back in. It was lucky that he’d gone out the door our meeter/greeter was taking us out too.

So the meeter/greeter man carries Colin’s bag to him and we get into the van and he drives us to the boat. Our boat – and by boat I mean luxury cruiser!! – is called Carnivale. Its got four levels of cabins and a bar and a pool on the open top deck. It‘s a nice boat, very similar to the one I was on last time I was here. I kind of mucked up this part of the tour. To try and get better flight times we ended up with an extra night in upper Egypt – my plan has been to have the extra night in Luxor so we had more time to see the east and west bank, but the timing of the boat meant we’ve ended up with an extra night in Aswan instead.

I was a bit annoyed actually with how this whole part of the tour started. We fly really early and I thought that was so we could get the tours underway and see lots of stuff. But then we got the boat and had to wait around for an hour for our rooms to be ready, then we waited all day before our first tour started. We spent the day just sitting on the deck of the boat, in and out of the pool. It was very very hot. Almost too hot.

Late in the afternoon we finally started the tours… we went to Karnak temple first. Karnak of course was amazing. The only bad thing about the tour was it is so incredibly hot. It’s almost unbearable.

Karnak is my favourite temple. Its massive, contains about 10 cathedrals, It was built, re-built, decorated and re-decorate for over 1500 years. At one point – during the time of Ramses II I think it had 80,000 people working on it. Guess it was like a big ‘public works’ project – both building something spiritual, but also keeping the population employed.

The boys loved Karnak – but by the end of the look around we were nearly ready to pass out. I bought 3 big bottles of water and we started sucking down the water to try and re-hydrate. It helped, but we were still struggling.

After Karnak we went back to the boat for 20 minutes to pick up Maggie. She’s a South African lady who is joining our tour. She was booked through Half Moon tours (the same guy Ahmed booked our trip through) so they put us together. It was good to have someone different with us – we were running out of stories to keep ourselves entertained so it was good to get someone new to hang out with.

First stop now we have Maggie with us is Luxor Temple. The guide’s been ok, his name is Wael. He knows what to say, but he’s very ‘telling us by rote’. If we interrupt him he gets all thrown and struggles to continue…
The Luxor temple is much smaller than Karnak, but tis still quite impressive. My favourite bit is the Avenue of the Sphinx. Back in the day this was the path between Karnak and Luxor temple. Its said that the Pharaoh would be at Karnak and his wife would be at Luxor temple and he would walk down the Avenue of the Sphinx to get to her.

We’ve taken loads of photos, its so different here to being in Tanzania. In Tanzania everything was a dark reddy brown or green where as here everything is beige. Its just sand and dust for mile upon mile. I guess part of that is the oppressive heat. Its been ridiculously hot today, I’m just hoping it will cool down a bit as we get further towards Aswan, but I’m not holding my breath!!

After the Luxor Temple we went back to the boat for a very fast dinner. We were asking the waiters to speed it up because we needed to get back to Karnak for the sounds and light show. So we scoffed our food and then headed back onto the bus to go to the sound and light show.

We nearly got ripped off here. The airport pick up man had said that the sound and light show wasn’t part of our paid package so we gave him 400le to arrange for transport and entry to the show. I was sure that we’d already arranged this so I sms’d Ahmed and he rang the tour company and they rang me back. Turns out we had paid after all so they made the driver man give us our money back. I’m not sure if he was confused or dodgy – here its hard to tell. There are so many dodgy people that you kinda assume everyone is dodgy – out to make themselves a quick buck at your expense. He was very apologetic and made sure we were set to go for the light show so I’m trying to think the best, to think that it was an honest mistake.

We were all pretty shattered at the light show. It’s good because you walk around a bit, but at the end you are sitting on stone benches for about 20 minutes and I nearly fell asleep! I really enjoyed the light show, I just wish we hadn’t been up since 5am (and me with only 4 hours sleep!).

We got back to the boat (Aidan and I shared again and Colin got his own noisy snorers room). I went straight to bed and was asleep in about 34 seconds. Tomorrow is another early start - 6am!!