November 25 - Safaga, Egypt

I’m moving a little slowly today; we were up dancing until very late.  We’re docked in Safaga, Egypt, the Red Sea port which is the jumping off place for a visit to Luxor.  The last time I came here, the ship stayed overnight and we took a tour which allowed us to stay in a hotel along the Nile in Luxor.  This time we’re only here for the day so the tour to Luxor involved leaving at 6:30 AM, 8 hours in a bus and only a few hours in Luxor.  I originally booked it, but after getting on the ship I canceled because it really didn’t seem worth it.  The ride from Safaga goes through the Red Sea mountain range which is nothing but rocks and sand with only an occasional scrubby bush.  If you can picture the Israelites wandering through the wilderness after escaping Egypt, you’ve got a pretty good idea of the terrain.  Also, and rather importantly, there are no bathroom stops until you arrive in Luxor.

You can see what I mean about being desolate

So today I’m going to cheat and I’m going to write about Luxor and post some  photos from my last visit here so you can get an idea what it’s like. Luxor was the ancient city of Thebes and the capital of Upper Egypt.  The Egyptian god Amun was the patron of Thebes and after a rebellion in the 16th century BC, Amun became fused with Ra, the Sun god.  Amun-Ra became essentially the king of Gods in the Egyptian pantheon.  The city lies on the Nile River about 130 miles downriver from the Aswan Dam. It was an important city as far back as 2100 BC. Luxor is the site of the Temple of Karnak, which is the largest one in Egypt. It covers an area of 250 acres and incorporates hundreds of columns, statues and, at one time, over 100 obelisks.  Now there are only a few left and the most impressive is the one dedicated to Queen Hatshepsut.  It’s 100 feet tall and weighs 350 tons.  I always marvel at how these ancient people were able to build such massive, beautiful buildings.

These are in the Temple of Karnak

The Temple of Karnak is connected to the Temple of Luxor by an avenue called the avenue of rams because of the statues along the way, each with the body of a lion and the head of a ram.  They look like small sphinxes, except the Sphinx has the head of a human.  The entrance to  the Temple of Luxor is flanked by two massive statues of Ramesses II and an obelisk.  There were originally two of the latter but one was taken by the French and now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. (Everyone always thinks of the British as having taken lots of ancient artifacts like the Elgin Marbles from Greece, but they weren’t the only ones.)  The Temple of Luxor over the ages had a Roman temple within it, followed by a church and finally a mosque which still lies within the temple boundary.

The Avenue of the Rams

The entrance to the Temple of Luxor with RanessesII on either side of the gate

That's the miinaret of in the mosque in the Temple of Luxor

It’s worth telling a little about the Nile which has always played a big part in Egypt’s history.  The Nile actually begins as the Blue Nile, whose source is in Ethiopia, and the White Nile, whose source has long been disputed but it’s either in Rwanda or Burundi. The two Niles join together around Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.  As I wrote earlier the countryside you ride through on the way to Luxor is truly desolate until you approach the Nile and then you come to lush fields with the main crop being sugarcane.  Along the way there were lots of houses built of mud bricks with roofs of thatched sugarcane.  Riding through places like this makes you realize how fortunate we are to have the conveniences we have, and it hits home how many people there are who live in a manner in which our forebears did.

A couple of scenes from the Nile

Well, that’s a little about Luxor as I remember it from nearly ten years ago.  I’m sorry I don’t have new things to tell about it.  I think the temples are still as they were then so the pictures should give you some idea of the place.  The one different thing I can see from the ship is the city of Safaga.  Last time we were here the streets were packed with people waiting to get on ships in the port to take them across the Red Sea  to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.  There were literally thousands camping out on the streets and we figured it must have been the time for the Hajj that many Muslims make to Mecca.  They aren’t in evidence today.