day 2 Valley of The Kings & the West Bank

Feb 13 2013 West Bank Valley of the Kings Day 2 A trip to the west bank of the Nile with our own guide called Gabriel he and his wife are Christians, a minority in Egypt but 12million of them. So it was quite an early start leaving the hotel at 8am even so when we got to the Valley of the Kings there were a lot of coaches parked up from the cruise boats.

The valley of the Kings is quite small but 64 tombs in total, not all of which are open to the general public. Before you get to the ticket office there is the bazaar to get through, treat as the gift shop and ignore all the men pushing stuff in your face that is over priced and made in China.

You pay your entry fees to get into the valley and that gains entry to three tombs, you can chose which you go to and in what order except that Tutenkahamun is an extra cost. We gave him a swerve and saw Rameses II , IV and IX, these were the biggest we could get into on the day. In the entrance hall of the visitor centre there is a glass and resin relief of the valley with the tombs underneath. Some of the tombs go really deep into the mountain.

I didn’t expect to get greased in the tombs themselves but there are men there with torches and if you stop and look at anything in any detail they are right there and of course that comes with a tip! Some of the detail of the paintings and carvings in the tombs is fantastic and as our guide had explained things before we went in we were much more in tune with all the stories, characters and gods.

Knowing what the stories are behind the paintings etc puts you into the heads of the people who put them there 3500 years ago. You had to pinch yourself sometimes to remember that they were that old. Next stop was the local alabaster factory, a good demonstration of local craftsmen working away a bit of a show really before being shown into a warehouse full of copies of Egyptian characters for you to take home. It’s not what we’re looking for. We go for local art, something that has been painted that we can look at when we get home.

Last stop was the Necropolis of Hapsetshut Queen of Egypt. The place is huge and partly hacked out of the mountain that faces the Nile, we can see the place floodlit from out hotel garden. Our guide explained how this now hot, rocky temple complex was once full of greenery with trees from every area that was ruled by the Queen and smells of precious spices to help the gods bring good fortune. Alas the Pharoah who followed her decided she’d got a bit above herself by declaring herself Queen and so destroyed a lot of the frescos and columns depicting her features.

Centuries later archaeologists are painstakingly restoring it. Today they were continuing to work and we spoke to one who was excavating what they’d hoped was one of the plinths of a row of sphinx but had only come across an ancient pit which had scraps of broken statuary from the period of destruction. It was still enthralling for us though to see these ancient “scraps” as they were being uncovered.

The West bank of the Nile is the place for death and only Temples to the dead were built here, the east bank of the Nile was the place for life and where the people lived. The sun rises in east and sets in the west, quite simple really, life rises and death sets.

I must say a little more about the hotel last night, there were some local Egyptians but they had brought with them their own drinks, McDonalds beakers !! from the centre of Luxor town The entertainment in the bar was a single singer with some good kit and quite a wide repertoire. There were a couple of lasses about 25 years old and the look of utter amazement and not a little shock as all the around the bar baby boomers were jiving and twisting to songs from the sixties!