When you travel as
much as I do, you can get a little spoilt by the succession of amazing sights
on offer – “oh no, not another trip to the pyramids!”. When faced with a crack-of-dawn
start and 3 and a half hour coach ride to get somewhere, it can be easy to say
you’ll give it a miss this year.
But, if there’s one
place that I make sure that I never miss a chance to go to, it’s Luxor in
Egypt. I was amazed by this place when we first came here 24 years ago, and
it’s still as amazing as it ever was (even if the rest of modern Egypt appears
to have gone backwards in that time).
This year, I joined a
trip to the Karnak Temple, for me, the most impressive temple in a country of
so many outstanding temples. This was the holy of holies for the Pharoahs of
the New Kingdom, and it’s incredible to think that a temple of this immense size
and architectural complexity was put together 3,500 years ago. From the forest
of dizzyingly tall columns at the Hypostyle Hall, to the immense obelisks of
Tutmosis and Hatshepsut, it’s the scale of Karnak that impresses. While, the
small details are great to draw you in on a more personal level – superb
reliefs, and patches of the original coloured paintwork that have somehow
survived millennia of being outside in the hot Egyptian sun.
Then for lunch, we got
onto a Nile Cruise Boat for an atmospheric float around while we feasted on
some lovely Middle Eastern food. It was good to see these boats actually being
used – even with a bit of a rebound in the tourist trade, only about 100 out of
400 are actually in operation at the moment. Our guide told us that Hotels are
running at about 40% occupancy at the moment, so this is the busiest that I’ve
seen Luxor in about the last 8 years. I’ve enjoyed our visits when we’ve had
Luxor pretty much to ourselves, but Egypt desperately needs its tourist
industry to recover.
Our boat deposited us
on the west bank of the Nile, so we had a short ride to the Valley of the Kings,
for a visit to a couple of tombs that aren’t on the standard tomb-visiting
trips. First we called in at Tutankhamun’s Tomb – a small affair that isn’t
particularly richly decorated, but fascinating to visit because it puts into
context the incredible finds that we’ve seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Plus, it also puts into context how amazing must have been the contents of the
more important pharaohs, whose tombs are much larger and grander affairs.
As a case in point, we
visited the fantastic tomb of Seti I – the largest tomb in the Valley of the
Kings. This unbelievably well-preserved tomb has been pretty much off-limits
for the last 20 years, and now it’s being opened up for abut $70 for a 15
minute visit. That’s quite a lot of money per tomb-visiting minute, but the
size, the decoration, the quality of the artwork were about the best I’ve ever
seen in Egypt – a real privilege to see.
If that was an
Egyptologist’s highlight, I wasn’t prepared for just how magnificent our next
stop would be – a visit to Nefartari’s Tomb in the Valley of the Queens. Even
this jaded traveller was inspired to gasp out a series of involuntary “wows”,
as we ventured into the bowels of this unbelievably decorated tomb. If I hadn’t
been told to the contrary, I would have thought that this was a modern
re-creation of a tomb – the colours were just that perfect and vibrant. It was
like they’d been painted yesterday, and the quality of the artwork was amazing
for something that was 3,500 years old. To think that in Britain, we’re
bursting with pride at a bunch of balanced rocks at Stonehenge, when they were
creating art as advanced as this at roughly the same time (give or take a
thousand years or so!).
Sadly, we weren’t able
to take photos in any of these tombs, but you’ll just have to take my word for
it that this trumps anything that I’ve seen in Egypt before – and that’s saying
something.
If anything is worth a
3.5 hour coach journey to get there – then today was it.
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