Jewel of the Nile: Hot Air Balloons, Valley of the Kings, and a Love Letter for a Stranger
Egypt • Luxor • March 2006
The overnight train from Cairo to Luxor is, in theory, brilliant. You don't waste nine hours of daylight traveling. In practice, you arrive having gotten a crappy night's sleep on a crappy train that also loaded your luggage onto a roof rack without tying it down. Our entire ride I had mental images of our bags sailing into oncoming traffic. They didn't, fortunately. We arrived at 5:30 in the morning.
The Sheraton in Luxor made all of it worthwhile. We are not typically five-star hotel people. We tend toward clean and functional. But when the rate is $70 a night and the Nile River is right outside your window, you make exceptions. The Nile looks exactly how you imagine it should look. Ancient and wide and lazy and somehow both very still and very busy at once. Luxor is the Jewel of the Nile. I understood that immediately.
After breakfast we headed to the Temple of Luxor, built between 1387 and 1349 BC and, as with seemingly everything in this country, located smack in the middle of the city. There's a McDonald's across the street. I can't decide if I find this charming or deeply wrong. The temple is in remarkable condition, larger and older than the Forum in Rome, and you can still see color on many of the hieroglyphics. Next to it is the Avenue of Sphinxes, lined on both sides with sphinx statues that once stretched all the way to Karnak Temple three kilometers away. The government is excavating all 700-plus of them, which has involved tearing up streets and homes in the process. Progress.
We found a horse and buggy driver outside the temple who took us to Karnak for about two dollars. It's a lovely way to move around Luxor, and our driver turned out to have a brother with a motorboat and a cousin with a taxi, all very helpfully connected for the rest of the day.
Karnak is the best thing I've seen in all my years of travel. I know that's a statement. I stand by it. 300,000 square meters. 3,500 years old. And you can TOUCH it. You can reach out and put your hand on the actual ancient stone and run your fingers along carvings made thousands of years ago. A Bedouin man took us off to the side to a room most tourists never find, where the hieroglyphics still had full color on them and the only light source was a large piece of aluminum foil reflecting sunlight through a small hole in the ceiling. Just brilliant, literally.
He also performed a marriage blessing for us: touching a particular symbol on the wall, transferring it to your head three times, then doing it to each other, then kissing three times. I'm told there's no divorcing after this. Matt seems fine with the arrangement.
After Karnak we had lunch at a recommended restaurant, lamb tagine and kebabs, excellent! When we finished, the owner came over and asked if I would read him a letter. He handed it to me and it was from a British woman: she loved him, missed him, hugs and kisses, the whole thing. I had no idea if this was a real relationship or what exactly we'd walked into. He looked so proud as I read it. Then he asked if I would write a reply for him. I asked what he wanted to say. He thought about it and said: "Just that I miss you very much, want you to be my wife. Just write nice things from a woman. You are a woman." So I wrote a love letter for an Egyptian restaurant owner to a British woman I've never met, addressed the envelope and everything. He was absolutely delighted. Egypt keeps finding new ways to surprise me.
We ended the day at Luxor Museum, which was a revelation after the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Proper display cases, working humidity controls, actual lighting, clear labels. The artifacts looked cared for. You wish all of Egypt's treasures were treated this way. At night we went back to Luxor Temple, lit up and breathtaking. One of those places you just want to sit in for hours. Most couples were walking and holding hands. I was holding Matt's tripod, a filter, and two extra lenses. I am the world's most devoted photographic assistant and I want that on record.
The next morning started at 5:20am for our hot air balloon ride over Luxor, which was smooth and quiet and scenic in a way that only floating above a place can give you. We flew over the city and the West Bank and the villages, and the villagers on the rooftops ran out and screamed "Allo!" We landed in farmland near a village and the balloon crew burst into song and dance to celebrate. I got pulled in to dance with them and offered minimal resistance.
Our horse driver's brother met us by motorboat to cross the Nile, because everyone here is connected and it works beautifully. His cousin-driver took us to every site for the day.
Valley of the Kings was extraordinary. King Tut's tomb: one small, beautifully painted room with his actual mummy still in the sarcophagus. The oldest tomb belongs to Tuthmosis III (1429 BC), with hieroglyphics so early they look almost stick-figure compared to what we'd been seeing. The Ramses III tomb had eight rooms and the best color we saw anywhere. In one tomb, Matt shone his flashlight briefly into an empty sarcophagus and a Bedouin attendant came SPRINTING over, yelling "No!" and then proceeded to bang the top of the sarcophagus repeatedly with his hand. I'm fairly confident his banging did more damage than Matt's flashlight.
The Hatshepsut Temple, which our guides told us to pronounce "Hot Chicken Soup," a suggestion we enthusiastically adopted, is one of those places that doesn't photograph the way it looks in real life. Standing at the base looking up the hill at this temple built by a female pharaoh in the 1400s BC is just... it stops you.
At Medinet Habu we got absorbed into a school field trip vortex. One child, then fifty, all cameras out. We were separated into different groups, boys getting handsy in that way that made us want to leave, and just as we were trying to figure out how to escape, a Bedouin man came charging through, physically shoving kids aside and yelling. He then gave us a full private tour. We were extremely grateful. He got a very good tip. The Valley of the Queens came next, where a different Bedouin offered to let Matt take photos inside the tombs (strictly forbidden) in exchange for a larger tip, then zipped his lips and said "Shhh." Rules have a price here. At least it's consistent.
On our last day in Luxor we finally slept in, visited the Mummification Museum (they mummified alligators, monkeys, and fish, which nobody tells you), and then made the classic tourist mistake at the Souq market. I had a gallon ziplock of colored pens specifically for this purpose…I'd read that kids love them. One little boy asked for a "ben" (no P sound in Arabic), I gave him two, and within fifteen seconds there were fifty children converging on me. I handed the bag to Matt over my head. They swarmed him. He tried to make sure everyone got one. He lasted about two minutes before he threw the rest of the pens a few yards away and they all bolted for them like, in his words, chickens after chicken feed. I felt the whole spectrum of things: wanting to do something nice, feeling helpless, frustrated, and laughing despite myself.
The evening on the patio overlooking the Nile, the sunset turning everything copper and gold, made up for every chaotic, confusing, exhausting, wonderful thing that had happened. That's Egypt in a sentence honestly: chaotic, confusing, exhausting, wonderful.
That night we took the overnight train back to Cairo, then flew to Amman. Next stop: Petra.
