Day 9 - Last day in Luxor (Nov 13)

We woke up relatively early (6:45am), packed, grabbed a breakfast box (mmm...bread and jam...again), and hopped on- guess what-a minibus!

We headed out to the West Bank to visit the Valley of the Queens and Valley of the Kings. They are desert valleys, nestled between sand mountains with hidden tomb entrances to try to deter grave robbers. You enter most by heading down a series of stairs, where you'll find either a corridor leading to a burial chamber, or possibly several preceding rooms. Some of them even disguised the burial chamber (typically at the back) by putting it in a side room, again to confuse robbers. Almost all have very, very well-intact paint on the walls. It's so amazing to think of how old these are and how well preserved they still are. I tried to imagine the people in here painting them, with the light of a mirrored disk to reflect sunlight in, or by sunflower seed oil, so that it wouldn't burn black and discolor the walls. Most of these were painted directly on plaster, or on plaster that had been made into a relief while it was still wet.

The depth of a King or Pharaoh's tomb indicates the duration of his (or in two instances, her - Nefertiti and one other) reign. The reason is that they begin digging the tomb when the Pharaoh comes into power, and continue until he dies. If he died suddenly, it's apparent by the hastily finished burial chamber, as they only have 70 days to complete a tomb during the mummification process.

In the Valley of the Queens, we saw Nefertari's tomb and one other (forgive me for not remembering right now). In the Valley of the Kings, we saw Rameses I, Rameses IX, and Thutmoses III. Thutmoses III's tomb had really unique hyroglyphs that were like stick figures, much smaller, and all painted on instead of carved in. No photography in any of the tombs, but I managed to get a couple, of course. King Tut's tomb is an additional 100LE to enter, so we didn't bother...besides, all the artifacts are in the Egyptian museum. Rameses II tomb was closed for restoration.

While there, we also saw some archaelogists overseeing the excavation of a site about 15x30ft. It had been excavated before, so they were just removing the top 5 meteres of sand and gravel before they start the delicate excavations. They're in search of Rameses VIII tomb, which is currently missing.

After the morning tour, we had about an hour or so to kill, so we grabbed a lunchbox at a nearby deli and soaked our feet in the rooftop hotel pool. And on to the second half of a day's worth of tours! (exhausting!)

We now visited the East Bank. First, Karnak temple complex. It was built over 2000 years (from about 2000 B.C. on). It was huge, and interesting to see what kings did to the structures of the preceding rulers (like building a wall around Nefertiti's obelisk). There's a 2km Avenue of the Sphinxes that leads to Luxor temple. That was our next destination, and we stayed there from sunset till about 8pm. I was bombarded by local schoolgirls, who were eager to practice their English and get pictures with me. We hung out mostly with Nick, and a bit with Glyn. Then G, Nick and I wandered around, grabbed dinner at the same falafel place as we had the night before, and went back to the hostel.

We had a couple beers in Nick's room to kill time before the night train. We got them from the same deli owner as the day before, where he had them stashed in the back, and it was "our secret" that we had gotten them there. We also stopped at a pharmacy and bought what should be prescription sleeping pills for the train ride. Nick is a pharmacy tech in Brighton, UK, and helped us pick out what was good and what was to be avoided. He couldn't believe the medicines you could get sans prescription there (or the prices...very low).

On the night train with our four Aussies, we tried our best to set up sleeping conditions in the less-than-comfortable-or-clean six-seat car. We played a card game that David and Suzanna taught us, had a beer, then took our pills and slept the whole ride.