El Nakhil Luxor

... at the Nile Palace Hotel and I'd highly recommend it. Yes it's a real tourist hotel complete with nightly, truly dreadful live entertainment but it has a great feel. It has a courtyard for drinks and a number of decent if not memorable restaurants but the terrace on the Nile is fantastic with amazing views and felluca's for hire at a moments notice. It's not the Old Winter Palace but definitely worth checking out.

... asking to take the tiller for a bit but it really did look way to ********* the way down the nile we had a 3 course lunch of salads, breads & a meat dish but I couldn't eat too much. As we cruised down the nile the sights and sounds are simply wonderful. Donkeys braying, men slapping the water with their oars to scare the fish into their nets, kids on the bank yelling out hello, some women washing clothes in the nile, kids swimming, farmers tending their fields growing mangoes ...

... hang up which meant that we wanted the taxi to pick us up. Whilst we were waiting a young fella came by with his cart of nuts. His name was Rajhad and he was selling nuts during the day to send money to his family as well as earn money to become a tour guide. He has great passion for his country. Lovely fella &#8211; we had a good laugh with him. Back to Mara's where we fell into an exhausted sleep as usual. <br><br><br>

... but kept in much nicer condition than the ones in Cairo. A few people were troubled by this, but I thought it was much better that way. One option in the Valley is to go inside King Tut's tomb. They offered a student discount for 50 pounds which I decided to do. If there was no discount, the fee was way too high for me since it was a small tomb. Once inside you go down a small corridor to see two rooms and a few paintings on the wall depicting some ...

... station. We enjoyed Luxor and it was a respite from Cairo which I felt was aggressive to tourists. We boarded the bus and disappointingly for the 16 hour trip it was cramped and no toilet and full. On to Dahab by the Red Sea and the bus lurched off into the desert , we stopped for an totally ugly rest stop for 10 mins where it was mad scramble to get food that was largely inedible but we ate anyhow and then on into the night. The trip was cramped and uncomfortable with little sleep had.

... is in the museam and it is spectacular. His mask, made of 11 kilograms of solid gold, is really really impressive, as is his sarcophagus made out of solid gold. He was packed in three sarcophaguses, one of stone, one of wood, and one of gold. I can't imagine what it must have been like to cut through the stone to find wood to cut through and find solid gold. Wow.<br><br>I had two thoughts when I looked at most of King Tut's artifacts. First, someone needs to write ...

... builders had 67 years to expand it. Another important tomb was one that we all know about--King Tut's. This was the child king who died before the age of 20 and ruled from age 5 on. Yet, despite this, we managed some important accomplishments during his go-round. The thing about his tomb, besides the curse, is the fact that it was one of the rare tombs found un touched by graverobbers. It was full chock a block with everything he would need for the afterlife, you name it, from ...

... had met Damian, an Australian Geophysicist, working for Qarum Petroleum (in partnership with Apache), on the battlefields of Gallipoli in the spring of 2008 and he had rashly given us an invitation to come and stay.  We tried to catch up with our sleep and the following morning took an elderly taxi back to Cairo Airport to take the one hour flight up the Nile to Luxor.  At Luxor Airport, we were met by Mohammed Hussein, the guide Damian and Felicity had recommended and ...

... she was trying to find a zipper to fix a pair of pants and I didn't want her to be alone. Once we had the zipper we started walking to the coffee shop and I was telling Cindy about how I wanted to find Deb and his scarf shop. Someone heard what I was saying and said 'you looking for Deb I show you' and it was about three shops back from where we had come from and I couldn't believe I had missed it the whole time. We walked in and I met Deb and he was really nice ...

... to second past the post as Paul&#8217;s donkey &#8216;Dangly&#8217; charged off ahead with more staying power than mine could muster as we approached the stark rocky hills further inland. It wasn&#8217;t really called &#8216;Dangly&#8217;, but it was the only name that came to mind after I watched its back legs banging into its nutsack with every stride. Perhaps it wasn&#8217;t only me who was feeling a little red raw in the downstairs department. <br ...