At the wake of dawn, at 5am, we had to wake up to get ready to head towards the train station. We were going to go by train to Luxor. The trains are pretty cheap, but they are pretty unreliable in their timing. Ours arrived an hour late and we heard that somebody else’s had arrived 12 hours late. Yeah, very unpredictable. We left at around 7:30 on the train.
It took us around 5 hours to get to Luxor, but they were some interesting hours. We drove by countrysides, cities, and small villages along the Nile. The train was not very clean, but it was very comfortable, at least compared to a car seat.
When we arrived, we stayed at the Nefertiti Hotel. It is a great hotel there, that is very close to the Luxor temple. So, since the temple is really close, we decided to go to the temple for the afternoon.
The Luxor temple is a really big temple, it has 5 big statues in its entrance with an obelisk in the middle. Those statues are not in very good shape, so it has been refilled with cement. Interestingly, a mosque was built on top of the ruins of the old temple.
After seeing the temple, we walked the Sphinx Avenue. It is a road that has sphinxes on every side. When we started walking through it, I thought that the sphinxes had been added just for the tourists, but soon, I figured out that this avenue existed long ago. In total, there are over 600 sphinxes.
After that, we headed towards Karnak Temple, the largest temple complex in Egypt, and the second largest in the world. We spent a very long time there, even to the point when we were kicked out ;). But that’s for another post.
That evening, we ate falafel sandwiches at a nearby local shop for very cheap, as always. That day we walked very very much, and we were exhausted.