Luxor

It's been a bit of a challenge keeping up with school while travelling, especially since I spend an hour and a half commuting to and from school each day. That said, here are the highlights of the past two weeks. I will begin with my trip to Luxor:

Mark's friend from high school, Buddy, is an Egyptology enthusisast. Actually, this is a bit of an understatement, although he would never admit to posessing such an immesnse body of knowledge on ancient Egypt. Buddy is studying abroad in Itlay this semester, and accompanying him to Cairo two of his classmates from Italy, Betsy and Asad. Betsy actually went to high school with Mark, although they didn't really know each other then. I beleive Buddy met Asad in Italy. He goes to university in the US, but his home is Karachi, Pakistan. Buddy, Betsy, and Asad were all on break from their school in Italy, and Buddy's interest in Egypt made visiting Mark good decision.

Luxor and the surrounding areas are a wealth of archaelogical sites. We easily packed three days full of tourism and exploration without ever making it over to (relatively) nearby Aswan. In order to spend enough time in Luxor, we took the night train out of Cairo at 8:30 on the night of Tuesday the 24th and skipped classes Wednesday and Thursday and returned by plane to Cairo Friday evening.

I was tutoring at St. Andrew's unitl 7pm, as I do every Tuesday. For this reason I carried my backpack packed for the weekend around school with me all day so that I could head to the train station immediately after tutoring. I left St. Andrew's on time, but when I tried to meet up with Mark, Betsy, Buddy, Asad, and Sara, my phone would not work, even though I had plenty of credit. Vodafone for some reason wanted my name, address, birthdate, and passport number (which I did not give them) before continuing my service. This was only a minor setback, although it seemed big at the time because I was in a rush to catch a train. But even worse, it reminded me that I had forgotten my passport in my room. I would need that to fly back to Cairo from Luxor! I hopped a quick cab back to the dorm, grabbed my passport and attempted to get another cab back to Downtown. The cabbies were in a bad mood that night, as the first one would not take me Downtown, and the one that finally agreed would only do it for twice the going rate (although this still amounted to less than $2). I finally arrived at the trainstation via the subway at 8pm, an hour after I had agreed to meet Mark and our friends. The next problem was that I had arrived on the wrong side of the station and was faced with a huge concrete wall, designed to keep people from coming into the station from the wrong direction. Made it half over the wall before deciding that, although the coast was clear, potentially causing a scene with the guards would delay us too much. In stead I walked until I found some guards standing neer an unoffical entrance. They let me in just fine, only asking to see my ticket before they waved me through. I finally met up with my friends, ten minutes before the train arrived.

The train ride itself was nice enough, although my intermitent naps probably added up to less than 45 minutes of actual sleep. We arrived in Luxor at 5:30am. Making our way past the wave of taxis, happily waiting to take us to our destination for a ridiculous fee (but a fee that would be considered chump-change to any foreigner converting from the euro or dollar), we began my favorite part of any trip. Mark busted out the Lonely Planet, flipped to the page with a tiny, sparsely detailed map of Luxor, and we tried to figure out where the hell we were and where we were going. This group (meaning me, Mark, Sara, and a number of the other people we travel with who were not present on this trip) likes to walk. We all have fairly independent personalities with widely varying degress of a "take-charge" tendencies. We all get along well and enjoy a bit of an adventure.

Luxor isn't exactly a dangerous town, but nevertheless, it is still exciting to navigate your way through a strange twon with tiny map. After making one wrong turn (we blamed Lonely Planet for not making a better map) we finally found our destination: The Bob Marley Hostel. We ran into a group of backpackers who were looking for the Sherif Hostel, and the two ended up being one in the same. These fellow travellers were somewhat annoying. They rudely chanted "Stand up, wake up!" when we mysteriously found the hostel locked and the owners sleeping at 5:45 in the morning. I think Bob Marley would have wanted them to demonstrate a little more understading, especially since they were being obnoxious with his song.




The Bob Marley Hostel is a trip. We had to walk fifty yards to the end of an alley to get to the entrance, which was on the ground floor of a fiver or six story building. Outside is a giant sign advertising the hostel, and underneath it is a flag with the iconic red and black face of Che Guevara. Inside the lobby was a small desk and a number of simple chairs and couches. The walls nearest the desk and the stairs leading up to the rooms were covered with Bob Marley posters, accompanied by poster for Tupac and Usher. The walls around the sitting area were brightly painted with such generic Egyptian scense and figures, such as pyramids and a baby Donald Duck. As is usual with any business encounter in Egypt, we were offered tea and gladly accepted after the long train ride and the long day we still had ahead.

We had booked ahead of time using hostelworld.com, and finagled to get a better room combination, giving us one quad for the four guys and a double for the girls. The rooms themselves were pretty tame, painted in a pale blue with simple beds which took up nearly all of the floor space; absent was the slightly over-the-top decor present in the rest of the hostel. We had a great view of the alley below, and the girls had a walk-out balcony. The light in the early morning was beautiful as the sun rose and its rays filled the alley and filtered into our blue room.. Maybe it was because we were closer to the equator, or maybe I simply havn't been awake at such an early hour for such a long time that I forgot what a sunrise looked like from any other setting than inside of Notre Dame's library.



We began the day at Luxor Temple. On the way we stopped at a local bakery and got pasteries for 1 to 2 LE each. I will avoid being too detailed about the visit specifically, but just let me say that watching Buddy run around and excitedly point things out and read hieroglyphs was quite a trip. Without him with us, the temple would have been nothing more than an impressive stone structure built a long time ago. Buddy gave it meaning, a story, a history. Some of the officials inside the temple warned us that we were not allowed to have a guide (guides in Egypt must be Egyptian, bringing your own foreign guide is generally not allowed), and we would smugly explain in Arabic that he was merely a student who was not even majoring in Egyptology. In reality, the people working inside the temple usually took a great interest in Buddy, referring to him as "Doctor," and pointing to explaing things which Buddy would either elaborate on or explain why the official was completely wrong. -- When I refer to an "official" working inside an achaelogical site, what I am referring to is usually an older Egyptian, wearing a worn galabiya and turban, who sits in various nooks and crannies of the site waiting for tourists to walk by. Then he will attempt to lead them around, usually pointing out the obvious or giving slighlty less known but still shallow information. It the tourists are receptive, he will lead them around for a while before asking for baqshish (a tip) at the end of the tour. These sorts of tours are usually limited to whatever room of the temple the man is sitting in and rarely extend to an area any larger, much the less the site as a whole.

After Luxor Temple we walked the town until we found a less-touristy lunch spot to refuel. We had checked into a cotton shop mentioned in Mark's lonely planet earlier that morning and the two of us decided to get custom-tailored Egyptian cotton galabiyas. Near the cotton store we found a place to get water for the day, and on our way out we were wrangled in by an Egyptian trying to impress us with his impressions of English and American accents. He went so far as to quote Shakespear and Jane Austen. In the end he convinced us to meet him at 3pm for an afternoon faluka ride on the Nile. It was twice the price of an offer we had received earlier in the morning, but we figured it was worth paying for his character. After lunch we went to met him and he took us out on his sailboat. The ride was peaceful and afforded us gorgeous views of the Nile and the surrounding green fields. The river was much bluer in Luxor than I had seen it anywhere else and the waters were calm. We stopped off at a place called Banana Island and checked out the banana groves and got some freshly-picked fruit before heading back out to the Nile for sunset. Then we found spot for dinner and headed back to Bob's.

The owners of the hostel had outfitted the roof as a chill escape from Luxor. It had a hammock, and few more simple chairs and tables, and the ground was covered in colorful pads. We came up here after out dinner and met some Brits. They were from Manchester and London and were touring Egypt to use up some of their accumulated holiday time. They couldn't have been more that three years older than any of us, although we never got their ages. We ended up getting tea and shisha with them before calling it a night.

The next day we grabbed breakfast at the same place and took a ferry over the Nile to the West Bank. There we negotated a taxi for the ride to Valley of the Kings. We bought two tickets each, allowing us access to six tombs. According to Buddy, all the best tombs were closed but this did not affect me too much. The ones we saw were still impressive and Buddy's commentary only contributed to the expereince. The most notable event from the morning-afternoon in the Valley were our (mostly Sara's) attempts to get into the closed tomb of Seti I. Sara initially tried to flip it into flirt mode with the official taking tickets. He seemed about ready to let us in for a small bribe before thinking better of it, realizing he would probably lose his job if he was caught letting us in. We toured some more tombs and when we swung back around there was a tourism police official there. Obviously, greater authority meant there was a higher probability that he would be able to let us in. Sara tried to song and dance again but only to the same result. He seemed like he REALLY wanted to take the baqshish and let us in but he eventually thought better of it. Besides, he didn't have the key anyway, the director did. We rested under the pavillion separating the two sides of the valley for a while, and then realzed Sara was gone. I put two and two together and peeked inside the director's open door. Sure enough, Sara was inside pleading her case. When she came out, she said she had tried to explain how Buddy was really into Egyptology and he really wanted to get into Seti's tomb and that he would be the only one and that if it made him feel better, the director could accompany him personally. She mentioned that all of the more popular tombs required separate tickets, and we would be willing to pay any extra fees necessary to get Buddy access. Unfortunatley, he would not budge, explaining to Sara, "I know you don't know you are doing this, but do you realize you are trying to bribe the director of this whole region?" Of course, that was exactly the point of Sara's visit. Even though she was unsucessful in the end, the attempt still makes for a good story and Buddy was very touched by her efforts to get access for him.

The end of our tour in the Valley brings us to the second interesting event of the day. It is possible to hike over the mountain that separates the Valley of the Kings from the fertile Nile Valley, where we wanted to visit the worker's tombs. We made it fifty yards up the hillside before an un-uniformed man tried to tell us that we were not allowed to climb over. Luxor is a very touristy town, which means the inhabitants are even pushier about selling you things. This primed Mark for any form of negotiation, and here was his moment to shine. Instead of continuing our hike and feigning ignorance, Mark turned around and met the guy. They argued in Arabic for a while, which meant that in order to keep the flow of speech going Mark every now and then made some pretty non-sense statements in Arabic. I think this tactic worked in Mark's favor for two reasons: One, the guy probably appreciated the attempt at speaking his language. Two, this probably also meant the Mark was only half-coherrent, making it possible to eventually wear out the guy's patience. The man first tried to tell us that the sites on the other side were closed, but we knew they weren't. He then conceded that we could walk over, but only if accompanied by an Egyptian. At this point, Mark claimed that we did have an Egpyptian with us: Asad. Although Asad had been mistaken for Egyptian a couple times, he knew absolutely no Arabic; only English, Urdu, and Italian. Mark then told the guy that Asad's family was wealthy and he had been raised abroad, spending most of his life in Rome, which is why he did not know much Arabic. I witnessed this whole scene from halfway up the mountain. Eventually the man and Mark separated and Mark joined the rest of the group. I'm not sure how it happened, maybe the guy was just annoyed with the situation and Mark's stubborness, but he eventually let us be.

The hike was beautiful and we had great views of the Valley below us. When we crested the mountain, we were greeted with the even more spectacular view of the Nile Valley below us, with the blue ribbon of river and the sprawling green fields dead-ending at the dusty mountains range we were standing on, buffering the fertile valley from the rest of Egypt's barrness. We descended the path and made it to the worker's tombs before close. The story behind these tombs made them my favorite. Many skilled laborers worked to carve and paint the Pharaoh's tombs, and because they had these skills, some were able to make their own private tombs. Although in scale they were much smaller, their artwork was just as impressive.

That night we ate on the roof of our hostel and passed out pretty early. The next day we ate breakfast at the hostel, checked out of our rooms, and stored our bags until the evening. We made it to Karnak Temple, which was HUGE. In the afternoon we went back to the West Bank to see some more ruins. We decided to walk back to the ferry by taking a detour around another archaelogical site. At this time they had all closed but we though maybe we could get a sense of the place from the outside. We had to stand on a hill strewn with trash just to peer over its walls. At this point we had walked a fair distance parallel to the river, away from the ferry. We picked our way back to the ferry by direction, regardless of the roads that were taking us there. We ended up gettin semi-lost, but this let us witness the sun set behind the mountains as we wandered down a narrow road through sugarcane fields. We were no where near the tourist centers of the West Bank and appreciated the evening walk through the Upper Egyptian countryside, unencumbered by tourists or those trying to sell to them, fully separated from the developed city. To everyone's relief, we finally found our way back to the main road and grabbed the ferry back across the river.

Back at Bob's we picked up our bags and tipped them heavily. Each morning they had given us tea and nescafe, and they had also given us one dinner and one breakfast. Usually when someone in Egypt gives you such "free" things, a tip is expected in return. Not so at Bob Marley's. Happy (one of the owners) seemed genuinely taken aback. I explained that we owed them this for all of the free drinks and food they had given us, not to mention the friendliness and the great atmosphere. He explained in reply, "but those things were free" and I believed that he acutally meant it. We gave him the tip anyway and said goodbye. We grabbed a cab to the airport and headed back to Cairo. Upon arrival we were still in haggle mode and got a cab for the seven of us back to the dorms for a pretty good price.



It was strange how well Sara and I got along with Mark's friends, even though we had only spent three days with them. It did not fell as if we were travelling with them for only the first time. At the end of the trip I felt like they had been my friends for year. I guess Egypt attracts a certain type of personality in a foreigner, especially in Americans. I think it takes a personality with a certain openness to adventure, ability to go with the flow and improvise, and enjoys doing things the hard, that is, fun, way.

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