Egypt: Day 7 - Luxor and sailing down the Nile in a Felucca

I wake up at 7 and go and brush my teeth. Slept rather well I think. Not the same for Satya, he's a bit under the weather. Breakfast beckons and off we go downstairs to the Valley.

Luxor Temple and Museum

Damn. Our visit to the Valley is postponed until tomorrow, as the tour operator is full up today. So it looks like we'll have to do Karnak and the Luxor Temple today. We rent a couple of bicycles at LE 7 apiece [Made in China] and cycle up to the Luxor Temple. Luxor is actually the Western corruption of a local village's name - El Uqsur. Cheapos that we are, we skimp on the usual LE 20 admission fee and peep over the thigh high embankment wall into the courtyard and the temple. Walk around and try to see if there's any suitable [non-paying] way we can enter. But the Egyptians are also Asians and they have blocked off all these. We move on after taking a few photographs, towards the Luxor Museum. Having been prewarned that this museum is a scaled down version of the Cairo Museum, we pedal past it with nary a glance, and on to Karnak. On the way we pass a bookshop and find a dusty 1997 edition of the LP at the exorbitant price of LE 85. Forget it! Instead we each buy a copy of the "Atlas of Ancient Egypt" and I buy a small map of the Nile too.

Karnak

We cycle on and finally reach the Temple of Karnak. Hordes of tourists. We included of course. We park our bicycles in a small garden and enter the temple. This entrance is flanked by two rows of small sphinxes with rams' heads. With this fact in mind, the path leading to the entrance is called the Avenue of Ram-headed Sphinxes. The Temple is one of the biggest structures in Egypt, the big pyramids aside, and we spend a full 2 and a half hours looking around the place. It is BIG and filled with pillars and obelisks and statues. Apparently, when the temple was discovered, there was one particular room which contained as many as 800 statues of granite, bronze, basalt, marble and gold. And it was supposed to be a dumping ground for the older [obsolete?] statues. The temple was discovered in the early 19th century, and beautiful pictures exist today showing the tops of the tall obelisks peeking out from a pile of sand. All the sand has been excavated and the temple stands clear now. Signs of the excavation are all around. Graffiti belonging to the early archaeologists - names and dates - climb up pillars, and indicate the sand level at various point in time. Walking around the pillars, some of which still have their original colours is a deeply hypnotic feeling. The colours have withstood the test of time and nature and man, and their sapphire blues, emerald greens, ruby reds and amber yellows wink through years of grime and erosion, hinting at the splendour that must have greeted the worshippers. If only I had a time machine to go back to those days!

Looking at my watch, I'm brought back to today and now. We have an appointment with Mohammed for a felucca ride on the Nile. Run back to the Sherif Hotel rather hurriedly and enquire about a good place to have lunch. The recommendation - a joint called "Mish Mish". We walk there and enter a small restaurant, which in its heydays would have been the closest thing in Luxor to a western style restaurant - complete with knife and fork, and placemats too. Of course, the said heydays are long gone, and we find ourselves and three flies the sole diners in the place. Lunch is bread with tomatoes and white cream salad, babaghanoug. I have something called an eggplant bram, which is rice with a liquidy brinjal curry. Satya has the same in the okra flavour. Okra [ladysfinger] in this region are just about an inch long and there's no need to cut them. All in all the food's ok and cheap. We get back to the hotel by 3 pm.

Felucca Ride



Mohammed [the same chap who brought us to this hotel last night] calls in 5 minutes, and we walk the short walk to the riverside. There we meet up with a friend of his, a man called Hassan and bearing the grandiose title of 'boat-captain'. Literally we walk the plank and into the felucca. The felucca is a small sailboat, about 20m long and 5m wide. Making ourselves comfortable among the dirty cushions, we set sail into the Nile. There's no current and no wind to speak of, and so we drift slowly for 10 - 15 minutes. During this, we have a glass of tea and listen to some Bob Marley on the car stereo. Bob M is very big in Egypt, and more so in Luxor. There's a photo of him at the Sherif Hotel and I guess he's an icon to the local drug scene, of which Mohammed admits to being a part. Today he's just smoking Marlboros. We drift across to the West Bank and sit there for a suitable period, allowing the locals there to make a pitch for our $$. "Camel ride? Donkey ride? Horse ride?". The word 'La' works as well here as it does in Singapore. There it's punctuation, in Egypt it means 'No'. Satya rather nice-heartedly gives a small note to a child who gives him a flower. Big mistake. He's immediately swamped by six more kids and we have to shoo them off and retreat to the boat. We drift along a bit more. Sometime later, we witness a complex series of signals between Hassan and another boatman, and quickly find ourselves part of a convoy of feluccas, all headed for Banana Island. There's a tug tugging all of us along. 20 minutes later, we pull up at B.I. Climb out and walk around for a while in a banana plantation. Rather incongruous to find souvenir shops here, but we still enter and look around. Satya's dying to take more 'sunset on the Nile' photos and he reminds Mohd that it's approaching sundown, and the latter takes us somewhere beyond a fence of barbed wire, past a herd of cows and barking dogs and their owners and behind a sugarcane field, where we witness one of the most beautiful sunsets ever.

We return to the boat and with the aid of a strong wind, make it back to our starting point rather quickly. Alight from the felucca and baksheesh the captain and return to the hotel. It's 6 pm by now, and we have to run to catch the 7 pm sound and light show at Karnak. We mount our trusty "Made in China" steeds and gallop off towards the Karnak Temple. Reach there at 6.55 pm, and a minute after we buy the tickets, the show starts. It's a walk through the Temple again, this time accompanied by voices and music. Quite a decent show, though I fall asleep near the end. By then it's bitterly cold, and we don't have the luxury [Luxory? Haha] of our jackets. We cycle back to the hotel after the show, and book our places on the early morning balloon ride over Luxor. Bye bye $$. Then it's back to bed as we retire for the night. Another early day tomorrow. And I thought we had left those behind ...