El Fayrouz Luxor

... house still contains the original or at least period furniture together with copies of the letters he wrote to Canarvon. They have an excellent presentation where a back projected actor sits on Carter's desk and tells the story of the find and even uses a period slide projector to show some of the original photographs. It had only been open two weeks and so was empty and simply enchanting. You get a real sense of ...

... them back home to their mothers. Apparently the locals are pretty ****** off that a lot of the boats no longer stop or depart from here, so their income has dropped significantly.<br><br>We finally made it to our beautiful floating home of the next 6 days. She is called the Malouka (we were meant to be on the Assouan but not sure what happened there). However, we did have the panoramic room which has great french windows that open on to the water and the breeze flows through ...

... and how much we should pay for things. Found that the banks are now closed for 10 days because it is the end of Ramadan and that we still can't readily buy alcohol until Monday as the Christians are celebrating Sunday. For f**ks sake. Mara reckons next year they are going to close Mara House down for the month of Ramadan as all her staff are off also. The restaurant here is closed too - no staff. Was so looking ...

... August.<br><br>We began the day with a 45 minute donkey ride to the Valley. Riding a donkey was a bit more bumpy than the camel, and I ended up losing my lens cap in the process [I had an extra since I had two lenses and a protective case, so it was ok]. The view while riding was quite amazing, as we went through a small town and out in the hills to the main part of the valley. The entry ticket provides 3 tombs in the cost, and we hit the tombs of ...

... by a buffet restaurant and had a big lunch as we knew we would not need dinner after this good value meal. Back at the hostel we chilled for the rest of the evening in our aircon room and I read a book and finished it that night while Wayne constructed a van on the computer again having lost his data when the old puter died. I also had done our washing and it was drying nicely in the aircon room.<br><br>Wednesday 8th July. We had a bus ticket to Dahab for 3.30pm so we packed our ...

... of a society with such a horrifically inept army. As my professor Michael MacDonald once said, the Arab armies are the worst in the world...what's the evidence? Israel still exists...<br><br>The Cairo Museam is one of the most overwhelming places I've ever been in my life. It is filled with some of the most incredible old stuff I've ever seen, and is layed out with no rhyme or reason in an old decrepid rundown building. Half of the things in it don't even have ...

... day in Luxor. Luxor, like Aswan is relatively laid back, although it has much to offer the visitor. Foremost among them is the fact that one-quarter of the world's antiquities are found here. The area is rich with treasures such as important temples and tombs in such profusion that it is mind-boggling. On the west bank of the Nile, you find dozens of tombs of important people like some of the Ramses. There were several of them, although Ramses II (the one in the Moses story) is ...

... had finished. He tried his best and we got a good idea of the features of the temple and its decoration highlights. One of the most interesting bits was the fact that Hapshepsut's son had tried to remove everything there that reminded him of her because she had taken the throne off him. The next stop was the Valley of the Queens, surprisingly we found this to be even better than the much more famous Valley of the Kings. The tombs although smaller had much ...

... coming the other way. Our driver got very angry at the other calesh drivers for not letting us past and he kept having to try and move the calesh over so that the others could fit past. The driver ended up having to get out of the calesh and lift the carriage up and move it over so that were out of the way enough. As the 20 or so other calesh went past our driver yelled and abused the other drivers. We did make it back safely to the hotel eventually and Mohamed was ...

... next to our room. One dunny between the two of us just wouldn&#8217;t have been enough. <br><br>By the time we left the hotel after breakfast and crossed the Nile to the western bank by small boat I felt much better. I still wasn&#8217;t sure the rest of the morning was going to be particularly comfortable though, for slightly different reasons. We climbed onto the donkeys that were to take us to the Valley of the Kings, and after two days of wearing wet ...