What is happening?
What a few weeks!!! We are all being affected by Corona virus at the moment and it’s hard to believe that just few weeks ago we were planning for our trip to Sichuan, China and now we are stuck at home, self isolating and don’t even know when we can even go back to work or we will have any job to go after this. There are quite a lot of podcasts and papers and reports about what will happen next both positive and negative. Personally I do believe that something beautiful will come out of this, at least for us, even if it’s going to be painful. So we try to keep ourselves optimistic and be grateful for being healthy and wish the best for everyone in hardship and pain. We hope that it makes us realize how hard it’s to be separated, to queue up for bare essentials and have unclear future. millions of people are born into these situations without Corona being around for decades and even die in the same situation without experiencing stability and safety. I deeply hope that after few months, when it is all over and we are sitting on our couch with a glass of wine in our hand, watching the news headlines about Syria, Yemen and others in war, feel a little bit more connected. I do believe if we feel connected, if we feel their pain, only a little bit, the world would be a better place for all of us. Having said that, let’s get back to our travel diaries. I do hope that I can finish off our last trip finally during the isolation and even start our Morocco diary if I stay committed 🙂
Luxor Facts and Why We Ended Up Here :
Well Luxor!! Pretty much everyone visiting Egypt and want to go further than Cairo, will visit Luxor. It’s called the open air museum of Egypt. With Valley of the kings complex, Luxor temple and countless number of ancient Egyptian landmarks to visit, it’s is a must for tourists interested in ancient Egypt. As I said earlier, we didn’t want to go to Cairo or other touristic spots in Egypt but in the last minute, we had to change our plans. Read about our Egypt planning here.
So after staying in Cairo for 3 days, we took a day train to Luxor for another leg of our journey that I was so excited about. Because we had to start that leg from Luxor, we decided to follow our two nights rule and stay in Luxor for two nights before moving on.
The train ride, at least the day train with lots of stops on the way, will take at least 10 hours to arrive at Luxor. Getting on that train was a challenge, if you are interested to take the same route, read about local transportation and day train from Cairo to Luxor, read more here.
Luxor, like other cities and towns in Egypt, is built on the Nile river banks. In fact 95% of Egypt population are living by the Nile river banks. It’s an impressive river and we were really interested in the real life by Nile rather than any archaeological sites. So before heading to Luxor, I did find a nice place to stay on the west side of Luxor.
The Eastern side of Luxor, built on eastern banks of Nile is where the Luxor temple is located and as well as all the city infrastructure, hotels, bazaars, train stations and roads as well. The west bank of the Nile in Luxor is like another world, it’s completely rural with only one sealed road, with lush green farms, water channels, palms everywhere and plenty of donkeys and no hotels at all. To commute between two sides of the river, you either can take a boat or take a taxi to go far south and then take a bridge to drive over. The moment I’ve seen the first photo of the west bank, I knew that we need to stay there.
Arriving in Luxor:
After 10 hours on the train, which was one of the coolest train rides, we’ve ever had, we arrived in Luxor after dark. It’s always a strange feeling, arriving in a new place especially after the dark. A combination of excitement, fear, losing coordination senses while trying to find your way around the town with a heavy backpack. Anyway we were trying to find our way to the river banks and then find the public boats to cross the river. I was trying to follow my gut feelings to find the way in the narrow busy streets of Luxor and Amir was trying to find the route by google map which wasn’t working perfect in walking mode in the backstreets of Luxor. It was getting frustrating with the level of harassment that we were receiving from some locals who were offering hotel, carriage rides and all sort of services, that we finally got to the main road next to the river. Temple of Luxor was shining in the horizon with all the lights beneath each column and we could see the reflection of city’s lights on the Nile. After having a quick dinner at a restaurant, we finally found a boat station. It was right across the road from the Luxor temple. There are big ferries working 24/7 and transferring locals from one side of river to the other side and cost only few cents.
There’s always a boat to get on and lots of interesting people to watch till boats gets full and ready to cross the river even at 9:00 pm at night. After arriving on the west bank, we had no idea how remote our stay was. According to google map, it was only 10 to 15 minutes by car. since it was late, we decided to take a tuk tuk. It costed us 2 NZD, we hardly fitted in with our backpacks and after an interesting conversation to show the driver, where we were going, we hit the road. The main road was a boulevard with lots of greenery in a middle, soon he turned into a narrow yet sealed road in dense rural area and got out of that and entered a dark dirt road covered with palm on both sides and no light or houses around. The only thing that we had was a point on the google map and according to the google map we were heading to our destination. We then realized that it was a great idea to take a tuktuk rather than walking , it would have taken us the whole night and there was no way that we could find it on our own and there was no one to ask if we got lost. Finally he stopped by a water channel and showed us a house on the other side of the water and we finally got there!
Irie B&B was the name of the place and soon we were greeted with Ameera herself, the owner. Still confused and didn’t know exactly where we are, she took us to the rooftop, where she was living with her husband (She was originally from Costa rica, married to an Egyptian man from Luxor) and there we could see the magic!! A cool breeze was blowing and on one side, Nile was shining in the horizon and on the other side, Valley of kings were hard to miss with all its night time lighting. Then she showed us our apartment, yes we had a whole apartment with a full bathroom, kitchen and balcony overlooking palms and rice paddies for ourselves for just 17 NZD per night.
Visiting Luxor:
We woke up in the morning with an amazing view and after having a great breakfast on the rooftop, we decided to take it easy and instead of visiting Valley of the kings or temple of Luxor, just walk around in the village and enjoy the countryside after three hectic days in Cairo.
After doing our laundries using the luxury of Ameera’s washing machine and letting them to dry on our Balcony we got out. It’s always interesting to arrive somewhere late at night for the first time and then get out in the morning to see the same scenery in day time. Ahhhh it was unbelievably beautiful. Nice and calm, lush green rice paddies and palm trees, birds were chirping in the air and every now and then, locals passing with their donkeys and carriages were waving hand for us. We got invitation for a cup of tea almost from every local that we met throughout the day.
We didn’t have any particular plan for the day but we also didn’t expect to have this much fun for the whole day just in walking distance from our B&B. We visited many farms and had interesting conversation with lots of farmers and their families, and finally couldn’t resist one of the invitation and went to their house for a cup of tea.
Amazing family with big hearts and bare minimum house, they kindly took us to their backyard, where they kept their water buffaloes, chickens and goats and even tried to persuade us to have kids using sign language, Arabic and English 🙂
Getting close to families like this with absolutely minimum possessions, super happy and optimistic, makes me realize that how far we’ve come from basics and what we’ve thrown ourselves into in the madness of the modern world that we are forced everyday to buy more unnecessarily items and don’t even feel satisfied.
I know valley of kings is impressive to visit but really visiting somewhere like valley of kings were the kings were buried with all their possessions because they thought they would need it after life is more inspiring or spending a day with real people living a real life that helps us re evaluate our priorities? for both of us , the second one is what we travel for.
Getting closer to the lunch time, we were hungry and it was no local cafe or even tea house to stop for lunch, so we decided to walk to the public boat stations, were we took the tuktuk last night from and see if we can find something to eat on the way. getting out of the countryside, it was still quiet but roads turned into sealed roads with few cars and motorcycles on the roads and more people walking around
Since we didn’t find anything to eat, we decided to take a boat ride to the east side and check what is happening on the eastern side. River front was covered with colorful Fallucca style boats, offering tourists, Nile tours, but lack of tourists in recent years in Egypt, left lots of these boat parked by the river. Being able to read Arabic, it’s really fun to walk around and read the boat names and the quotes that were written on the boats. Overtime it becomes almost an obsession to read as many as we can especially when there’s a lot of them, like here 🙂
Getting off the boat, walking through the Luxor town, all the friendly smiles, all “Salam Aleikom” disappeared and gave its place to “Hello Sir” and asking to offer services, you name it everything.
It always makes me wonder how tourism ruins customs and traditions and getting to a touristic place won’t show you the reality of the locals. I understand that tourism as a big industry helps all the nations especially the poor countries like Egypt and help locals to stay in their hometown and work rather than migrating to the bigger cities like Cairo and do non productive works but still it’s hard to maintain the balance. So far, Egypt was the worst in terms of how tourism ruin the interaction between visitors and locals in touristic spots. That’s why we tried to skip it as much as possible and staying on west side of Luxor was a right choice.
After having a lunch and looking around few monuments in Luxor, we got back to the west side to enjoy the sunset in the countryside and pack out bags for early morning departure the next morning.
And just like that our only day in Luxor was over and we went back to our stay to take some rest before the next adventure that I was so exited about. I’ll tell you about it in next post. Till then take life easy in this hard time and stay positive. Most of us will come out of that alive.
