Strangely enough, one of the most memorable things about Cairo was just getting there in the first place.  We were coming from Luxor, and had decided to catch the train:  we were looking forward to a relaxed day spent reading and occasionally looking out the window to the splendour of the Nile.

As we knew from the Man in Seat 61 – the internet bible of all things train-travel related – catching the train in Egypt can be slightly cumbersome.  Officially – ‘for your safety,’ of course – foreigners are only supposed to be allowed to catch the overnight sleeper trains (which are, obviously, ridiculously more expensive – and which also mean that you miss any daytime sight of the Nile).  In practice, we’d had no trouble in Aswan just buying tickets from there to Luxor the day before we wanted to travel that segment.  We hoped that it would be the same story from Luxor, but alas…

We tried buying them at the train station three times during our time in Luxor (including as soon as we arrived), only to be told the train was full.  Various reports on the internet have it that this is what they tell you just to get rid of you, in the hope that you’ll then accept the offer of some friendly local (presumably friendly to the guy at the ticket counter, as well as to you!) conveniently at hand to offer to help you get what you’re after (at some substantially inflated price).  But we’d read, and were told by the man at the ticket counter (after we persisted in asking for long enough for him to spot that his tactic wasn’t working) that you could just get on the train and buy tickets from the conductor once on.  Excellent news, and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do.

Except that the train was full, at least in first class (other classes are, well, not recommended).  Though that’s not to say that I necessarily believe it was the first time we tried to buy tickets.

It wasn’t “you have to get off now” full, but it was “no seat reservation for you” full.  So we spent our ten hours of following the Nile mostly standing in the aisles, or hopping from seat to unoccupied seat as locals got on or off at stops along the way, each only to be replaced by a new puzzled-looking face holding a ticket for the seat, wondering why there was a tired-looking foreigner sitting in it.  First class is nice and all, but it’s definitely better when you’re not on your feet.

Anyway, having made it to Cairo, we basically had two tasks:  the pyramids, and the Cairo Museum.  (We also had a third:  find an internet café we could use to upload the millions of photos we were collecting to the internet, so they’d be backed up if the unthinkable happened – so far in Egypt our internet access had been spotty, to say the least.  But despite an hour or so’s searching on day one, we failed miserably at that task until we stumbled across one just around the corner on our last day in town:  the hordes of western coffee shops that Wikitravel had us expecting to fall over at every turn have presumably all closed up in the economic downturn and the chaos of the revolution.)

The Cairo Museum. I’m not sure specifically what the blackened building on the left is, but it’s somewhat typical of many of the buildings on Tahrir Square. This is not an area of Cairo you’re encouraged to visit when there are any protests happening…

The Cairo Museum left me in two minds.  There’s a lot of cool stuff there, but I’ve never realised before quite how important it is that a museum be logically set out and explained and labelled to tell a story.  The Cairo Museum is very much mummies, mummies, everywhere, but nought to stop to think [about].  To bastardise a vaguely inapt couplet.  It’s a collection of some very impressive pieces, I have no doubt.  Except that I have no idea what most of them were, or why I should care.

There are certainly some very grand-looking and beautiful artefacts (although unfortunately the spoilsports won’t let you take photos in the museum, so I have no pretty pictures to share, I’m afraid).  But rather than a fascinating learning experience, the Museum often feels like the religious relic equivalent of an old folks’ home – not the most interesting location, but somewhere you can put your assorted collection of otherwise-ignored old stuff and not feel too bad about it.

The Museum does house the contents of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, though, which was genuinely intriguing.  Especially since we’d been to the tomb itself earlier in the week.  The most fascinating exhibit by far, King Tut’s stuff takes up at least twenty times as much space in the Museum as there had been in the tomb itself.  Packing him up amongst the pretty, shiny stuff he was taking with him to the afterlife must have been an impressive effort in solving a 3D jigsaw puzzle.  With the added constraint of getting the stuff in there through the entrance tunnel.  Personally, I’m picturing King Tut asking his mates if they could help him with the couch when he moved in, although I’m sure that’s not the image that the exhibit is supposed to conjure up…

The Pyramid of Khafre

There’s not a lot to say about the pyramids, in many respects.  I’m guessing you probably all know at least roughly what they look like, so there’s not a lot to describe.  And while you can go inside two of them, you’re just seeing now-empty chambers that won’t benefit much from a wordy exposition.

We spent a whole day out at Giza – on foot, doing all our exploring by ourselves (without a tour group to constrain us), wandering all around for the full day politely – and sometimes not-so-politely – declining offers of camel rides all the while.  Especially rewarding was the walk out into the desert to see them from a distance, with Cairo in the background.  The pyramids are surprisingly close in to modern Cairo:  whenever I’d heard “Pyramids of Giza”, I hadn’t really understood that Giza is literally a suburb of Egypt’s primary sprawling metropolis.  But that’s on one side;  on the other, there’s a vast expanse of sand, which you can spend hours strolling off into to find the perfect vantage on the pyramids and their surrounds.

Pyramids on left, Cairo on right, vast expanse of sand everywhere else

Having spent those hours wandering through the dunes, idly wondering just how far up a pyramid we’d be able to climb before being shot (or at the very least, loudly whistled at) by a bored-looking security dude, we headed in the direction of the Sphinx.  And once done with that, we headed out in the direction of the Sphinx’s gaze.  To Pizza Hut.  Right smack bang in front of one of the ancient world’s greater wonders, the apparent focus of the giant stone creature’s timeless gaze.  Having had our fill putting back in whatever fat the walk in the desert had taken out, we wandered back out and around Giza for a bit, before returning to the same establishment for dessert.  Well, not just for dessert.  Our actual purpose was fulfilled when we made our way up onto the fast food chain’s rooftop, to see the sun disappear behind the Pyramid of Khafre.

Sunset, as viewed from the roof of the Pizza Hut in front of the Sphinx

Which, we felt, was a fitting conclusion to our adventures in Egypt.

Whereas Aswan was a base for Abu Simbel, and itself had only the Tombs of the Nobles, Luxor is a smorgasbord of ancient sites.  (Well, Aswan itself had only that if you consider just the things we bothered to see – we skipped the gardens on Lord What’s-his-face’s island in mid-Nile and a couple of other minor attractions, blaming a hearty reluctance to give enough of a crap to bother dealing with the touts we would have had to navigate en route.  More on them in the next post.)

There’s the Valley of the Kings (including the tomb of King Tutankhamen), the Temple of Hatshepsut, the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses II (more glibly known as the ‘Ramesseum’), the Colossi of Memnon, and the Village and Tombs of the Workers, all on the west side of the river, in the Theban Necropolis.  So that would be the ‘monuments to dead people’ side of the river.

Then there are the Temples of Karnak and the Luxor Temple on the east.  The ‘praying for a little longer before ending up on the other side’ side of the river, perhaps?  A couple of long days in the sun, and we did it all.  Oh, and the museum, too – also on the east.  (That part of the day obviously wasn’t long in the sun – in fact, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw that many of the museum’s more gushing reviews on TripAdvisor seemed to go on at quite some length praising the quality of its airconditioning.)

The pictures don’t convey the full awesomeness of being at the sites, surrounded by history that’s pretty much as tactile as it gets.  (Not that you should actually go too overboard on the tactile experience, of course.  No overenthusiastic rubbing away the remaining artefacts of ancient Egyptian culture, please.  Although I’m sure for a suitable ‘tip’ to the nearest ‘guard’, you can probably buff yourself vigorously against whatever relic comes to hand, if you really want to.)  More than that:  history you can walk through, and around, and between, and under.  History that’s standing in the same place it was put thousands of years ago.  For all the hassle and annoyance of travelling in the tourist centres of Egypt, standing in the desert amongst such ancient grandeur was worth it.  In such an amazing place full of amazing monuments.

… But any description that I could give is going to fall far short of bridging that gap, so to some extent, at least, the pictures’ll mostly have to do anyway.  Except for the actual contents of the Valley of the Kings and the Tombs of the Workers – no pictures allowed there, I’m afraid.  (Probably for the best, or we would have been there happy-snapping for days.)

A lone black-robed hawker on a hill above the Valley of the Kings

We started our first day early, finding a taxi on the street to take us around the dead-people sites (ie on the west side of the river).  We would have organised it through our hotel just to save time and to avoid the hassle of dealing with people on the street, but the night manager was evidently try to scam us by quoting hugely higher prices than the hotel owner’s starting price had been, so we decided to give that a miss…  Score one for doing things yourselves:  we easily negotiated a price on the streets well below what the hotel was promising, and paid less than we would have had the hotel owner organised it, even after a substantial tip to the driver at the end of the day.

We got to the Valley of the Kings around 7.30am, and were glad we did.  Although there were a few hardy souls who had got there at the crack of dawn and were already leaving, there were still very few others around, and we got to enjoy many of the tombs completely by ourselves.

That included the tomb of King Tutankhamen (designated KV62), which, after handing our separately-purchased additional ticket for the tomb to the remarkably Morgan Freeman-lookalike guard outside, we were able to experience with not even a hint of any other people around.  So the three of us stood alone in front of the King’s mummified remains – just his head and feet poking out from under a white blanket in a glass case – before exploring, in bizarrely air-conditioned comfort, the remarkably small space that he’s inhabited for most of these last three thousand odd years.  And noting that there seemed to be an awful lot of baboons depicted on the walls, among other animals and humans.  I wouldn’t have picked ancient Egypt as a baboon-rich environment, myself, but there you have it.

The other big highlight of the morning – the double tomb of Ramesses V and Ramesses VI (KV9) – we also got to ourselves.  Well, but for the guard constantly and annoyingly pointing out blindingly obvious features – “that’s Anubis”, “that’s a cow”, “that’s a bird”, “here’s Ramesses V”, “here’s Ramesses VI”, the last two repeated ad nauseam – in broken English in hopes of a tip.  (Solution for those travelling in a group:  split up.  There were three of us, and with each of us in a different part of the underground tombs, the guard could only annoy one of us at a time, at most!)  The double tomb was clearly a substantially bigger enterprise than Tutankhamen’s frankly miserly effort:  a long entrance chamber of brightly coloured hieroglyphics, with then a two-part extended corridor leading along and then sloping gently down to a large main chamber with a huge broken stone sarcophagus.  This is the sort of tomb that announced power and privilege, and somehow even sarcophagus’s brokenness contributes to that effect.

The interior decorators for the double tomb seem to have chosen snakes as the feature animal, rather than King Tut’s simians, and so the entranceway is adorned with quite a number of enormously long footless reptiles, with even a few snake-headed people mixed in amongst the more usual dog- and bird-headed fare.  Quite a handful of scenes of men riding snakes, too;  perhaps some of the less practical depictions, to my admittedly uneducated mind.

Having seen the two big-ticket (and separately-purchased-ticket) items first, we then had to pick three of the eight or nine other tombs in the valley which happened to be open at the time.  (Your standard entrance ticket to the Valley comes with three tombs included, none of which can be King Tut or the double tomb.  Other tombs sold separately.)  We tried to pick a reasonably varied choice from the descriptions we’d researched the night before.

First, KV11, the tomb of Ramesses III – a huge tomb, but with its four large chambers at the bottom completely ruined, with broken ceilings and with their plastered walls almost completely worn away.  Like a number of others in the Valley, the tomb has been open since antiquity, and has clearly suffered for it.  But enough remained to pick out more snakes in the decorative elements – this time including some, strangely, with legs – and the upper section of the entrance corridor (before the bit where they accidentally broke into KV10 – whoops! – and had to clumsily dogleg around before continuing on to the main chambers) still survives enough to make out the staple of hieroglyphics, eagles, birds, dogs, etc.

Next, KV16, the tomb of Ramesses I, this one very deep, down a few steep sections of stairs to a small chamber well underground.  Unlike King Tut’s version, there was no airconditioning here, so the incredibly colourful chamber was somewhat hot and sticky.  But that didn’t much affect our appreciation of the large central red stone sarcophagus and the bright hieroglyphics on the walls – here simply painted onto a background painted on the wall, not carved in as in most of the other tombs.

And last, KV47, and finally someone back to someone not named Ramesses – this the tomb of Siptal.  Again we were alone as we wandered down the long corridor to the burial chamber ruined long ago by flooding.  And we remained alone as we studied its detailed rose-coloured stone sarcophagus, decorated with intricate engraved hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus itself, all the while appreciating that the location and orientation of this particular tomb kept it nice and cool – a welcome contrast to Ramesses I’s hole in the ground.

Above the Temple of Hatshepsut, on the ridge between the Temple and the Valley of the Kings

Once the Valley of the Kings had thus been suitably explored, we ventured up the hill (up the sort-of-marked path past the ‘no climbing’ signs) and over the ridge to the east, to overlook our next destination for the day:  the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.  We checked that out from our perch up on high, and enjoyed the view across the thin green strip of land astride the Nile, before returning through the Valley of the Kings to find our taxi and drive round to wander through Queen Hatshepsut’s impressive monument, which, at least, we could explore with cameras at the ready.

The Temple of Hatshepsut. Our wander from the Valley of the Kings had taken us to the edge of the cliff on the skyline directly above the temple.

From there, it was off to the equivalent structure for Ramesses II:  the ‘Ramesseum’.  A slightly less intact edifice, this one.  I guess that’s what you get for building your ‘temple of a million years’ on the Nile flood plain, perhaps forgetting that a million years means really quite a lot of water movement through the area, which I imagine doesn’t do great things to the structural integrity of your foundations, even if the building itself doesn’t normally flood.  But anyhow, the giant stone head – of the Ozymandias colossus – is probably much more interesting and imagination-provoking lying on the ground than it would be on a still-preserved statue, so the ruins were impressive regardless, and we spent a good hour picking through them while our taxi driver wandered off to find his lunch (somewhat incredulous that we weren’t doing the same;  not only that, but also that we intended to keep going for the rest of the day without stopping – presumably most of the tourists passing through have a little more difficulty with the heat and effort of wandering around in the sun all day!).

We also amused ourselves giggling at perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the day:  the valiant attempts of Catholic missionaries to scratch the large phalluses off the fertility figures on the pillars.  Of course, having scratched away as they did, all they really succeeded in doing was leaving a series of even more obvious, slightly larger, vaguely dick-shaped indentations, so I’m not quite sure what they thought they were achieving.  But it’s the thought that counts, I suppose.

An excited ancient Egyptian, with member rather unsuccessfully erased

The penultimate – but yet still quite substantial – attraction for the day was the Village and Tombs of the Workers.  The ancient village of Deir el-Medina housed the masons and other artisans who worked on the tombs of pharaohs and nobles in the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere around the Theban Necropolis, and in what I can only imagine must have made for an incredibly morbid existence, in what little time they had to spare from building big rich people tombs, the more well-off of those masons and artisans built small poor people tombs for themselves and their families.

No photos allowed in the tombs, but here are some ornately decorated walls inside a temple in Deir el-Medina (the Workmen’s Village)

While much smaller than many of the more grandiose tombs in the Valley of the Kings – as you’d expect – some of these more humble final resting places are incredibly well preserved.  So although Deir el-Medina may not be a staple of the main tourist track through Luxor, it’s most definitely worth a visit.  The intricacy of the beautifully painted tomb interiors here far exceeds what we saw in the thoroughly-looted tourist hotspots earlier in the day, to the extent that we were almost saddened to see that we seemed to be the only people bothering to visit them.  The walls and ceilings are vividly painted with scenes every bit as detailed and colourful as the better-preserved parts of the tombs of the Kings.  And the much reduced size gives the tombs an intimacy that the Kings’ tombs can’t rival.

Finally, to round out the day, a brief stop at the Colossi of Memnon.  Wikipedia tells me that the Colossi’s original purpose was to stand guard at the entrance to an even bigger temple than the Ramesseum, or any other temple in Luxor.  But you wouldn’t know it these days:  they’re out by themselves in the middle of nowhere, with Amenhotep’s Mortuary Temple having survived the inundations of the Nile even less well that Ramesses’.

The Colossi of Memnon

And thus we completed day one:  a fantastic day of epic history and stoic water consumption in the blistering sun.

Day two had a shorter itinerary, but the main item – the Temples of Karnak – was pretty much a whole-day event.  The Temple complex is enormous and quite varied.  We started with the towering pillars of the Great Hypostyle Hall, and spent a large chunk of the day making our way on a long circuitous navigation through a variety of other temples, obelisks, halls, etc, right out to the lonely statue of a scarab beetle out back.  You’ll know you’ve got to it when you see the surrounding hordes of tourists walking endlessly around it, in imitation of the ancient tradition to circle it seven times counter-clockwise for good luck.  I was subsequently told that what the tourists generally don’t know is that this was the good luck charm you used if you’d tried everything else but hadn’t been able to find a suitable wife or – more frequently – husband.  This made it all substantially more amusing, considering the number of couples striding purposefully around, just because the tour guide told them to.

A view down the central axis of the Temples of Karnak, from between the two great obelisks, right back towards the entrance

After most of our day was spent at Karnak, we did indeed enjoy the airconditioning of the Luxor Museum.  Also, it was a pretty good museum:  somewhat small, but well-labelled and informative, and with some interesting and well-preserved artefacts (yes, including two mummies) to gawk at.

The Luxor Temple, the last item on our to-do list, we gave a miss, satisfied with simply observing it from the outside on our several walks past, and not feeling a pressing need to endure the mass of hawkers at its entrance to see from the inside what we could already see from the street.

The Temple of Luxor at night

And then, several visits to McDonald’s later, we were done with Luxor, and off for what we hoped would be a comfortable and scenic train trip up to Cairo…

Aswan, seen from across the River Nile, from amongst the Tombs of the Nobles

Aswan was our introduction to Egypt.  It introduced us to heat – forty degrees plus, but dry, much like I remember South Australian summers growing up, albeit with a lot more sand.  It introduced us to the up-close-and-personal wonders of visiting the world’s archetypal archaeological destinations – the ones you’ve always associated with exotic far-off lands;  the ones you don’t really imagine as things you could stand beside, or inside, or staring in the face of.  It introduced us to an unreasonably large number of trips to McDonald’s – if only to get a salad we could trust had been washed in water that wouldn’t make us sick.  (Of course, given that we were there, it seemed silly to pass up the opportunity for a side of burger, chocolate milkshake and sundae.  Possibly two sundaes.)  It introduced us to Egyptian drivers’ novel use of headlight and horn as a method of communication – at times seeming as though we were witnessing some complex courtship ritual conducted entirely via the flashing of lowbeams.  And it introduced us to the utter desperation of locals trying to survive in a country almost entirely dependent on tourism, but which has seen tourist numbers fall off a cliff over the last two years, since the beginning of the revolution.  That introduction basically consisted of being hassled mercilessly and constantly every time we ventured onto the street.  But more about that in another post.

We were in Aswan for Abu Simbel.  That despite the rather blatant fact that Abu Simbel isn’t in Aswan – it’s a four hour drive away.  But it’s four hours’ drive in the direction of Sudan, through a part of southern Egypt that’s not generally considered a great place to be.  Which is made obvious when you get up at 4am to meet your minibus for the daily police-escorted convoy, all off to see Ramesses the Great’s famous monument to himself and his wife.  (Well, one of his wives.  He was a pretty popular guy, it turns out.)

Once we got past the bizarreness of that convoy – and the early-ness too, for that matter – we got on with gaping and gawking at the history sitting right there in front of our noses.

The main temple, dedicated to Ramesses the Great, at Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel is two temples carved into the rockface built to face (and overawe, presumably) Egypt’s potential invaders to the south.  One temple for Ramesses II (aka Ramesses the Great), and one for his wife Nefertari, of whom he was evidently rather fond.  (Moreso than one imagines were the slaves tasked with the more menial aspects of demonstrating Ramesses’ devotion, anyhow.)

In front of a statue of Ramesses the Great in the façade of the Small Temple

The pictures will convey the impressiveness much better than any descriptions I can give…

The façade of the Small Temple

… except for one thing the pictures don’t show:  the temples are not where Ramesses had them built.  There’s a dam there now.  So in the 1960s, while building said dam, they also relocated Ramesses and Nefertari en toto.  Quite a feat, which the visitor’s centre impresses on you well.  Then you realise that you’re being impressed by the job they did in the late twentieth century.  With, y’know, bulldozers and cranes and stuff.  Carefully relocating an original that was built three and a half thousand years earlier.  With, y’know, slaves and little rock hammers that these days don’t have much greater utility than to test your knee reflexes.

The Great Temple, seen from in front of the entrance to the Small Temple. Yeah, looks like a bugger to relocate, doesn’t it.

Other than Abu Simbel, we did little in Aswan other than acclimatise to the heat and to the wearyingly relentless attempts to sell us this, take us for a ride on that, and generally find a way, any way (legitimate or otherwise), to get as much money as possible from my pocket into someone else’s.  We did get a boat across the river to explore the Tombs of the Nobles – that was before Abu Simbel, and was interesting both as our first live experience of Egyptian history and because it also offered some good views across and up the Nile.  But other than that, once our police convoy safely delivered us back from our meeting with Ramesses, we relaxed and got ourselves ready for a train ride up to Luxor.  Job done, next bit of history, please…

A falluka sailing down the Nile, in front of the Tombs of the Nobles