Valley of the Kings

Every morning in Luxor, Marc got up for the sunrise. He so enjoyed his coffee on our terrace, on the banks of the Nile, listening to the West Bank waken, hearing the hum of the East Bank metropolitan side of Luxor rise louder and louder. Throw in the mosque's call to prayer, emanating from who knows how many mosques, well, it's not a time we will soon forget. 

If we went up another flight of stairs from our terrace, we were on the roof, set up as another seating area, and from here we had a 360 view, stunning. Directly behind us was the Valley of the Kings, and every morning hot air balloons rose slowly and quietly in the air, mostly carrying tourists which we were glad to see! One morning there were 13, and their presence lasted just over an hour at the crack of dawn.

Built over a 500 year period from the 16th to the 11th century BC, 63 tombs and chambers of Pharoah's and noblemen have been discovered in the Valley of the Kings to date. Scholars estimate that hundreds more are yet to be discovered.

Here's the layout, below. Reasonably, you can only visit 3 in a half day. King Tut is in this valley too, but our host Claudia, herself an amateur guide and Egyptologist, recommends not paying the extra entrance fee because there is nothing in his tomb to see, all of the goods have been removed. 

We arrive early in the morning (for us and Claudia!), 10 am, and the heat is already high. Claudia is thrilled to see the parking lot filled with tour buses, vans and cars, it's been years since she's seen that many. She is hopeful the tourism industry is returning to Luxor. We walk into the grounds, and she provides our introductory context to what we'll see, answering our many, many questions. Marc is so excited to be here.

Two layouts of the burial chamber design, earlier construction had the L-axis, later ones had a straight line to the sarcophagus. We will see both.

Our first tomb, we have to climb up, up and up, to go down, down, and down. Inside, the walkways are easy as we go further down into the tomb, the walls are spectacular, color still very visible, the heat rising the further we go. Claudia is able to explain many of the hieroglyphs which tell so many stories, so many myths, illustrate the Book of the Dead, the Gates, the tributes. Photos are not allowed and there are guards positioned throughout the tomb, but we manage to squeeze a few in.

So, having succeeded with surreptitiously getting photos, Marc snaps one too many. Claudia had warned us that smaller cameras are better because the click of the mechanism is quieter. We have a pretty big Nikon, so the click is pretty loud, especially in a soundless,  thousands of years old tomb! Marc clicks one too many photos, and a guard comes running. We try to deny it, He asks Marc to click through the photos, he confiscates the camera. Claudia is helping keep the situation calm, reminds him that plenty of other people in this and other tombs are taking photos, he still confiscates it, and tells us we can pick it up at the exit of the tomb. We're upset and worried that he'll either erase the photos (that would be okay, and we deserved it), or worse, take the data card which has days' worth of photos still on it. 

We finish the tomb and head to the exit, and basically we have to pay him, he threatens to take us to the site guard office for questioning, Claudia ends up having to tell them she'll call her Egyptian husband, they soften and we pay. It turns out it's all innocent enough, the guards are paid extremely poorly in this job, and it's a way for them to make extra money. They can often make more by this manoeuvre than accepting a bribe ahead of time to allow a photo. We're rattled and embarrassed, and we move on.

Some better, web-based photos, since we dared not take any more ourselves! 

One of the tombs, below. It really is incredible to think that this was at the end of all those long, long passageways, that so much wealth was buried with them, that so much rock debris was filled in after death. Most Pharaohs began building their tomb here as soon as they assumed power. Some died early and so were buried in someone else's, so much to learn! 

And of course, Exit Through the Gift Souk!