Egypt Tour, Felucca, Kom-Ombo and Edfu Temple!

4/9/09

2000 (local time)

What a massive couple of days! So we have spent 2 full days, eating, sleeping, and partying on a felucca, and now it has finally finished. The felucca trip ended dropping us off at Luxor.

A felucca is a old Egyptian sailing boat, that is about 12 metres long and about 6 metres wide, where you eat, sleep and relax, so for this reason we had to make sure that the boat was clean and tidy almost all the time.

It was such and awesome trip, just chilling out listening to music and reading my book! An absolutely amazing trip. If you needed to go to the loo you had to tell the crew to pull over and stop. Luckily no one had the Dahab Belly and had the runs!!

Every lunch and dinner time, we would pull over to the side of the Nile and have a swim and eat food, take plenty of photos and just once again relax!

Anyway, we were woken up at 600 in the morning because our felucca had ended, but before we could check into our hotel we had to visit 2 temples on the way. They were Kom Ombo & Edfu Temple.

As I'm writing this now, I cant even remember what temple is what, and I'm actually having to research it, because we have been to so many temples they have all blended into one!

The first temple we visited was Kom Ombo temple. The Kom Ombo temple was used as a meeting point/monastery for the local town. It was fantastic looking at all the different carvings on the walls. There were a few things that stood out on this temple. Firstly, it was the colour that you could still see on the walls. You could see faint fades of blue and red from the ancient paintings and hieroglyphics. The second thing that stood out was an ancient Calender used to tell the date of the week and was from then you could tell what season the ancient Egyptians were in AND you could tell what sort of prayer should be used on that day, it was simply amazing. The third thing that really interested me was a well, called the ‘Nile-o-metre’ this huge well measured different things for the city. It measured the time of day and it also measured how much tax the farmers had to pay on their crops. The Nile-o-metre used the water from the Nile to give an idea to the government of how well the crops were going to do that season, and there for were able to tax the farmers a certain amount. F or Example, is the water in the ‘Nile-o-metre’ was resting at 6 metres from the bottom of the well, the farmers were going to be taxed maybe 20% and if the water was resting at 7 metres, they would be taxed 25%. It was a highly intelligent system used by the ancient Egyptians. The way the ‘Nile-o-metre’ was used for time, is I can only assume it measured the tide and ‘somehow’ got an idea of what time it was. For that time, it was an amazing invention, and it was only stopped being used fairly recently. Once we finished our spare time walking around that temple we hopped back onto the bus and endured another journey to Edfu Temple.

Edfu Temple was simply stunning. I cant remember all that much about the temple, in terms of history because of information overload. But describing the temple was almost as good.

The temple itself was absolutely massive, almost bigger than the Abu Simbel temple in Aswan. On the front walls of the Edfu Templ were massive carvings of Pharaohs and Kings carved into the wall. It is just amazing thinking about how the Ancient Egyptians carved such beautiful things into sand stone.

When we were taken into the temple the roof was black. When we asked Bishoy why the roof was black, he told us that when Egypt was taken over by the Christians, they used it as a garbage and waste disposal site, what must have happened, is that the garbage caught on fire and scorched the entire building. Apparently when it was found, the whole temple was black, so the founders underwent a restoring project to clean it up, and left the roof black so that they could show what happened. Pretty cool stuff I reckon.

There were a lot of corridors leading to different pats of the temple which would have made it AWESOME for a massive game of hide and seek...

Once we finished up with this temple and heard the story of how Qunny got ripped off at the toilet, I was once again fast asleep waiting to be dropped off at the hotel so I could have a shower and freshen up a bit.

When we pulled up at the hotel, we all realised that we had gotten upgraded to a 5 star mansion hotel. Look don't get me wrong, a 5 Star hotel is fantastic, but the problem was that, number 1 we were 10 minutes by taxi into to town and problem number 2 is that when I asked the hotel receptionist where some food was, they pointed me to KFC and Pizza Hut! Now I was furious! We are in Egypt I don't want to be eating shitty, greasy westernised food from America. So I took it upon myself to be the black sheep of the group and go 10 minutes into town to find some proper food. Fortunately I found some others from my group that felt the same, so we got a taxi into town and had some proper Egyptian food.

All was well after I got some food into my stomach and got back to the hotel to have a swim. But I would have much rather stayed in a 3 star hotel and been in the centre of town. Not too worry! As that night we were going to see Luxor Temple!

I still had a quarter left of my Jim Beam that I bought to take into the Felucca so I thought, what a top idea to have a few people over to have a bit of a drink on an empty stomach before we went to Luxor Temple. After polishing off the Beam, we had to get onto the bus! No Worries! But again, I took it upon myself to take the microphone off the guide an inform the group of what we have done over the past days, I then thought it would be a good idea to let the group know of the different ruins we drove past on our way to Luxor Temple. I informed them that ‘these set of ruins were from an Ancient Egyptian Petrol Station’ Funny Days!

We then made it to Luxor Temple! It was obviously night time and it looked fantastic, the photos don't really do it justice but we did our best to make it look alright.

Bishoy (guide) pointed out to us a piece of Christian Graffiti. When the Christians found the Luxor temple they ‘plastered’ over the Egyptians Hieroglyphics, and then painted their own stories and paintings on the ‘plaster’. Anyway, when the excavators found Luxor Temple, the chipped away at the ‘plaster’ and found all the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Luckily for us, the excavators left some of the Christian painting left. The painting is of a group of men, thought (I think) to be of Jesus and his Disciples. The picture is one apparently one of the oldest paintings of that nature!

After taking many of photos and getting hassled by the Egyptians it was dinner time! MASIVE BUFFET! I WENT TO TOWN!!! ATE MY MONEYS WORTH!

Anyway, that was our massive day! Good on you if you read all that, because it was massive!

Tomorrow we were going to the Valley of the Kings! Can’t Wait!

Hanging out in one of the towns on our way to Luxor!

The Felucca that i was sailing on!

The other half of our tour! Having dinner that night! Awesome Ey!

The Hot Sand Dance! The sand gets bloody hot in the Sahara.

A view from the Sahara to the Nile!

The Type of Calender I spoke about in the Kom-Ombo, Cool Ey!

The Nile-O-Metre! Bit Dirty now though!

Just chlling out, doing my pose at the Kom-Ombo Temple!

Dont really know what this was about, but a 'Tourist Police' Showed me this, then asked me for a tip! WHAT A JERK!

The tour were stuffed, so took some good sleeping Photos! look at Quinny on the Left!

The Edfu Temple!

You can almost see the colors under the door way!

Another pose outside of Edfu Temple!

Edfu Temple was Massive!

We then left Edfu temple! Back on the bus again!

Thats it for the photos!

Next day coming up ASAP! BRING ON THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS!