Valley of the Kings
Trip Start
Dec 16, 2004
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17
21
Trip End
Jan 17, 2005
Luxor,
Egypt
Sunday, January 9, 2005
An aerial view of the Nile Valley
. We rode for about an hour and reached the Valley of the Kings.If you've ever seen a documentary or information on Egypt, you surely have heard of this place. To date, they have formally discovered 62 tombs in an area of about 4 miles or km, I can't remember. Most famously, the 62nd tomb was that of King Tut. It's amazing to be nestled amongst these huge mountains and see tiny little openings to tombs just all over the place. Nothing could have prepared me for what was inside. Most of you have seen the picture of temples and whatnot, and they are brown in color. But these
monuments used to be covered in extremely bright colors--white, red, blue, green, gold, etc. Much of the colors are gone, and it's often difficult to imagine what they must have looked like. Our first tomb we entered was of Ramses 4th. I was so shocked and amazed at the vibrant colors covering the walls! The walls were just filled with stories and symbolic scenes of life and death...white washed walls covered in the brightest colors!! It was just breathtaking and you'll never understand the feeling of seeing these things until you see them with your own eyes. We also visited the tomb of
Ramses 9th, to see an example of an unfinished tomb as he was not a very wealthy king and ran out of money
Hatshepsut
. Basically, his tomb was much more 'ghetto' with really shitty artistry and a lot of black color used instead of blue in order to save money. Half of the temple was just barren wall. The final tomb we looked at was a shared tomb of Ramses the 5th and 6th. It's unknown whether they shared this on purpose, or if the father died before it was finished and the son finished it and was buried there himself. But again, just a tomb of amazing pictures and colors. This one was also significant because the enormous granite sarcophagus was still there!
Unfortunately, evidence of the crap tomb raiders and early adventurers who discovered and often pillaged the bombs was seen here. They had heated the sarcophagus and then threw water on it to crack it open and rob it. So the main frame of it is there, but with many large pieces off to the side. You can still see the burn marks and the soot on the ceilings from their fires. It was also interesting to see the early Coptic graffiti on the walls of the tombs. Coptic refers to the early Christians who fled to the Valley of the Kings in the 3rd and 4th century AD when facing persecution by the
Romans--who were still idolizers as far as religion was concerned. You can see their red crosses and latin graffiti on the walls of the tomb of Ramses 4th as they were hiding out in the tombs for quite some time
Vally of the Kings
.We hiked to the very top of a mountain trail to get a bird's eye view of the valley. Just on the other side of the valley, is the enormous monumnet of Hatshepsut. She was a famous pharoah--yes, SHE, although all of her depictions show her as a man and in the traditional pharoah garb. This tomb you may recognize as the one that is three tiered and very modern looking. We didn't actually go down to it as there is not that much to see. But we hiked down to meet up with our loyal donkeys for a ride back to town. We
cut through the small town alleys and the locals had a hoot seeing all of these crazy tourists clonking down the streets. We went through the sugar cane fields, a very large crop in Luxor.
After a quick lunch and shower, we joined the convoy to travel on to Hurghada. Hurghada is a Red Sea resort town...very big with divers and Swiss and Russian tourists. If I get cut off or bumped by one more Swiss tourist, I am going to scream! Nevermind that we have four of them on our own tour and they are just the pushiest people in the world--and very demanding. Hurghada is a bustling beach town and is growing on a monstrous scale...it almost reminded me of a mini Arabian Las Vegas. There are new resorts being
built all over the place. We arrived here around 6:30 and were only staying until 2am this morning. So most of us decided to just stay up all night and headed to a tourist bar for some beers. Papas II was your typical tourist spot with very young people acting stupid...like they were on spring break or something. Definitely not my scene.
