We took everyone's advice and headed to Karnak Temple EARLY: 7:00AM, when the temple opens. The reason: crowd and heat. There's not a lot of people there that early, at some points, we had the area to ourselves. When 9AM came around, bus loads of tourists poured in - it got so crowded when we left (around 9:30) that you can't even take a picture of a column or statue without a stranger slipping in. It was a brisk 75 degrees when we started with the sun blazing. It was about 90 degrees when we left and the sun felt a lot hotter.
Like the Luxor temple, Karnak temple is a complex of structures built by whoever ruled Egypt at the time. The architecture was mostly Egyptian.
Hieroglyphs:
on walls
deeply engraved in columns (anubis pez dispenser?)
Columns:
Columns and obelisk
Columns with different designs
The "fence" looking wall on top suggests this structure having a 2nd floor at some point
It's HUGE!
Statues
the faces were weathered away
Ram heads + lion bodies
The rest of the day...After the temple, we got a late check out at the hotel, got a free buffet breakfast (they never gave us a check) and passed out till about 3PM.
It was smoldering outside by the time we're doing checking out. For a late lunch, we ate at a barge that had giant fans that had the mist going.
We hung out at the air conditioned hotel until the sun started setting around 6PM. The heat was getting to me, I think I was maybe starting to catch a cold (good thing I got some Nyquil). We checked the bags with the hotel and hopped into a cab to go to the souk. The Souk was very similar to Kahn el Kalili in Cairo but with less hassle. There was even a stretch of shops where they didn't bother you. It was in this Souk that we figured out their system: If you keep walking, the shop owners won't follow you pass their border, where of course, the next shop own will start homing in on you.
Night train to CairoWe got to the station at around 11PM (after we got dinner and lounged at the hotel some more). The train was 1.5 hour late and wasn't as nice as the previous sleeping trains we took to get here. It felt like a throwback to the 1970s. The food was even more horrible, good thing we ate at the hotel. Daylight saving kicked in; +1 hour. The nice steward woke us up around 5 as we were near Cairo. The breakfast was the standard fare of bread, more bread and instant coffee. By the time we got to Cairo, we had missed our train to Alexandria by 4 hours (delay, daylight saving, more delay while we were sleeping).
To Alexandria!We tipped toed around the mass of people praying to get to the tourist info office. We explained our situation to them who then explained it to one of the tourist police officiers. The tourist police then writes a note, told one of his subordinates something and told us to follow the subordinate. We followed him across the station and upstairs to the train station's managers' office (it looked like one of the raggity offices in "The Wire"; papers, desks, dust everywhere). A few interactions later, the station manager wrote and stamped us a form for a ticket correction and the tourist police officer brought us down to the ticket office. The man at the ticket office was furious but eventually gave us a handwritten correction ticket carbon copy (old school!).
With about 10 minutes to spare, we were led back to the tourist info office. The second police officier kindly reminded his boss to ask us to tip him The boss police recited the ticket info that was written in Arabic: platform number six, car number one, seats twenty six, twenty five and give him twenty pounds". The train was about 15 minutes late but we were finally on our way to Alexandria.
full set of Luxor pictures here
