Luxor, Egypt

We arrived in the port of Safaga, Egypt, early yesterday morning, Wednesday, April 18, for a 1-day visit. Safaga is a small port town located on the coast of the Red Sea and is the principal access point for Luxor, our real destination.

Luxor is about a 3-hour drive from Safaga. Once known as Thebes, it is set on the west bank of the Nile River and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site lined with beautiful colonial hotels and some of the world's most ancient and significant ruins. On its east bank are the sprawling temples of Luxor and Karnak that are linked by an ancient avenue of sphinxes. On the west bank, in the Valley of the Kings, lie the tombs of Egypt's great pharaohs. Janis and I signed up for a 10-hour excursion that promised to take us to the temples of Karnak. It did, and the experience was well worth what turned out in fact to be more than an 11-hour day.

First, a bit more about Safaga and its port. In this country of 100 million people, Safaga has a population of only 40,000. In addition to serving as the access point by cruise ship to Luxor, it is a popular port for Egyptian workers, some 2 million of whom ferry from this port across the Red Sea to work in Saudi Arabia. The port is also used by Egyptians to make the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. (Ninety percent of Egyptians are Muslims and 10% are Christians.) There is an aluminum factory within the port and a phosphate plant just outside the port in Safaga.

When we pulled back our curtains, we saw this very serene scene. (Click on any photo to enlarge it.)

We boarded our bus -- a very nice one which, for the first time on any excursion connected to this cruise, included a toilet -- and were introduced to our guide who turned out to be a real winner. (The quality of guides varies dramatically from place to place. Although Viking seems to do its best to line up the best ones available, in some places even the best ones aren't very good either because their command of English is poor, they're simply not all that knowledgeable about the subject at hand and/or they're poorly trained and often say very little, even on long bus rides.) He has a masters degree from Cairo University in Egyptology and, so, is truly an expert on the subject of ancient Egyptian civilizations and history, speaks excellent English and is very engaging and entertaining to boot.

Our first task was to get out of the port. We were part of a caravan of 20-something buses with heavy security details at the front and back. Each bus had to drive to a security building within the port and each passenger had to leave the bus, enter the building, pass through a magnatometer and reboard the bus. Now, this exercise might have made sense since from here we were entering Egypt proper, except that we were invited to leave all of our stuff we brought with us on the bus before going through security and, as it turns out, the authorities did not inspect any of the buses themselves or board them to examine their contents. An empty exercise. So by the time we left the port we were already 45 minutes into the day's activities.

The ride to Luxor actually took about 3 1/2 hours but was interesting in terms of what we could see along the way and what it told us about life in this part of Egypt (which, even though in the south of Egypt when looking at a map, is referred to as north or Upper Egypt because of its higher elevation and the fact that the Nile flows from the south to the lower elevation area in the map north that runs into the Mediteranean). The first half of the ride, in terms of travel time, was on an excellent highway and covered all but the last 32 kilometers. That highway runs due west from Safaga.

The part of Safaga we passed through consists mostly of housing. Here's what it looks like. You'll notice that almost every residence building has rebar sticking out at the top. Our guide explained that property owners are obligated to pay property taxes only on completed buildings, so most property owners start but don't finish another floor, live in or use the rest of the building and don't ever pay any property taxes. We saw this in every town we went through. (You'd think the government would long ago have addressed this, but it hasn't.)

As soon as we left the town of Safaga, which happened in a matter of minutes, the rest of that highway ride was mostly through unsettled desert and rocky terrain (there are a few small settlements along the way). It's actually very pretty.

There were occasional police checkpoints along this highway that required brief stops, but not nearly as many as on the more local road that we turned south on for the last 32 kilometers. As soon as we turned off the highway we were in the city of Qena which has a population of 250,000. Not a pretty place, but clearly one that very much conveyed a sense of community. And people who looked up at us on the bus were very friendly.

Just outside of Qena proper is a lot of newly constructed housing. Our guide told us this is government provided housing for those who have no source of income and is one of Sisi's initiatives that is very popular.

A canal runs through and alongside the city all the way to Luxor which is where we first saw the Nile itself. The Nile undoubtedly is the water supply for the canal, and the canal in turn is a source of water for the lush farmland that borders the local road we were now on. We've heard about Egypt's Fertile Crescent. Well, this is part of it. A hour and a half worth of desert road and then this.

What came as a total surprise was the extent to which, at least in this part of Egypt, farming and farm-related business are conducted with animals and simple tools rather than with mechanized equipment. Likewise with means of transportation.

We were also struck by the fact that almost all the women we saw outside were clothed from head to toe in black. Our guide said this reflected the culture in this part of Egypt and has nothing to do with religion. Just reporting what he said. And, as you can see from all of these photos, the men are more likely than not to be wearing the long-robed dishdasha.

And, once again, there were many places along the route that were littered with rubbish.

I mentioned numerous police checkpoints. On this 32-kilometer local road that ran from Qena to Luxor they seemed to appear every few kilometers. Most of the lookout structures, as shown below, were manned by men with rifles. Note the rifle in one of these photos. The road is also laden with speedbumps so it was very slow going. These last 32 kilometers took as long or longer to cover as the much, much longer highway itself. Our guide warned us at the outset of the bus ride, when he explained our route to us, that this will be the longest 32 kilometers we will ever have traveled. He was right.

Well, we finally entered the city of Luxor and crossed a bridge covering the famous Avenue of Sphinxes, a 1 1/2- mile-long ancient road created by Queen Hatshepsut and lined with human-headed sphinxes. This avenue once connected the temples of Karnak and Luxor. I had all I could do to quickly snap a few photos of this amazing site from the bus as we crossed the bridge as we were entering and leaving Luxor.

We were taken directly to a Hilton hotel in town for a buffet lunch since it was now lunch time. Nice hotel on the Nile and nice lunch.

After lunch we headed to the temples of Karnak in an area of Luxor formerly known as Thebes on the east side of the Nile. This was a visual feast and made all of the day's long bus riding well worth it. I will leave it to any of you who are interested to read up on these temples and monuments. Suffice it to say for our purposes here in this travel blog that the project was started during Egypt's so-called Middle Kingdom period by pharoah Sesostris I and was improved and added to all the way through the Ptolemaic period which was the last of the Phaeronic era. It is located on the east side of the Nile because that side was associated with life and the living and these temples were originally built to honor the living. Pyramids and monuments that were built on the west side of the Nile are considered funereal and were built as tombs for certain deceased pharoahs all of whom were believed to enjoy an afterlife as reflected by the artifacts that were buried with them. Our guide was masterful in explaining what we were seeing, including the meaning of many of the hieroglyphics engraved on the monuments.