It is funny how some things just happen sometimes.
After finishing with the diving course I thought it would be a good idea to do some more tourism so what better idea than to pay a visit to
Luxor and see the temples and the famous Valley of Kings.
As you can see on the map below it doesn't look like it's far... but it is!
El Gouna is just off
Hurghada. It looks like a quick ride but it's in fact several hours (about 4-5 hours or so) of bus and you don't just get a bus and off you go. No, you first go to
Hurghada and all the buses going to
Luxor get together there and then they all depart at the same time with a military escort. Yes, that's right! you have a military escort all the way stopping all the other traffic on the road and the buses pass by one by one... tens of them!
But I'm getting ahead of myself... I bet you are wondering how is it that I ended up in a German excursion?
Quite simply because there weren't any other spots left in any other excursion and luckily, Holger and Karen managed to get me into theirs, so for 4-5 hours I listened to the guide explaining all the Egyptian history from the beginning of times, in German... at first it looked like it was going to be a very long trip indeed. As it turned out, the guide didn't seem to be very good because as soon as some of the other passengers found out I couldn't speak German they turned to me and started talking to me... in English... mainly asking me why in hell did I joined a German excursion if I couldn't speak any German. O:-) On the positive side of things, thanks to that, I didn't have time to get bored.
The first stop in
Luxor was at the temples of
Luxor and
Karnak.
Luxor used to be known in the ancient times as Thebes, and it used to be the capital of
Egypt at the time.
One of the problems when all the buses go together is that for one or two hours the place gets so full of people that it is hard to walk despite of the enormity of the place...as soon as the buses go, the place becomes part of the desert... not a soul in the place.
At first I felt like I was missing out a lot with our guide giving all sort of explanations in German... and as I was leaning back against a column trying to get a good picture of the columns in front of me I heard another guide giving the explanations in Spanish... and another in English... then is when it hit me... all I had to do was to linger around those groups, swap from one group to another so not to draw too much attention to myself and pretend I didn't understand what they were saying...
So I may have missed the first 10 minutes of the history of Egypt but I sure got all the rest. :-) and with different versions, each guide had his/her own style which made it much more interesting than just listening to one person all the time. This is something I may get to do again in the future... it's so much more interesting when you have 2-3 guides instead of only one! :-)
It seems it wasn't only the Brits that "borrow" some of the Egyptian treasures... If you have ever been in Paris you may find the below obelisk kind of familiar.. guess where the French Obelisk comes from? :-)
The detail in all the engravings was amazing
Holgar and Karen posing by the obelisk
Yours truly in my desert camouflage attire.
The obelisk, twin brother of the one in Paris.
The guardians at the entrance
From there we resumed the excursion and went to
Deir el-Bahari also known as the Northern Monastery. This site was on the way to the Valley of the Kings and it was a complex of mortuary temples.
Can you see a bunch of people on the right hand side on the above picture?
That would give you a good idea of the distance from where the bus left us to the temple... perhaps 200 metres. It doesn't look far, does it?
But they do not let you walk all the way there and they force everyone to go in one of the below trains.
It seems that with the heat a lot of tourists ended up fainting on their way to the temple. The area is very exposed and offers no protection whatsoever, so now they force everyone to go using the little train. That day the temperature was around 35C, quite bearable... but I can only imagine in the middle of the summer... where you can get 50C easily... then the little train makes total sense.
On the way out, they have a team of hard sellers who would stop at nothing to sell you their trinkets. Specially if they saw you were a girl going on your own. I've never seen anything like it. They were so aggressive that it was even scary. When we were leaving the place we were advised to go all as a group and not to leave the group at any time, or at least that's what my translator said as I was still receiving instructions in German. O:-)
Finally we made it to the renown Valley of the Kings
Unfortunately I could not take any pictures inside the tombs. There were too many people inside and you could only let yourself being pushed by the masses and go with the flow. There were so many people inside the tombs that they felt like the London tube at peak time in the mornings. I'm surprised nobody fainted it was quite stuffy in there but the tombs were quite impressive and worth the effort.
After that we went back to El Gouna (6 -7 hour trip) and we got there at night. The following day I just walked around and took a few more pictures making time until it was time to catch my bus back to Cairo.
Below it was my last picture of El Gouna
It looks good, but it is better than it looks on the picture.
All in all, it was a fantastic trip and I have some amazing memories from it. Had I had more time, there were still a lot of things I could have done there. Who knows, perhaps I'll get back some other time. It is just worth it for the diving... Now I only need a volunteer to join me. :-)
