Day Two - Valley Of The Kings, Hatshepsut's Temple
No, they weren't joking. 4:45am. Bugger. Stagger in for breakfast at about 5:15am and horrify Lisa by eating scrambled eggs and sausages at that time. Hey - grapefruit too! The sun's coming up and I take the opportunity for a quick look on deck around us. In the distance there's a couple of sandy looking mountains, palm tress everywhere, and a slight haze. Yes, here we are. Surprisingly, the Nile actually looks bluish, not the filthy brown I'd been expecting - obviously Cairo.
The coach takes about fifty minutes to get us to the Valley Of The Kings, through which we get to see rural life. It never ceases to amaze me in developing countries how people live, and I don't mean that in a snobbish way. People live here out of town in what are basically mud huts. Poverty is a terrible thing, and frankly I would not want to have been born anywhere else but England. To be brought up in a country where it'll never realistically be possible for you to leave must be hard. Here, in Egypt I'd imagine it's not so terrible since at least if you're educated you can perhaps move on, but in Bali is seemed impossible. Yet they were a genuinely friendly and evidently happy race. So go figure...
Worse though, it must be horrendous to be born female in Egypt. They appear to be genuinely treated as third class citizens, and that's if you actually see any. They are all apparently holed-up back at home doing whatever. This is a problem for western women travelling here, as Egyptian men do not appear to respect or understand our ways. Tales of random gropes are commonplace, as western women are all loose and just gagging for it. I fear for Lisa, especially with her long blonde hair, and I'm certainly not going to stand by and accept it as 'their way'. When tourism is you main industry you have to understand the people you're dealing with, and try not to just sit back and make an easy buck.
We start to leave the green of the Nile banks and head into desert land. The Valley Of The Kings, where some 64 tombs rest not in peace, is set in mountains and it takes a surreal ride on Noddy trains to take us there. The street vendors prove not to be as much hassle as I was anticipating - you ignore them, and generally they go away. Not as persistent as some of the Balinese, and nowhere near so as the natives of Barbados with their 'Charlie'. The sun's starting to ride high and it's not even 8 'o'clock as we set foot in our first tomb, that of Ramses II. Nothing can prepare you for the intricacy and level of work that has gone into these resting places. Our guide spends a great deal of time talking us through only a fraction of the hieroglyphics. Flash photography is not, understandably, allowed yet there's always offenders, and one woman in our group ends up having her camera confiscated. I realise I've made a mistake in loading black and white film into my camera, as I wasn't prepared for the level of colour still remaining today. The amount of work that went into what is essentially a fancy grave is astounding. What gets to be more striking is the heat and how it was engineered through this. Though I suppose having armies of slaves and peasants at your disposal does help somewhat. And all of this work was meant never to be seen by anyone but the Gods. Hey guys, I hope it paid off and you're enjoying yourself with Ra at the moment.
What is frustrating, however, is that the tombs have been completely gutted and the contents, save that which was robbed, now remains in the Cairo museum and thereabouts. There are not even pictures or drawings to indicate what these magnificent tombs once looked like, or when re-opened by archaeologists. This is a shame, though even without these, they are still incredibly evocative. To have witnessed these first hand at the turn of the twentieth century is something undoubtedly worth the various curses.
It would be magical to experience these tombs alone with just a torch for company. Unfortunately though, we have to make do with hundreds of other tourists, causing things to be a little crushed and cramped. This cues the most stupid thing I've heard yet on holiday. A woman complains that there are no exits and you have to leave the way you came...
Come 9:30am it's time to leave this magnificent setting. If I were travelling independently I would love to have climbed into the mountains (carrying plenty of water!) and looked down upon it. Alas...
We stop off at an alabaster shop, and buy a lovely looking small vase for about £25. No doubt it's far from the cheapest, and street vendors would undercut it, but many of these are allegedly fakes. We're paying over the odds, and I suspect our tour operator have some sort of commission deal going on. Still, it's nice and we like it. So there.
Next we go to the Temple of Hatshepsut which is set into the mountains. The surrounding mountains are a natural, amphitheater-like enclosure, and the effect is astounding. Unfortunately you cannot help but see the recent additions - the road, the building and renovation equipment, and plenty of people. This is again a place where I would dearly love to be transported back in time to see it in its glory, allegedly adorned with small lakes, greenery and palm trees. Instead, the entire area is a dustbowl and now we have to put up with the ubiquitous street vendors again. Is there anywhere else in the world a nation that lives so much in the present by thriving off it's past?
It's a long walk of about half a mile to the temple itself, and the sun is approaching it's strongest and we're all starting to wilt under the heat. As fascinating as our guide, Max, is, we're all starting to feel the strain of a long morning, and concentration is becoming harder. I lend Lisa my hat to shield her in this shadow less area, yet after only five minutes I feel my follicly-challenged head straining against the rays and demand it back. Who said chivalry was dead? Anyway, she's got loads of hair.
This is also where nearly fifty tourists were gunned down in cold blood at the back end of 1997. A sobering thought, and one which is not helped by the machine-gun toting security. Reassuring it's not. They may be there for our safety, but it shows that there's still the potential of violence at any time, and with the long open expanse of the walk to the temple you do feel naked and exposed.
So now we've set sail. Finally. The Nile is breathtaking in its uniqueness, and I'm seriously going to have to root out a thesaurus for more adjectives. To have the desert and mountains beside you and the banks littered with palm trees is immensely calming to say the least. The shade is by far the best option though. The heat and blinding sunlight is almost too much. And it's not summer yet! Apparently come August the temperature regularly rises to 135°, which is unimaginable. There are going to be some extremely burnt people at this rate as they are sat, steadily going lobster-like. For me, it's siesta time until Edfu.
Woke up after about an hour's sleep with a serious case of the 'where-am-I's' and feeling incredibly dehydrated. Perhaps we shouldn't have fallen asleep with the curtains open, leaving the sun to blaze through, and making the (somewhat poor) air-conditioning kind of redundant. To wake myself up a quick dip in the small swimming pool was called for which quickly did the trick - it's surprisingly freezing temperature being the complete opposite of the heat. Mind you, the sin has lost a lot of its power now and is easy to sit in.
And still the Nile rolls by. I haven't bothered yet to take a picture of it, as I really don't think I can capture the spectacle. Maybe as the sun goes down - the ubiquitous sunset shot that'd have my old photography teacher reel back in horror.
I've nearly finished my film from this morning and tomorrow will switch to colour. I sincerely hope that I've got some good photos of the tombs, but I really wish I had more technical skill with low lighting. One of these days I'll remember to do a good practice and read some manuals properly before leaving for faraway places where you don't get to go back the next day for another go. Still, I stuck to my usual edict of taking loads of photos in the hope of getting one good one. I just hope I get the right good ones.
I was very amused as we neared Edfu to find that even in the boats we're still attacked by the street vendors - though now we're most definitely in control. As boats wait to go through the dam, a couple of dozen rowing boats turn up trying to sell clothes. The deck is about 40 feet above the sea level, so they're alongside, throwing up their wares trying to entice us. This upsets the guy who owns the shop on the boat greatly, and he's wandering around telling us what crap it is. He proves his point too, by wetting a garment, rubbing it together and lo, the dye does indeed run. The fun is eventually stopped by the 'Nile Police' in a boat threatening them with oars!