Going to Egypt pt VII

A(nother) big day today, our second in Luxor. We're off early to see the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens on the west bank of the Nile. Greg and I pack for the day's adventure before heading downstairs to the breakfast buffet.

The valley is bleak, and if it weren't for the small birds flitting among the rocks and shadows I could almost call it sterile. Our minivan driver parked in the large asphalt lot and our guide David hopped out to buy the tickets. We grabbed our hats, our water, and cameras and stepped out into the early-morning heat.

After years of watching sedentary tourists practically expire, the Egyptian government installed a Universal Studios-style tram to carry people the quarter-mile from the parking lot to the entrance to the valley. David hands us each two tickets, one for the tram and one for the Valley of the Kings itself. He explains that the valley ticket permits us access to up to three tombs in the valley, but that not all tombs are open, so we start strategizing what we want to see most while we put-put up the incline. Don consults his PDA.

We stand in the welcome shade of a rest area while we explain to David where we'll be and where we'll meet and when. I hand him a page I've ripped out of my guidebook, the one describing the walk up and over the ridge dividing the Valley of the Kings from the Valley of the Queens. Oh yes, he says, I've done this walk many times. It takes forty-five minutes.

At Don's suggestion, we head up the valley to the tomb of Tutmosis III. Most of the group eyes the lengthy staircases dubiously, but Don assures everybody it's worth it: the tomb is decorated in a singular style with passages from the Book of the Dead. We head up.

[I've got no pictures from inside the tombs. Photography is not allowed, David explained to us, not because of the flash but to keep people and their moist exhalations inside the tombs to a minimum. For the same reason guides can't accompany their groups inside.]

[But it was awesome!]

The second tomb we visited was more typical; so typical I don't remember whose it was. And I can't consult my notes because now I am completely out of pens. If I was to do this trip again, I would have brought two or three dozen pens with me: the tourist police, tomb "guards," kids selling tourist tat, they all badly want a pen. So now I have none, and no notes.

But somewhere along the way between Tutmosis III and the crowd around the entrance to King Tut's closet of a tomb, we have picked up a guide for the trails leading up and around the valley. For some odd reason this reassures the rest of our adventurer's party, that I will have a guide for this 45-minute walk. Fine, I agree, and explain to Ahmad, no group, just one, and that I will be back to meet him at this spot when we have finished tomb-crawling. Okay, he says, look for me! See! Blue scarf. Okay.

So I blow off the last of the tombs and make arrangements to meet everybody at the cafeteria at the Temple of Hatshepsut on the other side of the ridge. Take lots of pictures, says Don.

Ahmad and I take off like shots up the hillside.

The long, hot walk from the shaded rest area up the valley to the tombs. The guy with the bucket is working on/excavating one of the tombs. Beyond him, some tourists in shorts—guess they didn't get the memo on inappropriate attire.

One of the new and improved maps outside each of the tombs, courtesy of David Weeks' mapping project.

One of the staircases leading up to Thutmoses III's tomb. The whole thing was so very Indiana Jones (even the tram, if you think of it in a Disneyland attraction way): the cliffs, the narrow passageways, the prunish old men in native garb sitting on their heels...

I don't know what this is, just that I liked the look of it and it's near the spot where I agreed to meet Ahmad for our little stroll. I verified my own sense of direction with our guide David, who said, Take that trail up and over there, down and around, and we'll see you in 45 minutes.

I'm looking back down into the Valley of the Kings after walking uphill for just a few minutes. It felt like mid-80s temps, and the soil was nice and grippy under my Birks. The structure on the right is the shaded rest area; the buff-colored walls are tomb entrances.

Going to Egypt pt VI

That's Don and Greg having passed through the courtyard and now entering the temple at Dendara. It's mid-afternoon and well into the 80s, so any shade is appreciated. We cannot convince Don to wear a hat.

A lovely image of Hathor, down in the storeroom/crypt/hole at Dendara. All of the gods images were lovely, and I wish the Khnum and Sekhmet had turned out, but I'm a lousy photographer.

Still down in the hole, which was full of celestial imagery, including this...what? Those are Hathor heads on the hemisphere, the two on the right in a celestial boat along with the sun disk.

Lots of Horus imagery, including this one with a, key? Wish I read hieroglyphics like Don does.

Oh, no! Someone left their donkey cart in a street-sweeping zone. Hope they don't get a ticket.

The main temple area is to the right, and the Nileometer is to the left. And that's David, our Luxor-born guide, wearing a sweater on this cool March day.

I like this artwork (and that's original pigment, folks). Usually it's just a plain winged solar disk decorating the arches, but this one depicts the scarab beetle, winged, clutching the sun in its legs.

The zodiac room at Dendara. Unlike most of the temple buildings, this room is on a human scale. Which made photographing the intricate ceiling difficult. So all you get is this shot of one of the skylights and a bit of the blue-and-yellow-painted ceiling.

Behind the main temple. Just a nice shot showing the dominant color of Egypt away from the Nile.

Flotsam

While I struggle through too many trip photos, I have some random web links for you to explore if you are truly, truly bored:

Remember Gary Seven and Isis? They almost had their own show, and some other truly, truly bored folks came up with this almost-show's theme music;

Karnak temple as it looked 150 years ago, plus other old photos;

Finally, just something to think about.

Going to Egypt pt V

Two, no three things stand out in my memory of my first day in Luxor. By now I've been on the move for five days, and while my body has settled into local time, my brain is ready for a rest to process everything going on. I keep a notepad with me when I travel so I can jot down reminders, but I'm experiencing a critical shortage of pens on this trip, so I have no notes, just these lingering impressions.

As the passengers from the early-morning flight from Cairo waited for the luggage carousel to start, I watched the sun rise over the sandy mountains. It was beautiful like all desert sunrises are beautiful, in the way when it's not the Eye of Horus rising, but something wild. And with the day only minutes old I could tell it was going to be much, much hotter here in the middle of the country.

We had three hours to look at the countryside as we rode in our minivan among our protective army convoy to Abydos. Anna, Glenn, and I played a game of listing all the plants and birds we saw, but mostly we stared out at the poverty and desolation of this extreme desert. Even in Cairo, we saw people driving donkey carts; now that we're well outside the zone of any city, that's all we see: tourist buses/minivans, army pickups, a few bicycles or motorcycles, but mostly donkeys and donkey carts. Sometimes a cold case of sodas in a local storefront, or a satellite dish stuck to the side of a cinderblock building. Lots of cinderblock and mudbrick buildings, many looking either half-finished or partly decayed. Many unroofed or with unfinished upper floors. Why bother? When Anna asked our guide, David, how much it rains here (David is from Luxor), he says, Two days a year.

Our minivan has a/c, and little curtains for each of the windows to block the sun.

The third thing that stands out for me is Dendara. Everything I've seen until Dendara has been curious, interesting, impressive...and fossilized. Our little adventurers party was excited to see Dendara's famous zodiac. And it was beautiful and impressive, as was much of the temple complex. But while we were poking around a couple of galabeyyeh-clad locals were sitting next to a grate, and asked if we wanted to go down into the store-rooms.

I've spent enough time traveling to know that if some stranger asks you if you want to see something, you say yes. The men warned that the stairs were steep and the passageway small, leaving me as the only enthusiast in the group. So down I went.

It was no storeroom, nor was it a crypt as my guidebook called it. It was...something else. Connected to the instructional rooms holding the zodiac above? I still don't know what, but it was the first time a piece of ancient Egypt felt alive. I got a few precious moments down there my myself before I wiggled back up and insisted on Greg following me back down. We had to share it with other tourists this time, but it was still awesome.

That was also our first night on the Hamees, our floating hotel, which was a ton of fun but I was so tired that night I don't remember a thing.

Everybody had a different deity they'd hunt for in the riot of imagery inside every temple. Sekhmet was mine, Glenn's was Sobek, Don's was Thoth, Anna's was Seshet, and Greg's was Min. Here's Our Lady of the Wrathful Heat as depicted in Abydos.

Many Egyptian temples are "enhanced" with interior lighting, or full-on sound and light shows. Many of the temple interiors are soothingly dark and the lights, which you can see in this photo from Abydos, let you see the reliefs. But they usually produce ghastly-colored digital photos, at least with a point-and-shoot. This one, for some reason, came out quite nice.

This was either in Saqqara or Abydos; I can't remember. But it is a temple of Osirus, built where one of the pieces of his rent body fell to earth. The temple was originally underground. Don and I got a guard to let us go down the stairs, but he wanted too much baksheesh to allow us over the barricade partway down the stairs, so no green waters from this holy of holies.

Greg was quick enough with the camera to catch this sign for Cofe Shop Sity. We saw tons of fractured English signs; not surprising, since everything went through a language and an alphabet scramble. Plus the whole Arabic vowel thing. Too much fun. The photo also gives you a taste of the excrable architecture of modern Egypt.

Tales of the Far North

A short pause in Egypt blogging while I go through the bazillion uncataloged photos. In the meantime, I have a couple of Humboldt Co. tales for you:

This one's from the Co-op grocery store by the New Vitality Homeland. A guy came through the checkstand with a package of turkey oven bags. Chatty, ever-so-friendly Jason, on bagger duty, starts telling the guy, "Yeah, turkey! It tastes so much better than chicken. I love it; eat it all the time..." etc. The cashier and someone else in line are laughing at all this. After the customer left the store, the cashier told Jason, "You know people buy those to put pounds [of marijuana] in, right?"

Well, no. That was news to Jason (and me). Turns out a representative of the company that makes those turkey oven bags flew out to Arcata to find out why why the Co-op sells more turkey oven bags than any other store, year-round. The cashier then said, Didja ever notice what else is on the shelves next to the turkey oven bags? [Trimming] scissors and jars? Oh yeah, it might not be on the overhead placard, but it's true nonetheless: Arcata's supermarket has a marijuana supply aisle.

The second story is from work. And does not involve dog poo!

During break one of the carriers was telling us how, when he was working down in Eureka, he had this one address that was on a hillside, with flights and flights of stairs between the street and the front door. He used to just leave one of those little brown notice slips when they got packages too big to fit in the mailbox, but then the lady of the house complained to the postmaster about it.

So now the carrier has a certified letter for that address and trudges up the steps to the front door—where he can see right into the living room as the curtains are open, where Mister and Missus Occupant are getting it on in plain view. The carrier started to turn away, remembered the complaint, so he turned back and knocked on the door and got Mister Occupant to sign for the letter.

The carrier said that after that, if he brought a certified letter or parcel up to the door, Missus Occupant would never answer the door.

Going to Egypt pt IV

An early start to the day. Too early to make the hotel's breakfast buffet so they prepare us each a box to take on the plane. And bottled water. Wait—don't we have to go through airport security?

Yes we do. The procedure is straightforward: men appear curbside and whisk your luggage into the airport. People, almost all men, mass in front of the security scanner making it difficult to keep an eye on your carry-on. The travel agency representative (if you're using an agency), who got you from the hotel and got you checked in at the airline counter, hands you your boarding pass and points you in the right direction. They are not allowed to go any further.

I was too gorked out when I stepped off the plane in Cairo to appreciate it, but now I am loving the travel agency assistance. Many people are using e-tickets and have just a printout off a computer or nothing to show to the security guard, who is insisting that only ticketed customers can proceed. Agents (not just ours) are arguing rapid-fire in Arabic with him while people squeeze through the security scanner and past the man with no paper ticket (and no agent). The crowd is getting tight, making me nervous as the press trying to get through edges toward inappropriate. Then a man—baggage handler? security? who knows—starts demanding my carry-on so he can put it on the scanner's conveyor belt. I don't want my bag to go through when I can't (the men are still arguing about the e-ticket) so I shake my head no. So the man reaches to grab my bag off my back. At which point I'm thinking inappropriate touching ! He must have seen the look on my face because he backed off. And apologized.

We squeeze through, collect our scattered bags, do a count to make sure we have all five of us, then head toward our gate.

[More later, hopefully this afternoon, because I just got called in to work and have no photos ready.]

Going to Egypt pt III

Saqqara, the necropolis of Memphis, the Colma to our San Francisco. We can see Djoser's famous step pyramid as we drive down the road.

Here's an excerpt on what Wikipedia has to say about the step pyramid:

The step pyramid at Saqqara was designed by Imhotep for King Djoser (c.2667-2648 BC). It is the oldest complete hewn-stone building complex known in history. It is also the location of the newly opened (in 2006) Imhotep Museum.

We get the rundown from Amgad: burials from the first few dynasties were in shaft tombs, then mustafas, then...hey! why not stack the mustafas? And now you have a step pyramid. It became all the rage. And you'd jockey to get your smaller pyramid or your mustafa built as close to the pharaohs as you could, to share in his glory. Only again, in the early dynasties, invocations to the dead within were entirely verbal, so these early pyramids are bare of text.

Which is fine as we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, nor could we go in Djoser's pyramid. But we did get to do the duck walk through another, smaller pyramid, a real Egyptian tomb, and I'm sorry I don't remember if it was a queen or other nobility. That little taste got me to thinking, what would it have been like to open the passageway, clear it of rubble and sand, and descend down the steep, smooth, pitch-black passage into who-knew-what below? It would have been done by someone with bigger balls than I, my friends, that's for sure. I'm no claustrophobe (like Don), but I don't have the temperament for tomb-raiding.

More on Imhotep, that blue-collar wizard who, while not the first to build with stone, designed the first cut-stone building ever. Look around you and see the hand of Imhotep! His tomb, probably in Saqqara, has never been found. Did he invent papyrus scrolls? Maybe. Did he invent columned architecture? Maybe. He's credited as the founder of medicine in Egypt. His cult lasted into Ptolemaic times. Go Imhotep!

It's been a long day of ruin-exploring, and we're ready for dinner back at the hotel and a full night's sleep. D'oh! Scratch that last: we have to be at the airport for our flight to Luxor at 5am.

Sand is everywhere as we head toward Imhotep's innovative creation.

Amgad tries to get us to hurry so we can go in the tomb inside the crumbly mass on the right before the 4pm closing time. See anything green?

A gateway leading to a now-ruined temple. The roof, which was intentionally split by its designers, is covered with blue-painted stars.

Temple ruins, with the bent pyramid just visible in the background.

Tourist policeman on a camel, guarding the tour buses. He's got a camel goad in his hands and his Kalishnakov slung over his shoulder. Most of the locals are wearing sweaters because it's early spring, and a bit on the cool side with temps in the 80s.

Coming next: ancient Thebes, modern Luxor.

Going to Egypt pt II

What will Washington, DC, look like in five thousand years?

We've taken a short drive to Memphis, an ancient capital of Egypt. Enough of a drive outside Cairo for us to see how quickly the city ends and the hyper-green of Nileside cultivation begins.
We first meet Rameses II here. He'll be everywhere with us on our travels through Egypt. I like to imagine FDR instructing all those WPA crews to inscribe etchings and text describing Roosevelt's great presidency: his power, glory, and might; how he was favored by God; how his people benefitted from his special place so close to His right hand...on the side of buildings, bridges, and roads across the country. Not to mention Mt. Rushmore.

Anyway, Rameses II left a very fine statue of himself at Memphis.

Our guide, Amgad, has a masters degree in egyptology, which makes me wish even more that we'd brought our Mythos cards. C'mon! our little adventurers group of six has an egyptologist, a dilettante, a scientist, an occult shopkeeper, a writer, and, uh, me. How do I fit in?

Don, Amgad, Anna, Greg, and Glenn get oriented in Memphis.

There's not much to see really at Memphis, but our next stop, Saqqara, is a different matter.

Going to Egypt pt I

After two and a half days of traveling I am standing in the presence of the last surviving ancient wonder of the world, the pyramids at Giza. I ask Amgad, our guide, if they still impress him, who sees them all the time. He says he prefers the grandeur of the temples, and to wait; I'll see what he means. Fair enough.

He lets us alone to scramble around the enormous base, touching, taking photos, gawking. Egypt gave us no space to ramp up to her oriental alienness. It hit us in the face as soon as the airplane doors opened and we walked out of the plane and into a bus to drive us 200 yards across the tarmac and into the terminal. No queuing, no romance language, no familiar writing. Travel company representatives in suits met us and shepharded us through customs and into our sightseeing van, our driver sleepy but glad to be working. It was 2am Cairo time, the hour when everything comes together.



Seven hours later we're standing on the Giza plateau. The geography is stark: there is the sea, there is the city, there is the Nile, but mostly there is the desert and it is buff and sandy and omnipresent, even when I'm standing at the sea or in the city or floating on the Nile. It is inescapable and unavoidable, and will be propitiated.

But standing beside the enormity of the pyramids cuts my attention in two. See those two tiny figures on G-man's left shoulder? (You may have to look hard.) One sits on a camel, the other on the pyramid itself. Each of those blocks is chest-high on me, and I stand 1.78m.

We want to go inside, but our late 9am start to the day means we've missed out on the limited tickets for the day. Seeing our faces, and that we are truly interested in what we're seeing, Amgad promises to try for tickets when we return to Cairo in a week. We climb in our tour van and Ali drives us to Memphis.

It never rains in Arabia

I'm back in Humboldt; G and the rest of our party are traveling back in time in Turkey. This is an excerpt from G's last email:

...about 4 or more hours meanderıng down through Ephesus. Glorıous. Ran out of camera batterıes. Both!

...Lunch at an outsıde Turkısh place, sıttıng under a veranda on cushıons on the ground, guy smokıng a hooka nearby, monkey on a leash, eatıng stuffed pancakes and drınkıng tea. Then off to the museum where they have three statues of the many-breasted Artemıs, the temple they came from, and back here.

...the house of relıcs really ınterestıng. Lıkeö part of the skull of John the Baptıst and the raın gutter from the kaaba. Two of them!

...That nıght ıt was raınıng so we ate at the hotel and Don ordered thıs yogurt drınk thatismıxed wıth water. He lıked ıt. Untıl he got back tohıs room, whereupon he began pukıng and dıdn't stop all nıght. So the next day we flew to Izmır and he was fucked up.

...Turkey ıs entırely modern and feels very safe. Very secular and, unlıke Egypt, not full of harassıng sales guys.

Just pancake-eating monkeys.

I'm in San Francisco!

Though not for long. Too few days to see all my friends. It's been almost a year since I was last here.

My pollution cough is almost gone; my skin's desert glow won't be far behind. Humboldt rain will wash it away.

Excuse me while I go walk some city streets.