“Stay away from negative people.
– Albert Einstein
They have a problem for every solution.”
Lesson Learned: Now that we have gone over to the East side of the Nile River we can’t be happier that we chose to stay on the West Bank. Luxor City is dense along the river. It has no people space on the river and the hotels remind me a lot of those we stayed at in Cairo. We don’t miss that.
We are not staying in a 5-star hotel, though there are those around, but we aren’t spending $400 a night either. We’ve made some good decisions and some bad regarding lodging. Selecting the Thebes Hotel and staying on the West Bank is one of those good choices.
Regrets: We didn’t book the Thebes Hotel for 3 or 4 days longer. It would be nice to chill a while without anything to do, because international travel can be long, hard and tiring. Oh well, our next stop in Croatia should be great.
Go-Date: Day 68, Sunday. March 31
The Great Karnak
Is it just me, or does anybody else remember the Great Karnak on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show? Actually, it was really the Magnificent Carnac, but close enough for government work for me.
Karnak Temple is a huge complex, I mean huge. This makes sense since it took about 2,000 years to build from beginning to end. Its made up of a vast mix of decayed temples, chapels, pylons, and other buildings. Construction at the complex began with Senusret I in the Middle Kingdom and continued throughout the Ptolemaic period. Most of the construction happened during the New Kingdom, which means it’s not as old as some of the other tombs, temples, and Egyptian hot dog stands you can find in the area. The development around Karnak was the ancient Egyptian Ipet-isut (“The Most Selected of Places”) and the main place of worship of the eighteenth dynasty of the god Amun.
When I say its huge, you can’t wrap your mind around how big this place is. The stones, statues, pillars, and rubble just goes on and on. It is the second most visited site in Egypt; with only the Great Pyramids in Giza getting more visits. It consists of four main parts, of which only the largest is currently open to the general public. The three other parts, the Precinct of Mut, the Precinct of Montu, and the dismantled Temple of Amenhotep IV, are closed to the public. Karnak is the largest religious building ever made, covering about 200 acres, and was a place of pilgrimage for nearly 2,000 years. The area of the sacred enclosure of Amun alone is sixty-one acres and could hold ten average European cathedrals.
If you ever visit, pick a cool day. If not, bring a big hat or umbrella. You walk a lot. At the entrance, you believe this place is over-hyped, but the further you walk, the more in awe you will become. Before you enter either Luxor Temple or Karnak Temple you are fair game for the touts and hawkers in the square. They will swarm around you like flies on fresh meat. Try as you would like, you can’t swat them away, or spray repellant to hold them at a distance. You can be firm, but friendly, and show no hesitancy. A pause is a signal that you are vulnerable. It is tiresome, but inevitable. Be assured, the treasures you will find more than compensate you for these minor inconveniences.
We visited Karnak on the same day as we did Luxor. We might have split these up, but we didn’t want to make the one hour trek from the west to east twice. Take your time. Soak it in and just imagine how it must have appeared when it was new.