Egypt Trip Part IV, Luxor
Luxor or Thebes, the “world’s greatest open air museum”, was the ancient capital of Egypt. If there is a counterpart of a city in China, I would say Xi’an. Our local guide told me, any dig into the ground, you will find some antiques, private archaeological evacuation is totally forbidden!
Personally I would say Luxor is the most pretty city in Egypt, but it is also the hottest city, not only in the sense of tourists attraction, but in temperature as well, the last rain was 6 years ago.
West bank of the river Nile, A panorama view of Luxor at dawn with the King’s Valley in the background. (click for large)
Colossi of Memnon (see Wiki), they were at the entrance of Amenhotep’s Memorial Temple. Local records indicated that singing from the twin statues could be heard in many cases, especially in the early morning. The temple behind them is nowhere to find, but as we passed by, I saw workers are digging at the ground, and many pieces of stone with carvings are unearthed.
Nor far from here, maybe just another 10 minutes by bus, we found ourselves at the entrance of the King’s Valley. Same as in the Cairo Museum, tourists are not allowed to take pictures in the valley. The valley reminds me the Ming Tombs in Beijing, in 1827 archeologist numbered them from KV1 to KV15 (KV for King’s Valley), actually all of them were robbed for many times even thousands years ago, there were no breakthrough till the KV62, the tomb of Tutan Khamun, and that was in 1922, many people related died in the next 2 years…, the latest confirmed finding was KV63 in March of 2005.
Too much of the history, under the sun, we just rushed into 3 of the tombs, if you don’t mind to pay another 100 egp, you can visit the famous Tutan Khamun, as everyone in our group heard of the story, we just headed to our next stop, the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsu.
By the way, here you can find a panoramic photo of the King’s Valley.
At the entrance of Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, the only one female pharaoh in the history of Egypt. The easy way of remembering her name is “Hot Chicken Soup”, thanks again to our local guide.
If you don’ t have much like us, there are two temples that you must to visit, the Luxor Temple and the Karnak Temple. The former one is smaller, huge columns are just spectacular and marvelous, interesting enough, you can find a mosque inside the temple, and by the end of the temple, traces of an early Christian church can be found at the small chambers by the end of the temple.
Karnak Temple is a very large place to visit, to see how large it is, please check my the map below. My first visit here was in the afternoon, and there were no where to hide from the sunshine, nice place to go for taking photos, but just too hot in the afternoon. My 2nd time of visiting here, was in the early morning, almost the first group to arrive, and it was much better.
The statue of Ramesses II, and his daughter and wife standing between his legs. The smaller temple at Abu Simbel were built just for her.
That is all for our trip in the upper Egypt, we are heading to the Hurghada, the summer resort city, a 30 years old city. The sun were just too much for us, we need some fresh moment in the water…
The highway leading to Hurghada, a city neighboring the Red Sea. Buses have to stop at these checking points time to time.
View Egypt in a larger map
