Day 8 Valley of the Kings

 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 avoid them. That plan worked out so-so okay…the flat short tunnel tombs proved not to be so interesting so we decided to go to the Ramses9 tomb which was highly decorated on 4 sharply descending levels…we got about halfway down the first staircase when we decided that the risk/reward ratio was not in our favor and turned back. We were disappointed but in truth there was still so much other stuff to see that it was all blending into one another anyway.

We continued on and visited 4 more tombs…all were highly decorated with hieroglyphics. One of the tombs was that of the boy king Tutankhamun…it was highly decorated but small and contained his mummified remains.

A small kerfuffle at the last tomb…just as we were exiting it got lightheaded and needed to sit before we could move on…I feared a repeat of my last Cairo airport experience but was able to reach a WC just in the nick of time (no photos).

After that we decided to call it a day and returned to the hotel. At sunset the Nile is full of feluccas taking tourists on a sunset cruise.