Royal House Hotel Luxor

... around with all the knobs on the wall, checking what was behind a swinging door. Turned out to be a sink. We tried our best to turn down our beds but it was dinner time and we had not a clue how to pull the beds out. We turned the music on and apparently it was retro 80's night! A little bit of HEART, a little bit of Pet sjop boys! Loved it. Dinner was ok, edible. After dinner we went to sleep, well we tried to get to sleep. The train was really rickity, good ...

... see when they put down the chisel before they had to bury their king. An amazing tomb. The other two we made it into was Tawosret/Sethnakht tomb and Ramses IV. Taworsret/Sthnakht tomb the wife of Seti II has been open since antiquity, it and it shows with the amount of damage. It does however have amazing roof decorations. The most crowded of the three was Ramses IV tomb, which can be dated back to 278BC. Ramses died before the tomb was completed ...

... themselves no matter where they go! King Ramses, Queen Hatchepsut and even King Tut had bits at both Karnack and Luxor. We had an overzealous Antiqueties Policemen show us some out of bounds sights, and he was nice enough and interesting enough to score a tip (his full intent I am sure!) and then back to the boat for dinner. Meals on the boat are interesting, it seems we have a comedian chef that just can't help taking the **** out of you in a playful but completely confusing way! He ...

... I like Obama! I like America." If you push people further you find that, while in some places it is, to a degree, something to make you like the seller, people really are not afraid to tell you how they hate George Bush and did not like the America of just a year ago... Today in Cairo Jessica, who says "she's not the biggest Obama fan..." was very annoyed by the number of people who hear you are from America and always excitedly express their love of Obama. She ...

... is evidence of their presence near the entrance on the right - writing in red on the wall. It continued to rain off and on the rest of the afternoon, which was great because it was overcast - not too hot - and the dust was calm - for the most part. In Tutankhamun's tomb, we saw his mummy - so tiny, and the rest of his coffins that were not taken to the museum. Inside his tomb, there was a local man that would wander around to tourists and go "Wow" and get a ...

... left the hotel and headed back to our own abode where we were given the rest of the evening for relaxation and sleep.    On the morning of day 5 we embarked on one (of several) of the most highly anticipated temples on our trip.  This day we were going to Abu Simbel, which I am sure many of you are unaware of what this is, hence why I have attached a picture of it for your reference.    We left for the airport at 9:00 AM to catch our 10:30 flight to Abu Simbel, to which we ...

... also visited the huge colonnaded mortuary temple of the very successful Queen Hatshepsut, the first female Pharaoh.  We later learned that is was here that Islamist terrorists massacred 58 foreign tourists and 4 Egyptian, which accounted for the considerable numbers of armed guards around. Nearby, the Ramesseum of Ramsess II, while it had clearly been magnificent, was in a deidedly poor state of repair, with a huge statue of seated Ramses fallen over and in several ...

... Avenue of Rams towards the Temple entrance. Late afternoon soon merged to sunset, enabling us to view the wonders in both daylight and by night. A group of people stood circling a 2.5m tall scarab beetle for good luck. According to ancient texts, the Egyptians believed that the scarab beetle came into being spontaneously from balls of dung and they associated this with their religious ideology of self-creation and ...