We arrived in Luxor at about 7pm on Thursday 9th September. After dinner on the boat we hopped on the bus and drove into the Luxor town. Here we went to El Safa bazaar Jeweller shop and after some hard bargaining walked away with a few gems.
After the jewellery shop we headed for the bazaar markets, this was a very different experience. Everyone yells at you as you walked down the street trying to get you into their shop and placing different scarves etc on you.
We tried to do a little bit of bargaining for a couple of things, Trace has way too much of her Pop in her! The story goes something like this, we approached the shop and choose our items we liked, Trace then asked the guy how much for these two. He answers ‘250 pound” she say”30 pound”, he say what you cant be serious, she say yes I am, “30 pound”, the guy goes on as they always do and drops to 110 pound. Trace sticks with her 30 pound. . . . then Mike pipes up, just as the guy is about to drop more – “how about we meet in the middle, 70 pound” . . . . . we ended up ending that deal and walking on. The guy ran after us for ages, eventually offering 30 pound. . . . .
Back to the boat by 10.30pm we watched the belly dancer, darwish dance and life music. This was great entertainment and we really enjoyed the darwish dance, he spun for what seemed liked forever and didn’t fall over!
DAY TWO
We were woken up at 5am which was actually 4am! We had to wind our clocks forward an hour because Ramadan time ended.
We headed out to Valley of the Kings, this was awesome and one of our highlights of the tour. We were not allowed to take our camera into Valley of the Kings, so no photos here sorry guys.
- Thutmes III 18 dynasty 1500 BC
- Seti II 19 dynasty 1209 BC
- Ramses III 20 dynasty 1170 BC
After Valley of the Kings it was onto the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut
Then the next stop, Kom Ombo Temple
Our final temple for the day was the Luxor Temple, by the time we were taken to this everyone was very hot and tired.
The Luxor temple did supply us with our final Cleopatra’s needle. We has seen the other 3 on our travels New York, Paris, London. Also during this temple visit we (the girls on the tour) had the frightful experience of being stalked by what looked like little boys with mobile camera phones. We as a group were standing beside a temple while the guide was explaining the significance to us and the Egyptian boys started to gather in two half circles around us taking photos.
We were back on the boat just before lunch to eat, relax, pack and soak up some sun before the overnight train to Cairo – joy!!
The overnight train to Cairo was nowhere near as bad as we had imagined! It was comfier than the bus to be honest. It was a long train ride, we didn’t get into Cairo until 9am after leaving at 10.30pm that night.
We spent the day in Cairo supermarket shopping for supplies for our kite surfing trip and walking around a few streets. Later that night we took a visit to a Papyrus paper shop were we purchase a painting of Abeul Symbol.
The view of Cairo from the upstairs bar at our hotel
It has been so hot right through Egypt reaching temperature of around 40 degrees most days, we have been going through about 6 litres of bottled water each day!
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