Egypt: Part 2- Hot Air Balloon Adventure and Hatshepsut Temple

Sunrise from a hot air balloon!

We had an incredible opportunity to take a hot air balloon ride to watch the sun rise over the Nile and Luxor Valley. We figured that we may never get a chance to do this again, so why not!? It required us getting up at 3:30am in order to be on the bus by 4am. Yeah, you can only imagine as we are both non-morning people....LOL! Here we are on the sketchy bus......we look more awake than we thought we would at 4 in the morning! ;)

Sleepyheads at 4am....

Once on the bus, we drove around Luxor picking up other people from various hotels. We then drove to the shore of the Nile where we boarded a river ferry to cross over to the east side. We had to wear these life preservers and were served tea/coffee and twinkies. LOL

Starting to wake up...

It was an eery looking landscape when we first arrived because it was still very dark and these large mounds were silouheted against the lightening horizon...

This was our balloon.....it looked so cool and was VERY hot standing even this far away!

Balloons starting to inflate...

Me getting really excited for our balloon ride!! :)

Sun is starting to come up...

Up, up and away! Each time a balloon lit up it looked like a giant lightbulb floating in the sky!

Waiting for the sun as we lift off the ground...

The sun is coming! Yes, that is the Nile!

So enough of the sunrise pics......here is what we could see from being up so high! :)

Fields of sesame......that's what those bundles are!

This is the mountain that holds all of the royal tombs......you can see that right beside the road they are doing new excavations on some tombs they had just discovered in the week before we arrived in Egypt!

The Ramesseum which was the Memorial Temple of Ramses II

It's hard to see but at the front of this mountain is Hatshepsut Temple......the morning light makes it seem to blend right into the mountain. The black strip behind it is the Valley of the Kings.

The Nile Valley with the fields of crops.

There seems to be a distinct line between irrigated and non-irrigated land here!

Over the Valley of the Queens...

A fantastic view of the Valley of the Kings.....especially glad we got this as we found out later in the day went we went to it, that no cameras are allowed and our guide wouldn't even let us take pics of the valley when we were driving in it!!!

This is one of my favorite pics of that morning! :)

As our hot air balloon ride was winding down, we passed over a village on the outside edge of the irrigated valley....

Yumm! There's our supper! LOL

As we were flying over you could hear a little boy yelling out "hello" to us from this house!

Our landing spot.......little bit of a rough landing, but once again we were safe and sound on the actual ground! :)

Some pics of the Nile.........such a nice day! :)

Our water taxi...

We drove to the Colossi of Memnon which were built in the 14th century BC and are statues of Amenhotep III. They were the outer guards of Amenhotep III's funerary temple which no longer stands. Oddly enough, I found out that they call them the Colossi of Memnon after King Memnon, but he really has nothing to do with them at all!

From there we went to tour Hatshepsut Temple and the Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Kings. Hatshepsut's Temple was HUGE! Apparently it was a funerary temple that was built simply to prepare her body for burial......so for a grand total of only 40 days! Some of the painted hieroglyphics and pictures were still pretty bright and we were able to take pictures of them. :) Here are some pics from this temple. :)

On the top level of Hatshepsut's Temple

Looking back down...

Queen Hatshepsut, the only queen to be buried in the Valley of the Kings! :)

Enjoying the beautifully painted hieroglyphics and pictures...:)

We were GREATLY disappointed that when we went to the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, that we were not allowed to take any pics whatsoever. Ok, inside the tombs I could totally understand as some of them don't even have a protective shield over the striking and still quite bright paintings, but outside and in the valleys themselves!? We wonder if we had a real stickler for a tour guide and if we really could have.....but being polite and rule-abiding Canadians, we did what we were told and respected what the guide told us. We just were quite sad to have no pics from there. :(

We were taking the sleeper train from Luxor to Cairo.....so hung out at the hotel for a few hours before going to the train station. We watched the sunset and it was spectacular! :)

So beautiful!! :)

The Luxor Train Station!

The train station was very sketchy and being the only 2 white girls in the place, we attracted a lot of unwanted attention, so hid behind our bags off to the side of the tracks.

Here comes our train...:)

So they served us mystery meat on the train.......it looked like beef but had the consistency of chicken! :P I told my kids at school about this mystery meat and they all say it was pigeon and seemed to be surprised I wouldn't know that. Hmmmmm, I don't know if that's what it really was, but it was gross and other than the taste test, we didn't eat it! :P

Here is our tiny little sleeper compartment. The seats fold down into one bed and then the second bunk folds down from the top. :) It was pretty cramped, but worked as a great safe place to crash before heading to the Pyramids! :)

And that pretty much sums up Luxor and everything we saw and did there! :) Next post will be on the adventures had in CAIRO! :)

Egypt: Part 1 - Karnak and Luxor Temples

Kim and I at the airport getting ridiculously excited about flying to Egypt!

This school year has been insane with a packed schedule at school and tutoring during the evenings! But alas, Eid Break FINALLY came and thus I got to embark on my first traveling adventure of this school year --- Egypt and Jordan!

Kimberley and I left for the airport 3 hours before our flight....we were shocked by the amount of people flying out that same night! We stood in a line that stretched OUTSIDE the airport for 30 mins before even getting in the main doors. We kept our elbows up and our feet firmly planted and managed to push our way inside and through security. It turns out over 64,000 people flew out of the airport that night because of the holiday and Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca)! Our plane was delayed and we ended up getting into Luxor 3 hours late. Thankfully, our ride from the hotel was still waiting and took us safely there. :)

We stayed at the Nefertiti Hotel in Luxor and it was AMAZING! It cost only $30 Canadian per night for a clean and simple room and provided breakfast on the rooftop terrace in the morning. It is located on the edge of the bazaar and right beside Luxor Temple along the Nile. The view was beautiful and the atmosphere fantastic! Ahmed, the manager who's family has owned the hotel for over 60 years, took excellent care of us making sure we had places to go and good guides to take us. He even organized for his friend to drive down from Alexandria and meet our train when it came into Cairo at 5am! ANYWAYS, an excellent hotel that I recommend to EVERYONE who goes to Luxor.....be sure to ask for Ahmed! Here's the rooftop terrace and the view from up there.

This is where we ate breakfast and supper each day with the view of the Nile and the mountains where all the royal tombs are!

A more close up shot of the Nile......

I have so many cool pics to post, so I am going to try and keep the "chatter" from here on, to a minimum so as not to bore you too much! Our first adventure was to go and see Karnak Temple of Thebes. Here are some shots from that visit!

The very large entrance to the Temple lined with ram-headed sphinx!

Some engravings on the stone walls

This random tourist would not get out of my way for a picture, so I had to snap this with him in it! :P

The columns inside the great Hippostyle Hall were HUGE and I found all the carved pictures, cartouches and hieroglyphics fascinating!

One of the only remaining obelisks from the time of Hatshepsut....

The sacred lake in the Temple complex used for sacrificial cleansing.

The sun sets quickly in Egypt.......an outer court view of the complex.

The sun setting!

As we were leaving, the moon was already out!

From Karnak Temple we went to Luxor Temple and even though it was only 3 km away, it was completely dark by the time we got there! I'm thankful I bought this new camera before the trip as the pictures in the lit up temple turned out great! :)

This is the "Avenue of Sphinxes" that runs the 3 km between Karnak and Luxor Temples.

This is the front of Luxor Temple!

The enormous statues of Ramses II at the entrance into the Temple...

As we were walking through the entrance, looking up from the right.......

And the left....

Inside the outer courtyard

This is inside the Court of Ramses II......the tops of the columns are shaped like the buds of a papyrus blossom.

Looking from the Court of Ramses II into the Court of Amenhotep II

This just looked really cool and beautiful with the moon...I tried, but couldn't quite capture the same feeling in the pic!

The walls were covered with various reliefs, here are just a few.

From here we went back to the hotel and went to bed as we had to get up at 3:30am for our sunrise hot air balloon ride! Stay tuned for the next post with those pics! :)