Egypt Day 5, An early morning and power tourism

The wake up call comes at 6 on your second cruise day, and as I alluded to in the title of the last post, you're not really cruising, since you're still right there at the dock where you have been since you boarded the day before. I looked out my cabin window as the sun rose to see the hot air baloon crowd getting underway. Add this to the list of things I'd do if I find myself back in Luxor. After a quick attempt at eating some breakfast, we found our other 6 group members now affectionately dubbed the "tigers". Our really nice tour guide, Achmed (please stop giggling, yes his name really was Achmed and No, he was neither dead, nor a terrorist) dubbed us the Tiiiiiii guhs! because that was the name on the side of the bus we had for our days in Luxor. Oddly enough I was wearing my white Auburn hat (for the record I really really dislike white hats, but it was perfect for sunny days in the desert) and one of our fellow travelers turned around and said war eagle! She too was an alum, and now lives in Texas. We took a small boat across the river, and got on the bus at the other side saving us from having to drive through town down to the bridge and all the way back up. The take home message from our second day in Luxor is that the sun rises on the east bank of the Nile, so that's where the Temples are, and sets on the west bank, so that's where you bury your dead. So day two was west bank for the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, and Temple of Hatshepsut. The valley of the kings is where Tut was buried, but we decided not to pay the extra money to go inside and see his tomb. You get inside 3 better looking tombs for the price of admission, so paying extra to be hot again, and see where all the stuff was before they carted it off to the museum didn't seem all that interesting. You'll never believe this, but they don't allow pictures inside any of the tombs. Some of them are very well preserved, with vibrant colors and really wonderful scenes on the walls. Totally worth climbing up and down the steep stairs to see them, but also really hot and stuffy. In the Valley of the Queens we visited the tomb of Nefertari, and Amenherkhepshef. Amenhekhepshef's tomb was really interesting because he died as a child and all the pictures in the tomb show the pharaoh introducing his son to the gods.
The next stop on our west bank whirlwind tour is Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. If you followed yesterdays link, you know later kings tried to erase Hatshepsut from the record, so they did a real number on the temple she'd built. It's sometimes listed as the arabic Deir el-Bahri. She wanted to convince everyone that she was a male, and the son of the god, and her son busted the heck out of the temple after her death. It is really well restored, and sorrounded by mountains and allows pictures! We did a quick drive by the collosi of memnon, but our group was so tired only me and one other person jumped out to take the obligatory photo. We were back on board by lunch time and had a lazy afternoon watching the nile drift by as we actually started moving south (up current) on the river. At some point the boat stops to wait for it's turn to go through the locks, at which point an army of small rowboats pulls up to the boat to sell their wares to people standing out on the decks. You should have seen the arm strength on these guys throwing things up to a 5th deck on our boat. And since we started this post with a sunrise, lets finish it off with another nile sunset for your viewing pleasure.