For Mom, Love Steve

I did do two full days of nothing but not much to write about there. I did finally decide that I needed to get the west side out of the way. Now, I was in kind of a pickle. The west side is a very large procession of sacred buriel areas for Kings, Queens, and lessers, each with its own section of the valley. Inter amongst them are more temples and statues which are fairly important and border line must sees. Luckily, Erin had given me an out by explaining to me what things were a must see and which stuff I could leave out as she was very in tuned to my attitude about the stuff. This helped to shave off about half the things on my itinerary. The other contemplation was how to see all the sites. I could sign up for a tour which would pretty much alleviate all thinking on my part and get the whole experience out of the way in the most efficient matter. It would however entail paying a lot more than what I would by doing it on my own, and also involve me having to follow around a bunch of other people who might be so giddy about how great this stuff was that I actually might vomit. I figured that since I was hardy enough to cross Sudan on my own, I could handle doing some tourist spotting on my own. In that regard I rented a bike, crossed the Nile on the public ferry and peddled my ass out into the desert.

The plan was to go to the farthest one of the must see places which was the Valley of the Kings. It was about 11 kms out of town on a slightly uphill but fully paved road. It was straight out in the desert again and was pretty damn hot. It was a bit disconcerting when the tourist buses would drive by with there sub zero airconditioners on and the tourists actually using ice scrapers to clear the ice off the windows so they could look out to see the crazy asian guy riding a bike out in the desert. If one of those people aimed a camera at me, I was more than ready to start throwing rocks. After a grueling ride to the site where I actually passed a couple of Chinese guys who were walking. Damn. Those guys were hard core. I pull up to the big tourist building and took a seat inside of the semi-airconditioned pseudo staging area. They had a large flat panel tv in a viewing area with a bunch of benches staged in front of it. There was no one sitting there so I took a seat in the front row and watched the short video about the uncovering of the tombs. This whole time I was pouring off sweat and using my hat to sop up as much as possible lest I make a puddle. Before I knew it, I lifted my head and I was surrounded by 40-50 people who must have just got off of one of the tourist buses. I knew I looked a bit odd sitting there with my head between my knees just sweating like I had Malaria so I quickly got up, and scooted off to another corner to finish sweating out the last of the liquids in my body. That is one thing I have learned from traveling in Sudan is that there actually is a point when you stop sweating because there is nothing left. Probably not a good thing, but it is useful.

Once I composed myself I followed the last crowd outside to a little staging area where these little trains picked people up and drove them up to the tombs. The guy told me I needed my tickets first and pointed to the ticket window. I went up there and checked the prices and remembered that these places were great for breaking large bills as they always had tons of change. I dug into the front of my pants to get my money belt only to find my penis. What the hell. Holy shit, I left my money belt back at the hotel. For fucks sake. I remembered that morning for once I didn’t put on my money belt because I was only going down for breakfast. I threw my money belt under my shirt on the other bed and forgot all about it. I stood there in two panics. One because I had just busted my ass to ride all the way out there to have to go all the way back, and if I did want to see the place I would have to ride all the way back again, shit. The second panic which was more disconcerting was that all my money, my credit cards, my passport, were all just sitting in a convenient little package right there on the spare bed sitting under my shirt. Hell, if I was a maid and I found a money belt full of dollars and pounds, I would take at least some of them. Hell, there was enough money there that someone not paid very well could easily just take the money and have the same amount of money as if they worked there for a year. Shit. I did some quick calculations. I counted the money that I had in my wallet and in my pocket and I scrounged up $38EL. The student ticket was $35EL and the train ticket was $2El. That left me $1El but I had paid $2El to take the Ferry across. I did a quick mental calculation which involved loss of wealth, physical and mental wear and tear, importance of experience, temperature, heart rate, ego, and came up with that I would get the ticket, walk instead of taking the train, zip through the three tombs that are allotted and then bust ass back to the hotel. I do have to laugh as the train ride lasts about fifty yards but you can’t tell that because it ends just around the corner so you don’t know if it is fifty yards or ten miles. I zipped through the three tombs recommended to me by Erin and hauled ass back on my bike just to find my money belt safe and secure under my shirt. I was pretty much drained at that point and said screw going back out and figured I would decide that night if I would just blow off the other areas or make another go at it the following day.

After a Big Mac Meal and a time to stabilize I figured that I would make the run out to the other areas the next day as I had the farthest place out of the way and the others were all grouped fairly close together.

The next day went just as planned and I sweated my way through Temple of of Mentuhotep, Deir al-Bahri, Deir al Medina, Medinat Habu, and the Colossus of Memnon. With that, I concluded my stay in Luxor.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:03 am and is filed under Egypt, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.