🇪🇬 Red Sea Snorkel

🇪🇬 Hurghada pre-brekky & pre-heat.

🇪🇬 El Gouna, Red Sea. Riviera Hotel "square pool" swim

Luxor (Qasr al-Aguz village)

🇪🇬 Karnak Temple 🛕 and very very etc. Ah, but what a day.

TL/DR version:  Luxor.
Balloon flight over West Bank.
Valley of the Kings. 4 x pharaoh's tombs.
Queen Hatshepsut's temple.
Alabaster (fake?) factory. Sigh.
Colossi of Memnon
Karnak temple (biggest in Egypt)
Luxor temple.
Brain overload. No room for any more history. One in, one out from here onwards. 

Chaotic start to the balloon ride. Up at 4:30 but didn't get to fly until 7:30. Delays at every step so we were behind the curve right from the get go again. Maybe they have a "system" but I'm gubbered if I can see it. 

We finally got on just about the last, of perhaps 50-60 balloons varying from ours, the smallest at 210,000ft3 carrying 7 passengers up to the stonkingest, 700,000ft3 affairs carrying 32 pax in a basket the size of a shipping container. We did see sunrise, just not from a balloon. 

No matter, it was still a fab experience, our first balloon flight. I'd planned to balloon last time I was in Luxor about 20 years ago, but they'd all been cancelled after the latest of a series of accidents a few days earlier. We even met one guy a few days later who'd been in the latest crash and had a broken leg, but carried on visiting the tombs. He was from Yorkshire though. 

We flew in perfect conditions over the key West Bank sites,  i.e. Valley of the Kings, V of Queens, Queen/King Hatshepsut's temple, Colossi, and over the almost straight line dividing the fertile irrigated Nileside land with arid desert a bit further West. 

So quiet, so mesmerising except when the pilot made a right racket squirting more fire into the system. He seemed to think that was necessary to keep us up, so we said nowt. 

We cruised at 500m - many balloons were really close to the ground - and averaged 4.7 knots over about 40 minutes before a perfect landing but ooh, the scrawping of the basket base along the rocks for a few seconds. Like fingernails on a blackboard it was. 

It was worth the wait. Quite magical. 

Next the aforementioned V of K to see three of the best opened tombs (there are typically 10-12 of 62 open at any given time). We entered those of Ramesses III, Ramesses IX and Ramesses  V / VI. The last two must have got a BOGOF deal.

I say three; I tried to blag my way into a fourth but the gatekeeper saw right through my devious ploy of covering one of the punched holes in the ticket with my thumb. He then encouraged me to bribe him to get in. I won't say whether I was receptive to this shallow, despicable, nefarious practice. 

The staff in many of the sites here regularly pull people to one side to take them behind ropes with a "Ssssh!, secret, only you". I saw one who hounded a tourist, presumably for not giving him enough, or any bribe afterwards. Seems like everywhere we go here runs on Baksheesh. 

On to Queen Hatshepsut's temple. It's very impressive too, looks modern even, though it's 3500yo. That's just ridiculous. Nearly 300m wide and with a 1km causeway to reach it, much of that is now shortcut using electric buggies. Busy? I'd guess there were about fifty times more people than when I was here last* 

*For transparency,  we visited not long after a series of terrorist attacks, and the UK was one of very few nations who still "allowed" their citizens to visit. I remember feeling unnecessarily smug that other governments were being over cautious and we had everywhere to ourselves. My, were we popular, but not always in a good way? 

Even so, tourism has exploded over the world especially amongst citizens from "developing" and populous nations, and I can only see that trend going one way for a while yet. Have I mentioned yet how busy Egypt is?

Next stop, the bloody Alabaster factory, except I'm pretty sure it isn't; more an outlet shop with three fake staff on the terrace who pretend to be working during the demo, but who all stop and light up their fags the moment us punters enter the shop. 

There's also a so-called museum with some older exhibits, which they're more than happy to sell at a premium and they'll even provide a stamped, generic certificate of authenticity in case customs stop you, thinking what you have is genuine. 

The shop was run by the grandson of Hassan, the boy who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun by noticing his piss running through a hole, or who noticed the donkey stumble in a rut, or one of the other apocryphal tales of discovery. No, it's true.  He said so. 

Guess how much Alabaster we bought. Correct. 

Afterwards, Colossi of Memnon (two, errrm, colossal figures) and a terrible restaurant for dinner. Cold, greasy, expensive. As expected. 
Elaine did a smarter thing and skipped it,  instead having a kip on their tiled terrace. 

After culinary dissatisfaction, Karnak temple, the biggest in Egypt, and twice as big as the Vatican. The centrepiece is the giant hall once supported by the 134  columns each 9 Westerner's armspans around. We tried it. 

Constructed over many centuries, more than 30 pharaohs contributed to this temple.  For context at home, we've had 13 "rulers" since 1707. 

Karnak is connected by a 3km avenue to our last stop, Luxor Temple with its most memorable feature being the 3000yo replica obelisk of the one on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The Egyptians managed to locate theirs in one piece. That'd've taken a lot of big lads or a good idea. The French needed to break "theirs" into three to get it home, even though it was a bit smaller. To be fair, it was a single piece of granite weighing a thousand tons (well, three pieces x 300kg+ now). 

Today was definitely two daysworth of stuff packed into one, and we were flagging for the last pair of temples. I'm sure we heard a groan when Ahmed gave us 45 mins of free time at the last one.  We were about the last back, after 30. 

Good job I've got an Internet to remind me what I've seen.

Last leg was a ferry back across the Nile and a tuktuk back to the digs for scran, shower and sleep. Reckon I was asleep well before 9 and for lots of hours thereafter. 

Time for some R&R and doing nowt,  although it probably won't be long before I get a bit bored with that. 

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Jim S

🇪🇬 Karnak Temple 🛕 and very very etc. Ah, but what a day.

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🇪🇬 Red Sea Snorkel

🇪🇬 Hurghada pre-brekky & pre-heat.

🇪🇬 El Gouna, Red Sea. Riviera Hotel "square pool" swim

Luxor (Qasr al-Aguz village)

🇪🇬 Karnak Temple 🛕 and very very etc. Ah, but what a day.

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