the dan & carrie show

When we arrived in Luxor we met up with a friend of one of our schoolmates, who had happened to run into a classmate of his, from another school, and her family.

We ended up being quite a strange lot of people for the time we were there. It was the two of us, another American girl, a Canadian guy here studying Arabic and Islam, a British friend of his doing the same thing, a Spanish girl that he is in language school with, her family, and then on the 2nd day, another British guy joined us, after having been denied entry to Israel! Ten of us, stayed in the same hotel in Luxor, ate together, toured together, and hired a van for the 3-hour convoy to Abu Simbel together.
The first day in Luxor we visited the Karnak temple, just outside of town, in the morning, and then spent the afternoon by the pool and napping, as it was much too hot to be out and about.

Carrie and I went out in the early evening to wander around Luxor, and then met up with the others after dark at the Luxor temple.

It is amazing to see these buildings, and all the detail that went into them. The giant pillars, each one covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphics, some of which still have the color visible from when they were painted thousands of years ago! Let's see Sherwin Williams do that!

The question which these ancient monuments ask is, “what happened to the Egyptians?” All of these monuments, with mind-boggling attention to detail, can they really be built by the ancestors of the people who it seems today don't know what detail is when it comes to buildings?
The second day we rented a van to bring us to the Valley of the Kings, Hapshepshut's Temple, Medinit Habou, and the tombs of the nobles.

The Valley of the Kings was not quite how I had imagined it from the descriptions I had read, but I don't know that I could describe it any better. The rules are: no video cameras in the valley, and no photos in the tombs. Which means you can take pictures of the entrances of the tombs, and the hoards of people queuing to get in, but not of the carvings and paintings inside. So we don't have any pictures of this on the computer. I have a few from my “real” camera, but they are not yet developed.
Again we spent the heat of the day back at the hotel, and ventured out again in the evening.
Most of the time we were in Aswan was spent in our hotel, as it was quite warm, and we were only there for one full day. Although we did take a feluca, which is a traditional sailing boat, on the Nile at night.

There are no major sites in Aswan itself, and we left at 3:30am for Abu Simbel, a good three-hour drive through the desert. We spend only a few hours in Abut Simbel, but I would say that the sites there were worth the travel time. The rock cut temples made by Ramses II, and the mountain they were carved into, were moved by UNESCO in the 1970's to save them from being lost under the waters of Lake Nasser, when the High Dam at Aswan was completed.

Perhaps our favorite site on the entire trip was the last one we visited, the Philae Temple. This temple was originally built on an island in the Nile, and when the first dam was built in Aswan, it left the temple half under water for half of the year. Finally, UNESCO intervened again and the temple was moved to a nearby island, which was re-landscaped to duplicate Philae Island. While it was probably the smallest of all the temples that we saw, and perhaps not even the most complete, it was the least crowded with tourists, and it had a unique atmosphere.