Egypt & Jordan GAP Tour - March 17th

After having breakfast on the support boat we sailed for a bit before pulling up to shore and getting on a bus. We drove to Edfu to see the famous temple of Horus. This temple is the most preserved of all the temples in Egypt and was built between 237 BCE to 57 BCE.

After Edfu it was a two hour bus ride to Luxor. Luxor has often been called the world’s greatest open air museum...the number and preservation of the monuments in the Luxor area are unparalleled anywhere else in the world. We stopped at a government run jewellery store. (I keep saying ‘government-owned’ because on tour they took us to these shops to do our shopping to make sure we got authentic items)

We then checked in to the Flobater Hotel and ate lunch at Pizza Hut. We were hungry and it was too much trouble to find anything else.

Our next stop was the Karnak temple in Luxor. Karnak is a complex area of many pylons, temples, halls and sanctuaries from the middle kingdom till the Greek-Roman period. It is also the largest temple in the world.

We had plenty of time to walk around see the hundreds of columns and statues. One of the halls – The Great Hypostyle Hall – had 134 columns representing the papyrus flower. That was my favourite part. There were many areas where even the colours in the carvings were very well preserved so we could get a good idea of what this may have looked like when it was first built. The temple grounds also had a big sacred lake. This was one of my favourite temples in Egypt.

Something interesting – some of the carvings of males had their ‘male organ’ very distinctly shown.

In the evening after dinner we thought we’d do something a little different. We had already seen so many temples, so to change it up a bit, we went to see the Luxor temple at night when it is all lit up. It made it that much more magical, and for a change it wasn’t polluted with too many tourists.

Something fun and probably dangerous – we fit 9 people plus the driver in to a taxi on the ride back to the hotel. It was a cosy experience.

We then went on a search for some kushari – the traditional Egyptian dish I described in an earlier post. After stuffing ourselves we went to Murphy’s Irish Pub to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. This was something REALLY different – walking in to an Irish pub in Luxor and feeling like we were in Ireland, or Canada, or anywhere but Egypt!