After a busy day of sightseeing in Cairo, we headed straight to the airport to catch our flight to Luxor. The airport was an absolute and unmitigated mess. We didn’t see anywhere to get boarding passes, so we assumed that, like some other Middle Eastern airports, we must need to pass through a preliminary security screening to get to the area with boarding passes. We got in the line for domestic departures, which had a single family massed around the scanner and metal detectors. We entered the fray and after all of our baggage had went through the x-ray scanner and most of us through the metal detector, the security guard realized we had no boarding passes and kept all of our passports. I was frantically trying to gather up our bags as the x-ray conveyor belt just kept dumping more out on top of them. Fortunately, Severin was able to get his passport back, exit the line, and go to the EgyptAir ticketing office to print out confirmation pages, which placated the guard enough to let us back to the actual check-in desk to get boarding passes. Exhale.
From Luxor our taxi was a diesel-fume-spewing, 1970s era station wagon. I don’t think we broke 30 miles per hour the whole ride to the Winter Palace Hotel, and for some reason us chugging slowly along the rode in the darkness made me laugh. We got cold hibiscus tea at the check-in. The Winter Palace was a grand hotel but had definitely seen better days– it had that damp, musty feel to it that old hotels get. It had been repainted, but they’d never bothered to strip off the old paint, meaning some of the hardware was gummed up. We had an amazing view of the Nile from our room, though, and one night we enjoyed (meh) room service food on the balcony.
We had a busy agenda for two full days in Luxor. Day 1 was dedicated to the West Bank, “the city of the dead,” we wanted to see the Valley of the Kings, the Tombs of the Nobles, Medinet Habu, and the Ramesseum. Unfortunately, I allowed the guide to talk us out of going to the Ramesseum instead and going to Hatshepsut’s temple instead. The ruins of the Ramesseum inspired my favorite poem, so I’m a little bummed we didn’t get to visit and do a dramatic reading. Admittedly, Hatshepsut’s temple was nice, but the hands of extensive restoration were present. It almost felt like it didn’t belong alongside the rest of the ruins. Anyway.
Our first stop of the morning was the Valley of the Kings. We left our cameras in the car after a rather confusing discussion with our tour guide about whether we would be allowed to buy photo permits or not. A few weeks before we arrived, the rules had been changed and apparently now video (but not photography) is allowed inside the Valley of the Kings. But we saw people doing both and only saw someone get tsk’ed by a tomb guardian once. I’m not sure it mattered all that much, because my camera was probably not up to the task of low-light photography anyway, so instead we just enjoyed the moment and appreciated seeing these 3,000+ year old tombs through our own eyes.
The first tomb we visited was my absolute favorite– it was KV2, belonging to Ramesses IV. The tomb is a straight-shot with a gentle downslope, and well-lit, so when you first enter an expanse of yellow and blue hieroglyphs stretch out in front of you. The ceiling is painted cobalt blue with gold stars. There is abundant ancient Roman, Greek, and Coptic graffiti as the tomb was frequently entered in antiquity. At the back of the tomb, a huge stone sarcophagus stands at least 10 feet tall. But I was most obsessed with the art on the ceiling of this chamber, which had again the cobalt sky with a the pale-yellow colored goddess Mut. She was stretched along three sides of the ceiling– her torso down the middle, her legs wrapping around one side, and her arms wrapping around the opposite side. (Stock image is here, but it doesn’t really do it justice…) The painting shows Mut swallowing the sun at the end of the day, and then giving birth to the sun the next day.
The second tomb we visited was KV11, belonging to Ramesses III. This tomb was also amazing but for a different reason– mainly the spectacular burial chamber, which had a spectacular stone sarcophagus in the middle of a pillared hall. The original sarcophagus is supposed to be in the Louvre, so not sure what we were looking at. No matter, it was incredible! It is worth noting that even in the middle of November the air in the tombs was very heavy and still. I can’t imagine digging or excavating these tombs in the dead of summer, it must have been absolutely miserable.
You can enter three tombs on one Valley of the Kings ticket, and the third we visited was KV8, belonging to Merenptah. Merenptah’s tomb was much deeper than the prior two, and all I remember is walking down and up a lot of stairs. But it was nice to have visited three distinct tombs…honestly, I would have happily bought two tickets and visited another three, I enjoyed them that much. Next time…
Now, I know what you’re thinking…what about King Tut!? You have to pay about $5 extra to go see it, and everything we’d read said it is actually one of the more unremarkable tombs in the valley– Tut died so young that he didn’t have a lot of time to obsess over arrangements the way the other pharaohs did. We breezed past the tomb on our way to KV8, saw the outside and the signs, but didn’t go in. We had already seen his treasure at the Egyptian Museum, so I don’t feel any regrets!