Egypt Winter 2011 - Day 5

We are still in Luxor - far from the demonstrations taking place in Cairo. We began our morning by taking a chilly boat ride up the Nile to the Karnak Temple! It took 5 boats to get us all there. Here are 2 of them: You see cows out the window of your car all of the time - well we saw cows too! :) Actually, they might be water buffalo.

Workers out in their fields - using camels and donkeys instead of horses or tractors.

The boat ahead of us is a cruise ship.

Ah, here we are at the Karnak Temple - this is the avenue of the sphinxes. This avenue originally ran from the Karnak Temple all the way to the Luxor Temple. Imagine how impressive it must have looked!!

These sphinxes are in what is called the Great Court.

This next shot if of Kent's favorite room in the whole world - the Hypostyle Hall in the Karnak Temple: You can even still see some of the colors.

Isn't this close-up amazing? Imagine an entire room full of these!!

This was one of our guides - he helped us understand the lay-out of things with diagrams:

This is one small section of the Sanctuary:

This is looking into the Sanctuary at the altar. I found this interesting and somewhat sad: In an ancient temple like this one, the most Holy spot of the temple is the furthest in and is approached by gradually going up. That part is similar to our own beliefs. BUT, instead of the room becoming bigger and brighter it gets smaller and darker, so that those approaching are in fear as they arrive in the holiest of holies. What a difference the light of Jesus Christ makes.

This is called the Sacred Lake.

Right across from this lake is a large statue of a Scarab. The Scarab was the God the pushed the sun across the sky. Also, the scarab beetle reproduces without the help of another scarab beetle so it was also a representation of eternal life.

Our guide told the students that the tradition was - if you ran around the statue 7 times you would get married. We had a lot of people running around the Scarab! :)

Our next stop was the Luxor Temple - here, again, is part of the Avenue of the Sphinxes:

Here is another view of the avenue. You can guess why Kent took this one. :)

This is looking down at the Court of Rameses II.

This is the vestibule:

Our return trip to the hotel was done in carriages. All of them have lots of color and decorations on them. These were hanging all along the edge of roof of the carriage. On some of the carriages, every inch has something hanging from it.

Luxor street scenes - school girls

Close up

This is Kent (he's the one in the middle) with one of our guides, Rafeet and our marvelous Tour Agent, Emad. You can't believe how hard he works for us!

Took a train from Luxor back to Cairo. This is our hallway:

This is our compartment. We had 24 students who crammed themselves into one just to see if they could! Those on the bottom weren't so happy!

Here we are getting ready for bed.

Train station.

As far as the demonstrations going on. Our guides and our Tour agents were, of course, very concerned about it. They had friends involved and they were very hopeful that Mubarak would step down and that things wouldn't get really ugly. Our friends are anxious for a better government, better jobs, better lives for all Egyptians. They asked us several times to please pray for them!

Our boss, here at the Center, was very concerned about us. We had much better intelligence being on the ground in Egypt than he did in Jerusalem. He talked with Kent several times a day to discuss our plans and to make sure we were fine. The tour agency we use took such good care of us and worked extraordinarily hard to provide safety and comfort and still provide us with the tour we paid for. Yea, for Gabry Tours!