Egypt Day 2: Karnak and Luxor Temple

We were driven from Luxor airport to the Karnak Temple.  We were so excited to be there and especially wanted to see the depictions of  Pharoah being made ready to go through the veil to God, that Lee's dad had seen and was so excited about.  We did see the depictions, but they were too high up for our camera to get a picture.

Causeway between Karnak and Luxor

                                                  Inside main gates of Karnak

 

                                                                 Obelisk of Hatshepsut

 Light opening into Temple ante room.  Notice the brightly painted ceiling still intact

Karnak

Karnak with obelisk behind

Every opening to let in light is lined up with the entrance to the Holy of Holies

Some places we saw as we drove from Karnak to Luxor--nice views of the Nile River too.

Luxor Temple

City scene on our way to the hotel--the Steigenberger Hotel

The hotel was very nice, and you had to take a boat ride to get to it.  This is the view from our room

Sunset on the Nile

The hotel celebrating Christmas and the New Year. We had a lovely  time here and had 3 dinners--1 Lebanese and 2 Italian.  The waiters were amazed that we left tips!

Walking outside the hotel was not a lot of fun.  We were accosted by several hawkers who wouldn't take "No Thank you" for an answer until we got kind of mean about it.  One guy kept walking with us.  We tried a different tactic--we gave him a dollar to leave us alone.  But even that didn't really work, as he found us again on our way home and tried to sell us more stuff!  So, we stayed in most of the time and enjoyed the sunsets!

We learned that everyone has to be given a tip!  Even the bathrooms had attendants that you had to tip.  Overall, the people were very nice and we had such a great experience.  Egypt in December was truly lovely at about 70-75 degrees.  We were very careful to only use bottled water and cooked vegetables.  Lee ate some fruit at the hotels, but I did not want to take a chance of getting sick.  We had nuts, granola bars, and protein bars for lunches and also some bread that we took from our breakfast buffets.  The buffets were very good--way more food than we could eat.  The dinners were part of our hotel payment and we had our choice of a couple of them at both hotels.  The last night in Luxor we needed to get some money.  We had tried the day before with no luck, and finally had to go to a bank.  Once we got back to the hotel I saw that the debit card Lee had was  not in his wallet.  He must have dropped it between the ATM machine and the bank!  ACKKK!!!  We ended up emailing Chris Bean, our financial adviser, and he was able to cancel the card--he has helped us with so many things this year!