Patriarchy at its dumbest..

The previous post in this series is here..

Have already mentioned Queen Hatshepsut in detail in the post on Karnak temple's sunrise visit. 

After we left the Valley of the kings and the various tombs, our next stop was the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, which was way outside the original city. 

San finally takes a moving selfie.. that turned out pretty good!

It was literally carved into a mountainside with three visible levels and chambers and corridors that went six deep (when I zoomed in with my iPhone through a restricted gate).

This is one of the few places you can see her beautiful face carved as is without a Pharoh's fake beard and head dress. 

She went to the land of Punt and got back a lot of interesting plants, animals and riches by trading. They are currently guessing that this is somewhere in Somalia or in the Indian ocean as warm water fishes are portrayed in the murals. you can see it in the video highlight.

the usual kings and gods at the entrance.. here she has the fake beard in place..

The temple itself was beautiful but it pained us to see most of her relief on the wall carvings chiseled out completely. Not sure exactly who did this. They think her stepson did it. No matter who did it, it was a dumb move to not celebrate this lady and her accomplishments. 

You see the typical murals of the various gods blessing what was once Hatshepsut's carving.. 

This temple is a good 1/2 mile or more in from the ticket gate and they do have a golf cart service to take us to the ramp that goes up to the temple entrance. 

There are side temples for the jackal headed god Anubis, the godess Hathur and their most beloved giver of live, Amun Ra. We went in and out of those hallways and sanctums in 30 minutes. 

Again when we came out, there was a market and you had to go through it to get to the parking lot for vans. We were back on the road. It was getting tight to squeeze everything in.

A video highlight..

Thousands of years.. the pharoh's are gone. their gold is gone.. their mummies and tombs and temples mostly destroyed.. a few preserved with great luck.. but male chauvinism and keeping women down... that survives the ages!

Did I say the clock was ticking.. We still had three stops before the airport..

Time levels everything..

The previous post in this series is here..

In the middle of writing this post about how time makes sure nothing can survive it intact, it was pointed out the the time and effort spent in writing this blog is an absolute waste! If the great Pharoh's of Egypt and their secret tombs with hidden labryinths, sweet smelling poisons that would emit when tombs were opened, granite stone coffins that would not be easy to move in confined spaces, were still looted successfully.. this blog.. okay, I get it. 

Then again, the intent of this blog was never to survive even 20 years. My first post on this blog was originally done on Jan 1st 2005 after we had come back from a trip to Zion and Bryce canyon.. when the Tsunami hit! After coming back home, my cousin BIL told me about this thing called Blogger started by google. It was just a homepage creator. I wrote a "Hello World!" post but realized "who is going to know about this?". Then blgoroll came along and others started blogging and I jumped on it a good 6 months later. 

In a few days it will be 20 years of blogging! Never thought it would go on for 20 years. Mostly wrote for myself and the kids.. so someday they can go back and read it! Back to Egypt... 

It is true that majority of it is looted. Anything that was pure or gilded gold is just gone! If the local thieves and invaders didn't get to it, the Brits and French took it to their museums in the name of preservation!

We had 2 hours and Walid was not going to join us. He gave us directions to go and and out of the tombs. there was only one way in and out and all of them went down to a chamber at the bottom through narrow channels. 

All this time we were color blind. This tomb visit showed us what all those temples must have been like!

Words are not adequate to describe this. You have to go visit it. Hopefully the pictures and video do it some justice!

the caption for the photo below "what is the point? it still got looted!" 

A bigger, grander coffin.. still looted!

Museum piece now..

The tombs in the valley of the kings are many.. Our ticket gave us access to 3. We also got a special extra ticket to see the Rameses V and VI tombs which are extremely well preserved and the colors are still there on every wall. It was totally worth the extra price!

thank you sand for saving some history for us..

there was a stream of people.. so the one way to get a clean photo was to stand across the whole thing..it was also a rare thing for San to take this group photo.

took this pano shot inside one of the tombs. it was difficult to manouvere and iPhone and get a shot here. not sure how they painted all this in that confined space.. maybe the ceiling was open when they painted it before closing.. maybe kids or dwarfs painted it! who knows!

The rest of the photos are in two slideshow galleries..

Vertical shots..

And a video highlight of the tomb visits..

This is yet again a thing not to be missed. We now understood why folks bypassed the boat ride from Edfu to Luxor and came by bus instead to have more time in Luxor! 2 hours was not enough to see everything here, but we went in and out of the four tombs pretty quickly and we got a decent idea of it.

There was a brief power cut when we were inside the main tomb and everything went pitch dark for a few seconds till Phone flashlights went on everywhere. They restored it in 5 minutes and we got to continue taking pictures. 

Once we exit the place there was a wait for the shuttles. There were two groups fighting over the next shuttle and people had to be physically separated! Things got heated.. we just watched it from a distance, waited a few more minutes and were at the entrance. There was a large shopping area outside. We walked through it and got to our van. The vendors here were very pushy and in our face and blocking our path at instances. Walid helped navigate it expertly. 

We were still racing time as there were 4 more stops to go before hitting the airport..

Amazing boat ride sunset - West Al Khazan

The previous post on this series is here..

We had reached out cruise boat and had a nice lunch. The plan was to take a nap and do an evening activity. It was optional and 4 of us opted to do it. It was 20 USD per person to do a boat ride on the Nile to the other side past Elephanine island to visit a Nubian village.

Our guide Walid, pretty much begged me not to miss it. He said "you are a photographer! the sunset here is just plain amazing! don't miss it!". So off we went. We started at ~4:30. Walid had told us that it will be at least 2-3hours to go, spend time at the village and come back to the boat by the 7:30 dinner time. 

Walid was spot on! This was the most amazing sunset we had seen with the boats, the river and the different types of huts in the villages we crossed. 

Here is a slideshow..

There were lot of pictures on the boat ride to and fro.. some highlights and "people pictures"

We got fantastic photos!

Most of these Nubians (folks from south of Egypt and Sudan) who are generally dark skinned were displaced because of the dam. They had a rich social culture of large families that lived in groups. Their houses always had a central courtyard with rooms being added as folks got married. A modular mud house structure with igloo type roofs. They put sand in the open courtyard.

there were beautiful murals on the walls..

Almost all of them had crocodiles for pets as the crocs were their main god. 

Walid told us that Crocs were their god(Sobek) for a reason. They would watch how high the crocs went to lay their eggs on the sand banks. Higher they went, more the expected flood for the year a few months later. The crocodiles were an early flood warning system for them. They saved lives. They were worth protecting! They are fed "bread"! they were veggie crocs and were mostly docile and played with the kids. We shopped around the market and were welcomed into a home for tea and coffee. The family was nice. Their kids had a 20 year old croc and a 2 year old baby. I was allowed to hold and pet the baby croc which was just wandering around our coffee table! 

it was 1 USD to pet the croc and take pictures. It was free to let it wander around near us! 

After that we were asked to check out the view from the roof.. it was like a west mambalam rooftop per the group! The village roads (sand) and the cute shops and fast running race camels made for some amazing experience.

We said bye to the village and went back to our cruise boat watching the reflected lights from the village in the Nile waters..

(our friends were the reason for this photo.. wife did the art direction, husband took the photo)

It was a spectacular evening! We were glad we went on this. . . 

Video highlights of this "optional" but should have been a compulsory trip!

After this we stopped at the local Aswan market to get some water bottles (the cruise was charging for large water bottles). Later we found out that the two regular bottles in the rooms every day were free. However there was no way to make hot water for tea in the rooms. They did give us hot water at the bar but we had to tip the guys who gave us hot water at the end of the trip(that was okay!). 

We were informed by an apprehensive Walid that we leave the following morning at 4AM and he has set up a wake up call for the group! Again a collective groan went up. There was going to be a long drive in the morning! 

When we went back to the cruise, my head was splitting because of jet lag. I dozed off and skipped dinner.. apparently they had made Dal just for the desi familes who had joined that day on the cruise (it has a 200 people capacity and was pretty much full!). There was 8 of us and a group of 6 from Mumbai and another quiet desi couple. 

It was lights out for me!