The alarm went off at 0300, which was painful. At 0400, we were in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the bus to pick us up. We told our French friends about the tour, and they decided to come too. 5 minutes later, we were on our way. The bus was really nice, with comfy seats. We followed the coast north to a town called Safaga, stopping to pick up people along the way. In Safaga, we joined a convoy of 70 tourist busses, all going to Luxor. There have been issues with terrorist attacks against tourists in the past in Egypt, so the government requires that all tour groups travel in a police escorted convoy through the desert. At 0730, the convoy pulled out, heading east towards the mountains.

The mountains are as dry and barren of life as the coast. For part of the way, there wasn’t even any scrubby little desert plants around. The mountains look very unstable, like soft rock that easily breaks apart. In some places, the mountains are large solid boulders, but in other places, it looks like the boulders have eroded into piles of rocks and dirt.

Around 1000, we reached the Nile valley and turned to follow the river. The guide explained to us that in Upper Egypt, people were still very traditional and followed the old, customary way of life. The people are still farmers, and they have very few modern tools to farm with, preferring farming by hand. Houses are made from mud brick with ceilings made of plant stalks. Houses ranged in size from one room, one story to very large three stories. Apparently, as the family grows, they just add more rooms/stories to the existing house. Despite the old fashioned ways, virtually all the houses had satellite dishes on the roofs. Few women were out, and all wore the black robes and black head scarves. There were lots of men out, and all were dressed in what look like old fashioned pajama dresses that go to the ankles and are long sleeved. The land was all farmland dotted with clusters of houses and the occasional mosque. It looks like they grow a large variety of produce.

At 1100, we rolled into Luxor. From what we could see, it looks like a small town. The buildings range in size from one story to 15 stories, most of them on the east side of the river. There seems to be an assortment of age range amongst the buildings, from hotels that date back to the late 1800’s to modern, brand new looking buildings. Most are apartment complexes with shops on the ground floor. Many, many of the buildings are unfinished, and look like they will never be completed. The tour guide told us that our suspicions are correct, that they don’t have to pay taxes until the building is complete, so the buildings will never be finished. They just do enough to make a portion of it habitable.

We had thought that once we reached Luxor that the convoy would break up. As far as we could tell, all 70 busses pulled into the same tourist attraction, called Karnak Temple Complex or Ipet-Isut (The Most Perfect of Places). Karnak is a cluster of 7 temples, along with multiple shrines and special monuments to the Gods, a sacred lake, and more, all built in a 247 acre site situated about 600 meters inland from the Nile. A large wall surrounds the complex to help keep out the flood waters of the river during the annual flood. The first of the temples was created in the Middle Kingdom about 1900 BC, and successive temples, monuments and altars were built over the next 1500 years by assorted pharaohs.

The walkway leading to the entrance through the outer wall is lined with sphinxes with a ram head and a lion body. The entrance looms larger than life, having to be at least 6 stories tall. The good thing about so many tourists in the photo is it gives you a good perspective on size.

You walk into a courtyard where the common people were allowed to leave offerings for the priests to take into the shrines. Only the priests and pharaohs were actually allowed to set foot within the temples. The courtyard has a series of large pillars, each pillar with a top carved to look like either a lotus flower or a papyrus flower, some open, some closed. Which flower and whether it was open or closed was considered important symbolism. To the right are the walls surrounding the temple to Pharaoh Ramses III (which we didn’t get a chance to go into), that is flanked by large statues (presumably of him), and a walkway to another section of the complex.

To the left is a small shrine to Pharaoh Seti II (which we also didn’t have time to go into).

Standing in the courtyard, we could see that everything is made from stone, mostly sandstone and limestone, with quite a bit of granite, as well. Every inch of every wall and column is completely covered from ground to ceiling with carvings. The more intact portions of the various stone surfaces are polished smooth, deeply engraved, and painted. There isn’t much paint left, as it has been faded by the sun. On the less intact pieces, the smooth surface has fallen off or worn away, but the artists had carved deeply that you could still clearly make out the designs. Only the only the most damaged pieces of stone didn’t have carvings.

The tour guide explained the meaning of some of the imagery to us, and told us about customs, rituals, the complex religious beliefs, and some general history as he led us forward past some very enormous (like probably 5 stories tall) statues of Ramses III and into the Great Hypostyle Hall. The Great Hypostyle Hall is the most impressive all the structures at Karnak, with 122 columns standing 50 feet high along the outer portion, and 12 center columns standing 69 feet tall. The columns are so fat that 50 people could comfortably stand on the tops of each of them. This hall was once roofed, and the carvings are better preserved than those in the courtyard. There are even splotches of paint left here and there, particularly on the cross timbers of the roof.

It is almost indescribable the feeling of awe to be standing in a three thousand year old building and still being able to see a shadow of its former glory. It is unimaginable how majestic these buildings must have been when they were perfectly intact, and all the walls were polished and freshly painted. We felt very small and insignificant next to such big columns. We had studied about the Egyptian ruins in school, and it was weird to be standing in and amongst them, actually seeing them with our own eyes and touching them with our own fingers. The sad thing is that there is a lot of graffiti on the walls from the tourists.

We back tracked and went through the opening that we had shown you in the picture above. It leads into another courtyard area outside the Temple of Mut. In the courtyard is”¦

To be continued”¦