Egypt Part The Third 2022 - Archaeology Warning!!!! Medinet Habu Temple

 The Luxor area is literally littered with archaeological sites which is hardly surprising when you consider it is the location of Thebes, the glorious capital of Upper Egypt during the time of the New Kingdom. The city of Amun, later deified as Amun-Ra...

Most visitors to the area are on a time limit unfortunately so they only get to see The Valley Of The Kings and The Colossi of Memnon which you cannot miss because they are on the side of the road!!

To visit all of these sites in depth would take years and I met a Spanish Egyptologist who has been studying the sites for years and she says she still hasn't finished!

So at the risk of boring you dear reader I visited one of the other temples in the area, Habu Temple, the mortuary temple of Rameses III.

Rameses III was known for his battles against the ''Sea Peoples'' unfortunately the day of my visit that part of the complex was off limits for some reason so I cannot bore you with the huge carved wall depicting the defeat of said Peoples....

Much excavation work has been carried out on the site, since 1926 mostly by the University of Chicago Oriental Department who are still busy at work on the site to this day, the middle of the site once contained a Byzantine Christian church which was demolished to allow excavation of the ancient site below. Needless to say nobody thought to do any drawing or photographs of it beforehand. We can blame the French for that I believe... From here on I will leave you with the pictures although there are a couple of comments further down!

The Temple is built on a slight slope which makes it a bit more interesting than some.

As you can see it is not too crowded...

Lots of statues of Rameses III pretending to be Osiris....

Like a lot of them he thought he was a God...

Note the colours which have remained for 1000s of years which is more than you can say for some of the modern paints.

A lot of the carving is excellent and unusually deep.

If you think the picture below looks familiar look at the picture of the railway station in a previous blog..

At some stage the builders have been in (left), and put in a new piece of wall which has obscured the carvings on the original wall......

Some of the excellent carvings are on the outside of the buildings, hopefully you can see the detail on the picture below..

The Return to Egypt 2019 - Further Felucca Fun, An Evening Cruise, And Flight Of Fancy.

In such a rush to get my shipwreck blog completed for all to enjoy I did not find out until later on the Sunday evening that I was not not the only one to have an interesting felucca tale to tell.....

There were two Australians staying in the same apartment block as me and we had had a couple of chats over breakfast although they were only here for less than a week, and returning from an evening cruise with Ahmed and then dinner that evening, they were standing outside waiting for Abdullah to come down and open the front door because ''we have lost our key..'' 

The key, it turns out was, was at the bottom of the Nile, along with the bag containing it..... 

Strangely while we were returning to the West Bank to park Ahmed's boat I did say to Ahmed that there as something odd going on further up stream as suddenly there were several motor boats all converging on a point in the middle of the Nile.

These, it turned out, were rescue ships heading out to rescue the Australians whose felucca had sunk in mid-Nile!

An unusual occurrence but due to the same reason that mine had nearly sunk, executing a tack in still quite strong winds they had shipped some water and listing ''rather more than a bit'' according to the Australians, the next tack had swamped the felucca and down she went!

The police take this sort of thing very seriously and arrested the captain and tested him for alcohol and drugs, and took full statements for the two Australians, the only passengers, who were completely unfazed by it all and refused to file a formal complaint.

As they said, ''It's a boat. Boats sink. It happens all the time when we are at home.''

You would have thought I had had enough of Nile cruises for one day but it was pre-arranged, and an evening cruise, at sunset, on the Nile is an almost magical  experience not to be missed. 


Tomorrow is my last day in Luxor before I fly out early on Tuesday and to finish the holiday off I have booked a completely new experience....

 I am not an early riser at the best of times, but this morning I have to be up at 5 am to be collected by a taxi as I am going on......

Yes, you guessed it a dawn ride in a hot air balloon ride. I have been in helicopters, I have been in light aircraft, I have been on a DC10, indeed I am so old I have been in a DC8, I have even been for a short flight in a Spitfire, but never a hot air balloon.

It is still dark, and I have to wait for a boat to come over from the East Bank bearing the rest of the people going on the balloon I am on. Indeed there are a lot of people milling about because there are a lot of balloons going up!! I was surprised how many...

The take off field is out on the road to King's Valley, there is no landing field because the balloons come down wherever they do.... Arriving there was all rather exciting as some balloons are already airborne, some air being inflated, and some are not inflated at all. And the first thing that happens is that my big camera is taken off me, but everyone has mobile phones these days, indeed all of the people on my ''flight'' come from the sort of countries where they make mobile phones....

Dawn is breaking but the sun is not yet over the horizon.....

Too many photos spoil the fun, so here are just a few.... And a video...

I am not sure of the environmental impact of all these hot air balloons burning all this gas, but this is the first time I have been born aloft by a very large bag of hot air.


I can't help thinking that a large bag of hot air accurately describes some people I know... 

Getting into the gondola requires a certain amount of agility as not all of the balloons have though of providing steps, however there is always somebody on hand to give you a leg up as it were.... 

Dawn breaking on the Temple Of Hotchickensoup 

 Sugar cane...

 What goes up...... Comes down wherever it feels like it......

Tim's Hot Tip of The Day..... Do not do what one Japanese girl had done which was to book a coach transfer from her hotel in Luxor East to the Red Sea leaving at 10.30 am..... Because they don't know exactly when or where the balloon will land there is no set timetable.

Luckily for her we have mobile phones these days and the balloon company were excellent and organised a taxi to take her from the West Bank to meet her coach after it had left Luxor town!

 Those power lines look a bit close....

 Landing in the middle of a cut cane field suddenly people appear to help you out of the gondola.


I must say the whole experience was quite thrilling, and well worth the money!

It took a while for our minibus to arrive to pick us up, time for a wander around on terra firma, and have a look at one of the many irrigation canals.









Don't ask me how the captain does this but her gets the balloon to turn a full circle providing panoramic views, luckily I am quite tall so I can see over everybody else... This is not actually the video I wanted to post but the file I wanted to use is too big it seems!!

Cairo.... A Day Off From Sightseeing, Fayoum Oasis, and A Police Escort...

Those of you who have been paying attention will remember that I arrived in Cairo a day late because of bad weather on Crete, and a snowbound Athens airport, this meant that I did not have my usual day of getting acclimatised before the adventures began. 

The other point of leaving a day spare, as any independent traveler knows, is to allow time for flight delays so there is the minimum of rebooking required!! See the system works!!

So by Thursday I am ready for a day off doing whatever I please and have a look around where I am staying, which is on Gezira Island looking east across the Nile. Very handy really because it is only a short walk across Kubri Qasr Al Nil Bridge and turn left to get to the Egyptian Museum and ''downtown'' Cairo, and not far from the Cairo Tower and Opera either. There is a metro station nearby but today I refer to walk.

Or I would do if the taxi drivers outside the hotel would let me! Ask the taxi driver how much it will be, and if you decide it is worth it then take a taxi.... In my case back to the souk for a bit of shopping to get one of these.

Well one of the things hanging up that is. It's a light fitting and it is not for me and I am not going to carry it around for the next two weeks, it is going in a box and being posted. After some serious bartering I got it for half the price the the man asked, (and don't ask me how much it was), and then I asked him if he could put it in a box because I had to send it by post. At this point three other people got involved, the end result was that I paid the price he asked in the first place and after that is was out of my hands because it was boxed, I addressed it and it disappeared on a scooter to be posted. Three weeks later it arrived at its destination in Florida.... Magic... Who needs a genie in a lamp? All you need is an Egyptian!

Needing to get back to my hotel I thought about getting trying on of these out. You see a lot of these buzzing around, this one is rather smart as mostly they seem to be very elderly Volkswagen camper vans, usually with the back engine flap open because they have an air cooled engine.

They seem to also be ''furnished'' with fringes, tassles, and brightly coloured ''rugs'' which I found out later are Bedouin made and cost a fortune if you want to buy one! But is was not to be because I got ensnared by a taxi driver, but with a difference. This one put the meter on with the result that the fare back to my hotel was about half what I had paid to get there. A lesson learnt there then!


Just around the corner from my hotel is the Cairo Tower.... There is also a gardens here but it was closed for some reason, and there are various government offices, heavily guarded I might add. I think the Cairo Tower is well worth the effort just to get a few photos if nothing else, and to meet people of course. Particularly people wanting to get a visa to go to the UK, but I will not dwell on that......

 Cairo is a bit hazy to say the least.. But you get the general idea, and meanwhile the horses are getting their lunch....


Tomorrow is another busy day as I am off to Fayoum Oasis.

The trip out to Fayoum Oasis is, I think, something that not many people do, although, all in all, it is worthwhile if you have the time! My day did not get off to a good start when the guide got into the car and promptly went to sleep.....

Passing through several villages we pick up a police escort on the way, the only occasion during my stay when I had a police escort but there had been some ''troubles'' in the Western Desert so we had to have one. Indeed you have to have permission to go out this way! A bit of confusion came into play when the permit we had said I was Australian when I am not which is probably why when we stopped to pick up a bit of breakfast, I apparently bought breakfast for the police escort as well! Welcome to Egypt! 

The sites out this way are clearly not visited by many as at Karanis the guide has to call the curator to come and open up for us, and at Qasr Qarun, the ancient city of Dionysis there was no curator at all, the settlements here are mainly Roman and it would appear that most of the reason for their existence is that they were on the caravan route. 

Meanwhile the desert has reclaimed some of the excavations that were done in the past and little has been done in the way of restoration or preservation.

Interestingly the Temple of Sobek-Ra at Qasr Qarun is just about the only remaining temple with the roof still intact.

The nearby lake, which is below sea level is far smaller that is was in ancient times and has become so salty that marine shellfish can be farmed in it.

 One day I will learn how to put photos in the right place on Blogger....

Above Karanis and right the Temple of Sobek Ra 

Finally we reach the waterfalls at Fayoum, this is the place where people from Cairo come to have a splash about do a bit of sailing, sand boarding, and canoodling, which is frowned upon!! People have been arrested it seems and while we are wandering around I seem to have collected a ''minder''....

There is a large ''coffee house'' here and it is that time of day, and my guide is getting more and more fidgety by the minute because there is a small mosque here, and it is Friday... Before he has a chance to even say anything, I just say ''Go'' because I can already tell that he is one of the more devout and it the Holy Day of the week.

 An ideal place for beach volleyball, after all there is plenty of sand....

 We are on the eastern edge of the Sahara Desert here, and if you were expecting rolling sand dunes with windblown furrows and Omar Sharif to come riding bareback over the dunes then forget it. It might be like that further west but here the dunes have ruts from 4WDs, and a lot of rocks...

But we have one more stop to make before returning to Cairo. Fayoum is famous for its waterwheels, (which were invented by the Greeks), and we are going to see some of them. Well actually
we are not because the ones you normally see are being ''restored''.

So we are going to look at this one instead, in spite of the rubbish, (mainly plastic carrier bags I am sorry to say), everybody seems to be enjoying the fun of diving off into the canal.....

Above is one of the crops you see frequently here, it is a fast growing grass especially for feeding animals, so to the left is a donkey who has been to the supermarket and is carrying his dinner home with him.

Arriving back in Cairo we go to eat, and this time I insist the driver comes too.... After all he was a lot more responsive than the guide.....