A Luxorious day

4th October 2009 – Day 6 – Luxor, Egypt

Where's Waldo? For the first time in history, M feels small.

Ruben and Natalie buggered off to Kom Ombo temple for the day and M and I, ever enthusiastic, decided to sleep in and take our (t)rusty bikes over to Karnak where we wandered around for many hours – I thought I’d seen enough temples to last me a lifetime and if it had been any other place I’d probably have been blasé about the whole experience but Karnak was impressive! A huge place, spread over a large area and very well conserved – a lot more impressive than anywhere else I’ve seen so far and I’m glad I dragged myself out of bed for it! A thoroughly unsuccessful trip to the pharmacy to find water purification tablets was spiced up by some guy who wanted to take us to some shop which he bravely attempted, sticking to us incessantly for over half an hour until we invented an emergency for which we had to get back to the hostel. As it turned out there was an emergency – we urgently needed to take a nap and laze around, which we did until Ruben and Natalie came back from Kom Ombo with tales of great adventure!

M inspects Karnak's architecture. "It's not straight", she concludes.

They’d eventually got there after working out the Egyptian train system and got told the temple was right near to the train station and visible from it. This turned out not to be the case and then found out that the temple was a long trek out of town. When they got out of town they’d gone past a school at closing time and, like fish followed by seagulls, they were swooped upon by a mass of kids demanding money. They didn’t give any and their tightness was punished by a stoning by one of the kids who also pulled Natalie’s hair. Getting onto a minibus didn’t help as the kids followed them demanding more money, until they got off at the temple to be greeted by tourist police. The kids disappeared. Adventure indeed!
After a lazy evening planning the next day we disappeared off to bed. The wonderful news is that tomorrow morning, we’re off to Hurghada, tourist hell hole par excellence…

Just to reassure our parents - we're both still alive and smiling!