If you’ve been following our trip so far, you know that Anna, Luke, Lars, and I have all enjoyed stuff like hiking through the Sinai and sailing on a felucca a lot more than we’ve enjoyed the more postcard-friendly tourist destinations like temples and ruins. But we were going to be in Luxor today, and we decided that we just had to do one of the big historical things. After looking through our more or less trusty guidebook, we settled on Karnak, a 100 acre complex of ruins built over a period of 1,300 years.
Our guidebook also helpfully informed us that the site opened at 6am and that tourist buses generally start showing up around 9am. So we set the alarm for bright and early and were up and outside of our hotel right at 6. We hailed a cab (in Luxor, like the rest of Egypt, you hail a cab by walking down the street; they find you) and negotiated a rate of E$20, or US$4, which we thought seemed fair.
The cab probably made out better than we did, since it was just a kilometer or two away. But whatever, we wouldn’t have known how to get there. We were at the site by 6:15, and it was pleasantly deserted. We bought our tickets and headed in to Karnak, not really sure what to expect.
Well, if you go, expect big. Very big. It goes on pretty much forever, and there’s a huge variety of stuff, as ruins go. There’s a large area with 134 columns in a grid pattern, some huge obelisks, a large pool, big rooms, small rooms, huge facades, statues, lintels, you name it. Since we were there just after sunrise, the light was incredible, and for the first hour or so we were the only people there. That’s definitely the way to visit.
Like every other historical site we visited in Egypt, Karnak did have an indigenous population of “guides”, several of whom we saw sleeping in various ancient rooms and whatnot when we got there. We were careful not to wake them, but eventually some of them did hear us and got up. The downside to being the only people there: we were the only targets for baksheeshing. By this time, I was developing a sixth sense for breaking off from the group at the sight of a “guide”, but it was during one such wander that Luke called me back. One of the, um, guides was going to show us something cool.
And it was cool. Karnak is still undergoing massive renovation and reconstruction, and this guy took us through some “no entry” gates into a working room where renovation was underway. Being an enclosed room, some of the hieroglyphics still had color to them, and it was pretty cool seeing the tools and apparatuses that the people working on restoration were using. We saw everything from small brushes to pretty beefy looking pneumatic tools. And the room itself was pretty impressive, too, with very dark granite doorways that were somewhat unique. I’m sure the whole thing violated a million bureaucratic and safety rules, but it was actually a worthwhile use of baksheesh. I think we paid E$10 or so for our behind the scenes view.
The incredible thing – one of the incredible things – about the Karnak site is the sheer scale, in both physical size and historical time span. We walked, and we walked. And we saw amazing stuff. And there were still huge fields where pieces of the complex were laid out in neat rows, ranging from small fragments to huge columns, all waiting (presumably) to be sorted, ordered, and re-assembled. I’m interested to learn more about the reconstruction effort and if there are any plans to be flat out done – the place was pretty amazing as we saw it, and I can only imagine how much imposing it will be when more pieces are put together.
But, even as amazing as it was, we tired of walking around ruins after about two hours, and we started drifting toward the exit. Which was just as well, because the tourists we arriving and the place was getting busier. Fine by us; we’d had it to ourselves for a couple of hours and were very happy with what we’d seen. On the way out, we stopped by the apparently-brand-new visitor center, which had some great pictures of Karnak’s initial discovery and excavation. It also had a mostly interesting video playing on a brand new A/V setup with the most terribly maladjusted mixer ever.
We wrapped up at Karnak around 9 and walked back into town, since it was early and cool and a relatively short walk. It was kind of one of those “what now?” moments, since we didn’t have other plans, and our sleeper train to Cairo wouldn’t leave until 8:10pm. We made made our way back to Snack Time, a local fast food place with the kind of strong branding, clearly thought out menu, and western-style prices that indicated a desire to expand, and parked for a bit to use their free WiFi to check email, update the blog, et cetera.
By noon, we’d had all of the fast food, checked all of the email, and done all of the blogging we could handle. So we were kind of kicking around for something to do. Leafing through the guidebook, we found that the Valley of the Kings wasn’t far away, and we decided that we might as well do that. So we headed over to the local ferry (E$1 per person) to cross the Nile. While on the ferry, we were solicited by a taxi driver, and when we asked about rates, he offered LE$50 for round trip to Valley of the Kings, including 90 minutes of waiting time while we explored. That’s about $9, and a surprisingly fair fare. We could probably have haggled, but we were so used to people opening with demands of at least five times market value that we were taken a bit aback and just agreed.
That turned out to be a fantastic decision. Abdul had a good car with air conditioning, had great English and was a friendly and informative guide as we drove, and was just generally a good guy. It was kind of weird, but welcome. He dropped us at the Valley of the Kings and we agreed to meet in 90 minutes to return to the ferry. It was at about this time that I discovered that my trusty Canon SD700 IS, which had survived rafting the Futalefeu and summiting Kilimanjaro, had apparently succumbed to the Egyptian heat and dust, and that the little motor that extends the lens for use wasn’t even making the attempt anymore. “Lens error, please restart camera,” the display said. Partial disassembly/reassembly did nothing. Dead camera. So expect fewer pictures from here on out (Anna’s camera is working fine, but it’s too large for casual shots).
The Valley of the Kings is a pretty crazy site – something like 60 tombs in a relatively small area, all carved out of the ground in an attempt to evade grave robbers and archaeologists. Oops. Some of them are cut out an amazing distance into the earth, like tomb #36, whose associated Pharaoh I forget, which was accessed by first climbing a 50 meter stairway and then descending most of those 50 meters through long angled passages. It was pretty impressive, though very, very, very hot. By the time we were in the cartouche-shaped burial chamber, I’d estimate it was 43c / 110F, with maybe 60% humidity. It was brutal. And there was another baksheesher there, pointing out the ceiling and floor and stuff in return for expected payment. Ugh.
We also visited #14, which I believe is Tausert, which was interesting because the first half of it was in very vivid color, but from about halfway on it had been carved but not colored. More baksheesh here, as the “guide” literally pushed past us to use a weak flashlight to highlight stuff we were already looking at. “Hey, a snake” one of us would say. “Snake!” the baksheesher would say.
Finally, we visited Ramses IX, which tomb for once I can remember the name but not number. Another fairly long passage full of detailed and colored hieroglyphics, but this one brought back some memories for me. I’d been here, in this very tomb, with my father in 1981. In fact, I’d been yelled at by a guide because he thought I was touching a hieroglyph that I was really just pointing at. Funny how memories work. No worries of being yelled at this time, I thought, as there were now glass panels up between visitors and hieroglyphs (probably because of me).
Well, as it turned out, Anna managed to get in trouble here. The entire Valley of the Kings has a no-photography-in-tombs policy, ostensibly to protect the tombs from accidental flash photography, which is hard on pigment. The policy is probably as much about misunderstanding the economics of non-scarce goods and thinking that prohibiting photography will increase sales of books and postcards (hint: it won’t; you’re better off having tourists take pictures and return home to get their friends excited about visiting).
But the policy is the policy, and Anna tried to sneak a few pictures without warning the rest of us, who could easily have shielded her and distracted the baksheesher who was shadowing us. Predictably, he caught her and acted like it was a Big Scary Authority Thing. They’d have to go to The Office, and so on. Also predictably, it was just a baksheesh shakedown, and settled for E$20 (US$5). Maybe the no-pictures policy has a net economic benefit to the unofficial economy of the place, even if there’s a net loss to the site in general.
Anyways, we were ready to head out, and we found our cab driver and got going. He was an interesting guy to talk to, and we discussed the economic impact of the 1997 terrorist attack at the Hatshesput tomb, which killed around 20 locals and 60 tourists. Abdul said that it took a year for the local economy to recover, and that many people lost businesses during that time. Kind of grim all the way around.
We opted to stop by one of the Papyrus shops on our way to the ferry, and either Abdul was the smoothest operator we’d yet met, or the shop was genuinely run by his cousin. It was a nice shop, and they knew how to sell to westerners. Free water and cola, an interesting demo of how papyrus is made, clearly posted prices, and still a 10% discount off of posted prices (enough to feel like you don’t need to haggle, not so much that it discredits the original price). We bought stuff.
And then we headed back to Luxor, where we hung out for a beer or two, since we still had a couple of hours before our train. Our waiter, too, was an interesting guy, and we ended up talking about politics and culture with him. Like pretty much everyone else we’d met in Egypt, he wanted to talk about Obama, and he was upset that Obama could only be president for 8 years. He talked about Mubarak and his perception that the Egyptian government only cared about rich people in cities, and how little attention has been paid to the health care system. “In Europe or America, if your son needs a doctor and you can’t afford it, the government takes care of it for you”, he said. We had to gently let him down there. It was a good conversation and reminded all of us that a lot of the value in these trips is in the cultural exchange.
After a quick dinner, it was time to head to the train station for our overnight train to Cairo. The train was a few minutes late arriving, and then we were in our sleeper compartments. They were fairly tiny, but perfectly decent once we juggled our bags and books and whatnot and got the place arranged. We bedded down and tried to get some sleep before our expected 5:45am arrival in Cairo.