Guys, today was AWESOME! Susan, Lindsey and I got up really early and headed over to the West Bank again. We started at Medinet Habu, which was built by Ramses III to show his battle against the Sea Peoples (a group of nomads from somewhere up north- maybe Crete- who came down the Med. coast, ravaging anything the found). The place was almost completely deserted.
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| Me at the first pylon. |
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| Trampling some Sea Peoples. |
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| You can't see it very well, but the colors on the inner walls were breath-taking! And Ramses III really liked carving super deeply. If you blow up this picture, you should be able to see it. Amazing. |
After Habu, we moved over to Deir el-Medina, which was the village/tomb area of the workmen who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. You couldn't take pictures inside the tombs, but the 2 we went in were so pretty! Look up the tomb of Sennedjem (spellings may vary) on Google images to see how yellow everything is! After the tombs, we hiked up the
gebel (mountainside) to get to Deir el-Bahri (Hatshepsut's mortuary temple).
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| View of Deir el-Medina from the gebel. |
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| I'm queen of the gebel. |
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| Looking down at Bahri (on left) and the destroyed temple of Montuhotep II (from the Middle Kingdom) |
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| Stuart, I went way out on a ledge and almost fell off to get this one. I have a ton more from on top that I can give you once I get back to the US. |
That's all for now, but there are a ton more photos to come once I get them from Susan's nice SLR camera (including one of us smiting each other at Medinet Habu and the smiley face we found while hiking). Now it's time to lay by the pool and relax before the Luxor Museum tonight!
- Hiker
