After a torturous 18 hour bus ride from Dahab to Luxor, we were ready to stretch our legs. Luxor is the place to do it. Across the Nile from our hotel sprawl out temples and tombs and colossi. Needing the exercise, we ferried across the river and rented clunker bicycles.We’ve driven cars and ridden bicycles in some pretty crazy places, but I think that Egypt is possibly the scariest road scene I’ve experienced. And here we are riding down crummy roads in farmland dodging horse drawn carts, kids begging for money, giant tour buses, and goats. This is what we call fun. Well, fun until Mary pointed out a cool bird to me and lost her balance instead of watching the road… But it was a pretty bird.
After cruising through the Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Hebu, we headed out for the Valley of the Kings to see the tombs of the pharoahs. Ancient history is nice, but diving a couple hundred yards into a little hole in the side of a hill is way more fun.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but the tombs are generally square tunnels cut downwards into the side of the mountain leading to a room with the sarcophagus. Most have carvings or paintings covering the walls of the tunnel. Some go way into the mountain, some don’t. A couple had “well rooms” that suddenly drop 20 feet down apparently as a trap to tomb raiders. There is nothing left in any of the tombs beyond the huge granite sarcophagi left in a couple. Everything of interest has been stolen for museum collections. Even though we heard it was quite boring, we went to see King Tut’s tomb. It’s small and boring.
There are all kinds of rules about no touching, no pictures, no video and so on. But there is a very well established practice in Egypt called “baksheesh”, which means some combination of the words “tip”, “gimme money” and “bribe”. With a little baksheesh, you can do just about anything you want in Egypt. Sometimes it makes sense to do it, and sometimes it is just a pain to have a guy following you around asking for it. It is just a little sad that the guardian of a priceless ancient artifact will let you abuse it for less than a dollar and nobody cares. In protest, we took most of our photos the old fashioned way: we snuck them.
Almost as interesting as the tombs was how predictable the tour groups are. We showed up at about 12:15 and the valley was overflowing with tour groups. By 12:30, they were ALL gone. We had the whole place to ourselves and other people like us until 2:00 when the big groups all showed up again.