Luxor Part 1

We are back! Yay! We had a great week together in Luxor. The problem is that there are so many pictures I want to put on, but just can't. Oh wait! I have this wonderful program called Picasa. Let's make a collage.

This whole trip was a surprise for Spencer. It's our 10th anniversary later this month and he had all of last week off. So, what better time to take a vacation? I was going to try and surprise him the morning of, but seeing as how we had to leave at 4:45 am, I didn't think he'd appreciate being woken up that early and leaving on short notice. I left our plane itinerary on the bed and asked him, from another room, to go get the papers for me. He was thoroughly surprised! Our flight to Luxor left at 7am and is only an hour flight, so by 9am we were checked into our hotel and ready to begin the day.

We took it easy and visited the Luxor Museum first, which is, in my opinion, the best museum Egypt has to offer. It's 80LE ($14.47) entrance ticket is a little steeper than other prices, but totally worth it. Everything is well labelled, beautifully arranged and lighted, air conditioned (not that it matters at this time of year, but other times it's essential). They even have two mummies which are leaps and bounds past the mummies in the Cairo Egyptian Museum. The Egyptian Museum is a disorganized, poorly lit, over-heated mess of pharonic artifacts. And you have to pay extra to see their stinky mummies. But it's only open from 9am - 1pm, so you have to plan your time wisely. Although we got there at 10:30 and were completely done by noon. And we are museum freaks, we love reading every description, lingering over each piece and basking in the awe of ancient artifacts.

After the museum, we headed over to this great little cafe called Chez Omar. I discovered it last February when I went to Luxor with my friend, Collette. It's traditional Egyptian food, but not tourist prices. A bowl of lentil soup, 5LE (90 cents), rice and vegetables, 5 LE each and half a grilled chicken for 20LE ($3.61). And we each ordered our own everything, we could have easily split it. We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through town and along the Nile, you know, being mushy 2nd honeymooners! There is one picture, on the bottom row, 4th from the left. That was what greeted us when we returned to our rooms the second day. The "maids" (they were mostly men) had made up the room, rolled a towel into a snake/swan something, put a book in front of it and balanced my glasses on it's "nose". The tears of laughter were flowing! Though I had put my glasses away in my case, creepy at the same time. We made sure to hide everything adequately for the rest of the week.

The second day, we went to the West Bank (no, not that one), Luxor proper is on the East bank of the Nile. We caught the 1LE (18 cents) ferry across the river and hired a taxi for the day. We went to the Valley of the Kings first. There are numerous tombs (65 known tombs at this time and 2 new entrances discovered this year) but your ticket only gets you into 3 of your choice. And King Tut's tomb is a separate ticket of 100 LE ($18.10). We didn't go inside that one. We went inside Rameses IV, Tutmoses III and Rameses IX. The last one, Rameses IX, was a last minute choice seeing as how some other choices of ours required an extra ticket or was closed. After that we went over to the Ramesseum. It's the mortuary temple of Rameses II. After a quick stop at the Colossi of Memnon, it was back to the 1LE ferry across the river. That takes us up to Tuesday night, more to come! (oh, and no photo allowed inside the tombs, that's why there aren't any)