Day 15
We woke up to our last breakfast on the boat and bid our crew goodbye. Think we were all sad to see our boat life go and shocked at riding in a vehicle with wheels again.
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| After 4 days camping on the Nile (again, without showers or toilets!) |
Pop, like that, the bubble bursts and the spell was broken.
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| A luxury tuk-tuk? |
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| The area of Kom Ombo is known for its sugar cane production, which meant the city was filled with black factory smoke. |
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| Hungry? |
Taking the back way through farming villages we could see how many people still live poor but simple, honest lives. With a bewildering array of mud brick ingenuity. We made our way to Edfu temple. Dedicated to Horus, Edfu is the most intact ancient temple. Period. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at stumpy Greek & Roman columns trying to imagine what it looked like. No need here. Thanks to being buried in sand for centuries, Edfu’s 90% intact, and amazing.
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| Horus and Anne |
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| Nearly every temple we went to was defaced...by Christians. They took issue with polytheism & Egyptians gods. |
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| Some random guy who wanted us to take a picture of him, then asked for baksheesh. Gotta love the Egyptians. |
Even if we were starting to feel “templed out” this was a good order to see them in.
Then on to Luxor, formerly known as Thebes, and the capital of the New Kingdom (circa 1500 BC). We rode horse carts to Karnak, which was an incredible, huge temple complex. The columns! Oh, they were so cool. In rows 6 by 16, and so fat it takes ten people to link arms around them. Words and photos don’t do them justice.
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| Luxor Temple |
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| Avenue of the Ram-headed Sphinx in Karnak |
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| It would take a lot of Anne's to encircle that column! |
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| One of Hatshepsut's fallen columns, with one of the only images showing her as a *woman* king. |
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