Koh Tao Viewpoint

Koh Tao viewpoint

Hiking with a headache (word to the wise, skip the flip flops and lace up some hiking shoes)

Palm trees

The hiking trail

Koh Phangan

Gorgeous tree

Beach by our hotel

A floatin dock

Ahh!!! Relaxation!

View from the end of the  dock (Wasn’t Mike brave to carry his SLR camera all the way out here?)

Walk in the hills

Beach panorama

Well, not exactly. The truth is, we’ve had to balance our love for diving with our love for travel and our love for not working (aka, our budget). That’s kept us landlocked and feet-dry for the past year. So, when we arrived at Koh Tao we could hardly keep ourselves out of the water. We arrived sleep deprived from an insane night bus/ferry schedule that found us dropped off at the ferry depot at the ungodly hour of 3:00 am, only to have to wait until 7:00 am to actually get on the boat.  We spent that first day looking for a dive shop and were in the water first thing the next morning.

The Dive Shop

We dove with a company called Phoenix Divers. We chose them for a few reasons. Primarily, it was the vibe. We’re professionals, and we wanted a laid-back shop that would let us dive the way we wanted to dive. Most dive shops wouldn’t even entertain the idea of allowing us to dive on our own from the boat. They also wouldn’t all guarantee a small group size, and ensure that like-qualified divers would be paired together. Phoenix Divers came through on all of that. They weren’t pushy, and their price was right. So they got our business.

Of course, being certified, we tend to be overly critical about our dive shop. Especially when it comes to following the standards to keep everyone safe. I like a relaxed shop but in the water, things have to be done right. After 4 days of diving with Phoenix, there were definitely some things I didn’t like.

• No drop tanks on deep dives. They used them from the wreck dive, at our insistence, but it wasn’t typical.
• We didn’t get a boat briefing until day 4. It would have been nice to know that there was a dry room for our stuff on board a bit sooner.
• One of the divers we dove with requested a tank of Nitrox. It’s required that the the diver using the tank personally verifies the oxygen percentage before using it. Phoenix didn’t have an O2 sensor, and they wanted him to use it anyways. That’s a big no no.
• Dive briefings were done individually, instead of as a group.  We had no idea which divers were in our group until we were in the water.

On the other hand, there were some really great things about the shop.

• The price for diving with accommodation was the cheapest we found the day we spent looking. 2,700 Baht ($91 CAD) for four dives (two dives each) and 200 Baht ($6.70) for a private bungalow with hot water.
• Our divemaster “F” was really good, except for skipping the whole boat briefing thing.
• The dive boats had free food. Fresh fruit some days, and cookies every day.
• Their equipment was in really good shape.
• They took the boat out twice a day, giving you a choice of diving in the mornings or afternoons. They tried their best to schedule dive sites a day in advance giving you an informed choice of diving in the mornings, afternoons, or both.

Diving in Koh Tao

We don’t actually have the greatest frame of reference when it comes to diving, as we’ve only really dove in two spots – Utila and here. But I can say that the diving was really enjoyable. Compared to Utila, there’s just more fish to see. A lot more fish.  The coral seems to be in fairly good health. There’s much worse visibility and much stronger currents.

One of the most interesting things to me was the predictability of the local fish. They showed us a map of one of our dive sites with with a clown fish drawn on it, labelled Nemo. Our divemaster Eff said simply, “This is where we’ll see Nemo.” And he was right. That little clown fish spends every day hovering above a small tuft of anemone. He’s just always there.

Likewise, he was able to show us some large shark-like fish called cobias. They were just swimming circles right where he said they would be.

Movies

One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, I saw while diving in Koh Tao. A fishing net had washed up and covered the Chumphon Pinnacle dive site, trapping several fish.

A collage of clips from our 4 days of diving in Koh Tao

Photos

In general, I find underwater movies are much more enjoyable than photos. At least with our little point-and-shoot camera. We’d probably have taken nothing but movies, but our underwater enclosure is damaged (I’m kind of upset that I couldn’t get warranty from Canon) and we can’t change the camera mode back to movies once the camera is installed inside the enclosure. Inevitably, it gets bumped to photo and stays there for the rest of the day.

Our dive boat

Checking the aim on the sunken wreck’s artillery.

A bit rusty, but only a bit

Colourful christmas tree worms

Butterfly fish

Another butterfly fish

The effect of long term exposure to pink snorkels while diving.

A happy eel

Neat coral

Checking out all the silvery fish

Lots and lots of silvery fish

Sea cucumber

Hard Coral

Worms

Awesome

First, she and her partner, Terry, joined us in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  They had originally told us they would meet us wherever in the world we happened to be in February and we had left home thinking it would be somewhere in South America.  We didn’t make it that far, of course, but we had a great time together and appreciated their flexibility.

With Mom & Terry in Leon, Nicaragua

When they told us they wanted to meet up again this February (making it perfectly clear they wanted it to be in Southeast Asia this time) we decided to be the flexible ones and changed our itinerary to work with theirs.

Seeing my mom after a year apart was fabulous.  We had had our challenges travelling together in Central America (mostly due to very different travel styles and budgets), so this time we opened up our budget and let them choose our hotels.  We ended up paying about double our typical rate, but it was worth it to be close to them without the hassle of searching for  accommodation that everyone could be happy with in each new place.

We met up with them at a less than favourable hotel in Bangkok (the thing with booking hotels online from home is you can never be quite sure what you’re going to get) and explored some of the city sights with them – the Royal Palace, the Reclining Buddha, China Town and Khaosan Road.

Khaosan Road at night

Duck, shark fins (awww…) and more in China Town

China Town

Mom, blessing Mike with some Buddhist “hocus-pocus” (at least that’s what they called it at the Buddhist monastery we later stayed at)

Asian tourists crack me up!

Me, Terry, and Mom…. all taking pictures at the Royal Palace

Mom and I, dressed in the traditional Thai dress

The reclining Buddha

Then, we all caught a bus with them to Hua Hin.  The beach here was ok, but there was way too much development and too much city encroaching on it for my tastes. When I picture a Thai beach, there definitely aren’t any skyscrapers to be seen.  Large swathes of the beach were littered with “pay-for-the-privilege-to-sit” beach umbrellas – they took up so much space that at high tide there was actually no beach left to sit on.

City encroaching on beach

A whole lot of beach umbrellas

We all beach-bummed around, explored the malls and night markets, and just enjoyed being together again.

Mom & Terry at night market

Rice pudding balls at the night market

Walking the beach… a daily ritual

Reflections in the sand

Hua Hin restaurant

It’s always windy in Hua Hin… perfect for kitesurfing!

Way too soon, our time together was up.  Mom and Terry caught a train back to Bangkok to catch a flight to Bali and Mike and I took a fabulous (yes, this is sarcasm) night bus/ferry combo to Koh Tao for some diving.

Saying goodbye to Mom at the train station

… on April 30!

So in an effort to cope with the winter that just won’t end, I’m putting myself back on the beach with these Railay Beach pics.  It’s one of those picture perfect beaches. The kind you find on the cover of travel magazines and top 100 travel destinations books. This is definitely one of my all-time favourite beaches!

Arriving at Railay East

Railay East

Walking the path to Railay West

Beautiful beach

Our first Thai monkey sighting

One of these guys stole our bananas…

Monkey fight!

Monkey with a coconut

Railay West

Lunch boats

Sunset on one of Koh Lanta’s beaches

Snorkeling stop on the 4 Island Tour

The other side of Lanta… Lanta Old Town

4 Island Tour scenery

Swimming through the dark at Emerald Cove

The light at the end of the tunnel

In the secret lagoon of Emerald Cave

Looking up in the lagoon

Playing with water effects

Stunning!

Looking up in the lagoon

Island lunch on Koh Ngai

Paradise!

Koh Lanta beach

Koh Lanta tidal pools

Lanta sunset

Good night Lanta!

Infobox:  We booked a 4 Islands tour from Koh Lanta.  It included two snorkeling stops, a trip to the Emerald Cave lagoon and lunch on beautiful Koh Ngai.  The snorkelling was meh, but the boat ride and islands were gorgeous.  It can be booked at any of the dozens of travel agents in Lanta.  Cost:  700 baht (~$23 CAD) per person, vegetarian-friendly lunch included.

Whatever it was, we threw our tried and tested travel style out the window and got it in our minds that we needed to see “everything” in the short time we had left. Big mistake! We found ourselves beach hopping, trying to see every place anyone had recommended to us. It didn’t take long before we wore ourselves out. Or before we realized that, in the end, a beach is a beach is a beach.

Thailand’s beaches are all same same but different.

Our first month of beaching it in Thailand was poorly planned and poorly executed. We felt like we spent way too much time on trains and buses, packing and unpacking our bags, and searching for hotels and vegetarian-friendly eateries. This is why we’ve never liked the “3 days and move” rule that so many travellers seem to live by. We usually consider three days to be an absolute minimum. It’s not until after three days that you start to get a real feel for a place.

Here’s what our itinerary looked like:

Jan. 9 – Arrive in Bangkok at about midnight, check into an airport hotel

Jan. 10 – Go to train station at about noon, book ticket for night train to Surat Thani, spend afternoon exploring (with all our luggage) and waiting in train station

Jan. 11 – Arrive in Surat Thani in the morning, take shuttle to (tourist) bus station, wait for bus to Krabi, wait for ferry to Koh Lanta (which turns out to be a minibus that takes the car ferries). Arrive in Koh Lanta at about 4 pm to discover all the cheap guesthouses are fully booked. Should have booked ahead. Book a budget-busting (800 baht/$26 CAD) bungalow on beach.  We do the math – it took us 59 hours to get here from Cairo.

Jan. 12 – Relax on beach. Ahhhh!!! We could get used to this.

Koh Lanta sunset

Jan. 13 – Move guesthouses to cheaper one in town. This one only has room available for 2 nights. We want to stay three. Doh!

Jan. 14 – 4 Islands Tour – Koh Waen, Koh Cheuak, Koh Mook (Emerald Cave), Koh Ngai

Entering Emerald Cave, an 85 m water tunnel (the only entrance to the lagoon in the centre of the island)

The lagoon emerges… the light at the end of the tunnel!

Snorkelling at one of the islands.  They feed the fish, so there are lots to see.

Jan. 15 – Move guesthouses to another cheap one in town since ours is full tonight. Again, knock head against wall for not booking ahead.

Jan. 16 – Catch ferry to Ao Nang. Nearly toss our cookies. Ticket includes free transport to hostel which is not, as advertised, in Ao Nang. Arrive in the middle of nowhere (aka the jungle just outside of Ao Nammao).

At our Ao Nammao guesthouse

Jan. 17 – Catch longtail boat to Railay Beach (only about 30 minutes, after walking 45 minutes into town from guesthouse). Monkeys steal our bananas. Discover the roped off swimming area is infested with hundreds, if not thousands, of jellyfish, but the rest of the water is surprisingly not. Return the same way to find something amiss in our room (didn’t think too much of it, but later put the puzzle pieces together to discover 100 Euros had been stolen from our locked luggage that was inside our locked bungalow). Really not liking this guesthouse much.

Railay Beach West

Jan. 18 – Check out, leave luggage at front desk, and head back to Railay Beach. No longtail boats are heading back and we have a bus booked to Bangkok, so we have to charter one. They give us a good deal considering. Return to jungle bungalows, take minivan to Surat Thani and get on night bus.

Docks at Ao Nammao

Jan. 19 – Arrive in Bangkok at the ungodly hour of 5 am. Taxi to hotel rips us off, but we’re too tired to care too much. Hotel lets us check in early (as in immediately) and we take a long, long nap. Wake up and explore a little of Bangkok.

Jan. 20 – Bangkok sightseeing.

Jan. 21 – Move hotels. Meet up with Mom!

Jan. 22 – Bangkok sightseeing with Mom & Terry

Jan. 23 – Catch a bus to Hua Hin with Mom & Terry

Jan. 24 – Explore Hua Hin with Mom & Terry

Jan. 25 – Beaching & visiting at Hua Hin

Kitesurfing at Hua Hin beach

Jan. 26 – Beaching & visiting at Hua Hin. Catch a night bus to Chumphon. Arrive at 3:30 am. Have to wait until 7 am to catch ferry.

Jan. 27 – Take ferry to Koh Tao. Spend our day wandering the town searching for a good dive shop.

Beach on Koh Tao

Jan. 28 – After nearly a year, we’re finally back in the water. Two dives (and a little seasickness for Ashley).

Diving!

Jan. 29 – Diving at Koh Tao.

Jan. 30 – Diving at Koh Tao.

Jan. 31 – Diving at Koh Tao in the morning. Catch ferry to Koh Phangan in the afternoon.

Feb. 1 – Walk the very very hilly southeastern road to the Full Moon Party beach (not for the party which wasn’t happening today, just for the beach). Rest up for the walk back.

Feb. 2- Take it easy in the morning instead of beaching it (Ashley wasn’t feeling so hot) and then catch a ferry to Koh Samui. Meet our old travel pal Talon and his son Tigger from 1Dad1Kid. Couchsurf with them.

Feb. 3 – Hang out with Talon and Tigger for the day. Catch up on some blogging and photos.

Feb. 4 – Hang out with Talon and Tigger and walk to the mummifed monk on the island.

Feb. 5 – Go admire the Grandmother & Grandfather rocks on Samui. Catch a boat and then a bus to Bangkok. Have to leave at around noon… won’t arrive until 5 am the next morning.

Beach on Koh Samui, Grandfather Rock

Feb. 6 – Arrive in Bangkok at 5 am. Check into hotel and sleep. Run errands around town in preparation for tomorrow’s trip to Cambodia (need passport photos, train tickets, and camera cleaning supplies).

Feb. 7 – Catch an EARLY morning train to Aranyaprathet, cross border into Cambodia

Exhausting, right? If you’re keeping track, that’s 4 night buses/trains and 5 other travel days in our first 30 days in Thailand. Not to mention 3 extra hotel moves within the same location. 6 different islands/beaches (plus the 4 islands from the tour).  And 6 days spent in Bangkok over 3 separate trips. What were we thinking?

Now, we did see some amazing sights and we’re glad went everywhere we did. We just wish we hadn’t tried to cram it all into 30 days. We would have been a lot happier picking just one or two of these amazing beaches and relaxing there for a while.

Our favourite beach? It might surprise you. While we really loved the laid back vibe of Koh Lanta and Railay Beach’s scenery was worth the crowds, I might just have to pick Koh Ngai. And I only spent an hour or two there.  It’s a tiny island we stopped at for lunch during our four island tour. While a little crowded at lunch time (a lot of longtail boat tours stop here), it would be total paradise the rest of the day – no roads, no noise, just 2 km by 4 km of white sand beaches, turquoise waters, and dense green jungle.

Koh Ngui… talk about paradise!

Okay, maybe you’ve already been surprised. Probably because we’ve already been home for three weeks as any astute Facebook follower would know. If you didn’t know, don’t feel bad. It just means we get to surprise you now. Surprise!

How long are you home for?

Ah, right to it. The first question everyone asks.

We’re going to be home for a while, but not forever. Our rough plan/dream is to go to Bhutan where Ashley will teach math for a year and I’ll either work online or, more likely, go hiking every day and work on my photography. It can always use a bit of work but unfortunately doesn’t pay so well.

Where the heck is Bhutan? 

This is the second most common question we get.  Bhutan is a small country located in the Himalayas. It’s south of Tibet, east of Nepal, and north of India and Bangladesh. Aside from its premium geographic location, the kingdom is most well known for its so called “happiness legislation”. Basically what they’ve done is given up on the traditional measure of GDP employed by most of the world to determine how well the country is doing, and instead have decided to use the measure of happiness. I have no idea how they measure it, but they do.

Government policies are thus made with the goal of increasing national happiness, which has had some interesting results. The most relevant to would-be travellers like us is their restrictive travel visa. It turns out that cultural preservation makes the Bhutanese happy, while being surrounded by throngs of foreign tourists does not. Travel visas are limited in number, short on time, restrictive on movement, and are very very expensive. Which is why for years, Ashley and I had written Bhutan off as a dream travel destination that we would likely never see.

Until now…

What we’ve found is a volunteer job opportunity that Ashley is qualified for. Applications open in May. Successful applicants are announced in September. If she’s accepted (fingers crossed), we’ll be moving to Bhutan in January 2014!

If not… we’ll do something else. Probably something like teaching English abroad.

Map of Bhutan

Whoa, January! Is Traveled Earth shutting down until January? What will I read on Fridays?

Don’t worry… we’re not going anywhere. We’ve got a back log of, oh geeze, like two months of stories from our time in Thailand and Cambodia. I’m working really hard on getting our photos ready to publish, I promise.

By that time, this ice ball we call Canada should have thawed a bit, school will be out (relevant as Ashley is working as a substitute teacher right now), and we’ll be travelling Canada. We currently have a poll on our facebook page. You can help us decide which way to head out (East or West) by voting and sharing the poll with your friends.

After our brief (2 month) cross country tour we’ll be headed home for some more work until the cold sets in. Having skipped two winters, and finding this spring quite unbearably cold, I’ve got a pretty good feeling we’ll be re-locating someplace warm a few months before our scheduled arrival in Bhutan.

Phew, I can live with that. So how’s home?

It’s good and bad in ways, but mostly it’s just a little weird. It feels so familiar and yet so different from what we’re used to.  It’s been great meeting up with family and friends. We surprised both of our parents (we told them we were coming home in mid April and showed up without warning at the end of March). Their reactions were priceless.

We’ve rekindled our love of board games. We’re cooking up a storm now that we have not only a kitchen, but a whole array of seasonings and spices.  Ashley’s even started watching a little TV and movies again (I haven’t gotten there yet, but probably will soon).

Price shock has been hard. Rental rates in this city are unaffordable for us at $1,000+ a month for a single room apartment. A single restaurant meal for one person costs more than what we are accustomed to spending for the two of us during a whole day.

It’s also impossible for us to get by using only public transport. To get to work on time, Ashley needs a car. To visit my parents we need a car (there are no buses). So we bought a car.

Toyota Echo – The newest member of the Family

As you can tell from the picture above, it’s been cold. It was 38 °C the day we left Bangkok, and -14°C when we arrived back in Saskatchewan. That’s a big difference.  We knew the weather would be iffy coming home this early, but a windchill of -27°C on April 9?  Come on!

Some other odds and ends:

• Vegetables/fruits are expensive and taste terrible here. We’ve always known that. Everything is picked green and trucked long distances. At least in the fall we can hit up farmer markets.
• It’s nice being able to control what we eat again. Having a full kitchen is bliss. It’s been a glut of whole grains and beans. My bread starter is almost done, so fresh bread should be on the table soon.
• It’s weird not seeing/hearing chickens. Especially in the morning. I miss them. The factory eggs they sell in our stores are the most flavourless, sickly, pale food items we’ve seen since we left home (maybe the zero calorie peanut butter we saw in Florida was worse). Fortunately, we found a source of free-range eggs.

News from Bulgaria.

We got some bad news from Bulgaria this week. Our car has been stripped. They removed the LPG kit, broke the rear window, and stole the tires. And no, we don’t have insurance. It was a $500 car.

Broken rear window – no rims

Missing LPG kit

Our house was also broken into. We didn’t really have much in there, maybe $100 worth of tools which I’m sure are now gone.

That’s pretty sad news for us. Not so much because of what was stolen/damaged, but because our dream has been squashed. Our plan for the house was to visit it over the next several years and slowly improve it and the yard when we had money. Our goal was to only move there full time once we could afford to do it.

But now, we’ve come to realize that any improvements we could make, like installing new appliances, toilets, cupboards and the like would most likely end up as somebody else’s improvements in somebody else’s house when we’re away.

Not sure what we’ll end up doing with the place now, but if you’re looking for your own house in Bulgaria we’re open to offers…

If you missed our Bulgarian House Saga, you can read more on it here and here.

Back to the regular schedule.

That’s our real-time update for now. Stay tuned for posts on S.E. Asia. Our final trip stats and reflections will be published after that.

I’m guessing you figured out by now that Egypt wasn’t one of our favourite countries. In fact, when attempting to rank the countries we’ve traveled, we’d start by throwing it on the bottom.  So far on the bottom that you’d need a good pair of binoculars to find it.

Despite this fact, however, I don’t regret our time there for a second.  If I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I probably would (though I’d strongly consider a guided tour).  When travelling, you’re going to get some great experiences and some not so great experiences. Egypt just had a disproportionate amount of the not so great ones. But the sights were amazing, we met some great people, and we learned a thing or two about dealing with touts and negotiating for, well, everything.

Honestly, I did manage to fall in love with the sights and history of Egypt… I just couldn’t get past all the hassle, harassment, and frustration of the relentless a-holes. Thus I can’t give the country as a whole a thumbs up.

Karnak Temple

Egypt Summary:

Length of Stay: 24 days
Average Cost per Day for Two People (excluding international transportation): $ 62.26 CAD  [without the 3 night White Desert Tour, this cost would drop to $39.76 CAD per day - but we're glad we splurged!]
Cities Visited: 5
Distance Traveled: 4189 km in 9 automobiles, 5 trains and 5 boats
Days Sick: 0
Number of Items Lost: No items, just our patience and maybe our sanity
Biggest Tourist Traps: Egypt
Exchange Rate: $1 CAD = 6 Egyptian pounds

View from our Cairo hotel balcony

Our Route:

Our Egypt Route

Cairo – White Desert (Bahariya Oasis, Black Desert) – Cairo – Alexandria – Aswan (Abu Simbel, Elephantine Island) – Luxor [via the Nile] – Cairo

Highlights:

• Hands down, the amazing FOOD!!!!
• Riding camels by day, sleeping under the incredible starry sky by night in the White Desert
• The people of Alexandria
• Abu Simbel temples (especially the interior)
• Gliding down the Nile on a felucca

The Nile, just outside Aswan

Lowlights:

• The scammers, hustlers, and pushy touts in the tourist areas
• Dodging traffic
• General lack of infrastructure makes identifying scams that much tougher
• The overwhelming lack of hope about the future (most Egyptians we talked with believe the revolution was stolen, things are worse now than before, and they can’t foresee any positive change)
• Constantly being treated as a walking ATM
• Constantly being treated as a sexual object
• See this previous post

Highway rest stop

Surprises:

• The general apathy of the people towards the constitutional referendum that was taking place when we arrived
• Just how overblown the media makes the situation look with their coverage of the protests
• The scammers, hustlers, and pushy touts in the tourist areas (as in just how many and how pushy they can be)
• How good, cheap, and healthy the food was and how easy it was to eat vegetarian
• Having locals ask to have their picture taken with me (I would expect this in rural China, maybe, but not from a hotel maid in Alexandria)

Karnak Temple

Lessons Learned:

• Sometimes you should just pay the little bit extra to hire a driver/guide/horse because it will give you hours of peace you won’t otherwise find
• Tourism is not always easy and locals don’t always appreciate foreigners

Lunch before White Desert Tour

Egypt Journal – Where/How Did We Spend Our Time?

Cairo (4 nights)
National Museum, Pyramids, Tahrir Square, Islamic Cairo, Coptic Christian Cairo

White Desert (3 nights)
Camel safari with jeep escort, camping under the stars

Cairo (1 night)
This was just a stopover on our way to Alexandria

Alexandria (3 nights)
This sidetrip was originally planned because we had to wait to take the night train from Cairo to Aswan, but it became our favourite Egyptian city

Aswan (3 nights + 1 on train en route to Aswan)
Day trips to Abu Simbel temples, Philae temple, Elephantine Island

Nile (2 nights)
Sleeping, eating, and cruising on a felucca

Luxor (4 nights)
Valley of the Kings, Karnak temple, Luxor temple

Cairo (3 nights + 1 in airport en route to Bangkok)
Tired of the hassles, we mostly caught up on blogging in our hostel while waiting for our flight out

Smoking at the gas pumps

Typical luxor street
Roof tops – unfinished to avoid paying the steep construction tax

The East Bank

Karnak Temple

Entry was 65£ Egyptian per person ($11 CAD). It’s massively impressive, as in really big and full of cool stuff. It houses many obelisks, many more statues, covered temples, a huge columned hall, carved walls, and even an artificial lake. Just about every surface was originally covered with detailed carvings and hieroglyphics. Original colour can still be seen in many places where the stone managed to avoid direct sunlight. Unfortunately, almost everything you see has been badly damaged at one point or another. The temple is mostly a recreation made from a conglomerate of concrete and the original stones that managed to survive the ages. The good news is that the restoration was very well done. I think, given the options of displaying a field of crumbled blocks or a rebuilt temple like they have today, they made the right choice.

One interesting thing that holds true for just about all of the temples in Egypt was the presence of official scammers/beggars. These guys would wear a uniform and sport a set of keys. Invariably, they would come after you while you were off by yourself. They’d usually signal you to stay quiet and beckon you over to a locked door. Pretending that he’d be in trouble if he were caught, he’d look all around while getting you to hide behind some blocks. Finally he’d quickly unlock the door and usher you inside. Nothing more than charades designed to squeeze a bit more money from the unwary tourist. We found that if we clearly said “La Baksheesh” (no tips) up front, we would still get the “secret” tour but wouldn’t have to part with our cash after it was done.

Karnak Temple
Karnak Temple
Kissing by the butts (in one of those “secret tour” areas
Obelisk
A classic shot
Rams
Playing with Sepia

Luxor Temple

Luxor Temple is the smaller of the two and is highly accessible. By this I mean that there are no “block out fences”, and the temple complex is surrounded by roads. This meant that we were free to walk completely around the perimeter and get a surprisingly good glimpse of the temple without paying the steep entrance fee. Unfortunately, it’s located at a hot-spot for horse and carriage drivers. If you want to “enjoy” seeing the temple, you are probably best off to purchase a ticket, get off the street, and view it from inside.

Luxor Temple
Luxor Temple

The West Bank

Our original plan was to spend a few days renting bicycles and try to see as many of the West Bank sites as we could. I still think this would be a reasonably good way to see the West Bank, but we didn’t get the chance to try. Instead, we relented into taking a tour. It was paid for by the hotel we had booked our felucca tour through in Aswan. They did this because we threatened to go to the tourist police and complain about how our felucca tour abruptly ended leaving us stranded in the wrong city, without taking us to the two temple sites that were on the itinerary. Thus, our tour was free, but we did have to pay our own entrance fees which amounted to 150£ each ($25 CAD).

The tour included an English guide, transportation to the Colossi of Memnon, the mortuary temple of Hatchepsut, the Valley of the Kings, Medinet Habu Temple, and a mandatory shopping stop. Unlike the East Bank sites, the West Bank sites are in a very good state of preservation. I rate the tour quite highly, but it could be improved quite a bit by exchanging the hour long shopping stop for a lunch break.

Valley of the Kings

Not all the tombs are officially opened. Supposedly, the humidity from the breath of visitors causes damage to the decorated stuccoes. To solve the problem, the tombs are on a steady rotation giving them time to recuperate. On any given day, only a half dozen tombs are open to the public.

Interestingly, the entry ticket does not give you free run of the tombs. Your ticket only buys you entrance into three tombs.

The three tombs that we saw were very interesting, and totally worth seeing. The tombs were constructed for the duration of the pharaoh’s reign. Thus, you could tell how long the pharaoh had ruled for by measuring the length of his tomb. And they were long. Even the shorter tombs that we were in didn’t seem short. The walls and ceilings were covered in smooth white stucco which was covered from floor to ceiling by various paintings and writings. The artwork had a general theme. According to our guide they depicted scenes and prayers from the Book of the Dead which would help guide the deceased pharaoh during the first few days of the afterlife.

The tombs were also very similar. After seeing three of the tombs, I didn’t feel like I really needed to see a fourth, so the ticketing scheme seems to be okay in my opinion. Besides, there’s always the not-so-secret system of bribery if you want to see more tombs. We didn’t pay any bribes, so we don’t know exactly what the prices are, but we saw a lot of money changing hands between the tomb guards at the entrance and the throngs of tourists entering.

Here’s a basic run down of what you can get with a bribe:

• Entry into a tomb after you’ve used up your three entrances
• Permission to take photos (normally cameras are not allowed inside the complex)
• Entry into one of the sealed, not-for-the-public, undergoing-restoration tombs
• Permission to chisel off a large piece of painted plaster from the tomb wall as a take home memento. Crocodile paintings seemed to be especially popular.

Hatchepsut (a.k.a. “Hot Chicken Soup” Temple)

This three story complex was used as a stage for Verdi’s opera Aida in modern times. That all came to an end after a terrorist attack in 1997. Gunmen stormed the complex and shot and killed at least 70 people. Since then, there hasn’t been much trouble.

Hatshepsut Temple
Hatshepsut Temple

Medinet Habu

This was my favourite temple near Luxor. It was unique, having very deep carvings. And, there were very few tourists to get in the way of photos.

Medinet Habu – Deep carvings
Medinet Habu

Colossi of Memnon

A quick photo stop.

Colossi
Colossi

The graceful felucca

Of course there are also a large number of ships much bigger than the felucca. Loud ships that spew thick black clouds of smelly exhaust. These, naturally are called luxury cruise ships. Their numbers are not to be underestimated.

Regardless of your chosen method of transportation, one thing is for certain. No trip to Egypt is complete without spending at least a little time afloat on the waters of the Nile. At least that’s the way we looked at it. And, as you can probably tell from my description above, we chose to indulge our river-faring ways aboard a felucca and left the more expensive cruise ships to everyone else.

Two of many luxury cruise ships

We booked a group tour through our hotel for 250£ Egyptian each (about $42 CAD) . The itinerary had us mingling with a boat full of other tourists as we set sail northward from Aswan over the course of three days. After breakfast on the third day, we were to meet up with our land-based transportation and make our way to the temples of Edfu and Kom Ombo. Afterwards we would complete our journey by land to Luxor where we would be dropped off at the hotel of our choosing. But, we were in Egypt so that’s not really how the tour went. Since we’ve written about this already, I’m not going to re-hash it. If you missed our negative piece on Egypt, here’s the link.

Aside from the tour not going entirely as planned, and us feeling a little bit “taken”, the time on the river was quite enjoyable. We cruised for about 6 hours a day, gently drifting from one bank, tacking, and drifting back. Except when the cruise ships were passing, it was quiet, calm, peaceful, and relaxing. This carried on until the sun went down, giving us a nightly sunset display that we watched from the deck of the felucca.

After dark, the captain and first mate would glide the ship over to the river bank and tie us off for the night. We wrapped ourselves up in a couple of blankets and slept on the deck in the same place where we’d been seated most of the day.

Sunset on the Nile

Sunset on the Nile

A Few Thoughts

• The food was quite tasty. As advertised, it was mostly vegetarian (tuna salad was part of one lunch), which is exactly what we were after.
• There is no bathroom on board. We regularly spent 4 hours sailing without shore break, which meant holding everything for at least 4 hours. Of course we could have relieved ourselves at anytime – somewhat publicly over the side of the boat – but it never came to that.  Of course, this meant no showers for the duration of the trip.
• The deck of the felucca was covered with a thin mattress and a number of pillows. It was comfortable enough, and we spent most of the day sprawled in the same spots.
• Above the deck was a cloth sun covering that seemed to keep the sun off of us well enough, though not 100% of the time. Neither of us sunburned.
• It was cold at night, but there were plenty of blankets on board to make this a non-issue.
• We had no trouble with mosquitoes or other bugs. We’ve since heard from other people that have done the same trip that the mosquitoes on their tour were terrible. Either we were lucky, or they were unlucky. It’s hard to say.
• The staff didn’t speak more than two words of English. Not that they needed to.

Lunch

Shore Stop

Enjoying the sailing