Luxor is an interesting place, according to our guide book one of the few places in the world truly deserving of the predicate ‘unforgettable’.
I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, its place in antiquity is beyond reproach, but the hordes of geriatric cruise liner tourists at the Valley of the Kings, the pedlars, the nagging caleche drivers (“You know how much?”) and felucca touts, and the searing heat cumulatively amount to a pile of hassle that towers as high as the Colossi of Memnon, themselves.
The tombs in the وادي الملو (Valley of the Kings) open at 06:00. If you’re planning to get up early to beat the crowds, plan on getting there very, very early. We arrived at 09:00 and the area was already a mob scene, with literally dozens of coaches already having emptied thousands of passengers onto the site.
There’s a relatively new system in operation at the site, which means that a ticket now buys you entrance to only three tombs out of all those currently open. Which tombs are open varies constantly, so you have to check at the ticket office. Once you know which ones are open, you can choose which three to visit.
Except, that is, for the tombs of Tutankhamun (KV62) and Ramesses V/VI (KV9), for each of which a separate ticket is required. Trading on the fame of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the ticket for that tomb alone costs more than the standard three tomb ticket.
No photos are allowed anywhere, either inside or outside the tombs, and you’ll be required to leave your equipment with an attendant, who will, of course, demand baksheesh upon returning it to you, even though you neither wanted nor requested his services in the first place.
The most popular tombs take quite a while to visit, not because they’re huge, but because there is limited viewing space inside. The line of queuing tourists thus descends all the way through the entrance tunnel to the inner chambers, where one can ultimately enjoy a few brief moments taking in the innermost chamber, before the queue U-turns and snakes back outside. The experience is akin to standing on a very slow conveyor belt.
A test of one’s mettle it may be, but the tombs themselves are more than worthy of the effort involved in seeing them. Nevertheless, and perhaps I’m a philistine, but I wasn’t awed as I had expected to be. Perhaps the Valley of the Kings, much like the pyramids at Giza, is simply too famous, such that seeing it with one’s own eyes feels merely an enhancement, a reinforcement of an image already so familiar from decades of media exposure. One feels that one has been before, such is the familiarity.
Other sites we visited while in Luxor include Luxor Temple, الدير البحر (Deir el-Bahri) (site of the notorious Luxor Massacre of tourists in 1997, the Karnak Temple Complex and the Tombs of the Nobles. All in all, we crammed in quite a lot during our time there.
We also took the opportunity to go out on a felucca, but I ended up losing my rag with its captain at one point when I felt he was trying to scam us to pay a non-existent entrance fee for a brief visit to Banana Island.
Lukie absolutely loves the caleches. We took several during our stay, mostly just to please him. He loves to sit at the front and shake the reins and is clearly beside himself with joy. The downside is that he goes mental when it’s time to get down and continue on our way.
I mustn’t forget to mention the slightly pricey, but wonderfully air-conditioned Oasis Café. The prices are somewhere between the Egyptian norm and Western expectations, but service is attentive and the juices and milkshakes are out of this world. This place impressed us so much the first time that we went back for lunch a second time the next day.