We awoke from our night train induced morning nap around lunch time and decided to do… well, not much really. The hotel had a pool so we took the opportunity to lay around it. We were package tourists after all, we decided to behave like package tourist. We were waiting for the rest of our tour group to arrive. They had just spent two days on a felucca (a kind of small sail boat) cruising up the Nile, which sounds relaxing but apparently had been fraught with problems, particularly for one of the groups who had been stuck on board a boat with their extremely pissed and sleazy tour leader (known as No Spew Stu for reasons we won’t go into here). We had vetoed the felucca on account of time and Nato’s desire to avoid being on a boat for two days (based on previous boat encounters I can hardly blame him) and it was beginning to look as though we had made a good choice.

The tour groups finally arrived, looking tired, dirty and sun burnt. Along with the tour groups were the tour leaders, No Spew Stu (as previously mentioned) and our leader Rachel (much cooler than Stu and not at all sleazy). Between them they were in charge of 45,000 gringo tourist…. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but drop a few zeros and you’ve got pretty much the right number. Amongst these tourists were 3 Venezuelans, 2 Singaporeans, 1 Brazillian, 2 Americans and 44,992 Aussies, Kiwis and Saffas, all living in one share house in Acton (London). It was like being at the Walkabout with the added drawback that we couldn’t leave.

Fortunately we didn’t spend a great deal of time together as a group, but there were a few outings for which we were required to be together, the first of which happened on our first afternoon in Luxor where we visited the magnificent Luxor Temple. With one tour leader at the front and another at the back, we were herded in pairs, all holding on to a little yellow rope that ran down the middle of us to keep us all together… well maybe not but it still had a distinctly kindergarten-excursion feel to it. Nonetheless, Luxor Temple was amazing, even more so as we had arrived in the late afternoon and watching the sun set over the multitudes of statues and sphinxes was incredible. And we only had to spend about half an hour with the group… Then the five of us (Nato, Kato, Laro, Jeso and I) headed for a stroll through the market which didn’t last long as most of the stuff there was same same but crapper, and the calls of the hawkers got boring very quickly, most of them being directed at Nato and being along the lines of ‘Hey, you very lucky man, three wives, give one to me’ or ‘Hey, you Ramses Two (one of Ancient Egypt’s most prolific Pharaoh’s, as our guide explained, who was more concerned with quantity than quality… this extended to his children as well, of which he had around 50, many of them not outliving him). We were particularly impressed with one guy who seemed rather desperate as he pleaded ‘One for me, please! I am very tired and need a wife!’ I’m not sure what he was tired from but the idea of a tired sleazy Egyptian man impressed the girls even less than a regular sleazy Egyptian man. Maybe he was tired of the market – we were after about 5 minutes and found a little Egyptian place for dinner, deciding against the English Pub that most of the rest of the group went to.

Next morning we went out to the Valley of the Kings, Queens and Workers. This time we were separated however so we only had another 20 or so gringos for company rather than the 40 we had the previous day. The Valleys were hot but nonetheless impressive, as we visited several ornately decorated tombs of the Pharaohs. Ancient Egypt is divided into roughly three eras, and the Pyramids belonged to the first two periods, where the ancients believed that by building a huge Pyramid in the shape of the sun and burying their beloved Pharaohs within it, the Pharaohs would be transported to the afterlife along with all the treasures they had been buried with. Unfortunately most of the treasures made it not quite so far as the underworld and instead continued to float around in this one in the hands of hundreds of grave robbers for whom the Pyramids acted like a kind of golden beacon (and who were more concerned with feeding themselves in this life than some dead Pharaoh needs in the other). So the last of the Ancient Egyptians decided that the Pharaoh’s afterlife needs would be better served with tombs than with Pyramids. This didn’t really help matters much, as all of the tombs were still robbed except for one, the tomb of Tutankhamen whose treasures were instead pilfered by the Egyptian Museum (with a couple of bits as ‘gifts’ to the British Museum and the Louvre). But the upshot of the tombs was that all the work that had previously gone into building the Pyramids now seemed to go into decorating the tombs, many of which were incredibly well preserved. The greatest and most beautiful of all the tombs, our guide told us, was that of Queen Nefertari, whose tomb was unrivaled for the ornate-ness of the carvings and the preservation of the colors. It was also closed for renovations. Or something. Maybe she was putting in a patio out the back…

After the valleys, we went on a donkey ride through one of the local villages. Well, the girls went Donkey riding. Nato and I stayed behind and spared the poor donkeys, many of whom looked like they were on their last legs. Then the five of us went for a little felucca ride along the Nile to see what we were missing. Mostly water buffalo, some ferries and a few other feluccas, it turned out. Not all that much, though it was nice and rather relaxing after the heat of the Valleys. That afternoon we checked out the markets, only to discover that they were still crap and still full of sleazy Egyptian men with the same lines as the night before, though they seemed a little more subdued during the day.

Next morning we had another delicious breakfast of cold boiled eggs and bread before heading out to Karnak Temple. Personally I thought it not as impressive as Luxor, but maybe that was just the effect of being back among the 45 other gringos, not to mention the midday sun. But we did get to take a horse-drawn carriage there and back, eliciting much amusement from passing Egyptians.

That afternoon we headed to Hurghada, where we would stay overnight before heading across to Dahab. We had to wait until 6pm before heading to Hurghada as we were to be traveling by police convoy. This was due to a regulation that applies to pretty much all travel between Cairo and Aswan and states that any vehicle containing a gringo must be accompanied by armed guards (the trains) or police (the buses). This was ostensibly in response to the 1997 shooting of around 60 tourist at one of the Luxor temples, but has since evolved into more of a money-making scheme by the government as all tourist traveling must be registered and paid for. As far as terrorist targets go, an organized convoy of tourists traveling on a well-known road at a designated time in a convoy of around 60 buses and 2 police cars sounds like a pearler so how it was supposed to assure our safety I’m not quite sure. But such are the vagaries of the Egyptian Government. And as package tourists, who were we to ask questions??