Tuesday, 28 April 2015

Day 21 Monday 13 April Luxor, Egypt

We left early for our bus trip afrom Safaga.  It was through a mountain range who would have thought it was so rocky to go to Luxor.  Once were we near the Nile and there are irrigation channels coming off the Nile there were all these funny little villages.  There was always a bridge across the canal, a mosque and a significant police presence.  We had different theories on it. The government here has just sentenced 13 of the Muslim Brotherhood to death the day before but our guide tells us that it has to do with the sentence.
We met our Egyptologist tour guide Bilhail who was excellent.  His children speak Arabic, English German and French. He gave a 15 minute talk on the history of Egypt until the present day which excellent given the recent political complications.
We went to the temple of Luxor and we were told that wasn’t only five people we there and we swarmed there with hundreds.  It was also Easter Orthodox Monday and there many locals out.  90% of the country are Moslem but the 10% of Christians, about 8% are Coptic.
We had lunch at our hotel and after we went of the Valley of Kings, which was a much smaller in area that I Imagined. They only have three tombs open because of the humidity of people’s breaths.  They would have been fabulous in pristine condition.
Our tour guide told us not to bother with Tutankhamen’s tomb as there is nothing in it.
We went through some villages with sugar cane, from a distance, and if you swapped date palms for normal palm trees it reminded me a lot of North Queensland.
Our Hotel overlooked the Nile dotted with feluccas, quite amazing…let’s face it was fabulous!
We then went to the night Sound and Light show at the temple of Karnak.  It may not have passed WPHS but it wasn’t too bad.

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