Luxor, Egypt, Karnak Temple and the Valley of the Kings

The bus to Luxor from Hurghada was half an hour late. We were lucky to get seats. You can't buy seats in advance (as it's not an originating point), so there's just a mad scramble to get seats as the bus pulls in. A family we met on the bus told us that they hadn't been able to get on the bus the previous day as it was full. Take *that*, schedule!

The scenery to Luxor is more desert, but still pretty. When we booked our hotel in Luxor, the hotel owner had warned us that when we step off the bus, hotel touts will swarm us, try to tell us his hotel is full, or closed, or burned down last night, etc. It wasn't that bad, we shook them off fairly easily. Rather than deal with more dishonest cabbies, we walked the half hour to the Happy Land Hotel. We were disappointed to hear that the rate he had quoted us was "per person" - so double what we thought it was. My guess is that he doubled our rate because A) We looked tired and didn't look like we were going to change hotels B) We had told him we were going to go on a cruise the next day (not booked through him). A lot of the budget hotels make most of their money off arranging tours for their guests, and sell them pretty hard. He was right, we couldn't be bothered to fight. He tried to also charge us for the free breakfast, but we stood our ground on this one and got our crappy free breakfast.

However, the room was immaculate - the cleanest room we stayed in in Egypt (apart from the Sheraton). Make sure if you stay here though to ask for a room on the upper floors - our room was right beside reception and there was lots of reception and street noise. We headed outside and walked down the corniche (the road that straddles the Nile) to Luxor Temple. We took some good evening photos, and met Gord from waywardtraveller.org. Always good to meet another traveler on the road, especially a fellow Canuck!

We ate at the Amoun Restaurant, which is a tourist restaurant 5 minutes away from the Luxor Temple. It's an outdoor restaurant, service was fast, and the food was good.

The next day the horror of our cruise began. We were surprised that the guide was supposed to pick us up only at 10 - quite late, considering that this was to be our only day to actually see Luxor. He took us to the boat, which was moored not alongside all the other beautiful boats we had seen on our previous evening walk, but in a deserted area just outside the main strip of the corniche, with trash strewn about everywhere. The boat was deserted except for a guy manning the reception. We were getting more and more apprehensive of what we were in for. We demanded to see the room, and it was acceptable (although on the first floor, so our window was only a porthole). The reception staff wanted to hold our passports - alarm bells immediately went off. Every guidebook we've read told us that under no circumstance should you let your passport out of your sight. They showed us the pile of passports from other passengers (where were they?), and with a big leap of faith we handed ours over.

Next we were passed off from the guy who met us on the boat to our real tourguide, who barely spoke English. We established (mostly through gestures) that the other passengers had left at 7:30am from the boat, as we should have, but we were late. Explaining to him that we were told to only be ready to go at 10am didn't help. We told him that we did NOT want to miss out on any of our guided tours because of Hamis Travel's mistake, and that he was to skip the lunch and go on with the tour. We kept asking him when we'd join the other tour group - we thought he was just our temporary guide until we caught up with the rest of the group. He wasn't able to answer that question.

Our guided tours of the sites we were seeing was a sad joke. He had very, very little information, and what he did have was mostly wrong. So typically he would give us his schpiel for 5 minutes, then tell us "ok, free time now, meet in 30 minutes at car". Our supposed tour of Karnak Temple was a little longer - 10 minutes - but all other tourguides were at least 1 hour. He refused to walk out of the shade, kept complaining about how hot it was, while still wearing an enormous sweater. Fortunately, we had our Lonely Planet and Let's Go guidebooks with us, so we ended up self-guiding. Then he would complain when we were back that we took too long, and that it was so hot. Unbelievable. He would complain every time Wendy tried to take a picture because she wasn't listening to him. Not that there was much to listen to - either seriously every Pharaoh who ever made a statue of himself in Egypt was Ramses II, or our guide was sadly misinformed.

We finally established that we were never to join another group - he was our tour guide for the entire cruise. When we got back to the boat, we called Hamis Travel to complain. Their Luxor rep of course wanted to meet us in person to discuss (this seems to be a cultural difference - all discussions must take place in person, and not on the phone!). So we met him on a street corner, and he told us he would take care of it.

Vaguely re-assured, we headed out that evening by ourselves to the Karnak Temple sound and lights show. There are various shows throughtout the evening in various languages - although to be honest, the language was sort of irrelevent. As is typical for sound and light shows, the narration was over the top and vaguely annoying. During the first part of the show, the group moves en masse together through the temple, while they light up various parts, overly dramatic music plays, and voices drone on in stuffy English accents about stuff that doesn't make sense. After about 30 minutes of this, they herded us past some snack stands to some bleechers overlooking the 'sacred' lake, where we could get an overview of the Temple complex. The rest of the show would take place here. They lit up various parts of the temple, and the overly dramatic music and narration went on. And on. Finally after about 30 minutes of this (I pity the poor family of the guy in front of us who would have to watch his home video of the *whole thing*) people started getting fed up and leaving, us included. The first part of the show (walking through the temple at night) was interesting, but they really could have ended it there.

We continued on with our cruise on the Nile. Later in the trip, we returned to Luxor.

We arrived in Luxor exhausted. Hamis Travel had set us up at the Arabesque Hotel, and it was pretty bad. Purportedly 3 stars, those were the worse stars we've ever seen. If we had not been as tired as we were, we would have switched. We didn't pay for it (Hamis Travel gave us the voucher for free, but they originally tried to charge us US $30) and it was still too expensive. It was nasty. The linens had holes and dirt marks; the shower was explicitly constructed to inflict maximum head injuries on anyone above 5 feet tall, the street noise was very bad, etc. Fortunately it was only one night and we travel with our own towels.

The next day we woke up early and headed back to the West Bank. Although we'd visited it already on our "tour" with Hamis Travel, we wanted to head back and actually see some things. We got a local ferry across the Nile (by the way, this is much faster than the long detour to get to the bridge we had done previously with the tour). We were immediately surrounded by taxi drivers (as expected) and, as usual, found the quiet guy who wasn't aggressive and haggled with him. Although we had been prepared to pay $50 for a taxi and driver for the day (given what the guidebook told us, and our terrible haggling skills), we managed to get one for only $10 US for 5 hours. It might have been so cheap because it was New Year's morning, and there were very few tourists. He was reliable, always waiting for us at the sites we visited, and we tipped him 50% at the end of the day.

Getting around by taxi is really the best option for the independent traveler who wants to cover a lot of ground on the West Bank. The sites are spread apart, signage is not always there, and the prices for a taxi are cheap.
We visited Medinet Habu first. At the time (New Year's Day) there was only a handful of other people on the site. This was one of our favourite sites on the West Bank. The colors in the paintings were extremely well preserved, and the site was pretty big with lots to explore.

Next up we headed to the tombs of the Artisans, with some great underground (very underground) tombs. We were lucky the site was pretty empty. It was VERY hot (even underground), and only small groups are allowed into a tomb at once. I can imagine that on busy days this would not be a fun one.

Next up was the Tombs of the Nobles, but we screwed this one up. You buy tickets from the main ticket office (all tickets except Valley of the Kings are bought from a main tourism office on the street leading away from the harbor, and if you fail to buy the tickets here, you have to go BACK there, tickets are NOT available on site!). The problem was that they've divided the tombs up into groups and so to see the ones we wanted to see you needed two tickets, one to each of the tombs in that "group". Although there is only one ticket for the tombs of the nobles, once you visit one tomb within a "group" you can then only visit another tomb in that group with the same ticket. We didn't understand this. So, we wasted our tombs of the noble entry tickets on a tomb we didn't really want to see (cause we'd actually managed to find that one :) ), thinking we could still use it later for the other tomb. I still don't really understand what happened, as none of the guards spoke English very well. Surprisingly, they couldn't even be bribed.

We went back to the Valley of the Kings and tried to visit some of the tombs we were not able to see the first time. Unfortunately, most of the tombs we had wanted to see were closed. The good news though was that the tombs we did make it into were all pretty empty, so much so that we even took (flash-free) photos, without fear of suffering the wrath of the guards (or at least having to pay them off).

After re-visiting the West Bank, we wandered around Luxor's street markets, and eventually ended up back at Karnak Temple. There, we spent some more time taking photos and hanging out, soaking it in. In case we had any doubt, listening in on other tour groups made it clear just how completely uninformed and useless the tour guide from Hamis Travel was. We walked back along the corniche and watched the sun set over the Nile. We thought about going in to the Luxor Museum, but the ridiculous price tag ($20, if memory serves) dissuaded us. The price had tripled from what our guide book listed (the guide book being 2 years out of date). Student discounts were not substantial.

We walked to the train station and boarded our night train for Cairo. We had reserved a 2 person sleeper cabin, which, while looking a little dated, was very clean. The linens were very nice, the in-room sink was spotless, and the included dinner/breakfast was passable. Not bad for $50.

This is part of a larger trip report from a backpacker's trip to Egypt.
You can also look at our Pictures from Egypt or select from the sections below.