Thursday morning started off early. After breakfast I went outside to the river and saw the sky dotted with hot air balloons... so I had to take a tired-looking picture with Tessa :) Isn't she adorable?
Back out to the water for another felucca (I think that's how you spell it) ride a few minutes down the Nile to Karnak! This place was seriously jaw-dropping for me... I still can't get over how enormous it is! We were there quite a while and still saw only a fraction of the temple. One of my favorite things there was the Hypostyle Hall, a large area said to be built by Seti I, containing 134 colossal stone columns (papyrus columns, to be specific) which used to hold up a roof. It's unreal to think how much work went into quarrying and transporting and arranging and intricately engraving these massive pieces of stone... From what I picked up from our guide, the ancients figured out a really neat way to engrave these columns. Once the pillars were in place, the hall was filled with sand (plenty of that around) to allow the workers to get to the tops of the columns. Little by little, the sand was let out as they worked their way down... ok, you can't really get a sense for how much work that would be until you're actually in the hall, but it's pretty amazing. Some of these pillars are huge- it took 11 or 12 of us holding hands to reach around :)
We rode little carriages over to the Luxor temple--way better than tour buses! :) This temple was so much smaller when compared to Karnak, but still just magnificent. It's really a temple complex built in pieces by a few different rulers. Hatshepsut built the earliest chapels, and additions were made by Tutmoses III, Rameses II, and Alexander.
My favorite part in this temple would probably be this wall. I need to look up the details to the story, but essentially, Roman Christians decided at one point to do their own thing in this temple--they created murals with Christian images on the walls, here a depiction of the Last Supper on the wall of an inner chamber. It made me kind of mad to see things vandalized like that--but I couldn't deny it makes for some great history now :) It's just so striking to see the mural chipping away to reveal the hieroglyphs underneath :)
Here's the courtyard of temple--aren't those statues incredible? All this, with only crude tools and carts and hardworking hands...amazing. Oh, and I'm loving that hat the more I see it... May you rest in peace, my tacky $4 friend. You faithfully saved my face from some serious sunburns during your week of use...until I left you on the lampshade in a Cairo hotel room--a tragic ending.
Quick sunset dinner on the Nile...
...before a super comfortable, roomy, and sanitary overnight train back to Cairo!
And here's my lovely roomie, Ashley :)
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