BootsnAll Travel Network



Days 395-413: Red Sea and Luxor

Dahab, Sharm el-Sheikh, Hurgada, Luxor

How long have we dreamt of visiting Egypt? Probably most of our lives. The place doesn’t disappoint. We spent a couple weeks lounging around the Red Sea to sample some of it’s world-class underwater delights before heading to Luxor for our first taste of ancient Egypt.

As we sailed from Jordan to Egypt we watched the huge desert mountain landscape of Saudi Arabia float by. We landed in Nuweiba on the east coast of the Sinai penninsula and had our first encounter with Egyptian haggling over a ride to Dahab. After about two hours of fruitless negotiation with taxi and minibus drivers, we caught a bus for pocket change.

Dahab was the sight of three suicide bombings two weeks before we arrived. The scars of the attack were still visible, with shredded store fronts and shrapnel strewn craters. At the sight of one blast on the edge of the lagoon bridge, a small memorial was set up and one of the stone epitaphs was for “Marc”. Spooky. The thing that was remarkable was that the place was full of tourists.

Dahab is a very laid-back beach town that seems to exist for diving the many reefs in the Gulf of Aqaba. Lots of shops and restaurants line the beach with friendly, rather than overbearing, touts trying to get you into their place. We spent a week there and could have stayed a lot longer.

Not too hard to take in Dahab. Big, cold beers were less than a buck.
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Lots of friendly dogs in Dahab. But how on earth did this dog climb on top of a roof?
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Dahab was really windy which made for some rough ocean for snorkelling. But we still got out a few times and were rewarded with graceful lionfish, racoon puffer fish, gorgeous royal angelfish, enormous pencil urchins, and small barracuda.

Yeah! And and no llamas either!
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We celebrated our 400th day on the road with a big ol’ strawberry “thickshake”. Thickshake seems to be the term most places use for what we call a milkshake. Ordering a “milkshake” will get you a runny, mostly milk drink that really isn’t very good.

Sharm el-Sheikh was pretty much the opposite of Dahab. Just an unpleasant, noisy, overpriced, hassle-prone, tourist trap. But underwater it was amazing and worth putting up with the crap. Some of the best snorkelling we’ve ever had – if not the best – was at the Ras Umm Sid reef just off the shore. The visibility was a stunning 30 to 40 meters in crystal-clear blue water and the sunlight made the hordes of fish and coral erupt in a kaleidescope of color. We saw everything that we saw in Dahab plus “Picasso” trigger fish, pretty jellyfish, black spotted sweetlips, huge Napoleon wrasse, and beautiful hard and soft corals in yellow, blue, orange, green, and red. We spent so much time floating on the water that we burnt the back of legs despite putting sunblock on. That has to be the mark of a great snorkel spot!

The stunning coral reef at Ras Umm Sid in Sharm el-Sheikh.
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Every hotel in Sharm has a guard and metal detector at the door as a result of their bombings a year or two ago. Security was extra tight because many world leaders were coming to town for the World Economic Forum. They were even preventing dive boats from visiting the reefs near town in an effort to prevent an incident. We took this as a good cue to move on and caught a boat to Hurgada on mainland Egypt (and our first stop in Africa!). The only hang-up was the security guard at the fourth passport check who didn’t think Marc looked enough like his passport photo. He even asked Marc to put on glasses, which was tough since the laser eye surgery took care of that. He couldn’t do much about having a lot more hair, a bit less weight, and a much better tan.

Hurgada gets our vote for the most hassle prone city in Egypt so far. We couldn’t find a decent, non-tourist place to eat. So we got a kid to take us to a ta’amiyya (Egyptian felafel) joint that was fantastic, cheap, and had an incredibly friendly staff. It’s always nice to remember that there are always nice people who live in a town and that you shouldn’t judge a place by it’s touts or hookers.

Took a day boat trip to Gifton Island and saw dolphins on the way. Cool birds escorted our boat to the island.
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“Well, Love. Feel like going for a snorkel?” “Nah. But could you put more lotion on my back?” (Yes, that is Marc under all that hair.)
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Hurgada fishermen trolling the crystal blue waters.
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Got the bus to Luxor which now drops people off about 15km out of town rather than right at the Luxor Temple. We avoided the tout gauntlet by jumping into the first covered pickup that went by. The back had a pair of local women dressed in full black robes who had great fun trying to talk to us in Arabic. How anyone can wear these robes in summer is beyond us. When it came time to pay, a young kid on board showed us a one pound note (less than $0.20) so we knew how much to pay and didn’t get taken. That was our introduction to what our guidebook called the “hassle capitol of Egypt”. We couldn’t disagree more; we love Luxor!

Our first visit to ancient Egypt was the enormous Karnak Temple complex. This was also where we discovered that admission prices to all monuments have at least doubled since our book was written two years ago. Ouch. Karnak was amazing. Almost every square foot was covered with reliefs of gods, pharaohs, and heiroglypics. Even the columns were covered in carvings. Lots of color all over the place. When we think of ancient Egyptian monuments, we tend to think of bare stone. But at one time these places were completely covered in color. Blue gods, red people, green papyrus, yellow wasps, black scarabs – all on a white background.

The “hypostyle hall” at Karnak with its forest of heiroglyphic-covered papyrus columns.
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Most places had huge reliefs of pharaohs mingling with the gods or smiting their enemies. We loved the variety of gods and their animal incarnations: lion, crocodile, jackal, cow, falcon, vulture. One god was always pictured as “excited” to see everyone.

Queen Mom: “I’ve had it with these kids of yours!” Pharaoh Dad: “Now just simmer it down there spitfire.” Kids: “We drove mom nuts! High five!”
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We loved the variety of characters used in heiroglypics: scarab beetles, wasps, and “horned vipers” that looked a lot more like big slugs.

Dreaming big.
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Nice Horus carving with the dual Upper and Lower Egypt hat on.
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Egypt is not known for its food. While stuffed pigeon seems to be a staple, we’ve stuck to ta’amiyya (felafel), fuul (kinda like refried beans), and kushari. Kushari is a carbohydrate feast with two kinds of noodles, rice, lentils, chickpeas, spicy tomato sauce, and crisp onions. Delicious!

When we got to the West bank of Luxor, known as ancient Thebes, we found out that not only did the prices go up but that you can’t take any pictures inside of the tombs. Probably a good thing to save space on the camera memory cards but less good for the blog. Our first stop on the West bank was the Valley of the Queens. Turns out you can’t enter any queen’s tomb at the moment – they rotate what’s open. We did see a the tombs of a couple princes though.

We were allowed to take pictures at the Medinat Habu temple with it’s reliefs of Ramses III kicking butt. Particularly disturbing were the scenes of women counting piles of severed hands and genitals of their slain enemies. Yikes!

The enormous pylon fronting Medinat Habu. A pylon is a large gateway usually covered in pharaohs smiting enemies propaganda scenes.
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Loads of 3000 year-old color at Medinat Habu. Simply incredible how much color was left after so much time exposed to the elements.
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Amazing painted columns at Medinat Habu.
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People believed that if their name or image existed in our world then they would live forever in the afterlife. To keep future pharaohs from carving off their names, some rulers had their cartouches carved the better part of a foot deep.
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Heiroglyphics brought to light at Habu. Note the scratched out cartouche on the lower-right. Didn’t carve it deep enough!
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The Valley of the Kings was remarkable in that it the valley itself was unremarkable. But we guess that was the point, to keep people from finding and looting their tombs. A ticket gets you access to three of the dozens of tombs in the valley, but only nine were open and none of the ones we really wanted to see. The tomb guardians are grossly underpaid and the ticket prices were very high. This made for an ideal situation for a little bribery (Kelly’s idea) and we got to see five of the nine open tombs.

The tombs were filled with colorful paintings and carvings on the walls and ceilings. Most of the scenes were instructions for the pharaohs on how to navigate the afterlife and what gods they’d run into. There were also scenes of food for them to eat as well as incense and music to help wake them up in the afterlife. It was also interesting to see the evolution of tomb painting from caligraphic stick figures in the early tombs to incredibly detailed work in the later tombs.

Walking back from the Valley of the Kings in 107 degree heat. The Nile valley sure looked refreshing.
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The Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri was the site of the masacre of a busload of tourists in 1997. All of the sights were armed to the teeth with guards and huge guns. Each sight also had a metal detector, but they always just waved us through despite it’s beeping. Hatshepsut was one of the few women pharoahs and seemed to erect a wide variety of statuary, temples, and obelisks, unlike certain other pharaohs (Ramses II) who just put statues of themselves everywhere.

A steep cliff looms over the three-terraced Temple to Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri.
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Here’s proof that “they” have been visiting Earth for millenia. Probably built the pyramids too.
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A Hathor head capital at Hatshepsut’s temple.
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Eventually, folks other than pharaohs wanted to get in on the afterlife. And so the well-to-do in Thebes started building their own tombs under what is now the town of Old Gurna. The Tombs of the Nobles were quite nice and tended to have more scenes from everyday life: hunting, fishing, harvesting, musicians, animals (even Holstein cows!). Of particular note were the tombs of Ramose and Khaemet which had the most exquisite reliefs; the hair alone was worth a visit.

The Tombs of the Nobles are buried beneath the colorful mud-brick houses of Old Gurna.
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Ramses II made a few temples to himself, and the Ramesseum on the West bank was one of them. He wouldn’t be too happy with how his temple has fared over the millenia.

The entryway of the Ramesseum with Ramses II’s toppled enormous colossus. There’s Kelly for scale next to his head.
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A typical relief of Ramses in the presence of the gods being offered a sniff of an ankh.
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Luxor Temple was great and we hung around until night to see it all lit up. Loved the papyrus columns. We had 124 pictures of the place when we were done, and that after deleting a bunch!

Crisp heiroglyphics on the back of one of Ramses II’s many colossi at Luxor. Looks like it was carved yesterday.
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A pair of snakes wearing the two hats of Upper and Lower Egypt.
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We had to forgive Ramses II from putting up so many colossi of himself because they really were pretty cool. Yet another Ramses colossus to boost his ego.
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The back of a colossus.
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The entryway to Luxor Temple gets all lit up at night.
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The Avenue of Sphinxes runs about three kilometers from the Luxor Temple to Karnak Temple.
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Lots of restaurants in Luxor have resident cats hanging around begging for tidbits. At one place, we had a few cats hanging around and Kelly commented for them: “I used to be treated like a god. And now I’m reduced to this.”



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3 Responses to “Days 395-413: Red Sea and Luxor”

  1. zcookes/Mom Says:

    Do you get tired of comments about awesome pictures?

  2. Posted from United States United States
  3. Mom AKA Gm Lynn :) Says:

    WOW!!! Absolutely awesome (to borrow Suzi’s word)… the SS classes will be thrilled beyod words next year!

    BTW: School’s out for the summer!!! 🙂

    Hugs xoxox

  4. Posted from United States United States
  5. JTR Says:

    Great pictures guys. That said, I have to disagree with one comment. I have always found hookers to be a fine barometer for judging a place…

    JR

  6. Posted from United States United States