Biking Around Again

Ancient Egypt, finally! Why’d it take three trips to Egypt to make it to Luxor? And why stay only four days? You can probably see Luxor’s highlights in about eight days (six on the west bank, two on the east side?). Four days gave us a little taste of Egyptology.

Before coming to Luxor, visiting Upper Egypt seemed rather confusing — where to stay, how to get around, how spread out is everything, how do the tickets work. And then there are touts and scams and outright lying. The difficulties start with simply getting from the touristy Red Sea to touristy Luxor, something I’d expect to be easy.

In the end I guess it was easy — we didn’t leave our hotel at Utopia Beach Club until after 11am and arrived in Luxor the same day. The hardest part was convincing the tour desk at the hotel to call a cab for us. Arrange this ahead of time if you can. The taxi dropped us at the minibus station in Al-Qusair where we caught a Hurghada-bound shared taxi station wagon to Safaga and from there a gobus to Luxor. The road heading west from Al-Qusair straight to the Nile does not appear to have many transportation options. This might be why people repeatedly warned there were no buses to Luxor and we’d need to pay for a private transfer. This wasn’t the only time in Egypt that long distance transportation was easier and cheaper than we’d been told.

Touts in Luxor are notorious, but the scams and hassles seem to be confined to small areas where there are lots of tourists. As in Sri Lanka and Turkey and Syria (and many other places), visiting museums and archaeology sites can be surprisingly expensive for foreigners. Over 10% of our total trip cost (which included flights and a week at an all inclusive resort on the Red Sea) was spent on entrance fees (and we didn’t even visit the two most expensive tombs: Nefertari was closed, and we didn’t have time for Seti I). Ignoring the prices (close your eyes and pay) seems like a good strategy.

We stayed on the west bank and rented bicycles from Mahmoud for our three days of touring on the west bank. It’s easy to get around by bicycle though we were a bit surprised how long it took to get to Valley of the Kings, our first excursion. It’s slightly uphill most of the way which we didn’t notice till the end of the day when we coasted much of the way back to town.