Dec 28 - Luxor

By coincidence the theme of a lot of our recent travels seems to be that we don't need Las Vegas: we don't need Mandalay Bay, we go to Mandalay; we don't need Caesars Palace or The Venetian, we go to Rome and Venice; nor do we need New York or Paris; etc. Today we render The Luxor redundant.

After nearly ten very busy days of touristing we are starting to get worn out. This morning we’re in even worse shape since the “local wine” we had with dinner the night before was clearly some high-octane home-brew and we woke up with screaming headaches. Unfortunately, we ended up having a seventeen hour day ahead of us.

We started with the Valley of the Kings, visiting three tombs (no photos allowed), and then on to the Valley of the Queens. We encountered our first real crowds of the entire trip here, though our guide explained that this was probably less than one-tenth of what was here before the revolution and that he is only able to work a couple days a month. Unexpectedly (because we hadn't bothered doing our homework before the trip) the real highlight was the Karnak Temple. Neither of had realized that there was anything this large and well preserved left from the ancient Egyptian dynasties.

Next, our guide arranged for a relaxing private felucca sail on the Nile to watch the sun set:

Though weary, we were still not done and were taken to the Luxor Temple after dinner. This was another massively tall and well-preserved complex, this time lit up eerily from below in the clear Egyptian night.

Finally back at the airport for our midnight flight, the proper highlight of the day turned out being finding Luxor International to have free, functional (albeit slow) wifi connection (the first we’d seen since Petra). Emails and blog posts synced at last!