Luxor

I.
It’s a bit like the MARC train, but shakes more, vibrates harder, and moves slower. We ride second-class. It’s not recommended, but we’re college kids. We can tough it out.
Tickets for the sleeper train are USD $60, first-class tickets are LE 60 (USD $11). Ours are a mere LE 40 (USD $7), for 699 km. Ten years ago, this was probably a nice car. Two seats on each side of the aisle, plush, a footrest, reclining back. But ten years is a while. Now the plush is dirty and stained, and the seat backs recline with the slightest touch. Every half-hour or so, a man with a tray barrels through, chanting “Shay, shay, Nescafe, shay ya rayyis—shay?” (Tea, tea, Nescafe, tea, oh Sir—tea?) Visiting between cars is common, as is loud conversation. Outside is dark. We’ve left Cairo’s glow behind.
In the car behind us, a man begins yelling. It seems he doesn’t want to pay LE 40 to ride the train. Soon other men join in—yelling at him to calm him down. We look at each other and shrug. If that’s the worst, we’ll be find. We’re the only foreigners in the car, and the only other woman wears a brown abaya, niqab, and gloves, and occupies the window seat while her male companion sits on the aisle.
For an unknown reason, this feels like the real world. Perhaps because it is.

II.
The hustlers are bad. Worse than at Giza. Much worse.
We finally make it to Happy Land Hotel. It brings to mind creepy things, like Michael Jackson. But then we realize we left him at Giza along with Mickey Mouse.
Mahmoud at the front desk welcomes us with karkade—a hibiscus tea. He holds our collective hand through checking-in (a process that—with typical Egyptian efficiency—takes about 45 minutes). In that time, Mahmous checks our passports, books us a felucca ride for the evening at sunset, and a tour for tomorrow. We pay, realize that we overpaid, and he gives us the change.
Two rooms for four people each, with three boys and five girls. I end up in the boys room. The cleaning lady keeps walking past and I silently apologize for scandalizing her. The rooms are small, but clean, two sets of bunkbeds with sheets, a blanket, pillow, and a towel. Our room has a bathroom with a shower/tub, toilet, and sink. The only thing missing seems to be a shower curtain. (But the towel on my bed was rolled in the shape of a heart.)

III.
We walked past Luxor Temple in the early morning, now we walk back. LE 20 gets us in as students, and we walk into a courtyard of half-remaining men. Columns everywhere—big, fat stone columns reaching up to the sky like so many giant tree trunks. We pass column after column, wall after wall, covered in carvings and heiroglyphs.
But so much has been destroyed. One way of taking revenge on someone is to chisel their face out of their monuments. By doing so you obliterate their identity—and their soul. Something like 2/3 of the images have faces hackes away, arms in adoration and offering chipped off. Someone, as Evy says in The Mummy, “must have done something very naughty.” We walk from chamber to chamber, grand area to grander. In some places you can still see the pigments from almost 4000 years ago. There’s more to see than we can take in, but we do our best, consulting Lonely Planet upon occasion.
There’s grandeur here, bordering on ostentation, but there’s true piety, too. Someone did this—all of it—because it meant something huge.

IV.
After an unmemorable lunch (memorable only in how greasy it was), we catch a cab to Karnak. We walk in (shrugging off hecklers all the way), and come face to face with what’s left of a road flanked by rams—the sacred animal of Amun-Re, to whom the main Karnak Temple complex is dedicated. It used to connect Karnak to the Nile, but has since been pared down to about 50 yards.
Karnak is huge. A multitude of pharoahs built and planned it. Each one added his own temple, obelisk, stele, courtyard, chapel—you name it. You can’t really take it in—it’s so big, so detailed, there’s just so much. Room after room, wall after wall of relief, of carving, of heiroglyphs. You know from the start that every picture you take will fall short of what you see. But the camera comes out. You can’t really help it. We make our way to the Great Hypostyle Hall. Purposely, I don’t look up, but keep my nose buried in Lonely Planet until I’m in the middle. Then, I look up. The 134 columns tower over me. Truly, tower. The floor space of this one hall—this one room of one temple—is larger than St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London—together (6000m2). Each column is thick stone with carvings over every inch. I stand on the base of it and wrap my arms around. They go maybe 1/6 of the circumference. Between the columns are stone tops—the entire area was once roofed in stone. On those “in between” stones, the heiroglyphs have kept their color. 4000 years old, and the suns are red and the ducks yellow.
The temple Ramses III built is a hit with me. There’s a rather famous relief of him “smiting” his enemies (who seem mostly child-size, extending their hands in supplication that goes unheeded). His temple is full of much larger-than-life statues of himself…I’m not sure how amazing or how entirely narcissistic you must be to build a temple of statues of yourself.
We find more and more. The roofless temples seem to go on. Some places have color, some have extraordinary relief. There are some places that faces have been chipped away, not nearly as much as at Luxor Temple. I find one room, near the back, that has gorgeous carvings, most still with the paint. It’s dark and cool, and looks like not many people visit. But the pharoah depicted has been chipped away in every image. Not just his face—his whole body until all that is left is an outline of a pharoah, looking like a flaked arrowhead.
Trekking one, we pass a guy (American) we’d met with two other Americans over at the Ramses III temple. He tells us about a secret staircase in the corner of the Great Hypostyle Hall. Will and Adam realize that it’s the same place where the “Golden Gun” is in the N64 version of GoldenEye. So if you were curious, that staircase exists. And it’s pretty sweet. Scratch that—really sweet. (Even though it ends, blocked with debris, just feet from the sky.)
Wandering the “open-air museum,” I’m looking for the Temple of Ptah, because Lonely Planet says there’s a beautiful statue of Sekhmet—the lion-headed goddess of war, pestilence, destruction, and medicine (odd, I know). Near the outer wall, a man hisses to me and Will. (We’re quite alone out here—anywhere other than Egypt it would be crazy and I would be frightened. Here I just know he wants to show me something special and get me to give him a few guineas.) “Sakhmet?” he hisses, and I nod. He leads us back to the Temple of Ptah, then opens a gate to show me Sakhmet. She’s life-size and beautifully preserved, absolutely beautiful. He points to a hole in the ceiling, then closes the door to the temple. Light from a small square opening falls in a single shaft over Sakhmet. Beautiful. I give him some baksheesh and leave, satisfied.

V.
We ride a felucca—a single-sail Egyptian sailboat—that afternoon. When we leave, it’s 1500 and the sun is high. Our guide and his two sons sail the boat, and he chats with us a bit. He’s funny, and pokes fun at us girls in a kind, harmless way. We take “glamour shots” in the bow, chat, and goof off. It’s great fun.
We sail to Banana Island. Not like we’ve heard of it, but one guy says everyone told him to go. So we pony up the LE 5 per person, and our guide’s son takes us through the banana groves—pointing out the various sizes of the tiny, unripe, bananas. Muhammad, maybe ten, then shows us the wheel of clay jars used to take water from a deep well and put it in the channels that irrigate the fields. He takes us back to the start of the banana grove, where we sit on long benches and they bring us tons of tiny Egyptian bananas. They’re smaller and tougher than the bananas we get at home, and have seeds. But they’re tasty, as is the sugar cane they bring us, which we gnaw at in a manner hardly civilized.

VI.
It’s refreshing to be back on the felucca. Even for March, it’s warm down here and the breeze feels good. The sun begins to set, turning things golden. It’s not a colorful sunset, but the gold color is so strong, it makes it beautiful on its own.
The guide tells us riddles, while his older son makes tea. We drink sweet, sweet tea as the sun sets on our little boat. We laugh and talk, our voices carrying around us.
Dinner is overpriced and lousy.

VII.
We return to Happy Land around 2100. It sounds early, but nobody slept much on the train, and we’ve been in Luxor since 700.
We sit on the rooftop terrace, eating their much cheaper and tastier food. Everyone is tired, but content. We write in journals, listen to iPods, do a little homework.
Our intrepid gang of eight is at peace. At least for now, we are quiet, each in our own “Happy Land.”

VIII.
Our morning “on tour” begins with breakfast on the roof of the hotel. We clamber onto an air-conditioned van and drive across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings. Our guide today, Nasser, has 50/50 English skills, and has about 60% of his script down.
We ride a tuf-tuf—a tram that looks about like the ones in Disney World—to the Valley itself. We exit into a large, steep valley, with almost sheer sides. And full of people. Full of people speaking tons of languages. German seems popular.
Our first tomb—Pharoah Merenptah—is beautiful until I try and take a covert phtot and get my camera taken away. I was terrified that the gelabiyya-ed guard wouldn’t give it back—and he almost didn’t—but I stared him down, almost started to cry, and he gave it back. Egyptian men can’t handle women crying. Waterworks are an excellent accessory in a tight spot. The inside was really pretty though. (Upon further inspection, the covert picture of the tomb’s inside turns out to be of the guard—looking right at me. Brilliant.)
The next tomb, Thutmoses III, requires climbing up high. It’s the furthest open tomb, and the interior is impressive in the amount of paint still on the walls. It’s beautiful. The Litany off Ra and the Litany of the Hours—both of which we talked about in my Egyptology class—are on the walls. Christine gets her camera taken away, too, but gets it back.
The final tomb, Ramses III, is my favorite. The painted images of deities and the pharoah are gorgeous—and well-preserved. As we walk, I start naming gods and scenes, so I end up de facto tour guide for us (our guide didn’t go in). It’s awesome to see the scenes and the gods from class in person.
After leaving the Valley of the Kings, our guide makes an unannounced stop at Mona Liza Alabaster Fectory. There, his friends (who somehow knew we were coming…) named Mr. Bond (Mr. James Bond) and Mr. Rambo give us a two-minute demonstration on how they make alabaster jars, and then—surprise!—take us into their shop. They give us mint tea or karkade, and invite us to look around. Nothing has prices on it, inviting bargaining. They show us their favorite pieces, and most of us buy something. I bargain with one man in Arabic. He tells me he is determined to make a sale with me, but keeps telling me I am Sa’aba—hard. I drive a hard bargain, and do pretty well for myself. He started at LE 35, I got it for LE 12.

IX.
One of the things I really wanted to see was Hatshepsut’s Temple—el-Deir el-Bahri. (That means The Northern Monastery, from when Christians fleeing persecution came to Egypt and made many of the ancient temples into churches and monasteries.)
It’s huge and beautiful. The stone makes clean, sharp lines against the reddish cliffs that roll gently behind it. Hatshepsut built it while she reigned as queen, but she didn’t take to looking like a queen. In all the reliefs, she appears dressed as a male pharoah—ceremonial strap-on beard and all. The problem is that when you usurp the throne from your stepson when he’s a child, he grows us, takes the throne back, and tries to obliterate your memory. Thutmoses III vandalized much of el-Deir el-Bahri in an attempt to rid Egypt’s most famous stepmother from the common memory.
The temple itself—even minus the reliefs and paintings—is worth it. The architecture is beautiful, and truly amazing. A fitting memory of a very powerful woman.
(I guess that’s what happens when you start sleeping with your architect.)

X.
Medinat Habu is next. It’s the mortuary temple of Ramses III, built on top of temples to Amun that Hatshepsut and Thutmoses III had already constructed. Ramses III was a warrior—like most of the pharoahs—but his track records was impressive. 19 campaigns, 19 victories. Hence, he liked to commemorate his victories and what appears to be his singlehanded slaughter of every enemy. Quite the guy.
The temple is really big—mean to enshrine his warrior glory for all eternity. Several “sunken” reliefs (this temple is unique for using “sunken reliefs” as opposed to plain old reliefs and straight up carving) are huge and rather famous. All involve people or animals being killed by none other than Ramses III. There’s a really nice big one—much like the one at Karnak—of Ramses III “smiting” his enemies. “Smiting” becomes a catchphrase.
Much of the original color is preserved on walls, columns, ceilings—Ramses III making offerings to several deities (all of them blessings and confirming his great deeds, of course). The color is beautiful, making the images jump from the flat walls. Several reliefs show Ramses III going to war, hunting and fishing in his chariot, slaughtering captives (like at Karnak, miraculously only half his size), and in a truly memorable scene, cutting off the hands and penises of his captives. This guy didn’t mess around.
We take pictures in a back chamber of the temple, hiding from the “guards” (lazy men who will point out something you’ve already found and then block the exit until you give them some money) and generally desecrating the dignity of these sacred memorials. It’s a blast.

XI.
Our last stop is the Colossi of Memnon. We’re so tired and hungry that we take a few pictures and decide to climb back on the bus.
It’s relatively impressive, or a pair of statues that completely crumbled and were put back together. But it’s still not the best thing we’ve seen today. (Although you feel bad saying anything around here isn’t impressive—the sheer fact that it’s still around is quite a feat.)

XII.
Our first move upon arrival in Luxor was to get train tickets back to Cairo (since the people in Cairo told us we had to buy them in Luxor). We couldn’t, they said. Have to buy them the day of, they said.
A few went back this morning. Computer’s broken, they said. Plus, there’s nothing left today. Nothing until Tuesday, actually. If you want, he says, you can just get on and try to buy them.
After returning from our bus trip, four of us take a cab to the train station, including the one girl who is a dual American-Egyptian citizen and speaks better than any of us, to fight for some tickets. It doesn’t work. They’re pretty rude to us—especially to Vivette, the Egyptian girl (really, they just ignored the American kids), telling her there’s nothing they can do in not-necessarily-polite terms. We try to book a sleeper train (again, no spots), and then seem to get resigned to our fate: trying to climb aboard third-class cars in groups of two and buying the tickets once aboard. It’s actually illegal for foreigners to ride third-class, but if it’s our only way back, we’ll do what we can.
A bit heavy-hearted on top of exhausted, we return to Happy Land. Vivette decides to talk to Mahmoud, to see if he knows and way to help us. She returns to us with good news: for LE 95 each (and he needs it right now), he can get us on a bus leaving in three hours for Cairo. That looks a hell of a lot better than a third-class train for ten hours. We jump at it, and within half an hour we have tickets to go back to Cairo, plus a van arranged to take us to the bus station. This is, plain and simple, living in Egypt. Just when you’re lost and out of your MIND with confusion and worry, someone manages to arrange something that saves the day.

XIII.
1900, we board the bus that will take us back to Cairo. It’s a coach bus from about fifteen years back, so some of the seats, lights, and air vents don’t work. But we’re headed back.
When we reached the bus station, the sun was setting over bright green fields of sugar cane. The sunset was subdued—graying pastels into blue—with the cliffs of the West Bank fuzzy in the distance. Fog rolled gently across the sugar cane, sneaking between the palm trees that dot the fields. My last view of Luxor—where everything famous is surrounded by hot, hard, bright stone—is of sunset and fog over fields of sugar cane.
And it feels right.