Third day in Egypt and it’s getting better and better, problems are over and we only have to worry about how not to die under the hot sun. We started our trip in the morning at 7.30, because we had to be back before 13:00 when our ship would sail away. We still can not get used to the tipping system Egyptians have – everyone expects a tip, even if they didn’t do anything helpful to you. So Halim told us that we would have to pay 40 LE (Egyptian pounds) for the cruise ship x2 (I am not sure why), then tips for the guys who cared our bags, tip for the driver, tip for the priest etc (kidding for the last one, of course).

Anyway, keep that in mind when you go to Egypt, but let’s go back to the excursions. We went in the Valley of the Kings – you can not take pictures behind the fence of the entrance and there’s a place to leave your camera and stuff, however we decided to keep our camera in the black bag we had together with a bottle of water. It’s not allowed to talk in the tombs, so Halim told us that we will see three tombs, but we would not enter with us. We went into the first one of king Ramesses IX and a guy wanted to look in our bag and found our camera – I got scared that he might take it and we showed him the pictures and that there’s nothing from inside the valley, so he gave us back our camera.

Next, we went to visit the temple of Queen Hatshepsut who was the only Egyptian woman that ruled Egypt for 21 years and except for her closest people, no one knew that she was a woman because she dressed like a man and had a fake beard like a man and built her temple in the Valley of the Kings instead of the Queens one. The Kings used to live and build their temples for the time they’re alive on the east side of the Nile river and build their tombs for the afterlife on the west side of the river, because this was where the sun goes down. When a pharaoh starts building their temple, they were not allowed to finish it before they die as if they do, they’re basically ready to die.. For that reason the longer a king ruled Egypt, the bigger their tomb is in the Valley of the Kings. King Tutankhamen’s tomb was really small because he rules Egypt less than 10 years between 10 and 19 years old when he died.

To continue with the Egyptian history that I learned from Halim, in the city of Sohag (located in the middle of the Nile), a strong king was born (the Scorpion king) named Narmer who succeeded to unify the people of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt where they believed in two gods – Amon (meaning “Invisible” – in Upper Egypt) and Ra (meaning “Sun” – in Lower Egypt). So this king combined them into one god called Amon Ra – Invisible Sun.. but how could there be an invisible sun? The king explained to the people that during the day Ra rules the country, I.e. the Sun and when the sun goes down, Amon “shows up”, they cannot see him, neither can they see the wind, the air, but they can feel them – this is all Amon 🙂 And everyone was happy and these two kingdoms unified in one.

We also visited the Statue of Memnon, whose statue was of one single piece which weights more than 700 tons. There was a whole temple, but it’s completely destroyed, because another king was lazy enough to not bring materials from Cairo and he took the temples stones instead to build his own temple and furthermore – people took stones as well to build their houses.

Finally we went back to the ship and had a great time at the pool and sun bathing under the Egyptian sun while sailing. 🙂