Cruising on the Nile: Luxor and Aswan (Part 2)

Nile Cruise

Now, a Nile cruise is a must if you are planning on visiting Egypt at all. Cairo is good to see, but really the real ancient Egypt exists outside of Cairo in the small cities and Bedouin camps. The people and the culture are richer there and more authentic than the crowded, smoggy, dirty limits of Cairo. Plus the weather is much warmer in the winter.

Our cruise boat was quaint but nice. Food is always buffet style like any good cruise and the boat had nice clean rooms with a nice large roof top hangout area. However, the best part of cruising the down the Nile was to sit in my chair in my stateroom with the double French doors open to the water’s edge and watch the Nile river banks drift by. Truly it was like being in a old movie, with all of its grand romance and majesty, and be on the Nile river surrounded by ancient temples and quarries, and to breath the mist of the water that gave birth to Egypt and some of the most important civilizations in the world. Looking out from the boat you never knew just exactly you might see, but whatever it was, it was amazing.

The way I suggest cruising the Nile is to start in Aswan and proceed north, or down the Nile, towards Luxor. In doing this your last site you will visit will be Karnak Temple in Luxor, and it will have you leave Egypt with much respect for the Egyptian peoples and their history.

Along the cruise, which took 2 days, we saw the Temples of Edfu, Kom Ombo, Elephant Island, and the Pyramid Rock quarries. Docking at each one, we would take a local horse carriage to the temples, which were mini adventures in themselves and begin our explorations of the temples. My favorite temple was Edfu, as we saw it during the night, and its massive stone columns that held up the roof were still perfectly intact. The roof was about 50ft up, and even though originally had beautiful hieroglyphics painted on it, they were covered in black ash from the 1000’s of years the temple was used as a hideout for Christians are they were fleeing from the Roman’s and then the Muslims. Also, you we able to go exploring the temple and we found a dark hallway that descended below the temple, but was full of water and we had to stop. Who knows just what could be further down the hallway, underneath all of that water. I thought that this temple was huge when I first saw it, however, once I saw Karnak, Edfu became dwarfed in size.

Luxor

After seeing many temples along the banks of the Nile we arrived in Luxor. The name Luxor comes from, bear with me now, the plural of the plural of the word palace in Arabic. So lots of groups of palaces here…In the city of Luxor alone is 1/3 of the ENTIRE world’s historical monuments. Egypt in its entirety holds about 40% of world monuments. Not bad for one country. Reno has to get on the ball eh?

Luxor has fantastic sites to go see and it is recommended that one spend at least two days there. In seeing the sites you must spend one day on the west bank of the Nile, which is where the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Queen Hepepchutes Temple and the Two Statues are. The East Bank is the Temple of Luxor and Karnak Temples are and they are big enough to explore for hours, as Karnak is 19 acres large by itself. The significance of visiting each bank of the Nile separately derives from the symbolism the Egyptians put of the rising and setting of the sun in their ideology. The east bank represents birth, life and fertility. So, the temples of worship, farming and fertility, such as Luxor and Karnak, were built here. The West Bank symbolizes death and the after life and there the Egyptians buried all of their kings, queens and nobles along with the treasure and items they would need in the afterlife.

Oddly enough though, our trip started off with the West Bank first as the sun came up, but maybe because there was better light? Anyway, we drove the Valley of King’s first which is very very cool. It lies in a desert canyon surrounded by high cliff on each side. A gravel path extends from the Nile valley up into the canyon, and it looks like the gravel is the broken stone remnants of the massive excavations that took places into and below the canyon walls. As I walked up this gravel path I couldn’t help but wonder and visualize the thousands of workers and burial parties that have walked on this same path to the tombs below. All of the Kings that we read about and study in school and all of the power and grandeur that they exuded upon this land and the later influence that it would have upon peoples from all over the world up till today. So large that tourism here in Egypt is big enough to be the one of the largest imports and sources of money to keep almost 80 million people alive and working. Thanks to the Pharaoh’s eh?

After hiking up the canyon further you come to the tombs themselves. As they were discovered throughout the past 100 years, the foreign expeditions that came to dig here, built stone faces around the temple doors to identify them as being temples. As you look around all you can see are the many stone faces that are everywhere, basically one on top of another. If totally sparks the imagination to think that just below your feet are more tombs undiscovered, and I am willing to be a lot that there will be a lot more discovered within my lifetime. As I look around, just next to Tutankhamen’s tomb, which is one of the smallest yet richest of them all, and located just underneath the entrance to another tomb, the local labor is digging into the canyon in search of another tomb. I can’t wait to see what’s inside!

In the valley here you can usually go into many of the tombs. Some of them are quite large. For instance, Ramses the 2nd’s tomb has 52 side chambers, for all of his children to be buried. Because of the mass amount of rooms in Ramses tombs, archeologists are now looking for a large tomb in the Valley of the Queens that would hold all of Ramses’s wives. He was living large! The Valley of the Kings is something everyone must see if they come to Egypt. It is not too crowded usually, and is inspiring to think if these people died and were buried in this manner, who knows just how rich their lives were!

To conclude our West Bank of the Valley visit, we went to Queen Hepepchutes temple that I have previously written about, so I encourage you to read that blog entry as well.