Are you sick of Egypt yet?

Alrighty, day five. After breakfast they loaded us all onto the buses and we headed off for Valley of the Kings. This valley is in the middle of nowhere and served as the burial grounds for many Egyptian pharaohs. They’re still discovering tombs. Something the Valley is known for is its “natural pyramid” that overlooks the valley. People come from all over to see this natural pyramid. It was cool.
Our ticket that we bought allowed us to go into three tombs. I played “mom” as I handed around my sunscreen to anyone who wanted some. It was really dry, hot and sunny. Our guide, Habibi, talked to us for half an hour or so about the tombs and discoveries, etc.. He told us that back in the day, the workers started work on a pharaoh’s tomb as soon as he took the throne. Talk about being prepared. Anyway, many if not most of the tombs are unfinished because when a king died it took 70 days to do the embalming and mummification. So all work in the tombs stopped and everyone moved to work on the actual burial chamber to make sure that it would be finished by the end of mummification period.
First, I went with a group to King Tut’s tomb. Yessiree, King Tutankhamen. They have his body there. I saw THE King Tut. He looked like a prune. A big one. They also had one of his sarcophaguses…he had a bunch…kind like one of those Russian dolls. The walls of his burial chamber were covered with paintings and carvings of baboons. Baboons were supposed to be the animal and symbol of guards and protection. Not exactly the first thing that pops into my mind when I think “baboon.” Something more like bare butt. Or big butt. Or red butt. Or Rafiki. But I guess they can be pretty mean when they’re mad. It was pretty cool though. Once again, it was much smaller than anyone would imagine after watching “The Mummy,” but still cool.
After King Tut’s tomb we headed over to Thutmosis III’s tomb. We had to climb up a bunch of steps to get there. It was kind of in a crevice in a high cliff. I have no idea how they got his sarcophagus and burial box up there, but they did somehow. Anyway, his was full of all these passages and rooms with elaborate, colorful paintings. The ceilings were all painted dark blue with gold stars. The really cool thing about his was that the walls in his burial chamber were covered with Egyptian stick figures! I bet you didn’t know there were Egyptian stick figures, but there are and they are way cool. I loved them.
Our last tomb that we decided to go to was Ramses IX’s tomb. There were some really neat carvings in the entrance, huge bigger-than-life-sized depictions of Ramses and tons and tons of hieroglyphics. The burial chamber was intensely colorful with pictures covering every bit of wall and ceiling. On the ceiling was the God of the sky and day and night (I can’t remember her name). But I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of her. She’s standing like a table on her hands and feet and every day she swallows the sun and then births it again at the beginning of the next day. There were two huge depictions of her on the ceiling in bright blues and yellows. I wish we had been allowed to take pictures.
After Valley of the Kings we stopped to look from a distance at Hatshepsut’s Temple. Hatshepsut was the woman who became Pharaoh and always depicted herself as a man. Let me tell you, she was a mover and a shaker. After she died her husband/brother destroyed almost everything she had built and scratched out her name on everything and replaced it with his own mainly out of jealous envy. Anyway, a few years ago there was a shooting at Hatshepsut’s Temple and many tourists were killed. Because of that the Temple had been closed for a long time and so when our directors were planning our Egypt trip, the Temple was closed and so they didn’t put it in our itinerary. However, it opened up again recently, but we didn’t get to go. It’s too bad we didn’t get to go because it looked really cool…I got pictures.
After seeing Hatshepsut’s temple we went and looked at the Colossus of Memnon. It’s these two huge statues that once stood at the entrance to a Temple. The Temple isn’t there anymore, but it’s an active archaeological site—they’re still excavating it. It was pretty sweet.
Now, after that we went to my second (close to first) favorite site that we visited in Egypt—The Funerary Temple of Ramses III, also called Medinat Habu. This place was incredible. When you think of the classic Egyptian Temple, this is what you think of. There just aren’t words to describe. It’s a temple praising Ramses’ deeds and lauding his accomplishments and military victories. I wish I could have seen it in it’s prime. It was completely awe-inspiring in its run-down, ruined condition. Every surface was covered in majestic depictions of Ramses III and his battles, etc. There were some very unique carvings there that our guide pointed out to us, such as men wrestling and Semites. Man, this place was too dang cool. I wish I could describe it better. Some areas still had a lot of color. Everything had carvings on it…all the walls, ceilings, pillars, doorways, everything! Man, it was neat.
After Medinat Habu we headed back to the hotel for lunch and then we had the afternoon free. Someone had organized a two-hour camel ride through the working land and villages of Luxor and so I decided to go on that. We took motorboats across the Nile to get to the “less swanky” side of Luxor and my roommate Jenny and I got on our camel, who made us feel really good about ourselves by moaning laboriously and shaking his legs violently when he stood up. The caravan was very fun, but also very sobering. We saw neighborhoods of true poverty. Homes with dirt floors and dried mud-brick walls. Dirty kids playing barefoot on dirt fields. Narrow, dirt roads and alleyways, chipped paint, derelict roofs. It was intense. The fields that these people worked in, however, were well-kept and beautiful. They grow all types of produce there. But man, it was like walking through a village on survival-mode.
After the camel ride we went back to the hotel for dinner and then we headed off for the train station to catch our overnight train from Luxor back to Cairo. And boy was this train ride an experience! It was really fun. I’m all about the overnight train thing. It’s great…you just sleep while you travel. My roommate, Clare, and my favorite thing was the announcement on the cupboards in everyone’s room. It was full of spelling errors and kindly informed us that the belly-dancing contest would take place in the club car after dinner. Yes, the belly-dancing contest. Too bad we weren’t allowed in the club car after dinner, or I would have rocked that little contest baby. Haha. We all got a good laugh out of it anyway. Before dinner, however, a few of us went to the club car and quoted lines from “White Christmas” and sang “Snow, snow, snow, snow snow!” Hey, we thought it was funny.
Our dinner would probably best be described as a “mystery meal.” No one was quite sure what we were eating and so many of us avoided the food and ate the cookies and candy bars our guides highly recommended we bring on the train with us. (Yet another reason I would have rocked that belly-dancing contest.) After dinner we had fun exploring the cars and doing handstands in the hallways. Then a group of us decided to start “blitzing” people in their rooms and just piling as many people into one of those tiny rooms as possible. They are seriously hardly big enough to turn around in. We packed 32 people into one of those rooms and we were pretty darn proud of ourselves. We had fun opening the curtains in the room at train stations and watching the faces of the people standing on the platforms outside. Open-mouthed, unabashed gaping. It was rad.
I didn’t sleep the best…I woke up a couple times because there was a group of kids standing right outside our door talking and laughing loudly until the wee hours of the morning. And then, I had to go to the bathroom the whole night, but I was too lazy to get up, put my shoes on and walk to the bathroom at the end of the car. It was like camping when I was a little kid. So instead of going to the bathroom and sleeping peacefully the whole night, I slept fitfully and kept waking up until, around 3:30 am I finally just sat up and literally said, “Fine!” and went to the bathroom. After that I slept well…until 4:30 when they woke us up for breakfast. If you can call it breakfast. It was, like, four different slices of greasy bread and one of those little wrapped cheeses. Haha. I had a snickers bar and some delicious cookies for breakfast. Bad Heather.
We were supposed to start touring as soon as we got off the train, but I think things went smoother than they thought they would and so we were standing out in front of the train station at 5:30 am waiting for our buses and our police escorts. And it is here that I will leave you waiting for the next installment of the last three days of my Egypt experience. Dun-dun-dun. (That was supposed to be suspenseful theme music.)