On the Road Egypt

 Today was our last day of touring and it couldn’t come sooner. Ricki is ready to murder our tour guide Hamid…annoying is her highest praise for him. He gets on my nerves too but I’m more comfortable just walking away when he starts to blather. In fairness it’s hot and we’ve probably heard as much as we can absorb about the various gods and the genealogy of the pharaohs. The images and structures are still compelling so we just walked around on our own and soaked up some more spectacular views.

 We’re pretty much done with the big temples and statues and it’s time to visit the tombs which contain, sadly little treasure (looted over the years) but covered with hieroglyphics that look as if they were painted yesterday. While the Pharaohs constructed huge monuments and temples for themselves, they were a little more circumspect when it came to burying themselves along with their treasure. They choose a nondescript valley and dug tunnels into the rock. Each pharaoh had his own tunnel at the end of which was a chamber containing his crypt (mummy enclosed). There are 63 of these tombs that have been excavated and probably lots more that will eventually be found. Some of the tunnels are long (100+ meters) and have several levels. You get to go into 3 (out of 13 open to visitors) with your ticket of admission and you can pay to go into 3 more. We opted to go into 5. We knew that some of the tunnels were rather steep and involved walking down some challenging stairs so we tried to...

 Another early morning tour. This time we’re heading south along the Nile, The first stop is Esna Temple a 1.5 hour drive. The countryside we drive through is lush and fertile as the fields of bananas and corn draw their water from the Nile. A little less lush are the towns we drive through…this is a poor country and while the streets and roads are filled with schoolchildren in their uniforms they are framed by tumbledown buildings and local farmers driving carts pulled by donkeys. Esna Temple is small by Egyptian temple standards but what it lacks in size it more than makes up with it spectacular colors  and decoration. It was a Greek-Egyptian temple started in 183BC and it laid undiscovered until the mid-1800s under layers of sand. Our next stop was Edfu Temple another 2 hours further south. Edfu was another Greek-Egyptian temple and is unique in that it was one of the few temples that were not damaged in a huge earthquake around 37BC. It was a rather imposing structure but ...

 We woke up from our coma-like sleep 17 hours refreshed and hungry. This is the sight we saw from our balcony  around 6:30am. Breakfast in the hotel was pretty good and we were able to relax afterwards since our tour for the day didn’t start until 1pm.  The tour today was to the Karnak Temple which is located about 15 minutes down the road. There is almost nothing that can prepare you for size and scale of statues and structures built almost 5000 years ago. Towering statues of the pharaohs set amongst equally towering stone columns…all decorated with hieroglyphic carvings with the original paint still visible. There are something like 150 columns creating a maze in which humans are dwarfed. The complexed covered several acres with obelisks and highly decorated building walls interspersed with more statues. We spent about an hour walking around in the 99 degree heat and were thankful when we got back to the air conditioned car. Next was Luxor Temple, literally just a few m...