All the sites that I will be writing about didn’t happen in one day, we are not that fast!

Before we went to the Valley of the Queens we visited the local fruit and veg market. This is a great place to buy them as they are extremely cheap.

Valley of the Queens; Before I came I didn’t even know about it I only heard of the Valley of the Kings.

The queens valley is only quite small and not as good as the Kings one. I can’t remember any of the names of the tombs but we did take a few photos. There isn’t really much to write about so I’ll let the pictures do the job.

On the same day we went to the workers village. The workers village is where the workers who built and carved the tombs lived (you might have guessed that) with a couple of tombs that had been painted (not carved) by the artists in the village.

You are are not allowed to take pictures but if you give the guard a bit of change it’s fine. Even though they weren’t carved they were beautifully painted. There were paintings of the fields, farm animals along with lots of gods of course.

Next we went to the Colossi of Memnon. This isn’t a site, it’s more of a a one photo and leave site. It consists of 2 giant statues (23 meter high, one thousand ton) of Amenhotep 111 neither in great form but definitely worth a look.

Next was the temple Medinet Habu (mortuary temple of Ramesses 111).

All these places are full with Egyptian tourists because it’s holidays so that spoils it a bit and you also get stopped a lot for photos.

I wanted to mention this mainly for this carving which was highly fascinating.

It consisted of two court yards and lots of pillars some with colour still in them.

Valley of the Kings.

We didn’t do this one in the same day thankfully. I think we had had quite enough at the end of that day. Valley of the Kings is quite famous and is highly recommended. Once you get in the grounds you can either walk up the road or take a mini road train which we did since it was fairly cheap.

When you buy the tickets you can pick any 3 tombs to visit, except for Ramesses the 5th, 6th and Tutankhamun which you have to pay extra for. We bought an extra for Ramesses the 5th, 6th since we heard it was good. Tutankhamun was the most famous but since TUT (The Ultimate Traveller) had been here before but he told us it wasn’t very good. All the artefacts are in the Cairo Archaeological Museum (a later post).

Ramesses the 5th and 6th was indeed great. All the tombs all went fairly deep into the ground with side chambers now and then. They all had a massive area at the bottom, sometimes there was a sarcophagus (a giant coffin).

Again if you give the guards some money and ask them not to stamp your ticket it’s easy enough so we ended up going to 5 tombs today.

The second one was Tausert and Setnakht, one of the largest tombs. This one was great apart from the guards whom I disliked. I was in a room with mum and both guards were somewhere further down with TUT so I decided to take a sneak picture.

A few minutes later the guy came up and started saying “you have a camera, show me show me”. I said I don’t have one he opened my bag (which he had no right to do ), turned his torch on.

I took the picture with my nexus but I didn’t have time to put it back in the case so he saw the case but for some reason didn’t find my nexus which was very lucky. I don’t think he knew I had a camera I just think that he trying it on. Mum argued with him and he went away.

The third was Thutmose IV. This one was the steepest one of the day and went really far down. There was great sarcophagus at the end with a carving of the goddess Isis which I’ve been wanting to see for a long time.

We walked quite a way up the hill so it was a great view too.

The fourth one was Rameses III. I don’t think this was worth going inside for. It wasn’t the best for starters and there was a ginormous group of Egyptians there too.

The fifth and final one was Merneptah. This was basically the same sort of thing as the rest apart from the huge white sarcophagus that was really worth it. We didn’t take a picture because of the guard and we couldn’t be bothered handing money out.

Before you leave I just want to write a bit about Hatshepsut temple.

This is a really famous temple and extremely large. It’s not my favourite but i can’t exactly say that as you can’t go in most of it.

In 1997 there was an attack here at this temple, where tourists were killed and injured so I felt sick the whole time thinking of the attack. When we saw a bullet hole it certainly didn’t make me feel any better. Apart from that it’s definitely worth a visit.

That was the last Luxor blog post.