Luxor in the Afternoon

We got in to Luxor early.  I had it in my mind to head out and consume the sights, immediately.  Let’s go see Karnak.  It will take the morning. We’ll see Luxor in the afternoon.  I had assumed that they would not let us into their rooms at 6:30AM.  Who would?  I have no points with these guys.  They are not obliged to be flexible with me.  But they suggested, at the Luxor Winter Palace that they’d have one room available immediately.  And the other two?  Well, if you needed king sized beds, you’d need to wait an hour.  This was much better than I or anyone had expected.  And, it messed up the plans for immediate departure, as well.  Now, I worried, they’d all just go to sleep after a suboptimal night on the sleeper train.

And as luck would have it, no one could sleep.  The guy who’d negotiated the trip over to the hotel with me this morning from the train had gotten us a guide.  The guide was to meet us at nine.  We’d head off and do the west side only from nine.  Na Na was a lovely, local woman with a lot of spunk and strong opinions on leaders and sites and third-party vendors.  We had a good morning with her at the remarkable ruins of Karnak.  I got a tee-shirt and we had some coffee near the scarab betel statue from a man who told me my face made him feel good.   

But having finished our time at Luxor, it occurred to me to try to do the west side too in one, full day.  The actual temple ruins of Luxor we could see from the hotel was only walking distance.  So we headed off for the Valley of the Kings, which, was, to be fair very, very hot.  It’s Egypt in the summer, what do you want?  The artwork was each one more remarkable than the last as was the haggling over extra pay for the right to photograph in each successive funerary.   My daughter grew tired.  Na Na helped us to thwart back the baksheesh palms.

My daughters were done.  And I was not.  At least until we saw Hatshepsut’s palace.  A compromise.  First a lunch, insisted my wife.  The lunch was fine but when Na Na settled up and told us the price I reckoned we were charged three times what we should have been and it soured us a bit on our otherwise lovely guide.  She explained that she was a Catholic and that Catholic’s were a full 5% of the population, which caught me off guard.  She was a Mubarak fan, she explained.  Back then the conversion rate to the dollar was significantly more favorable.  Many people in the tourist trade seemed to be Mubarak fans. 

The younger daughter bailed on Hatshepsut or ‘hot-chicken-soup’ as she was otherwise popularly known.  I liked the story of how she claimed divine birth to legitimize her rule.  She seemed to me a lot like the story of Wu Ze Tian.  Indeed, the next time I end up lecturing on Wu Ze Tian I will draw reference to the Ms. Hot Chicken Soup.  Perhaps I’ll show a picture of her standing there with a long beard, legitimizing her manliness as a woman. 

Saturday, 07/06/19