Luxor

It was wondrous indeed. Can you imagine this being in your backyard growing up?

Look at that smile. After our trip to Luxor, I think I understand, Mr. Giant Head.

Before we left, everything I read convinced me to steel myself, that I was about to enter the hasslers' Mecca of tourist sites in the world. I was so, so pleased to find that this was not our experience at all. Perhaps due to the fact that we were traveling during the Eid holiday, in which people had better things to do with their lives-- eat lamb, visit family, be merry, or maybe because we look less like tourists than most of the other tourists in town, or perhaps because in general we've learned to walk at all times like we know where we're going--whichever of these happy boons graced us, the city felt open to our exploration and without the apparently usual inconveniences of twenty hawkers grabbing at our hair, foisting camel statuettes on us.

We studied a few maps on the train so we could hit the ground running, anticipating a similar level of disorder and illogic about the urban planning as Cairo. Our studiousness proved to be useful, but somewhat unnecessary given the fairly logical layout of the city and the fact that it is tiny. You can essentially walk the length of the city in approximately 30 minutes. This made Luxor an optimal 2-day destination, as after about half a day of wandering around, without really trying, we began to intuitively understand where most things are.

After a long night on the train, we arrived at 7 AM at the Luxor station. I expected to exit the station doors only to be greeted by an unruly human wall of hotel and market touts, but thankfully, as I was then reminded, 7 AM is generally too early for most of humanity to enact their full capabilities, even despite the exceptional ambition of hawkers and salespeople. We walked to our hotel, Hotel Oasis, one of these budget hotels whose shabbiness is commensurate with the pittance paid for it. We dropped our things off and set down the street for breakfast and the Temple of Luxor.

The Temple of of Luxor, despite the glory and magnificence of everything we saw after it, remains one of my favorite sites we saw in Luxor. It seems to boast far less of the skilled intricacy and mythological wonder of the tombs. But one step onto the temple premises and, despite the hoards of tourists, the incessantly screeching car horns, and the dissonant floodlights on the perimeter of the temple, I was entranced in a kind of solemn homage to the insane epicness of everything around us. We tend to imagine the Great Wonders of the World and the famed sites of history we grew up revering and dreaming of as being gargantuan, improbably-sized, and often, they disappoint our wide-eyed, youthful thirst for marvel, adventure, and majesty. Apparently, many people report feeling this way upon seeing the Sphinx (which always begs the question, "are you really, actually, saying the Sphinx isn't big enough?") But I understand this feeling entirely. Of course it's disappointing when the world fails to live up to our projections of its ideal forms. Well, I can honestly say that the Temples of Luxor and Medinet Habu (the mortuary temple of Ramses III) do not disappoint in this regard. Note this giant foot):

This dude's got some serious foot fungus going on there.

We went to the Luxor Temple early enough that the slight haze of fog still rested eerily over everything, contributing to our wonderment, as we felt like we were the archaeologists who discovered this great treasure, who would decipher the numerous engravings surrounding us (despite the critical and ornery gazes of the crows circling creepily above us).

Further downstream, we went to the Karnak Temple, which every guidebook warned we would be ill-advised to attempt to explore all at once, lest we inevitably fall, clutching our heads in a corner, overwhelmed by the grandeur and brilliance of it all. It was grand, and it was brilliant, but we were fine. It felt like something of a playground, not so far off from its ancient purpose as a continuously in-progress monument, cumulatively contributed to by 30-something pharaohs, including some big names like Ramses II, Akhenaten, and Hatshepsut, over a period of more than 2,000 years.

On our second day, we took the local ferry across the bank to the west side of Luxor, rented bicycles to pedal around the sites, and then taxied up to our first stop: The Valley of the Kings, the cavernous eternal home of hundreds of ancients. We saw three tombs: those of Ramses III, Ramses IV, and Seti (I can't remember which one). They were each exquisite and surreal in their own ways, but also somehow defiant of our expectations of ornate gilding-- perhaps humbled by the toll time takes on all things, or perhaps by the fact that fundamentally everything underground is still dark and dusty. After this, we biked down the gravely path downhill, dodging cars and tour buses as they too wound gloriously around the hill, gleaming in the sunlight, destined for enlightenment and illumination! This being the first time I'd biked in perhaps 10 years, I was a bit rusty at first (not unlike our bikes), but as I gained speed down the hills of Luxor, I fondly remembered galloping (at astonishing speeds, I might add) through the desert with Stacy from Giza to Saqqara and back when she came to visit. For some reason, my mode of tourism in Egypt consists of undertaking semi-athletic ventures for which I am perhaps ill-prepared, but so thoroughly enjoy, even as the hot midday sun beats upon my brow. Lawrence of Arabia would be proud, I hope.

After this, we stopped at the base of the hill and were told by some local police we could find food at some thatched-roof hut nearby, but we were soon scooped up by a twinkly-eyed runt of a boy, Ramadan, who insisted on helping us find food. We followed him as we spiraled through his village, Naga', whose houses were not much taller than ourselves, as he asked from door to door who might still have a bit of lunch. Finally, we arrived at his house, where his plum-cheeked mother and four siblings welcomed us in, brought in our bikes and insisted we eat of their food. After lavishing us with hugs and kisses and exclamations of the honor we had brought to them by setting foot in their modest, earthen-made house, they then seated us on cardboard stools and presented us with pots of piping hot molokhiyya (one of my favorite local foods-- a soup of innumerable cloves of garlic and the mucilaginous leaves of a kind of jute plant), rice, bread made from the family's giant clay oven, and enormous hunks of lamb meat, to be found in every home during Eid. They refused to eat with us, insisting that they had already eaten hours before (unreasonable, considering that immediately upon our arrival the food was piping hot, leading us to conclude that they had not yet eaten), but instead sat with us as we all watched Arthur and other children's programs on the TV. Their adobe walls were lightly decorated with pictures clipped from various sources-- a page of Arabic calligraphy, a few family photos, and amusingly, a typically Indian depiction of a mother and a child. After they gave us tea and bestowed upon us many benedictions and expressions of honor (according to them, I was Dr. Ramya, just so you know; who needs graduate school to acquire more degrees?), we reluctantly took our leave of them and slyly tried to leave them some money under a hunk of bread, as we knew they wouldn't accept it. But, Ramadan's mother was too wise to our ways and stuffed our money back in our pockets despite our protestations and scolded us, demanding to know "would you ever try to pay your mother for feeding you?" Hours later, Ramadan called us to ask if we had safely returned to our hotel and to invite us back to his home any time we returned to Luxor. This is Egypt's famed hospitality, complete with syrupy sweet tea.

Uplifted by our encounter with this beautiful and gracious family and our gratitude to them, we rode on to Deir alMedina, the historic village where the workers who built the Valley of the Kings lived and constructed their own tombs. It is morbid, yes (but, what about the ancient Egyptians isn't?), but it strikes me as being an unintentionally tongue-in-cheek ode to the glory of the workers (Proletariat Unite!) that due to the fact that Orientalists, treasure seekers, and tourists have always been more covetously interested in more elaborate sites such as the Valley of the Kings, they are nearly perfect, showing almost no damage to the interior of the tombs and nearly no degradation in the illustrations' color. Brilliant!

As the sun set, we rode past lush agricultural lands and briefly traipsed through Medinet Habu, waved our salutations to the Colossi of Memnon, and then continued back to contemporary civilization, where we returned our bikes and took the ferry back to the East bank of Luxor. We spent the rest of the evening there drinking tea and steeped fenugreek, halba, and people-watching. Our trip wasn't without our share of requisite purchases in the suq, such as scarves that have proven much needed in the unpredictably cold Cairene winter.

Thanks for reading this tome of an account; I hope it will inspire you, beloved readers, to come visit us and experience this all for yourselves! I don't know when I'll go back to Luxor; there's so much I still haven't seen in Egypt (heck, I haven't even seen the Great Pyramids up close yet, and I live but kilometers away from them), but I'd love to take you there.

*Apparently, jute leaves are also called Jew's Mallow, and molokhiyya was often served as the maror, bitter herbs, on traditional Egyptian Jews' seder plates!