The Temple of Karnak Does Not Disappoint!

Forget what I wrote about not wanting to spend much time in Egypt, just looking through the photos of the great temple temple complex called Karnak in Luxor (800 miles upriver from Cairo) makes me want to return.  The place is astonishing.  The center of pharaonic life for 1,400 years (from 1900 B.C), it's the largest such complex in the world. The Great Hypostyle Hall forms the spectacular center  It's hard to convey the scale in a photo, but it takes six adults to stretch their arms around each column's girth, of which there are 134, each either 50 or 69 feet tall.   A major wow!   Put Karnak on your list, maybe right at the top.  And go this time of year,  it would be no fun at 105 degrees, at 80 it's sublime.   I think probably the best way to do it would be on one of those weeklong Nile River cruises, as everything you want to see in Egypt is strung along the river.   It took us 3 hours to cross the mountainous desert (more checkpoints and AK47s) to get there.  You should have heard the moaning on the ship the next day--the utter exhaustion, the danger, have you recovered?,  blah, blah, blah.  I digress.    After a nice buffet lunch at a hotel on the east bank of the Nile we were treated to a sail across the river on a felucca, to the west bank and on to the Valley of the Kings.  Here's where the pharaohs from Egypt's most glorious period, the New KIngdom (1550  B.C. to 1069 B.C.), are buried.  The valley is rugged, arid, narrow, and rises up from the fertile, green flood plain of the Nile just across from Karnak.  The land of the living on one bank, the land of the dead on the other. The entry to each tomb descends into the underworld via a shaft of varying steepness.  I had no idea what to expect, in fact I guess I expected, well, caves.   Wrong!  Each one is different, all a series of rooms and corridors and niches and side rooms-- beautifully plastered and decorated with painting so fresh and colorful you can't believe it's all over 3,000 years old.   The mind bogles at the riches each must have contained, given the trove found at the relatively unimportant Pharaoh Tutankhamun.  By the way, Indiana Jones did not, as is commonly believed, discover  his tomb.   Rather, it was Howard Carter.   Entry into the valley gets you into three tombs (no photograph allowed),  I went down into that of Ramses VI, Ramses IX, and I forget the third.  Each was erie and wonderful. Coming back out into that rugged landscape was an odd feeling.  Loved every minute of it.