Luggage outside the room EARLY, meet the guide in the Iberotel lobby, onto a bus and ride to the nearby Cairo airport. The prospect of a rest from the demanding touring did not depress me. The last set of pictures I want to show are scenes mostly of Cairo streets shot from various buses. They are here.

The last bus ride of the day was to the immense Karnak Temple (the largest outdoor religious site in the world).

The area covered by the temple complex is immense and these pictures only give a tourist’s feel for it.

The Valley of the Kings is warm even today. I’ve been in the tomb of Rameses III (no photos allowed). One is my quota for the day. Interesting if one enjoys being crowded together in an elongated unventilated tomb with sweaty enthusiastic tourists.

After the Valley of the Kings we headed for the Valley of the Queens where we would have additional opportunities for oxygen-deprived panic, say in the tomb of one of Rameses’ sons.

I wrote the above paragraphs as I sat in the shade at the Valley of the Queens waiting for the other tour members while the experience was still fresh in my mind. This day would prove to be a very busy one. We boarded our bus early and headed for the West bank and the valley, stopping for a quick photo shoot at the Colossi of Memnon along the road. The next stop was the Al-Deir Al Bahari Temple.

Hatsepshut’s temple greatly interested me because of the little I knew of her in history plus fictional books by P.C. Doherty that used her as a character. One thing we were not told when we visited was that Al-Deir Al Bahari was the site of the 1997 Luxor Massacre in which 58 tourists and 4 Egyptians were killed by Egyptian terrorists.

Since picture taking was not allowed in neither the Valley of the Kings nor the Valley of the Queens these are the only pictures taken during this part of the day.

Ancient Thebes has become Luxor home to Luxor Temple along with many other attractions for the visitor to Egypt.

Later in the afternoon after lunch had settled we headed to shore through the lobbies of the eight boats between the Queen of Hansa and the shore. Naturally I counted the intervening boats so I would know when I reached the Queen of Hansa when we returned. What would become even stranger was that on our return the Queen of Hansa was only the third boat from the dock. Staying to watch the intervening boats’ elimination could have been as interesting as visiting the temple, but I digress.

A bus was waiting above the dock to whisk us to the Luxor Temple and “whisk” is the best word to describe the trip since the temple was just down the street from where the Queen of Hansa was docked. It was late in the day by the time we left the temple grounds and some of the pictures had to be retouched because they were too dark.

Somehow many of us had the feeling that Luxor Temple was not such a big deal, since we had been prepared for the BIG ones tomorrow: the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens and the Temple of Karnak. A fascinating sidelight of the trip to Luxor Temple and tomorrow’s trip to Karnak was that a ceremonial road lined with sphinxes linking the entire distance between Luxor temple and Karnak temple was month-by-month being more excavated and restored (there are a few pictures of a part of it at the end of the Luxor temple pictures). Mosques, apartment houses and stores are being relocated by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities to allow the restoration of the highway of the sphinxes.

We were back on the Queen of Hansa heading down the Nile to Luxor where we would dock and spend the night. Along the way we were lowered from our high level of the Nile to the next lower level through the river locks at Esna. Another treat along the way for a few of us was meeting the ship captain as he sat on his bridge piloting the ship (pictures of these adventures here).

Because of an apparent limited amount of docking positions, especially here in Luxor (ancient Thebes), the first boat to a docking position naturally docks. Other boat captains who like that area “park” their boats parallel to the first, and the way to the shore from the newcomers is one by one through the lobbies of the boats between theirs and the dock. Today our boat is the ninth from shore so we will have to trek through eight lobbies to get to the bus to carry us to Luxor temple.

Ah, let’s get closer still.

I am going to go with this title Google voice generated (sound it out). Today and yesterday have been Ptolemaic period temples in towns along the Nile. I now know how to get the largest granite blocks in place on a temple wall, but I doubt I will be building many more temples.

Our ship had docked at Edfu the previous night, so after breakfast it was onto a bus and off to the Temple of Edfu.

When everyone was ready it was time to run the gauntlet of the sellers of stuff to get back to the bus and back to the boat in time for lunch, as we began sailing for Luxor. Pictures? Of course there are pictures here.