Luxor
Once we made it to the airport, getting from Cairo to Luxor was a relatively painless operation, as was finding our hostel, where we reunited with Yvonne and Luke, who had been exploring other parts of the country while we camped in the dessert. The hostel was offering guided tours of the West bank so we took them up on it the next morning. After our excellent experience with Hani in the dessert, we were greatly dismayed to discover that this guide could barely understand English; each time we asked him a question, he answered a completely different question!
The first stop was a temple that had been destroyed by an earthquake in 37 BC. Only a pair of giant pharaoh statues survived the quake, each of which has a miniature statue of his wife beside him. Apparently that was the thing to do back then. The second stop was the Valley of the Queens, so called because no kings were buried there, although sometimes princes who died in childhood ended up there as well. Before we could look at the burial chambers, the guide made us watch a crummy documentary whose sound was barely audible. While looking at the tombs, the guide fed us some outlandish tales about the queens, including one about a queen who fabricated a myth about her mom being impregnated by a god so that she could hang on to the throne without having to cede power to a husband.
The third stop was at an alleged artist workshop, where we saw how they make alabaster jars, although we came away with the strong feeling that the guide just took us there in the hopes that we would buy lots of overpriced crap that he probably gets a cut on.
With that out of the way, it was on to the fourth stop: the Valley of the Kings, where we had only enough time to learn about three kings. Ramses III had 42 wives but still slept around with others and Sety II died young so they did an astonishingly sub-par job on his tomb. The highlight of this stop was a descent into the underground burial chamber of Thutmosis II, where we had a chance to examine very early hieroglyphs done is a style far simpler than anything I'd ever seen before.
Stop five was another temple, featuring two engravings of particular interest: one was a series of engravings of the fertility god, whose limbs were chopped off as punishment for impregnating a bunch of women; the other was a queen who swallowed the sun in the morning and expelled it through her vagina in the evening. The last stop on the tour was the residence of some old British guy that was only marginally interesting. The guide also tried to make us go through a sketchy papyrus factory but we refused unanimously.
That evening we visited the Luxor temple, which contained some fascinating relics from the Greek and Roman conquests of Egypt, including statues of Alexander the Great as a pharaoh and some Roman paintings that covered older Egyptian engravings. Outside the temple was a large courtyard lined with massive stone columns, many of which had statues of Ramses II beside them. But the most striking feature of the temple was a giant stone obelisk that rose several dozen feet from the ground.
On our final day in Luxor we visited the Karnak temple complex, this time ending up with an awesome guide. He explained that the complex had started out fairly small as the venue for the annual wedding ceremony for the Thebian trio of gods but had been successively enlarged by waves of pharaohs until it was the largest religious structure in the world. He also cleared up the fragmented stories we'd heard from the previous guide about queen Hatshetsup.
