Through the desert

We agreed as a group last night that we were going to leave really early this morning for the Valley of the Kings and Hatchepsut's temple because for one, the crowds at the Valley of the Kings can get really long, and the temperature today was really really warm. It was nice too, we didn't have any lines to wait at and I hear that some groups last semester had to wait an hour out in the sun to see some of the tombs there, so yeah, we are smart.

Unfortunately the Valley is one of the places where we cannot take cameras. The flash of the camera will eventually strip the color from the ancient paint that it still on the walls. It was actually really cool to see in the inside of the tombs there. The depictions on the wall of the many journeys of the pharaoh in the afterlife and the rituals that they performed to help them gain life after this one was really amazing to look at. They were really obsessed with eternal life, everything has this central theme to it. You can see the anointing of the kings with oil, the judgment of the king, and one of the weird things is the duality of it all. Like Osiris is the god of the underworld, and so while the king is being presented to Osiris, the king also is Osiris in the way that he dresses and such. The last tomb that we went in there was king Thutmose III whose tomb is up in the top of the mountain (the entrance anyway) and you get in the little tunnel and you just have to go down and down and down into the heart of the mountain. It's really quite amazing to see the talent that the Egyptians had back in the day. His was also cool because the whole room was painted as one big cartouche with stories of all of the people that he had conquered inside of it. The people's heads were cut off and everything! Of course, we also did get to see the tomb of King Tut, although his is a lot smaller than one would think for all that crap he had in his! Tut's mummy is also in the tomb there, and man was he small! You just don't really think about it until you get to see him, but he really was just a boy.

At this point we went to the temple of Queen Hatchepsut which is on the other side of the mountain from the valley of the Kings. Her temple was interesting for two reasons, one is that being the first real girl pharaoh she had to convince her people that she could do it, so there is actaully this whole wall of relief about her divine birth which of course qualifies her for the job. There is also a side temple on the 2nd level to Hathor (hat-hor) the goddess of beauty. Now, Hathor is depicted as a cow, and so you might wonder why the goddess of beauty is depicted as a cow, well Islam our guide had an answer for us: "I don't know know if this is real reason or not, but just hear me out. Have you ever look a cow in the eyes? Yes or not? Yes? well, I think that those eyes are the prettiest things ever, and I think the ancients thought that too." We tried the whole cow thing on some of the girls here, but even knowing that it was the goddess of beauty they didn't seem to like the idea of being related to a cow! ha ha, funny funny :) This is also cool because it's also the first place that we got a see a Holy of the Holies, or the place where their god would reside. All temples have at least one of these and they would have some idol in there back in the day to worship towards and leave offerings for. It's a cool thing to see.

That afternoon once it started to cool down a little bit, we went and got to get a felucca ride and ride a camel around Luxor. A felucca is a boat that does not use a motor at all, just the wind and a sail. That was a cool ride just relaxing as we floated around on the Nile. The felucca took us from the hotel to the place where we got to ride the camels and then back again. The camels were fun to ride though. Each camel had it's own guide, most of them were about 9-13 years old with a few adults in between to watch things over. My guide's name was Achmad (with that throaty 'ch' sound). He was alot of fun, I got lucky because he spoke English pretty well and we were able to have a cool conversation about things as we went. On the ride back Carlie was in front of me and I actually got Achmad and the boy in front of us to start fighting over how many camels she was worth! Achmad won with 30 million camels! I though it was all pretty funny. He even gave me this little thing of candy on the way. He was a fun little guy to get to know.

It was actually a little sad to talk about camels for women, because earlier in the day i had gone out to the Sook (a bazzar in Luxor) to shop with Morgan, Ashely, Aubrey, and Jesse to get some things for the fam back home, and as we left that bazzar for a more local one we met up with some guys that were leading us around being 'friends' and of course we got the question about if the girls were our wives or not. By the way, when you are in Egypt, you should always answer 'yes' to that, no matter what your status, it just makes things easier! But anyway, I said that we were just friends, and he told me that I could come to this place tomorrow and they were going to have a women market. I could get a pretty wife for about 5 camels, but if I only wanted a so-so wife, I would only need one camel! A little sad, but hey, what do you expect from a friend that wants a 'present' from you when you go to leave!?

Anyway, it was a fun time over all, but I was glad to get back to my 5 star hotel and lay down and watch some American movies with Arabic subtitles! Love you all!