Luxor Day 2

We went to sleep early our first night in Luxor. We woke up at 5 am to begin our second-day of touring. Day 2 involved descending into deep tombs at Valley of the Kings and Queens. They are the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, as opposed to the Old Kingdom ones buried in the pyramids. I am lacking on my ancient Egyptian history, so I'll let you just read the Wikipedia articles for more information. The day was blazing hot and Amir was NOT happy by the end of it. We weren't allowed to take any pictures at the tombs, for fear of arrest. In fact, someone from our group was caught taking pictures, but he's so smooth he got out of it. The tombs were intense, deeply cut into the mountains and all the walls were decorated with hieroglyphics (Book of the Dead kind of thing). The tombs were robbed during antiquity, so many of the artifacts are scattered around. In fact, one of the mummies there (Ramses I, I think) was found not long ago at a freaky things museum in Canada! It now is on display in the Luxor Museum (which we visited the first day). I wanted to see a real-live (real-dead?) mummy, and now I have. I don't think I need to spend the money to go to the Egyptian Museum now.

After the Valleys, we went to a few other sites, including the Ramesseum and Hatsheput's Deir el-Bahri Temple.

Those concluded our ancient Luxor viewings. Although it was the worst time to visit (heat of the summer), I am glad we were able to have the experience. I wish I had read up a little more on the sites we were visiting beforehand, I think it would have meant quite a bit more to actually know where I was. Just thinking about how OLD these sites are is pretty amazing. 3000 years old, at some places. And preserved so well. It's absolutely mind-blowing when you think about it.







A very unhappy guy:





Luckily, he did this all the way to Hurghada: