Egypt day 1

Egypt travel blog Feb 12 Ok not Tudor but ancient history instead. Luxor Our first full day in Egypt, well Luxor to be exact was relaxing and frustrating in equal measure. But first the flight from Gatwick yesterday was an hour and a half late taking off partly due to the snao and the fact that the de-icing machine broke down! which meant that we landed in the dark at Luxor so perhaps we didn’t get the full experience of flying in over the jebels. A jebel is an Arabic word meaning a rocky mountain looming out of the desert, Learnt that when we lived in Oman many years ago).

Rip off number one occurred at the airport, as soon as we entered the building there were reps holding up your name boards and ushered you to the right queue for your visa. Sitting under a big green sign stating that Visa’s are a £10 note or $15 handed over with your passport before you get to immigration, “ please take your note away and pay me on the bus outside “ Ok fair enough, outside the airport with our luggage we were directed to our transfer bus, where the driver put it on board and promptly asked for a tip, No this wasn’t rip off No one! that came on the bus when the tour rep who gave us the visa inside the airport asked for £12!!

The Hotel Soffitel Karnac is a nice enough tourist hotel catering mainly for French Italian German and British tourists. It sits on the East bank of the River Nile about 5kms north of Luxor town, it has a heated outdoor pool, pool bar, outdoor theatre, restaurant overlooking the Nile, Gym. Sauna, and some tennis courts. Like I said a nice enough place but I can’t see the local business elite holding their monthly meetings here. Our orientation meeting was set for 2pm, so with the hotel offering a shuttle bus and boat service to its sister hotel in town we decided to get the bus downtown and boat ride back. The Rough Guide tells you to beware of touts but nothing really prepares you for the constant hasseling every thirty seconds or so. You cannot stop and look at street signs without someone on a motorbike stopping and trying to sell you an English newspaper or a barouche driver with a scrawny horse trying to get you to hop on board for a cheap price. Taxi drivers, felucca boats rides etc. etc. It was unrelenting, even kids offering small packets of tissues and clinging onto your wrists and pretending to cry.

We escaped into the mummification museum just to get some peace. This is a nice little museum with some genuine artefacts on display with a mummy, and some grave goods of the nobles found hereabouts. It was somewhat a relief to get on board the boat back to the hotel, even there getting off the boatman held his palm out when we disembarked. The river Nile here is about 400m across not much wider than the Thames at Dartford and quite a slow current, a bit of a disappointment really even compared to the Rhine at Dusseldorf. The temperature of 23C made up for that though.

It was a gentle trip back to the hotel for Iunch and the reps meeting and passing the Temple of Karnac which we will visit later in the week. Narrow as the Nile is there are a huge number of Nile cruise ships tied up along the whole of the corniche, 6 or 7 deep all moored up and no tourists to go on them. And some were right in front of the Karnac Temple so no photo op there then. Lets hope we have more photo ops during the week.

The relaxing part of the day was sitting poolside and just letting life go by for a couple of hours. So we now have a plan for the week of where we want to go and who we want to go with. More tomorrow!