Christmas Day I wasn’t sure what I was going to do today, so I set out walking towards Luxor town centre. Much to my surprise, after the jackal and the hawk of previous days, as I crossed the road by the entrance to Karnak I came across a black cat sitting in the undergrowth washing […]
A Year Later, 2013 pt 4
The last two days seem to have flown past. Christmas Eve saw me on the West Bank visiting what is known as the Theban Necropolis, a vast area covering 2 square miles (5 square kilometres). The Valley of the Kings is a name familiar to most of us from various documentaries, but not so well […]
A Year Later, 2013 pt 3
After yesterday’s failure to find Akhenaten’s temple, I returned to Karnak this morning armed with a pdf copy of a photograph taken during the excavations done in the 70s. I was determined to find the temple site, or at least the place where it once stood. Again, as it was early, the whole complex was […]
A Year Later, 2013 pt 2
Luxor temple is beautiful, there is no other way to describe it. Built primarily by Amenhotep III and finished by Rameses the Great, with a mid section by Tutankhamun and his successors, it was the spiritual home of Mut, the wife of Amun Ra. Because of the political situation in Egypt, tourists are quite thin […]
A Year Later, 2013 pt 1
I find myself a year later writing to you once more, not begging for financial aid this time, but to keep you informed as to where things are. I am not as far with the book as I had hoped to be, for a variety of reasons, mostly beyond my control, however, this doesn’t mean […]
My First Time pt 6
The final missive from the land of sand.Christmas Eve 2012: I returned to Giza with the sole intention of going inside the Great Pyramid. Arrived at the plateau to find it quite empty, maybe too many Christmas parties the night before for a lot of the tourists. As I had been to the site before […]
My First Time pt 5
The sun and its daily journey have played an important role in all civilisations and none more so than Ancient Egypt. As the new day begins with sunrise in the east and ends with sunset in the west, so life followed the same course. The temples and palaces were all on the east bank of […]
My First Time pt 4
Thebes, capital city of the New Kingdom pharaohs. Luxor, as it is now known, is much cleaner than some of the other places we have been to and has an air of “holiday” about it. The hotel is situated on the main road that runs parallel with the river and is fairly close to the […]
My First Time pt 3
“Its just gone noon, half past monsoon, on the banks of the river Nile. Here comes the boat only half afloat, oarsman grins a toothless smile…”Well, not quite. The cruise boat is a floating hotel, mildly reminiscent of something from the thirties. I think they all know that Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile […]
My First Time pt 2
At last, Internet access and a chance to catch up. I cannot believe that it is only just a week and a half since I arrived here. It seems that we have done so much. Where to start?Day two: met the rest of the tour group at the Oasis Hotel in Giza, near the Pyramids […]
