I woke up early to the sounds of people around me, I saw most of my felucca mates up and popped up quickly! I was glad that I conked out and slept through the night without interruption, I guess relaxing in the sun can be a tiring! We had a good number of sites to visit today so we needed to get washed up quickly. Though I did take some time to enjoy a morning on the Nile
We were dropped off at shore, where a bus was waiting to pick us up and take us to our first temple to visit, Temple of Kom Ombo. Because of the many ruling parties that Egypt has had over its life, some temples tend to have characteristics of the people in power at the time it was built. In Kom Ombo’s case, there were distinct roman influences and you could see it in some of the pillar work that was present. Mudi walked us through the temple and explained some of its history as well as some of the rituals that would have been performed. We had some free time to explore the temple as well as a dedicated exhibit to crocodile mummification. There were several Crocodile mummies, eggs and tombs to see.
We returned to our bus and drove towards our second stop Edfu Temple. This temple was also very impressive, it had an outer courtyard where people could gather, while the inner courtyard (Holy of Holies) was very beautiful with its hieroglyphics and art. One sad thing I learned was that there were some radicalized Christians that hid out in some of these temples (hiding from the Romans) and because the hieroglyphics were of other God’s, these people would deface and remove any god like image within the tomb. You could clearly see where this sort of vandalism had taken place. Its sad that people could do these sorts of things to make it difficult for future generations to enjoy such a rich history.
It was getting near mid day and all of us were starting to wilt from the heat. We piled back into our bus for the two hour journey to Luxor. We checked into our hotel for the night, Hotel Emilio and Mudi allowed us to rest and refresh before we met up again at 7PM. We would be attending the sound and light show at Karnak temple tonight. Muscles and I showered and hopped into our beds to catch up on some sleep. Its an amazing feeling when you get to shower and get layers of sweat, sun screen and bug spray that’s accumulated over two days off of you. We were well primed for a restful afternoon!
Evening came way too early and we met up again with our group to bus to Karnak temple. In the visitors centre there was a full mock up of the entire temple complex. It was easily the largest temple (complex) we’d seen since we started visiting Egyptian historical sites. Moody had been hyping this temple up a bit and we were excited to see it. We would have preferred to have walked through it on our own, but given the time of day, there was no way we’d have survived a walk in the afternoon! So the light show was the next best alternative. None of us were very eager for the “light show” portion, but we all wanted to see the temple.
The light show was probably recorded in the late 80’s as the music, voice acting and effects were very dated, but it did have some informative sections. We had an opportunity to walk through the temple (albeit in the dark when the light show wasn’t going on) so we did get a chance to appreciate how grand the temple would have been in its prime. We all probably would have enjoyed a chance to explore more, but we were satisfied with what we saw!
Mudi then took us to a Luxor jewelry store to show us some gold, silver and precious jewels at a jeweler that G Adventures has worked with before. He also took us to a local McDonalds where I was able to try a McArabia, it was a wrap that had Kofta (mixx of beef and lamb sausage) as the main ingredient inside. We strolled down the street back to our hotel where we all enjoyed some “food from home” in our Hotel Lobby before retiring to our rooms to sleep. We had packed morning tomorrow as we would be visiting the valley of the kings and the temple of the only female ruler of Egypt Queen Hatshepsut.
Galleries
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