And we found our body - a famous one, too, Tutankhamun, in the Valley of the Kings. Here, you see spectacular sights - Luxor temple at night, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the temple of Queen Hatshepsut. We relaxed at Aswan for a few days and then took the train north again for the four-hour journey to Luxor. This, our guide told us, is done so that one day the children will build their own living quarters on the top floor.
They are also exponents of that peculiarly Egyptian practice of leaving the top floor incomplete when building a house. In these rural parts of Egypt the social culture remains largely unchanged and deeply conservative, although virtually every building has a satellite dish. Scattered along our route were tiny crumbling villages, horse-drawn carts and crammed minibuses. After an airline-style dinner, we rattled on through the night, waking in Aswan to the beauty of the sun rising over the desert. Our tour guides referred to our 'luxury' train with ironic emphasis (just as they told us that our hotel in Aswan was 'luxurious. We took an overnight train from Giza - the central Rameses station is legendary for its chaos - and travelled south along the shores of the Nile to Aswan. The spectacle is on the outside, but my son needn't have worried - we'd find a body later. In fact, there isn't a great deal inside a pyramid. 'No bodies, Dad,' he reported afterwards.
If you still can't face it, then do what I did - send in your son. The crowds are fewer and the route into the centre is quicker. Going into the pyramids is not for the claustrophobic, but if you really want to, try one of the smaller ones. Your Lux in: Tom took in the sights of Luxor, with its giant statues of Ramses II (left), and made the trip out to Giza to catch a glimpse of the Pyramids (right) - though left the business of going within the tombs to his sonĬairo's Egyptian museum has the biggest collection of ancient Egyptian relics in the world, and the Citadel, with its Ottoman mosque, commands an inspiring view - but the pyramids and the Great Sphinx are in the suburb of Giza, now almost swallowed up by the rapidly expanding city.
0 kommentar(er)
