CC Travel Blog

After we arrived, we were picked up and quickly sent off to the west bank tour. Luxor was the capital city of Egypt during Thebes and today it is one of the major tourist cities in Egypt. The name Luxor was given by the early Arabic travellers who meant to call it “palaces” seeing so many monuments, palaces and ruins. Things in Luxor are more central, along the road, we already saw hotels and restaurants. The air is a lot fresher compared to Cairo and the city is cleaner. On the west bank of the river, the dead and the gods of the dead were worshipped.

Our first stop is the Colossi of Memnon.

What is remaining on the site today are two giant statues with a legend about a dead hero (Memnon) and his weekping mother. This belongs to the Roman period of Egypt. The statues are said to be Pharaoh Amenhotep III, but very little remains of the Amenhotep Temple, so in plain sight stand these two statues and they’re the only visible items.

Both of the statues are quite damanged with no face to recognize and even the side carvings become blurry.

Moving on, our second stop is the Temple of Hatshepsut, which worships the first female ruler of Egypt. In order to be the ruler, Hatshepsut married her brother for seven years and ruled Egypt for 22 years. She dressed herself as a male, but later on a lot of her images were destroyed by her step son, who inherited the crown.

The grand temple was built at the foot of a mountain, in a deserted area, projecting the feeling of the female king, grand and tough. Inside the temple, a lot of images were well preserved and beautifully narrated the life of Hatshepsut and the gods she worshipped.

The weather was getting hotter as the day went by and the sun was shining fiercely at us. Our third stop is the Valley of the Kings.

In this deserted valley, dry and hot, resides over 200 tombs of the ancient kings in Egypt. It was said that mummies could be better preserved in this environment and the deserted location discourages tomb raiders. We visited 4 tombs in this valley and 2 tombs in Valley of the Queens, a village of tombs for queens and sons nearby Valley of the Kings.

Unlike the Asian concept of green cemetery for the dead, there is no river nor greeneries in the Valley of the Kings.

We first visited Tomb of Ramses Four. The tomb has paintings on the side of the walls which demonstrated influences from the Coptics and Christians.

The second tomb was Tomb of Rameses Nine. There are many small rooms along the corridor leading to the tomb center. Other than that, there is nothing special in that tomb.

The third site is Tomb of Tutankhamen, discovered in 1922, the tomb was relatively well preserved at the time of discovery and therefore lots of documentories remained about the excavation.

Tomb of Sety II has columns in the center of the tomb with fancy drawings of stars on the ceiling. It also has a mummy of an unidentified man inside.

The last stop is the Tomb of Thutmes III. It requires some hard work as visitors have to climb a lot of stairs up and down to enter the tomb.

The tomb was the biggest among the four and had a second lower level, but the air was quite stuffy inside. The paintings were well preserved and seemed very fancy. It painted when the king would go to the world fo the dead, what kind of gods he could get protection from to make his road to haven easier. Perhaps they were there as a reminder for the deceased king so that when he woke up from the dead, his soul would remember what to do next.

I was very impressed by the fact that so many tombs were burried in here and so well some of them were preserved. However, the daunting weather also reminded me that even being dead is no fun, and I wonder, how facinated the world of dead must have been to the live ones that they spent so much effort and energy to maintain the connection for the dead.

Valley of the Queens by its name burries queens and offsprings, which has a lesser scale of greatness compared to the kings’ tombs. We visited two tombs, the Tomb of Queen Titi and the Tomb of Amonchopeshfu, whom is a prince who died at the age of 12. Inside the tomb, a fetus skeleton was discovered and the mystery of who this fetus is remains unsolved.

I regret for not better prepared for the weather such that I was so dehydrated and hot that I wasn’t able to fully pay attention to the tour.

The people in Luxor seemed more at ease and relaxed. Maybe that’s what the water pipe is for.

Some people were making pottery for sale.

In the afternoon, we were back to the Luxor city area and getting ready for the cruise.

Once we got into our room, we dropped dead for almost the entire afternoon, exhausted from the vast disoriented Cairo and dry heated Luxor.

As the ship sailed at night, we fell asleep quickly after a contended four course Italian dinner. The next day will be a bright early day for us.