The Land of no Top Floors, Tue, 01 Mar 2022 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon in Africa, Egypt

Our ship leaves at 2pm, and that’s all the time we have to see the grave of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings! We got up before 6am to make sure we can make it, and had our tea watching the sunrise from the ship deck. Well, except the city is in the way.

It takes almost an hour to drive there, since the bridge to cross the river is way out of town. Still, we made it to Hatshepsut before 8am, and it was great, because it was pretty much empty! Ahmed said people normally do the Valley first, and that’s why it’s good to come here early. He gave us an excellent tour – poor Queen, with all of her cartouches erased! We spent a fair amount of time exploring, saw the Polish archeological team restoring a sphinx with an angle grinder, and then got told off for trying to climb a slope to other tombs.

The drive to the Valley of the Kings goes by a number of other tombs we hope to explore next week, and some of them really look like anyone could just come and jump in…

In the Valley, we’ve only seen three tombs: Ramses III, IX, and Meremptah. But they were all fantastic, with R III probably best, even though we didn’t get to go to the end (restoration).

It’s stunning how little remains in there, everything stolen, or worse – given away by the modern Egyptian government. It would be really amazing to see the tombs with the content still inside – though I can’t see how they would achieve it with the tourist traffic there.

At the end, we stopped by the Colossi of Memnon, and at some point one guy climbed one of them and for in-between the stones of its chest! We assume as part of some restoration. We also found that the colossi stood in front of the first pylon of a temple almost as huge as Karnak. Then when it fell in an earthquake, the subsequent kings just took the materials and reused them in new buildings!

At the end, it was just 1pm but we were exhausted. We don’t understand how people can do both the East and West banks in one day!

We got to the boat before the 2pm deadline only to find that it didn’t actually leave for another hour. At lunch we meet a great couple, Christina and Marco, who look like the only other people our age on this ship. We ended up hanging out with them a bit more on the sun deck, had a dip in the pool and some delicious smuggled rum and coke. After dinner, we went for a massage

Time for some assorted observations!

  • There is an incredible number of speed bumps, and they seem to be the only thing that introduces some sanity into driving here.
  • We saw drying pans for making sun dried tomatoes.
  • Vendors start using my galabiya as a conversation starter to sell me things now.
  • People on the ship really like really horrible music
  • The tipping culture is pretty intense here – is quite horrible that people don’t get paid enough and need it, but why can’t we just pay a higher fee for something instead of tipping?