Pharaonic Overload

I finally had the chance to go to Luxor this weekend, the resting place of the Pharaohs and Pharaohessahs, to combine English and Arabic femizations of words. In short, the city of Luxor is an uninviting tourist hellhole, but the monuments, tombs, temples and river are simply amazing. This is the point where I have to confess I am not particularly interested in Pharonic history, religion or art. I find the art monolithic, dogmatic and monotonous. That said, given how much stuff we saw spanning over 1000 years of history, the nuance and character of some of the art started emerging, particularly at Medinat Habu. Medinat Habu is from a later period, built by Ramses III and seems to show (although I'm no expert) some Syrian influence.
We flew from Cairo to Luxor, which is definitely the way to do it. It's a one hour flight, and it was 320 pounds round trip. That's actually a little bit cheaper than the overnight train, which takes 12 uncomfortable hours. So my advice would be to fly if tickets stay this cheap. It effectively gives you two extra days of travel time if you leave Cairo very early in the morning and leave Luxor later at night. I wish there was a way to completely avoid the city of Luxor itself. We had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune of being in Luxor during low tourist season. This meant the sites were less occupied, and our hotel was substantially cheaper. But the lower volume of tourists made the desperation palpable. At the best of times Luxor is known to be incredibly unpleasant, but when the tourist volume is at its low ebb, people get much more pushy, and there are many more salesmen and touts to devote their time to you. As Noga pointed out though, perhaps going during Ramadan was a good thing, because then people really don't have the energy to give chase. They're sort of listless. It's nice. Plus it being a tourist town, I had no compunction about eating and drinking in the street. Nonetheless, the people and hassle in Luxor would make me think very seriously about going twice. We just pretended to speak no English, and being with five people who could switch to Hebrew whenever we didn't want a cab driver to understand what we were talking about definitely had its advantages. Not that it did me much good, because I am pretty much limited to numbers and exclamations. Conjugating verbs is still a bit tricky.
I'm going to break this blog post into days because otherwise there is just too much. We saw an awful lot in four days, spent a lot of time next to the pool, and somehow I still managed to come back less rested than I started off. Might have something to do with the Pharonic blitzkrieg we undertook.

Thursday:
Got up at far too early an hour to catch our airplane, and had the chance to drive through Cairo to the airport during the day. I've always flown in and out of Cairo at night, so it was interesting to drive through Maadi and Heliopolis, the suburbs of Cairo. I've not spent any time in either place, both of which are supposed to be interesting contrasts to the rest of Cairo.
Here I have to refer back to my previous post about Egyptian bureaucracy. I described it just last week in very negative terms. Of course immediately after that I had a very positive experience with Egyptian bureaucracy. For some reason when we booked my ticket to Luxor we didn't notice that we had the date wrong. I was scheduled to fly on the 26th, when it was the 27th. We hadn't noticed this problem, but somehow the security officer at the airport did. Noga and I went to the EgyptAir office to see if the mistake was fixable, or whether I was going to be spending the weekend in Cairo. We explain to the woman the problem, she looks at the ticket, types some things into a computer, sticks an orange sticker on the back of my ticket, and says I'm fine. No hassle, no charge, nothing. Amazing! Excellent customer service Egypt Air. I'm proud of you. After all those
bad things people have said about you.
Got to Luxor, took a minibus to the Luxor New Winter Palace Hotel. A part of the Old Winter Palace Hotel, which was designed to draw royalty away from Europe in the 19th century, the New Palace is not nearly as sumptuous. It shares grounds and facilities with the Old Palace, so those are wonderful, but the rooms themselves could use an overhaul. They do however have the best cleaning staff I've encountered. More on this later.
We rested for a bit and then went to the Luxor Temple that night, which actually is in town, right next to the river along the Corniche. I would highly recommend going at night, because the lighting is very well done, and gives a particularly magnificent aura.
Ok, this blog has gotten pathetically late, so I am simply going to put this one up and get to the rest of the trip later. Meaning soonish.