First day in Upper Egypt

These next few posts documenting our trip around Upper Egypt might get kind of boring but I thought it was important to have a day by day record of what I did in case anyone wants to come for the same kind of trip or in case I ever want to organize one again. Fortunately, or, for my readers, unfortunately, not too much terrible happend during the trip so I don't have many harrowing Egypt stories to fulfill the "misery" element of the blog. But not to worry, once I am back in Cairo, I'm sure my life will rain crap once again. :)

Sunday night we left on the overnight train to upper Egypt for the beginning of our Nile Cruise. The cruise includes 5 star accommodations, three meals a day, ground transportation to historical sites, and an English speaking guide for four days and three nights, plus a night on the overnight train from Cairo and another night on the way back.

The train to Luxor was bumpy, jerky, and too bright to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time so we were all exhausted by the time we bumped and jerked into the station on Monday morning. We heaved ourselves off the train and limped into the parking lot searching for the promised guide holding my name on a sign. We searched in vain. Apparently the train had arrived early so although our guide came within fifteen minutes, our driver didn’t arrive for another twenty minutes after that. Although we had first been told we’d be able to check into the cruise ship before heading out to see the sights of Luxor’s West Bank (the City of the Dead including the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut’s temple), our guide informed us that check in wasn’t until ten-thirty. It was then around five-thirty in the morning, apparently the perfect time to sight-see, since we set off immediately for the West Bank.

Forty minutes of green pastureland dotted with palm trees and donkeys later, we forked over an exorbitant admission price that didn’t even include free range of the tombs. Each ticket buys entrance to three tombs and we went to the three our guide recommended we see: the deep, unfinished tomb of Ramses I, the long, flat tomb of Ramses III, and the super-long, slanted tomb of Ramses IX. The paint was still vibrant in the deep tomb of Ramses I and in some of the others as well and the number and detail of the hieroglyphs was boggling. There are dozens of kind of birds in Egyptian hieroglyphs, each representing a different word or sound, depending on the form and date of the language (there are three languages of hieroglyphs, I think, which evolved at different times over the course of Ancient Egyptian history). Some birds differ by only a single stroke, an added feather, talon, or the upward or downward curve of a beak, but have vastly different meanings. Unfortunately, the government allows no photos or video at the Valley of the Kings so I have nothing from here to post with this entry and my memories of the tomb scenes are already blurring with the other few thousand scenes we’ve visited since then.

We visited an alabaster factory, where the raw stone is first roughly cut with chisel-like tools into the general shape of a vase or statue, then packed with clay and material and buried in the earth to soften the top layers of the stone, then carved in detail, then polished smooth and fired in a kiln to re-harden. The stuff was beautiful, especially the green alabaster, which glowed like a green glass lampshade from the 40’s when held to a lightbulb, but I thought that even the prices one could get from drawn out negotiations were more expensive than it was worth.

We moved on to Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, or, more accurately, King Hatshepsut’s temple, since she ruled Upper and Lower Egypt as a man for twenty years. After her husband died and his illegitimate son took over, he too died and Hatshepsut’s seven year old son was next in line. She took over the throne, ostensibly ruling as a regent at first, then sent her son to a distant kingdom to be educated in the ways of war and politics while she officially declared herself king of Egypt. Why King? Because there was simply no way to understand or communicate the concept of a Queen of Egypt. The ruler was always a king. You knew he was a king because he wore a long beard and dressed in royal manly robes and depicted himself in the temples throughout his kingdom in the posture and bearing of a man. The scenes of his life written on his tomb and temples depict him hitting his enemies, hunting, and other manly ventures. Rather than break this mold, Hatshepsut found it easier to wear a false beard, dress in male clothing, and refer to herself in masculine pronouns. It must have worked because Egypt fought no wars during her entire reign. She resolved every conflict with diplomacy and political maneuvering and the country prospered until her son, now a grown man in his twenties, returned to Luxor and Hatshepsut mysteriously disappeared (her mummy was only recently located in a tomb near her own, where her supporters may have secreted it away to protect it).

Most statues, friezes, and paintings of hers in temples around Upper Egypt have been chipped away, particularly the faces, by her son’s supporters, to erase the shame of her enduring, but temporary dominance. Despite this, her temple is still very impressive, consisting of three huge levels of stone cut into the cliffside. Two large walls frame the entrance to the first level, a large courtyard which was once a great garden for papyrus and lotus, the symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt. The second level is formed by broad columns, as big around as California redwood trees (not the ones you drive through, but the next size down) forming long colonnades in the side of the cliffs with scenes depicting the journey of Hatshepsut to Somalia, or Punt, as it was called in Ancient times. A third, smaller courtyard, that I think might have originally been roofed in stone, is carved even further back into the cliff.

Our last stop on the West Bank was the statutes of Memnon, which was the name Ancient Greek tourists gave to two large statutes of an Egyptian Pharaoh whose name was not Memnon. We finally made our way to the boat to check in to our rooms and get much-needed showers. We’d been touring for six hours and it wasn’t even noon. We had the afternoon off but restricted our naps to only a couple hours so that we could be sure to sleep through the night. Lunch that day was our worst food on the ship by far but everything since then has been at least edible if not tasty, though there was some fish for dinner that night that had turned to a gelatinous liquidy ooze inside its shell of fried batter and breading. It is sometimes hard to identify what exactly the food is, especially dessert, and we often have to just serve ourselves up a small portion of something that looks like tunafish whipped into a thick paste and sculpted into the shape of a bumper curb in a parking lot on the off chance it might turn out to be chocolate mousse (which it did).