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Temples, Tombs, and Tourists

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

From Hurgada we continued on to Luxor. The ride was unusually eventful; I was seated next to a deceptively demure veiled woman in her 50s who broke the ice 30 minutes into the journey by showing me a film clip on her mobile phone that featured young girls shaking their butts and jiggling their boobs in time with Arab pop music. Her name was Awatif. After a surprisingly lengthy conversation (considering our limited knowledge of each other’s language) about our families and travel, Awatif saw a notebook I had brought onto the bus and asked if I could teach her the English alphabet. I did, both to my amusement and that of every Egyptian seated within range of Awatif’s booming voice. (When faced with an unfamiliar letter, she always guessed that it was the letter X—that is, until she actually came to X. Then she looked at me blankly and asked “M?”)

We arrived in Luxor in the late afternoon and, after months of Cairo’s concrete and travels through great expanses of desert, I was struck by a burst of colors—purple and hot pink bougainvilleas lined asphalt roads with black-and-white checked curbs that ran through deep green wheat and sugarcane fields where young boys and old men sat atop donkey-pulled wooden carts, and bisecting it all was a sapphire-blue stretch of the Nile. It was beautiful.

Bidding farewell to Awatif, Matteo and I disembarked in the center of town at the ancient Temple of Luxor, which was illuminated by dozens of floodlights. There was a huge square in the front (opposite a McDonald’s, naturally), where Egyptian families sat on benches, talking about the day’s events while their children ran around playing games. (I watched one bossy little girl direct five others, setting them up for an elaborate game that broke up just seconds after it began; children are the same everywhere.) And that night, after our new (and utterly ridiculous—but more on that in another post) travel partner bribed a guard with several pounds, we entered the temple and gawked at the intricate hieroglyphs carved across its massive façade. My first thought was that Egyptian temples remind me a little of walls in public bathrooms where writing is scrawled over every inch of space. (My second was that pictures of owls, eyes, scarab beetles, and the like are at least more aesthetically pleasing than phone numbers and offers for “good times.”)

The next day, we went to the nearby Temple of Karnak, which was even more massive and beautiful than the Temple of Luxor. The hypostyle hall, filled with over 100 enormous pillars carved to resemble a papyrus grove, was particularly impressive and no photo I took could capture its size and presence—there are just some things you need to see for yourself. I wandered through the temple compound for hours, marveling at statues, obelisks, and murals that existed thousands of years before me and will probably exist thousands of years after me. (Egypt tends to spark those sorts of thoughts often.)

For the third and fourth days, we crossed the Nile to Luxor’s West Bank by ferry and rented bicycles to free ourselves of horribly overpriced taxi rides to the Colossi of Memnon, the Temple of Hatshepsut, the Medinat Habu, and the Valley of the Kings. That we escaped the tourist trail was an additional bonus—with the dozens of tour buses sticking to a well-defined route, we found ourselves riding alone through outlying villages and fields, past curious (not to mention bemused—I don’t think that many rural Egyptian women ride bikes) men, women, and children who greeted and chatted with us in a genuinely hospitable (rather than the “come to my shop, my friend” hospitable) kind of way.

All of the West Bank sights were incredible and inspired similar reactions. I felt small. I was conscious of my mortality. I couldn’t get over how Egyptians liked to write all over everything they built.

Of all of the sights in Luxor, though, my favorite was the Valley of the Kings. Tucked in a blindingly-white desert landscape several kilometers behind the wheat and sugarcane fields, the Valley of the Kings is home to dozens of ancient Egyptian royal tombs (including that of the famous Tutankhamen). To enter the tombs you must descend into holes in the mountainside; once inside, you crouch in small passageways that break off into chambers filled with beautifully preserved paintings of the pharaohs, their exploits, and the underworld. Not knowing what to expect when I entered the tombs for the first time, I was thrilled with the interiors and felt (yet again) like I was in a scene from Indiana Jones.

Finally, our time in Luxor came to an end and we headed off to Aswan, a city 3-4 hours south by train. Aswan is located in what was once known as Nubia, an ancient land that straddled what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and differences between the people of Aswan and those I saw in northern Egyptian towns are evident—people have darker skin and more African features, giving you the sense that you are making your way deeper into the continent. The city itself is a pleasant place, sitting along the banks and islands within the Nile, and you can spend hours, as we did, sitting at one of the many parks along the water watching broad-sailed feluccas glide by while sipping delicious karkadeh, or hibiscus tea.

After a day of relaxation in Aswan, we headed even further south on a day trip to Abu Simbel, a hot town just 40 kilometers or so from the Sudanese border, where the famous Temple of Ramses sits at the edge of Lake Nasser. The temple, like every other temple we saw in Upper Egypt that week, was awe-inspiring. Two things made it stand out, though: one, the amount of chambers within the temple (all of which were filled with wonderful carvings and still-bright murals) surpassed those within any other temple we visited; and two, there were dozens of amusing bits of graffiti carved into the temple’s exterior and interior walls by European soldiers in the late 1800s. (This, I thought to myself, is definitely a way to achieve a degree of immortality and I fought a surprisingly strong desire to carve a reminder of my own visit into the stone walls.)

And then, from the southernmost point of Egypt, we began to work our way to its northernmost point, Alexandria.